London Bike Show 2012

Well, that was a cracking show for bike leching, but very little for those with an inverse enthusiasm-to-wallet ratio. Still, the chance to fondle Liquigas' Cannondales and try out Shimano's Di2 is not to be sneezed at, although my alcohol-related hayfever did inflict a few sneezes after discovering the Finnish tourist board's table of free vodka.


I was rather taken with the Vanmoof (http://www.vanmoof.com/vanmoof-no3) as a classy bit of design, and was absolutely gobsmacked by Cav's bike. I know he's a diddy wee man, but I had no idea how diddy. I was riding a bigger frame when I was 10. 


The pics all came out dim and blurry, which was surprising for a hall filled with so many 1000 watt lamps that you could feel the Vitamin D being leeched out of your skin. That'll teach me to take my phone instead of my camera.

This isn't a trick shot, Cav's bike is barely belly button high.

Cav, G and Alex Dowsett's jerseys.

The celebratory colour scheme that Cuddles abandoned after a few miles for fear of tempting fate. And quite right too, if you ask me. 

Wobbly forks and stays, tubes that aren't tubular, grooves in odd places.  Advanced? Yes. Cool? Yes.  Pretty? No.

Sure, it's pretty, but it's what's inside that counts, and in the case of the Vanmoof , what's inside is the gears,  the cables, the LED front and rear lights and the dynamo that powers them. Neat.

Vuelta 2012: Very Northern, Very Steep.

That's not a misprint, they really are ignoring  half of the country.

I’m really starting to love the Vuelta. I know, as a cycling fan I’m supposed to make snide comments about the route taking in Spain’s finest dual carriageways and concrete factories, or point out that all the top drawer riders will go home after using the first week as training for the Worlds, but I just don’t feel like doing that.

I’ve really enjoyed the last two Vueltas. Obviously 2011 stands out for the high placings of Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, the ascent of la Gamonal that ended Wiggo’s hopes and prompted a thousand speculative “what’s in Cobo’s fridge?” posts on internet forums, and the throat shredding showdown on Pena Cabarga (I don’t know if it shredded Froome and Cobo’s throats really, but I screamed myself hoarse).

Even 2010’s race stands out for me. People talk about the 2010 Giro being one of the finest stage races in decades, but let’s be honest, it wouldn’t have been half as interesting if it weren’t for Vinokourov’s race losing refusal to chase on the road to l’Aquila. That year’s Vuelta, on the other hand, owed its excitement not to huge gaps opened by passivity, but to the constantly shifting battle to close the narrow gaps between Nibali, Anton and Mosquera.  It might not have had the muddy strade bianchi or Basso’s redemptive win on the Zoncolan, but for me the Vuelta was the best grand tour of 2010 and were it not for an exceptional Tour De France, it would have been the best grand tour of 2011 too.

Which brings us to this years Vuelta, the route of which was announced this morning. It revisits two of the key battlefields of 2010: Lagos De Covadonga, the Vuelta’s Alpe D’Huez, and Bola Del Mundo, the ever steepening ramp that saw Nibali seal his victory with a desperate pursuit of Ezequiel Mosquera through the mist on the penultimate day.

While the Giro and the Tour are both opting for slightly less mountainous routes in 2012, the Vuelta is going the other way. Officially there are seven mountaintop finishes, but a closer look reveals that some of the non-mountain stages in fact feature short, vicious climbs to the finish, such as the 15% max Rapitan and the 28% max Mirador de Ezaro. I know I promised stop scoring easy wins with predictions of Joaquim Rodriguez victories, but anything short and damn near vertical has the Katusha man's name written all over it. Usually literally.

Of course, there’s a 16K Team Time Trial in Pamplona that won’t suit him, and a 40K individual test on Stage 11 that could be disastrous: he blew four minutes in 2011 and six in 2010 over similar distances. Nevertheless, the better time triallists may well be discouraged by the amount of climbing to be done, so perhaps the margins against the clock will be reduced by conservatism or absence.

Although the mountains are the best bit of any race, packing a grand tour with climbs doesn’t always make it interesting. Contador’s unchallenged victory in last year’s Giro proves that. Nevertheless, the mix of big climbs on short stages and vicious ramps ending otherwise pan flat pootles through the Spanish countryside looks like a recipe for explosive racing. I can’t wait.

Well that didn't take long...

Wasn't much like this at all, really.

I've just had my first crash in as long as I can remember, probably more than ten or fifteen years. Not coincidentally, it occurred less than a hundred yards after I set out to get used to my new SPDs.

I was very well prepared. I'd read useful guides. I'd watched videos on installing and riding with cleats. I'd sat on the kitchen table dangling my feet to make sure I got the cleats properly aligned. I was ready. That may have been part of the problem. I was feeling sort of cocky as I walked out the door, I'd used SPDs a few years ago with no problem at all, so a part of me was expecting to just click in and go. Another little voice in my head was saying that thoughts like that were asking for trouble.

I had a few initial teething troubles clipping in, my feet repeatedly scuffed over the fronts of the pedals as I wobbled along the road, until finally I engaged with each pedal with a satisfying clunk. Phase one accomplished. I pushed down gently and rolled neatly up to the t-junction at the end of the road, where I effortlessly flicked my right heel and popped my foor out of the pedal, just the way you're supposed too. Instead of pulling to a halt, however, I noticed that there was no traffic and decided to just carry on, rolling out of the junction in a smooth left turn, whereupon my wheels slid out from under me and I was dumped onto the tarmac.

Had I been going a bit faster the slide would probably have looked quite dramatic, but even at low speed the impact was enough to set all the bones down my left side humming like tuning forks. At this point an adorable little black cat with a big round face and a conversational meow trotted offer and let e scratch behind his ears while I got my breath back and waited for things to start seriously hurting. After a few seconds I was relieved to realise that they weren't going to, and I turned my attention to the Purple Peril. His eyecatching blue bar tape was in a rotten state and the left brake lever was now pointing accusingly at the right one. Again, no major harm done.

I wheeled the bike back home and had the brakes and tapes back in the proper place within twenty minutes. My elbow, which took the brunt of the landing, had to spend the afternoon nestled in a bag of frozen peas (doubly annoying, as I was going to have them with a Shepherds Pie today). What became of the cat, I don't know, but if I see him again he's getting a Salmon stick and some ear tickling.

The funny thing is, it wasn't your traditional new-SPD crash, in as much as I didn't pull to halt, find my feet inextricably welded to the pedals, and topple over sideways. In all honesty, it happened so quickly I couldn't figure out what had caused it, although I'm sure being clipped in on one side and loose on the other must have been a factor.

So, tomorrow I shall have another, less cocky practice with my new SPDs. Only this time I'll wheel the bike to a nice, soft, grassy park first.

Is there no end to Phil Liggett's talent?

Ever since I first saw The Atomic Cafe I've been a fan of "found art", and one of my Christmas presents this year was a collection of  "found poetry" called Dancing on the Pedals. It was compiled by Doug Donaldson, a former contributor to Bicycling, and contains gems drawn from the commentary of 'Uncle' Phil Liggett.

The tall, tanned one is Phil Liggett. The short, hoppy one is not Paul Sherwen.

Check these out:

PAST

Riders fall and need

wheels replaced

by helpers from their team cars.

Dust gets into the riders'

lungs as much.

But still,

the speed of the race 

is relentless.

All The News Fit To Ride

Newspapers up the jersey

keep the wind out

and get ready for the long flight down.

No parachutes will be issued.

Spanish Flier

That is amazing

now he hits the cobble hill

and dances

is dancing away too

to big gains

in the Tour De France today.

Calling it poetry is slightly tongue in cheek, of course, but funnily enough, it does neatly satisfy two of my admittedly uninformed criteria for good poetry: it's far more expressive than its minimal word count would lead you to expect, and it provokes an emotional response. 

You could argue that any chunk of speech could be chopped into mismatched lines to remove the rhythms of speech and replace them with the rhythms of poetry, but to test that theory I've just sat through David Duffield's commentary on the 1999 and 1990 editions of Paris-Roubaix, and nothing he says quite works the way Ligget's words do. Look:

David Duffield on Paris-Roubaix

Getting in towards the final fifteen kilometres of this race and still 

this little group are still in the lead. 

The crowds out on the side of the road cheering them all the way to the finish. 

Urging on the various people they want to win this.

 Is it going to be a win for France?

It doesn't work, does it? Don't get me wrong, I used to enjoy David Duffield's rambling commentary (I always wondered if he had an annual bet against Channel 4/ITV's Paul Sherwen to see who could get away with broadcasting the largest verbatim chunk of Tour's roadbook), but his commentary is clearly more prose than poetry, whereas Phil Liggett gives you crackers like this:

Rolling Thunder

This is something special today

the storms that appeared to blow in,

                                                 blew out    

at least as far as the weather is concerned.

The storm is all down there. 

On the highway.

Today.

Anyway, you can get the book here. In the meantime, what are the chances of getting Phil Liggett added to the GCSE syllabus?

New Year's Revolutions

It's my blog and I'll pun if I want to. Anyway, it’s a few days early, but I’m going to start working out my goals for the New Year. Not quite resolutions, but cycling related things that I’d like to accomplish.

1.) I will massively increase my mileage.
Most of this year I’ve done a couple of solo six to twelve mile rides per week, with the occasional twenty-miler thrown in, and one fifty-miler. So an average week has been weighing in at about 24 miles, a good week in the forties and an incredible week in the nineties.  For 2012, I’m going to make an average week hit the 60 mile mark. That said, I might try not to spend every mile going flat out the way I currently do. Also, I will find out what those bigger sprockets are for.

2.) I will stop mocking Dave Harmon’s commentary.
It’s all good-natured, but I do give Dave more grief than he deserves. Not that he ever reads my tweets. Ok, I’m pretty sure you don’t really pronounce it “Fuh-google-sang”.  Nor can I ignore the fact that no other cycling commentator will so consistently look at break that’s got a 35 second advantage with 25K to go, observe that Lampre and HTC are doing the chasing, then sagely announce that he thinks it will stay away to the finish. Death knell pronouncements aside, though, I’ve got to get over my resistance to any commentary team that isn’t Phil and Paul. Besides, he’s got Magnus Backstedt to keep him in check, and he beats Carlton Kirby’s breathless explosions every time a Latvian chancer is first to crest a molehill 100K from the finish.

3.) I will not attempt to carry out every single repair and tune up using a monkey-wrench.
Poor, poor Purple Peril. Many of his straight bits are bent due to the overzealous application of a monkey wrench better suited to coercing reluctant mafia debtors than tightening the bolts on a seat tube. This year, I won’t try to fix the unfixable, and I will use tools appropriate to the job.

4.) I will not train by dead reckoning.
I’ve got bad habits: Using low gears make you look feeble. Guinness contains iron and is therefore a food supplement. Twenty minutes riding so hard that I’ve wept blood with each heartbeat means I can spend the next three hours going slowly. This is not science. This year I will work out what I want to accomplish and find out the best way to achieve it.

5.) I will stop making easy predictions.
I’ve had a lot of mileage on internet forums this year simply by spotting the sort of short, sharp climbs that suit Joaquim Rodriguez, or the sort of deceptive finishes to lumpy days that suit the tougher breed of sprinters such as Peter Sagan and John Degenkolb. Easy predictions, easy wins. I feel slightly guilty, so this year I’m going to make some riskier predictions - Janez Brajkovic to get a Tour De France podium, for starters.

6.) I will learn to descend.
On my terrifying run down Mt Ventoux I noticed that simply glancing across the road was enough to make me sway off course at terrifying speed. I’ve since discovered that this is a well-known phenomenon, usually used as an aid to descending.  Keep your eyes on where you want to be when you come out of the corner, they say. If only I'd known that on my downhill run, I wouldn’t have put a year's worth of wear on the brakes of a rented bike. Seriously though, getting better mileage is just a matter of building physical strength, but getting downhill safely is a matter of building a braver brain, and that’s something I need to work on. I want to be able to take the mickey out of Andy Schleck again, and I can’t do that while I’m sympathising with his timorous downhilling.

7.) I will blog to my strengths.
Next year, every post will contain a reference to Peta Todd, deer and Mt Ventoux, because those are the ones that get the traffic, and I believe in serving my audience, which apparently consists of horny, animal-loving grimpeurs.

I'm a very lucky man.

Forgive the typos, I'm enjoying a few seasonal snootfuls. I'll fix them later. It feels a little unseemly to post a blog about all the cool cycling-related goodies I got for Christmas, but in the absence of professional road races to write about there’s a strong possibility that I’ll be using reviews to keep the blog ticking over, so I should let you know what to look forward to.

I’m blessed with wonderful wife and family who are kind enough to know and humour an obsessive when they see one and among the cycling-themed presents waiting under the tree were:

Shimano M520 & Red Shoes

Clips and straps have served me well for the past couple of years, but the last time my devotion to cycling attained a reasonably feverish pitch was about five years ago, and I had SPDs back then, and I wanted them again. I must admit, I’m not looking forward to learning to use them all over again. I’m hoping the heel flick will be saved in my muscle memory somewhere, but I strongly suspect I’ve got some comedic sideways topples in my near future. Actually, I have four pedals, as my in-laws didn’t realise that the pedals are sold in pairs. Look at those shoes, how cool are they? I want to wear them every day, and damn your ruined parquet floors.

Maglia Rosa

I love the Giro.  The Tour will always be the superior race, but only because of the the indefineables, the “je ne sais quois”. The Giro, on the other hand may come in second, but you can easily articulate all the reasons why it should come first: the unpredictability, the meat-flinging partisans, the Dolemites, and the sense of style. It’s that last one that’s shared by this history of the Giro from Rouleur. Look at that cover- the perfectly chosen photo, simple typeface and tidy dimensions. Anyone who’s found themselves paying through the nose for a copy of Rouleur magazine without even checking what’s inside it will already be aware of just how powerful good design can be. It’s nice to see that the same attention is paid to their books, especially when you know that words from Herbie Sykes mean that there will be substance to go with the style. That said, me and a Swiss army knife have so far failed to get through the actual packaging.

The Vault

An anti-novel, apparently. But perhaps not in the way its author thinks. My wife chose it for me based on the back cover blurb, which contains the line “a gripping tale of army snipers, nuclear espionage and competitive cycling.”  It does dozens of things that they probably tell you not to do in novel writing class, and is really enjoyable because of it.  

Hulstra Jersey:

Have you noticed how a slightly throwback, seventies look has become quite hip lately? This windproof top is the hippest thing I own. Slightly shiny, white and orange, fleece lining and zip pockets on the back. It’s beautiful. I’ve been complaining lately that it’s just too cold to stay out for long, but this should change all that.

2005 Tour De France DVD:

It occurs to me looking at this that when I started watching cycling, Channel 4’s coverage consisted of half an hour of highlights every day, for 21 days.  I used to feel like my many, many highlight DVDs were merely a substitute for the actual TV coverage. It’s strange to think that 12 hour highlight DVDs mean that I’ll see more of the race now than I did when it happened.

Bicycle Dreams

I’ve seen the odd documentary about the Race Across America, but this seems to be the definitive DVD on the subject.  Cycling is such a telegenic sport, it’s hard to get the visuals wrong, but from what I hear Bicycle Dreams finds the story to go with them. I might stick this on later tonight, unless someone manages to mobilise a strong  Downton Abbey/Strictly Come Dancing block vote.

Ah, the vagaries of blog traffic.

Oh look, I've had a traffic spike, I wonder where it came from? Ah, you're all googling "Peta Todd." And at Christmas too. You're all going on Santa's naughty list, you dirty little monkeys.

Just kidding. As you were.