I’m taking a couple days off this week. The plan is to ride to the Pigeon Point lighthouse, stay tomorrow night at the hostel, and ride back on Thursday. I’ll probably end up taking transit part (or most) of the way home since the 90 mile ride there is more than I’ve ridden in the last few weeks.
From Lake Merrit, I’ll go up to Skyline, down Redwood Road to Castro Valley, Palomares Road to Niles Canyon into Fremont, across the Dumbarton Bridge, through East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford campus, Sandhill Road to Old La Honda, 84 to Pescadero Road, Butano cutoff to the coast, then a couple more miles down Highway 1 to Pigeon Point. Here’s the route.
Starting with some pointed questions at Lance’s Interbike press conference and continuing in an interview with Cyclingnews, Greg Lemond has been touting an anti-doping plan that would return a positive test when a rider’s power output exceeds what his VO2 max indicates as possible for him or her.
It’s more of a concept than a detailed proposal, but it seems to be based on the idea that power output can be manipulated by doping while VO2 max cannot. Although the logic behind the Lemond plan is sound, implementing it would ask as many questions as it answers.
What if WADA and AFLD can’t agree on an exact number for the ratio of power to VO2 max that separates clean from dirty? I can’t envision either one of those organizations giving in to the other, but a compromise would mean that politics are adjusting the science. If they each run their programs with a different set of numbers, then there’s the possibility that a rider could be considered clean by one agency and dirty by another. Although the recent UCI-ASO peace treaty gives the UCI drug testing authority of the Historic Calendar, the AFLD still has legal authority to test anyone competing on French soil. It’s a controversy waiting to happen.
And when do we raise the threshold, and by how much? Fans in any sport always think that their era’s athletes are the best, but every sport gets more competitive when training evolves, equipment improves, and the talent pool grows. All of those things are happening in cycling, so we can’t have a system that doesn’t allow for tomorrow’s clean athletes to be better than today’s. But it’s impossible to know when that leap forward happens except in hindsight, which means that some riders will have to be wrongly punished in order to keep the system up to date. “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette” is not a good basis for a system that’s supposed to ensure fairness.
Team Inferno is going pro next year as Kenda Pro Cycling presented by Spinergy and touting an “100% American” roster (including staff). I know and like those guys, but the flag waving seems really out of place with cycling culture. Internationalism is part of the sport’s appeal.
From their press release:
“While the program will miss its international contingent dearly, the concept is one that Inferno believes is important. Many teams have collapsed in this pained economy and as such, fewer teams will exist domestically in 2009. This means American racers will be without a home, and to have talented racers from abroad take the few openings that remain simply is not in the best interests of American cycling. This sport is experiencing resurgence in America, and Kenda Pro Cycling p/b Spinergy aims to have Americans at the helm.”
My latest column for ROAD came out at Interbike and talks about the recent reshuffling of teams and bike sponsors. Also, Neil has embedded a couple videos from my Interbike lifestream on his blog, here and here.
At least for the foreseeable future, it’s over. Not surprisingly, the Grand Tours got what they wanted. Although there will still be something called the ProTour, there will also be something called the Historical Calendar including all events organized by ASO, RCS, and Unipublic. These organizers will keep full control over team selections and presumably won’t have their TV rights bundled in with the ProTour. I said a long time ago that the best the UCI could hope to get from ASO would be to handle drug testing, and that’s pretty much what they got. They also get to say that they “sanction” the HC races, which in practical terms doesn’t mean anything.
Furthermore, allowing the UCI to hang around means that the headaches of drug testing, global marketing, and athlete development for HC races are subsidized by the rest of the cycling world. Then again, the rest of the cycling world owes much of its existence to the Tour de France.
The UCI will claim that the ProTour still gives them the opportunity to expand globally, with the Tour Down Under, the Tour of Sochi in Russia, and the Tour of China that will eventually get off the ground. That’s not insignificant, but the US market is has the most potential outside of western Europe and ASO remains the gatekeeper here because of their partnership with AEG and the Tour of California.
Pat McQuaid has said that he expects the teams to re-up on their ProTour licenses now that a settlement has been reached, but I’m not sure why they would. The license offers no guarantee of starting the Grand Tours or any cut of TV revenue, but still requires teams to send riders and staff all over the world to markets where their sponsors might not have any business interests. I don’t see the incentive.
Lots and lots of goings-on at Interbike. It was a long couple of days. I’m not at the point yet where I have actual coherent thoughts but when I do, I’ll post them. Here are some things that were part of the experience.
As I learned from writing the Zipp catalog, the technology that goes into modern race wheels is amazing… and the prices reflect that. But now you can rent a $2000 wheelset for 100 bucks from Echappe Equipment. Well, insurance is $40, a cassette is another $10, and shipping is based on FedEx rates. Carbon-specific brake pads add $52 and you probably need ‘em if you don’t already have carbon wheels, which is probably the case since that’s what you’re renting. So it’s more like you’re getting a $2000+ wheelset for $200+ for the first day, plus another $25 per day after that.
Stilll, it’s a compelling option for a lot of folks, especially semi-serious age group triathletes who base their seasons (lives?) around a couple of race days. And if I’d rented some tubulars, I wouldn’t have pinch flatted a third of the way into the Heartbreak Hill GP that I dragged my bike across the country for (see Cat 3 results)
Before Cyclingnews, this was all the information you’d get about the Vuelta had until VeloNews came in the mail. (It’s on the left, next to the WNBA box score.)
Now that I’m commuting on BART, I get free coffee but no cell reception most of the way, so I’ve been looking at actual newspapers.
