Ok, kiddies, huddle up. I just need to remind you all that you’re not reading the Times, here. I’ve been known to be sarcastic from time to time. So every time you see something like this:

You can be pretty sure it’s going to be followed up by one of these:

It should be noted that in either case, the assertion is obviously ludicrous—Eastern Bloc cyclists were notorious for their wild, aggressive riding despite institutionalized, statist upbringings, and a host of Americans have managed to do quite well in cycling without Uncle Sam paying their medical bills (though back in ’96, a certain Texan was damn lucky he had Uncle Mike to help him out instead).

Cycling is friggin’ expensive. No doubt the constant demand for costly and exclusive parts from well-heeled cyclists has contributed greatly to the sport’s clichéd position as “the new golf”.

That having been said, not everyone needs a pair of Obermayers. Far more burdensome—at least from my tax bracket—are the opportunity costs associated with being a competitive racer. Last summer, when I elected to pursue paid writing opportunities instead of training (and managing this blog), the roughly 10 hours a week I’d otherwise spend on the bike were quite effectively monetized; my least well paying gig was $40 for roughly an hour’s work.

or

Why The Media’s As Guilty as The Bloggers, and Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Either

(Some of the people and organizations covered in this piece have contacted me with responses. I have complied and published them in a separate post.)

Back in 2005, when I started Cyclocosm, I actively avoided using the term “blog”. I used it in the <title> tag for anyone Googling for cycling blogs, but in written correspondence and in speech, I referred to it as a “cycling news website”.

A mere 10 days since the Tour and we’ve already had how many races? My count of top-tier post-Tour Euro cycling events is currently at three; one classic and two fairly extensive stage races:

Tour of Denmark (29 July – 2 Aug)
Clasica San Sebastian (1 Aug)
Tour of Poland (2 Aug – 8 Aug)

That’s 13 days of racing within 14 days of the end of the Tour—and frankly, that’s too many races. I realize that cycling’s season is long and grueling; even with recently defunct races like Züri-Metzgete and Deutchland Tour, there are a finite number of racing days in which to hold events.

I’ve know you don’t wanna answer those pesky questions about drugs, Alberto, but in all seriousness—are you high right now?

You’d have to be stoned out of your skinny Spanish gourd to simply stonewall some very reasonable questions a day after word broke that DiLuca turned up positive for CERA twice during his Giro campaign this year.

It’s not like the graphics (point of order: Riis was never “caught” doping) are anywhere near definitive. As much as I appreciate and enjoy the effort of the dudes over at The Science of Sports, there are way too many variables at play to effectively compare times between years, or ascending rates between climbs.

(I tried contacting the directly ASO via their YouTube channel, but they refuse to accept messages from anyone they aren’t friends with. I sent this to them via email links on their homepage, but I do not expect a reply.)

Dear Sir or Madam,

I was very disappointed to read this morning that you filed a copyright infringement complaint against my video “2009 Tour de France – Stage 2 – How The Race Was Won (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nq7oEE7PdUk)”

Today’s stage, and the radio-inspired protest that dominated most of it, was one of the most foolish things I’ve ever seen at the Tour de France—and yes, I am including the Giuseppe Guerini incident in that list. And, lest we forget, I am adamantly pro-radio.

All the proponents of race radio had to do was play along with the premise: have a single bike race without radios. The stage had almost no potential for GC impact (apologies if Leipheimer and Wiggins are still stinging from missing the split), and baring an event of Merckxian scale, fans and organizers alike would see removing the radios does little, if anything, to shake up the routine of break-and-catch.

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.

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 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.