The 2010 season’s opening weekend has come and gone, and its traditionally tough races did not disappoint.

Juan-Antonio Flecha finally got his first classic win at Het Nieuwsblad—though a glance over his shoulder just before his winning salute might have been a coy reference to that race he should have won.

The next day, KBK delivered wonderfully miserable conditions, through which three relative unknowns held off a high-powered chase before Bobbie Traksel of increasingly prominent wild-card squad Vacansoleil took an exhausted sprint for the win.

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Yes! It’s bike season again! Here’s Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, half of the Belgian season’s opening weekend, run in some unseasonably nice weather over various cobbles and bergs, and featuring an inordinately large number of mechanical problems.

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download]

Contains a photo from Jeff Jones’ Cyclingnews days, and footage from Sporza.be.

Be sure to check out the rest of the videos, either here, the iTunes store, on Vimeo or on YouTube. I’ve also got footage from today’s KBK event, which should be making an appearance later in the week.

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Today, Alberto Contador broke away to win the mountainous third stage of what is turning into a particularly miserable Volta ao Algarve.

In 2004, Armstrong issued a similarly strong statement in the Algarve TT. When asked about it in an interview with The Times of London, Armstrong said:

I was thinking what would I do if I heard Ullrich had won a time trial in February,” he said. “I think I’d get straight down and do 50 sit-ups just to say to myself I was doing something.

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There’s nothing like like watching endurance sports covered by a glorified electric company to remind one how miserably people tend to perform when placed outside their sphere of expertise.

Like a French judge ruling on cybercrime, for example. Judicial officials are already notoriously ignorant on matters of technology, and I sincerely doubt that having a shot at the man who embarrassed your national race is going to do anything for the judiciary’s grasp of the subject, or the fairness of its ruling.

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Cycling isn’t a sport that lends itself to idle boasting. The most flamboyant and outspoken rider in recent memory was Mario Cipollini, who managed to put together a small collection of Giro stages—among other prizes—to back up his chatter.

So it seems highly out of place when a guy like Jose Rujano says “I’m the third best climber in the world”. Even when Rujano was a notable—half a decade ago—I still don’t think he was the third best climber in the world. The tactical complexity of the ‘05 Giro makes a definitive statement difficult, but had the Smurfish Venezuelan showed his cards sooner, and had Ivan Basso not been laid low by the runs, I think the heads of state would have kept Rujano on a far shorter leash.

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While I could do without the music, and the grainy VHS-to-flash video quality, this Team 7-Eleven classic is definitely worth watch. It’s not often a 10-day stage race comes down to an intermediate sprint…



(via velogogo)

You’ve got to wonder at the behind-the-scenes machinations preceding this final stage. It strains credulity that Panasonic, after 10 days of racing, and shattering the field up the final climb the day before, could have controlled the entire peloton with their legs alone, before putting an all-rounder like Winnen in prime position to win the sprint.

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Is January too early to talk about the Tour de France? Of course not—at least, not when the Tour is the only cycling event your employer bothers to cover live, and especially not when that employer is the Network formerly known as “Only Lance” and you’re bashing the chief rival of a certain well-known Texan.

While anything Bob Roll writes must be taken with a MassDOT-sized serving of salt, Joe Parkin’s commentary tends to be quite insightful. So when he writes that “Contador has weaknesses in his armor that leave many of the great champions who preceded him absolutely dumbfounded”, I’m teetering on the edge of my seat, waiting to hear exactly what those weaknesses are. Sadly, the A Dog in a Hat author doesn’t deliver any details.

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If you’ve noticed the distinct, sharp-edge whiff of bile around the cycling world at the moment, don’t attribute it entirely to an excess of cheer at various holiday gatherings. Headlines at the end of the year—and the end of a decade, especially—always seem to reek more of regurgitation than perspiration.


It’s not that I’m above a year-end retrospective; I’ve done it at least once, and frankly, despite the four years that have transpired between then and now, that post is still one of the best end-of-year recaps around.

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Found this in my Tumblr feed this morning, courtesy of VeloGogo (which, as an aside, would have been a far better candidate for Blog of the Year if Competitive Cyclist actually gave a rip about the criteria it claimed to advance):

My only objection stems from the picture caption, which labels these videos as the “Old Testament”. In the Cycling Church of Cosmo, the dates and titles on those VHS collections (especially “The Greatest Climbs of the Tour de France 1990-1999″) would place them squarely in the center of the Apocrypha.

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A week has passed since the worst-kept-secret in cycling officially became a done deal. It’s been spun, analyzed, broken-down and overblown in all ways imaginable, but from my point of view, Toto’s cheekily delivered analysis hits closest to the mark—Brad Wiggins was “flipped”.

After the 2008 season, Wiggins was an also-ran in the world of professional cycling; a talented trackie who’d always planned to pick it up on the road, but couldn’t seem to deliver. Even as an obvious favorite in the short TT, Wiggins seldom came through, picking up a single ProTour win: the ‘07 Dauphine prologue. Despite a fistful of gold medals on the track, his stock was understandably low.

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