Opening the season right: by putting entirely too much effort into a video for a not-especially-interesting bike race. That said, who isn’t glad for some serious news relating to actually racing bikes instead of throwing lawyers around? And a good fight from some names a few steps below the marquee is always nice to see.

[Right-click to download]

No explanation needed

The jokes, dear reader, have already been made.

I’m sure you think you’ve got some clever new gibe to add, some original snark to spin-off that will raise the bar that little bit higher—and in some cases, I might even believe you. But in humor, as in all things, there is a point of diminishing return, and we have long-since passed it.

Or perhaps your intentions are noble. Perhaps you feel this story is so big, the celebrity status involved in it so outsized, and whichever side you disagree with so clearly idiotic and unjustifiable, that it’s totally worth your continued effort to try and reason your opposition into an inevitable concession. If history is any indicator, that just isn’t going to happen.

Not dodging anything, just a little body english / by PelgrimsPlekke, cc-by-nc

I consider myself among the more optimistic commentators as far as cycling and doping go. But as the year wraps up, I can’t help but think a nice Resolution for the sport might be to stop asking me to ignore what a more cynical man might call “the obvious”.

Consider the example of Sven Nys, who won yesterday’s World Cup in Zolder in a not-exactly-unpredictable fashion. This same Sven Nys rode the first decade of his career on a Rabobank team that’s alleged to have had an in-house doping program, and at the very least, explicitly tolerated doping for the sweeping majority of the Belgian’s time there.

In fact, when Nys finally did announce plans to jump ship to Landbouwkredeit (after an introduction from confessed doper Filip Meirhaeghe), it came just a few months after the Rabobank team had conducted a thorough investigation and sweeping internal changes in the wake of the Rasmussen Debacle.

“We are no longer convinced that the international professional world of cycling can make this a clean and fair sport. We are not confident that this will change for the better in the foreseeable future.”

Rabobank, on their departure as a professional cycling sponsor

We’ll be seeing you later…or will we? / by Gerard Stolk, cc-by-nc

That about sums it up.

As someone who has advocated, and continues to advocate, that cycling is getting better when it comes to drugs, it’s slightly painful to agree with that statement. Maybe this is how Fatty felt when he finally faced the music. Regardless, I can’t find any fault with Rabobank’s assessment—and I’m the sort who believes there’s no such thing as bad press.

Fine—I’ll just do non-ITU Triathlons / by Kevin Saunders, cc-by-nd

There’s an easy way to make a million people agree with you—present an argument that’s both simple and entirely compatible with their existing values.

An example: A man is suspected of burglary. He has left fingerprints near, but not at, a number of crime scenes, 11 friends are willing to testify against him, but the suspect has never been caught in the act of robbing a house. Should the state press charges?

It’s hardly a moral dilemma, and you’d certainly be hard-up to find many people who’d call it unjust. And yet, last Thursday a suspected burglar convicted doper effectively pled “no contest” after the authorities brought just such a charge, and in the process convinced millions that not only was this slam-dunk of a case a witch hunt, it was somehow “#unconstitutional” as well.

There’s more to clean racing than just racing clean / by flickr user niceguysean, cc-by-nd

For better or worse, the racing in this year’s Tour de France did not offer a great deal of excitement.

There were some interesting sprints, the positive (mad watts) and negative (position, timing) confirmations of Peter Sagan’s abilities, the emergence of Tejay VanGarderen as a guy who can hold a GC place for three weeks, but as far as a battle for yellow, there just wasn’t a lot to talk about.

Sure, Evans took some shots early, and Nibali took some shots late, but as the Tour went on, the storyline became less about Brad Wiggins defending his race lead and more about Brad Wiggins defending the legitimacy of his performance.

The Official 2006 Tour Logo. Hasn’t been much tugging on the jersey this year.

We’re nearly a week into the Tour de France, and yet the race’s most obvious prize remains awarded based on a handful of seconds’ from the event’s first seven minutes. Is this any way to encourage quality racing on the sport’s biggest stage?

I understand the arguments against bonus seconds—the best example is probably Levi Leipheimer—but I think they’re too often deeply rooted in an arbitrary notion of what constitutes “fair”.

Bike racing is as sport with many facets, and if a GC contenter can mix it up in a sprint or short, sharp finish climb, that’s a skill that should count toward an overall win. It’s not like the three-week runtime of a modern Grand Tour leaves any GC contender with a shortage of opportunities to peel back that few seconds’ advantage.

Ernest riding with the Boston crew | Matt Nunnelly, VeloNews.com

It hasn’t been the best month-and-a-half here at Cyclocosm. More accurately, you might say it hasn’t been the best month and a half for your humble narrator personally, but open-ended complaints make for poor reading.

So let me just say that it was a very nice break from the recent routine to see my friend, Ernest Gagnon getting some serious press coverage for the riding he’s put in over the past year-and-a-half.

The article is no exaggeration—in the fall of 2010, I started riding with a guy who was scared of his own shadow and could barely get out his car; it’s kind of tough to believe that today he’s the same guy who knocks off three-hour rides and is better at line selection than most Cat 3 ‘cross racers I know.

Brad Wiggins’ performance earlier this week in the first stage of the Tour of Romandie was a rare treat for the modern cycling fan: a real Grand Tour contender duking it and taking the win in a bunch sprint.

It wasn’t in a Grand Tour, of course, and it took a couple pretty serious climbs to thin out the field, but still—watching Wiggins reach back to his trackie days to hold Liquigas’ leadout, jump from the cheap seats, and even gamely extend his twiggy little elbows in the final meters was pretty damn cool:

The last time I saw something like this, it was 2004 and the biggest race in the US was a mid-April appointment in Georgia. Taking advantage of a field thinned by some late climbs, and leaning on his unique ability to lay down power at a high cadence, Lance Armstrong made a late surge in a fast, downhill sprint. Hate the Texan all you want, but respect the skills and instinct—rest day refills almost certainly didn’t help him here:

Embedded from Cyclocosmblr using Embeddlr(Don’t have Flash? Click here!)

Another new course this spring, though certainly nothing on par with Flanders’ change-up. Despite the re-worked parcours, this one unfolded sleepily, feeling at points like a Tour de France sprint stage. But comic relief at the back, some lively riding as the break wore down and an attack from a very surprising source set the stage for a fantastic finale.

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download]

Fancy that, naming something awesome (a bike race) after your product. To think that there are still a) unbranded products and b) products advertised with banner ads—boggles the mind, does it not?