It’s not like I haven’t covered this before, but I feel I ought to touch again on the radio issue. With two stages of this year’s Tour de France to be run radio-free, there’s a significant groundswell of support for the out-and-out prohibition of radios in professional cycling.

I’ve characterized this group—largely for comic effect—as retro-grouch luddites, and for the most part, that’s not true. The No-Radio crowd comes from across the sport, and bases its argument on well-meaning but misguided notions that banning radios will somehow lead to “more exciting” racing.

Velonews has started posting video retrospectives in recognition of the 10th anniversary of Lance Armstrong’s first Tour win.

They’ve still got some work to do on page layout, and the voiceover isn’t quite synced, nor up to How The Race Was Won standards, but it’s good to see they’ve taken my advice and begun embedding the videos in HTML pages so Google can see them.

Anyway, I thought I’d post my own retrospective here. Since Livestrong.com now posts Armstrong’s test results (BTW, charts should be saved as PNGs, not JPGs), I figured I’d try to compare it to some older data on Lance’s blood work.
I wish I had some actual numbers, but “fit to start” was apparently all the vampires recorded during their hematocrit tests.

I like Johan Bruyneel. I think he’s a savvy, solid DS, knows how to play out a good hand as well as anyone, and can handle the occasional a curveball. He even has a book, and apparently, it’s a decent read.

But I think, some years down the road, if anyone ever writes book about him, this year’s Tour selection could be the moment they single out when everything—the aura of invincibility, the unshakeable confidence, the entire Cult of Johan—came rattling apart.

If there’s a bike company that exemplifies everything I find ludicrous about the industry, it would be Kuota. From their rococo frame designs, paint jobs (or lack thereof), and high price tags, right down to the .it URL (even Campy isn’t that brand-obsessed), you’d be hard pressed to find a bike trying harder to draw attention away the shortcomings of its rider’s pe…personality.

Yeah, so as if WordPress nuking every file on my server wasn’t bad enough, there was a brief mix-up with DNS records that temporarily bumped Cyclocosm.com to a GoDaddy parked URL page.

The whole rigamarole would have been fixed much sooner—and possibly avoided entirely—if Verizon, my grundle of an ISP, hadn’t spent hours redirecting me to Bangalore, where a series of phone-mashers pretended that they had fake Anglo-Saxon names and that disconnecting my router from the phone jack would magically fix everything.

So Ag2r, perennial also-ran at the Tour de France, has announced a new jersey for this year’s edition of the Grand Bouclé. Unfortunately, there was a mix-up at the printers, but through my European contacts, I’ve managed to get a copy of the actual jersey the team will be using this June:

If you’re curious, the font is Proxima Sans Medium, but Gill Sans MT Bold is a passable (and free) stand-in.

So I’ve told you, many a time, that smaller stage races don’t do it for me. Don’t get me wrong, its awesome to see a dude like Sylvester Szmyd, who turned himself inside out feeding the whims of the schizophrenic helper monkey driving the Liquigas team car last month, take a stage on storied climb like Mount Ventoux.

But with Valverde almost certainly out of next month’s Tour, it’s just an evil tease to watch him race well. It’s like seeing a baseball hitter go on a nasty run when his team has already been eliminated from the playoffs.

On top of a week-long hiatus for some girlfriend- and day job-related travel, I managed to nuke my server while trying to install WordPress 2.8. I would highly recommend backing up and turning off all widgets before attempting an update.

Anyway, the images are all missing and likely gone forever. Text, comments, formatting, etc. were all stored in databases and should be fine. Some small template changes have also been lost, but I can restore most of them from the Google cache.

“…it won’t snap, either.”

-Lennard Zinn, on Mavic’s r-sys spokes, May. 8, 2009

I had a definite sensation that Lennard Zinn would end up ruing this tech story on Mavic’s “improved” R-Sys wheel design. I know Zinn’s got a heck of a reach, but at a beefy 190, I still wouldn’t put money against fellow VeloNewsie Ben Delaney kicking his ass—once the shoulder has healed, of course.

For all the entertainment and (hopefully drug-free) drama of this year’s Giro, I think the biggest revelation to come out of it was that Denis Menchov now has to be the favorite for this years Tour de France.

Sure, Menchov has won Grand Tours before, but the Vuelta is different. I’ve poetically referred to it as The Dreamers’ Race, since Laurent Jalabert, Tony Rominger, Sean Kelly and a host of other would-be Tour contenders wrapped up titles in Spain during their fruitless quest for victory on Cycling’s biggest stage.