For those of you who are planning to try and catch the crit portion of the Univest Grand Prix on Sunday, GamJams.net has the startlist for Saturday's road race.  I presume it will track closely with Sunday's crit.  It's an interesting field - I wish I'd known about it earlier, as I would have tried to catch it in person.

I know Podium Cafe is more a racing than a cycling culture community, but I thought I'd pass along something that deserves a brief pause:

A cyclist who pedalled the world for more than 40 years, braving raging rivers, a lion and the hospitality of an Eskimo princess, has been killed by a hit-and-run driver in Greece.

Ian Hibell, 74, was a well-known figure in the world of long-distance cycle touring, setting several records and pedalling the equivalent of ten times around the Equator.

[ . . . ]

Mr Hibell, from Brixham in Devon, set out on his travels in 1963 after asking his employer for a two-year sabbatical. He returned ten years later, having become the first cyclist to ride from Cape Horn to Alaska, among other journeys.

[ . . . ]

 

Mr Hibell rarely kept to the beaten track, managing to cross mangrove swamps, mountain ranges and even the Sahara desert on two wheels. He was shot at by bandits, had his tent eaten by tropical ants, was sniffed by a lion and chased by elephants.

Sounds like a life well lived.  May we all aim for the same.

No, the Olympics aren't quite over for pro cyclists.  Tonight (in a very general sense) we have the men's and women's XC MTB running.   VeloNews has a good recap of what the course entails.  And remember, mountain biking has provided a lot of top road racers - Evans, Rasmussen, Landis, Sanchez, etc.

The women's race started off at 10p EDT, and the men roll at 3a EDT.  Those of you outside of EDT will just have to do math.  I can carry the torch for the men's race, but I'll need a left coaster to complete the relay.

Live video link for (most) US-based viewers here.

On September 21st of this year, you'll be able to head down to Penn Quarter and see a real live pro criterium race in the form of the ING Direct Capital Criterium. It's a six turn 1km circuit that winds its way among the Federal agencies downtown.

I've been waiting for a long time to see something like this happen (in fact, I already know the shot I'll be aiming for). As it stands, there's going to be a Men's 35+ race, a Men's 1/2/3, and a Men's Pro. No word on who the teams will be yet.

DId you notice something missing from that list of races? That's right, no women's field. Which is especially disappointing, considering that Cyclelife, a presenting sponsor, has its own women's team. They're aware of that disappointment, and while they haven't promised anything about next year, they say that they hope to include a women's field when they can. The official race site is here, and I'll post more when details become available.

Sometimes it even hurts the folks who complain about the doping:

It was over in an instant, but the altercation between a Tour of Utah race official and Garmin-Chipotle team doctor Prentice Steffen was years in the making.

During the stage 3 criterium in Salt Lake City last Friday, Tour of Utah team liaison Marty Jemison, a former U.S. Postal Service rider, punched Steffen after the team doctor made what Jemison considered to be an inflammatory remark about alleged doping dating back over a decade.

The rest of the story here.

Perhaps it's just my excessively rosy outlook on life, but I was really hoping we could get through the Olympics without having a doping issue to talk about.  Unfortunately, it looks like Maria Isabel Moreno (website) took that from us, with a positive test for EPO.  The details aren't entirely clear at the moment, but I'm sure we'll know more than we ever wanted to, soon enough.

Update: The short version is that Moreno was tested on July 31 and left  the same day, never even entering the women's road race.  Sounds like she knew what was coming. The latest release on her website is announcing that she won't be talking to the media today.  And with that, I think that's the last time any of us will be giving her any attention, barring some useful finger pointing at the supply chain.

read this:

One evening last October at Camp Victory, in Baghdad, Iraq, U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel Mike Pietrucha, 41, set out on his bike for his usual 12-mile ride over broken blacktop and gravel roads. Halfway through the route, while crossing a large man-made lake, he heard a series of thumps coming from the Shi'a neighborhood east of the base. Immediately, he recognized the sound of rockets firing. As he considered his lack of cover, he heard voice warnings on a loudspeaker: "To the sound of 'Incoming, incoming'--like a M*A*S*H episode--rockets started landing," Pietrucha says. "The first rocket came in and hit maybe 300 meters to my right, so that was no problem." Then he heard the second coming in directly overhead. It hit 80 meters away from him, in the water, creating a two-story fountain. Pietrucha finished crossing the bridge, abandoned his bike and lay facedown in the sand underneath the bridge to wait out the attack. Five more rockets landed. "And then it was over," he says. "As a cyclist, I was used to stopping under bridges to shield myself from rain, but I never considered a bridge a good shield for rocket fire."

More than one of the guys I regularly ride with (usually in the dirt) around here has had his East Coast season cut short by a deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.  And yet they still ride.

I watched Road to Athens last night.  It's a documentary film about the selection process for the US MTB team in 2004, which was quite unlike the process for 2008.  In 2004, they attempted to make it a matter of UCI points (and World Cup standing, for a second men's spot).  Without giving too much away about the movie (which you should absolutely Netflix, buy, or borrow), that process turned into a complete clusterf()#.  So, to try and avoid that in 2008, they've placed some measure of discretion in the coach for the US MTB team (USA Cycling's "Mountain Bike Coordinator" Marc Gullickson).

For this year, there were four spots total (two men, two women).  Two spots were filled automatically (Todd Wells and Georgia Gould's UCI points performances sealed the deal for them).  The second men's discretionary spot was awarded to Adam Craig.   For some reason, the second women's spot is still undecided.  Interesting interview over at VeloNews with Gullickson about his view of the selection process.

And all this to find out who gets to ride this course just over a month from now.

Photo of Sue Haywood, featured in Road to Athens (taken by Megabeth at the 2007 Shenandoah Mountain 100.)

Hi, all.  I'm sure I'll be terribly embarrassed at the schoolmarmishness of this tomorrow, but right now I'd like to just post a brief reminder that it's important to (at least) credit photographers when posting their work.  I know this is the web, that everyone else is doing it, etc., but it takes a lot of work (time, effort, and money) to get a lot of those shots.  The very least we can do is make sure that they're recognized for the work they've done.

Ideally, when you repost a photo here, you'll have the permission of the photographer (you'd be amazed at how easy that is to get).  If that's too much, at least link to the original source and credit the photog.  Many many thanks.

(BTW, this is just a personal request.  Nothing more. )

-Photo titled You're Doing It Wrong.

And the Garmin-Chipotle team for Le Tour will be:

• Magnus  Backstedt  
  
• Julian Dean 
  
• Will  Frischkorn  
  
• Ryder  Hesjedal 
  
• Trent  Lowe 
  
• Martijn  Maaskant 
  
• David Millar 
  
• Danny Pate  
• Christian Vande  Velde

Again, we'll see them in their new kits on July 3rd.  Will Tom D. get one, too?