It was my birthday earlier in the week — I’m thirty-mumble (again). My present hasn’t arrived yet, but I’m hopeful it will be here before we head out to Illinois in a couple of weeks, because then I can visit here. Suggestions et cetera welcomed; it’s been about a decade since I engaged in this particular activity and lots of stuff is different…
Floyd Landis is riding the Tour (and currently holding second position in the GC, one scant minute off the lead, as the Tour heads into the mountains) with a severely degraded hip joint, the result of a training crash in 2003.
Landis and Kay had been dealing with this hip since January 2003, when Landis fractured it in a crash. But since July of that year, the story line had been his gutty, two-surgery comeback to help his U.S. Postal Service teammate Armstrong win the 2003 Tour de France. Seemingly fully recovered, Landis had followed it up with a breakout 2004 season that saw him join the top ranks of the sport. But that story ended with the radiologist’s blunt report: advanced osteonecrosis, 25 to 50 percent femoral head collapse, with superimposed osteoarthritis. It was a textbook case: cut off from the blood supply, the femoral head was withering into a cauliflower-shaped knob that was already grating away at the remaining cartilage.
(Something about the phrase “grating away at the remaining cartilage” makes me wince each and every time I read it.)
If you haven’t been following the Tour, it’s not to late to start — as I said, it’s just starting to get into the exciting stages, it’s wide open as far as who might eventually win this thing, and there are a number of people — Landis and Robbie McEwen in particular — riding with great skill and greater joy.
Since the Tour is in full swing, it seems like a good time to point to Sheldon Brown’s Bicycle Glossary. Ridiculously detailed, highly entertaining, and how can you not enjoy a glossary that says right up front “This does not pretend to be an objective document.”
Live tracking of Tour riders with a Google maps mashup. I assume this means they finally got around to making the riders carry GPS beacons…
We’re cleaning out the basement to prepare for some renovation work which will (hopefully) we starting here in a couple of weeks. As part of that, I’m going to be giving a couple of old bike frames to a co-worker — largely because he’ll do something with them, and I seem highly unlikely to get around to it anytime soon. He was talking about turning one (a Raleigh Technium road frame) into a fixed gear, so he might be interested in reading Quest for a Fixed Gear, which I saw in the Post this morning.
Last night, I stayed a bit late at work and then walked down into Bethesda to see Off Road To Athens, a documentary about the selection of the mountain bikers that represented the U.S. in the 2004 Olympics. The film was visually excellent, all the more so for being shot on “mostly” one camera. I’m not sure I’d believe that if it wasn’t the director saying it; the race scenes all featured shots from multiple positions along the courses. Somebody must have been running around the course like mad to get those shots.
Better than the raw film-making, however, is the story. Arcane, never-fully-explained rules about how many people the US can send to Athens create a situation where the competition to qualify for the team becomes all-consuming for the small community of potential qualifiers, even to the point where they’re not effectively training to compete in the Olympics because they’re working too hard trying to get selected to go to the Olympics.
The film is currently “on tour”; show dates available at the site. Highly recommended if you get a chance to see it.
So, unless you’re under a rock, you’re aware that this year’s Tour has kicked off. (As I type this, I’m watching the Tivo’d team time trial — say that three times fast.) Things might get a bit lighter around here as discretionary cycles get sucked into TV time (or, given how light they’ve been recently, you might not be able to tell the difference…)
So far, the best written thing about the Tour (that I’ve seen, anyway) has been these opening ‘grafs from the WaPo’s Sunday coverage of the second stage:
Dave Zabriskie was 17 years old when his mother drove him to a junior race in Colorado named after cycling icon Lance Armstrong. Zabriskie won that day, but never expected to have a chance to compete against Armstrong, much less best him on a given day.
Lance Armstrong has won the Tour de France six times, but never expected to have a chance to break the back of one of his most durable rivals on the first day of the race.
The two American riders made the exceptional seem routine in the dramatic Tour-opening time trial Saturday, owning it from A to Z.
The coolest tech thing I’ve seen so far: Bobby Julich of CSC is riding with an elliptical chainring — some discussion of that here.
Stone-cold funniest thing to date? The Bob Roll Kinetic trainer commercial. I expect to be stopping the Tivo fast-forward to laugh at this one quite often, and that’s the highest praise I can think of giving a commercial.
More for the locals than anything else — on July 21st, there’s going to be a screening of Off Road to Athens at Bethesda Row Cinema. The movie is about the process of selecting the three American mountain bikers (two men, one woman) that were sent to Athens. I’ve got my tickets (and may end up having an extra); let me know if you’re attending and we can hook up for coffee or something afterwards.
For the non-locals, there are other screenings coming up, mostly on the left coast…
Up on first-of-their-kind charges of blood doping, the best explanation Tyler Hamilton could come up with didn’t pass my smell test…
Last month, when the champion American cyclist Tyler Hamilton was accused of blood doping, or transfusing himself with another person’s blood to increase his oxygen-carrying red cells, he offered a surprising defense: the small amount of different blood found mixed in with his own must have come from a “vanishing twin.”
In other words, his scientific expert argued, Mr. Hamilton had a twin that died in utero but, before dying, contributed some blood cells to him during fetal life. And those cells remained in his body, producing blood that matched the dead twin and not Mr. Hamilton. Or perhaps it was his mother’s blood that got mixed in during fetal life.
Here’s the rest of the story at the NYT.
