Transcript Hey there Internets—as I mentioned on Monday, I’m a little cranky this week and so I figured, what with my ample amounts of free time and top shelf home production facility, I might as well turn some of that angst into entertaining multimedia web content. So I guess I want my first rant to…
Cycling Organization Press Release Generator
This form broke a few years after publication, and in July 2021 I disabled it completely. May it serve as a reminder producing spoofed content was once considered funny. I had some thoughts on cycling—on the honest-to-goodness racing of bicycles—earlier this week. But dang if I didn’t get a little distracted by the bellowing and…
Feeding the Trollstrong Foundation
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…
A New Year’s Resolution for Cycling
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,…
Rabobank Brings the Fight to Aigle
“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 That about sums it up. As someone who has advocated, and…
"No Comment" is the New Doping
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…
The New Reality
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,…
Every Bonus Second Counts
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…
My Friend Ernest
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,…
The Amgen Tour of Confused Californian Branding
The Tour of California has an image problem. Mercifully, it’s nothing to with jersey zips—it’s more that the race’s marketing material is absolutely incomprehensible. Let’s overlook the fact that “Eight Days of Epic” uses the most cored marketing term in recent memory (it’s been a joke on Archer for crying out loud)—the Tour of California…