From the Archives - Punish Me, Young Man!

Introduction

Today’s post is a story I originally wrote for Daily Peloton. (Their servers crashed a couple years ago and all their content was lost, so I’m gradually re-posting my dp articles here.) Enjoy please enjoy.

Punish Me, Young Man – October 14, 2007

On my ride today I got crushed by a guy whose bike had a front reflector. And yet, it was a glorious ride. (If that grabs your attention, read on, but if you’re looking for pro race results, you won’t find them in this story.)

I got off to a late start on my ride this morning, tired and feeling vaguely demoralized. I’d been caught in the rain on the previous day’s ride and was having that standard existential crisis of “Why do I train so much, and so hard, in October no less, when I don’t even race anymore?” So I was dragging to begin with, and then on my second climb, South Park Road, I really started to bog down. I was not feeling any of those “positive sensations” the pro racers are always talking about. And I kept seeing these squashed newts on the road.

These endangered newts are protected half the year by a road closure, but it doesn’t begin until November and I guess they got a head start on their seasonal migration because of the early rain. It was depressing: I saw like two dozen of them, smashed completely flat. Okay, this really shouldn’t have affected my morale, but that’s the kind of morning I was having. I almost turned around and went home.

Fortunately, the night before I’d watched the violent Western “3:10 to Yuma” and was still feeling the effects of second-hand testosterone on the baser part of my nature—the lizard brain that doesn’t make excuses. I decided to push on, taking the steep, long descent of Claremont Road so I could drag myself back up it. Toward the bottom I saw this guy coming up. He waved, and I gave a little nod before realizing, wait, that was a really big wave, maybe he needs some help. I sat up, looked back, and (being basically at the bottom already) turned around and rode toward him. He slowed down so I could ride up alongside him. “Hi, I’m new here and don’t know any rides,” he said.

Now, before I commit to sharing my ride with a stranger, especially if I’m grumpy, I’ll usually try to figure out what kind of rider he is. You can’t really go by how nice his bike is, at least in the Bay Area, where a newcomer to the sport will happily drop three or four grand on a bike. But you can get clues: how well does the bike fit him? Double or triple crankset? And does his gear look suspiciously new, or well used?

This guy was on a spanking new ride, an Ultegra-equipped LeMond, with not only a triple crankset but a front reflector. I think I first recognized the stigma of a front reflector when I was about eleven. In all the shops I’ve worked at, that was the one reflector we always left off on new bikes, even the cheap ones. Getting the risk-averse shop management to approve this was never hard: front reflectors only serve those who ride on the wrong side of the road at night without a light.

And yet, this guy somehow didn’t seem like a novice. (I used to hear the term “Fred” applied to beginners, but one of our local heroes, Fred Rodriguez, has pretty much put that name to rest.) This guy’s position was good—he didn’t have his handlebars jacked up Mary Poppins style, which seems an epidemic among novice cyclists. And he was lean. He also had this European accent, which I couldn’t place. He was medium height, with very dark skin. His clothing looked great (but of course this is something money can buy). I asked him how long he was looking to go, and he said four hours. Four hours!

I told him I wasn’t going that long, but if he wanted I’d take him up the steepest climb in the area. I’m always trying get my friends to do this climb, called Lomas Cantadas, which gains 1,240 feet in about 2½ miles at an average grade of 11%. My friends’ responses usually range from “Yeah, right” to “I did that once and I’ll never do it again as long as I live.” How refreshing that this guy was so willing. Of course, he not only had no idea where else to ride, but didn’t know what he was getting into.

But first there was Claremont to get over. We began the climb—about 1.5 miles averaging 10%—and he started half-wheeling me right away. That can be annoying, but then I know how instinctive this is when you’re riding with someone you don’t know and want to make a good impression. But man, the harder I went, the faster he went, without ever seeming to strain. “New bike?” I asked him. He told me he was borrowing it from a local shop: he’d just moved here from Austria and would be trying out for the Health Net team on Monday. Had I heard of Health Net? Uh … yeah. Wow. Suddenly I realized that, as ambassador for Bay Area cycling to a serious European racer, I was going to have to dig deep to make sure this ride wasn’t a total waste of his time.

Dang, he was strong. Had this climb gotten steeper? I’m known on my bike club for having the strange (and annoying) ability to chatter away merrily right up to my anaerobic threshold, but here I found myself gasping for breath. I asked him how old he was: twenty. I’d been thinking we were more or less the same age, but only because I always forget how damn old I am. He asked, and I admitted I’m thirty-eight. (Going on fifty, I didn’t add.) I asked what his specialty was, and he said he’s an all-rounder. Yeah, he looked it, but he could sure climb. Toward the top of Claremont, he said, “Hey, you ride good.” He paused, then continued, “For thirty-eight.”

I rested a bit descending to Orinda and along the flat section before the dreaded Lomas Cantadas. As soon as we hit the climb I felt its wrath. (At least there’s no traffic—the narrow road winds around through a sparse residential area that eventually gives way to ranchland at the summit.) Within a quarter mile I was in my lowest gear and bogging down, but the Austrian never slowed. I dug deeper and deeper, looking for some sign that he was feeling anything. No sign. I asked him if he raced pro or amateur. “Professional,” said, and quickly added, “but only on a Continental team.” He pointed at his jersey: this past season he raced for Swiag Pro Cycling Team, and for the Austrian national team. I asked if he got to ride Worlds, and he said that the federation screwed up and didn’t submit their results to the UCI, and ended up only getting to send one rider instead of three. He’d been among the original three, but wasn’t the one guy who got to go.

So here I was, riding with an honest-to-God European pro! I wished I’d had better legs, though the difference between my best and worst day probably wouldn’t have been perceptible to him. Boy did I suffer. Somewhere along the line I hit my highest heart rate of the year, 181. I asked him at one point what his was: 150. 150! When I was his age, I would hit 150 riding to class … he must have really been loafing. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between a local boy and a real pro. He’s basically a different species.

On the hardest part of the climb, a couple miles in, I came completely apart. I was fricking rendered. The center could not hold. The infrastructure was crumbling. The fountains no longer worked in my plazas. Goats grazed in the shell of my capitol building. I weaved, my form was shot, my legs howled (albeit silently) like spoiled children, I wheezed like a leaf stuck in the blower. And yet, it was fun! I was taking on all comers: Man Against Man, Man Against Nature, Man Against Himself. I way dying, yes, but I had that wimp in my brain up against the turnbuckles at last. Oh yeah? Feeling lousy? Feeling weak and worthless? Well, let’s head out with this guy, lets offer him up my skinny legs to snap like twigs, let’s let my male ego trounce the rational mind once and for all, let’s see just how low I can go, how much pain I can pile on. I doubted the pro even noticed what I was going through, as he always stayed half a bike length ahead.

Ages ago, when my brother Geoff was an up-and-coming eighteen-year-old racer, he often rode with a thirty-something ex-racer named Bob, a crusty old veteran who’d been pretty good in his day. One day, as they duked it out on an epic Colorado climb, Geoff tried to keep a poker-face despite terrible, terrible suffering. Finally, he sneaked a glance at his opponent. Bob turned to him, grinned, and said, “Punish me, young man!” Ever since I heard that story, I’ve longed to use that line, and this here was almost the perfect opportunity. But the Austrian pro’s English wasn’t perfect, and I’d hate for the language barrier to distort the joke into something embarrassing. I was sure thinking it, though.

My motor control gone, I fumbled and dropped my water bottle. “Oh, I’ll get it,” the pro said. Normally I’d have tried to impress him by circling back and snatching it up without stopping, but I was in no condition to do it, and welcomed a brief respite. Besides, I wanted to see how long it took him to catch back up. He took his time circling back, stopped, stashed the bottle in his jersey pocket, and then smoothly but unhurriedly cruised back up as I kept myself redlined. I was reminded of the time I watched piranhas hunting goldfish in an aquarium: they’re so much faster than their prey, they simply don’t have to hurry. “No rush, I’ll take out the fish whenever I feel like it … okay—now.”

Finally the awful, beautiful climb was over, and we cruised the rest of my ride (he still had two and a half hours to go), chatting. He told me his name, Robel Tedros, and I figured out how to remember the name of his team, Swiag (“I will get lots of swag”). I gave him the URL of the bike club I’m on, and he said he might look me up. He described his plan: if his audition with Health Net goes well and he gets a good offer, he’ll race in the U.S.; otherwise he’ll move to Italy and race there. (I’m not sure why he’s leaving Austria, though he did mention the weather is lousy there.) I described some other roads he could check out, wished him luck on Monday, and we parted ways. I can’t imagine he won’t shred the Health Net boys, but who am I to say?

When I got home I googled his name and found him all over the race results websites, lots of top twenties. His profile on his team’s website, roughly translated by my browser (I don’t speak a word of German), reads thus: “Successes: winner total valuation of the UNIQA junior Trophy 2006, 6 victories in the junior class 2006, 6 further Top three placements in the junior class 2006, Viennese master in the junior class/road 2006, summoning into the Austrian junior national team 2006, 1 victory in the junior class 2005, 3 further Top three placements in the junior class 2005. Qualities: very good mountain driver, good individual time driver, good Sprinter, very good Allrounder, my nerve strength, openness, tolerance, loyalty, ambition.”

[Here’s a photo of Robel from around the time I encountered him.]

So, next time you see a guy with a front reflector on his bike, don’t jump to any hasty conclusions. He might be one of those mountain drivers!

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From the Archives - National Championships Team Time Trial

Introduction

I just finished watching the Tour de France team time trial. What an awesome event. As a tribute to this underrated cycling discipline, I offer this story from my archives.

(I originally wrote this back in 2003 for dailypeloton.com, which has evidently gone under. I did a dozen or so stories for that magazine and over time I’ll post them all to albertnet. The first such story I rescued is here.)

In 1990, I helped represent the UC Santa Barbara team at the NCCA Collegiate National Cycling Championships at Stanford. We went in as favorites for the team time trial, having dominated in this discipline all season long. Here is the full story of our Nationals attempt.

Collegiate Nationals Team Time Trial – September 30, 2003 (race was on May 19, 1990)

My story begins earlier in the season. I stacked hard descending Refugio Road, north of campus off US 101. I was pretty banged up and missed the next week or so of training before the Conference Championships.

At Conferences, I had terrible form and dropped out of all three races: the road race, the criterium, and even the team time trial (fortunately, the team still managed to win). Despite this piss-poor performance, I had an automatic spot on the Nationals team, along with our team captain, Trevor Thorpe; the Conference road race champion, Eric Cech; and John Pelster, another of our most solid TTT riders. We had four other riders vying for the final spot; we’d make our selection based on how fast they went in training over the next week. Naturally, I was an emotional wreck after Conferences, but Trevor snapped me out of it, saying, “You are not allowed to freak out about this!” I still had two weeks before Nationals to get my act together.

Three teams in particular we worried about. The California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) team from San Luis Obispo had won the TTT at Nationals the previous year, in Colorado. The University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) team were the reigning overall champions. But I was especially worried by the UC Berkeley team, because they’d lost to us by only two seconds at the Conference TTT—and they wouldn’t let us forget it. The way they went on about our paltry two seconds, you’d think they won the race.

One advantage we had over everybody was our fleet of “funny bikes,” designed especially for TTTs. Oddly, it wasn’t until the night before that we finally equipped them with the “clip-on” aero bars. (At Conferences, their maiden voyage, we’d ridden on the cow-horns.) We installed the clip-ons the day before the race and tried them out for the first time that night, riding through downtown Palo Alto after dark.

Back at the hotel, our fifth rider, Dan Wolnick, had bad news: he’d come down with a virus. But he’d have to race anyway; our alternate rider was so bitter about not making the team, he’d decided to stay home.

The next day we had the road race in the morning and the TTT in the evening. The road race was a mixed bag. My fork broke and I had to withdraw, as I couldn’t get a spare bike from neutral support. (I was still riding toe-clips and they only had bikes with clipless.) Eric had back problems so he DNF’d too. Dan was too sick to finish. But Trevor—though he’d been dropped by the breakaway early in the race—managed to claw his way back, reconnect in the final kilometer, and solo to victory. He now had the opportunity to win two national titles in one day—but of course he wouldn’t have much left in the tank. The rest of us would have to have the race of our lives.

I was feeling some pretty serious pressure. After all, I’d finished exactly zero of my last four races. Also, I couldn’t stop thinking about the taunting from the Berkeley riders—“two seconds!”

More than anything, I didn’t want to let the team down. A good TTT team is much more than a bunch of strong riders in a paceline; it’s a highly temperamental thing. If a rider accelerates even slightly when he takes the lead, he makes it really hard for the previous leader to latch on to the back, and any disruption to the pace costs the group time. Every rider must be acutely aware of how every other rider is doing and fine-tune the line (e.g., leaving a tired rider on the back for a rotation, or switching up who is drafting whom). If a rider senses he’s feeling better than the others, he should take a longer turn at the front.

It was a strange feeling lining up with these guys. To say I respected them would be an absurd understatement. In fact, I was almost in awe. I knew full well just how blazingly fast each one of them was, and just how hard each was going to go. In fact, awe doesn’t even cover it: I was almost afraid of them. Afraid of just how much I myself would suffer in matching up to the example I knew they were going to set with every pull.

The TTT is arguably a shame-based event. Say you ride poorly in an individual time trial: okay, you cost yourself some time, placed poorly, scored fewer points for the team. But if you screw up in a TTT, you just ruined everybody else’s race too. Your teammates could be on fire, it could be the best race of their lives, and you could ruin the whole thing. The race organizers ought to provide seppuku knives at the finish line.

We set off, and fell right into formation. From the start, we were just flying. If Trevor was blown from his road race victory, he didn’t show it. Eric seemed his normal animal self. Dan didn’t ride like a sick man. JP was laying down a brilliant pace. And I felt unbelievably strong. It didn’t even feel like my body; it felt like a much better one on loan from a born athlete. With all of my setbacks behind me, I found an incredible focus. Oh, it hurt, I was suffering hard, but in just the right way. It was like riding right out of all of life’s frustrations.

The bike felt amazing. While in the draft, I felt like I was being sucked along. Generally, you ride the cow-horns while drafting, and switch to the clip-ons only when you’re breaking the wind, but soon we felt comfortable enough to stay on the clip-ons the whole time. JP was riding behind me, which meant his pull began just as I latched onto the back. Seeing him churn away up there, I could tell he was having the ride of his life.

My main strength in cycling is recovery, which is why the TTT was always my best event. After a long pull at the front, I would be on the verge of blowing up, legs burning, almost anaerobic, but a short rest in the line brought me right back into a comfortable zone. Today I felt so good, so fresh, that I practically wanted to yell at the front rider, “Okay, that’s enough, get out of the way!”

At the first of three turnarounds, Dan burned up in the atmosphere. Every one of his pulls had been perfect, but he could only keep his illness at bay for so long. Dropping out was appropriate: far better to drive well for only three miles than to screw up the team’s rhythm for the next 10+. Still, this didn’t bode well. It’s like losing twenty percent of your engine.

During the second leg of the race, as we flew along in our reduced formation, I become aware of this faint ringing sound. There’s not much noise in a TTT—just the light whir of gears and the whump-whump-whump of the disks—and once I heard the ringing, I couldn’t ignore it. I realized it was the sound of a bike part doing something it’s not supposed to do. But where? I slowly took my eye off of Trevor’s rear wheel and looked down at my bike. Nothing wrong there. I shifted my attention to Trevor’s bike, and eventually spotted the problem: the lock-ring had come completely off of the adjustable cup of his bottom bracket. Without it in place, the cup could rattle loose, then looser, until his cranks would begin to rock back and forth and eventually his bike would be unrideable. All I could hope for was that Trevor didn’t use much grease when he installed the BB, and that the threads weren’t “chased” properly—that is, that there was brazing debris in there making the cup not want to turn. As precise as our riding was, this possible sloppiness might carry the day.

At our second turnaround, JP and I didn’t switch positions like we normally do. We didn’t discuss this—we just instinctively maintained our original lineup. JP and I were still taking the monster pulls, and Eric and Trevor still seemed plenty strong, so I was stunned when, early in the third leg of the race, Trevor yelled out that he was gapped. I held back for just a few seconds before he latched back on and everybody yelled to go. Now I was thoroughly rattled.

A harrowing aspect of TTTs is that you don’t have any relative sense of how you’re doing. If you’re in a breakaway in a criterium or circuit race, you can get your splits, and you know your teammates in the peloton are working to shut down the chase, and you have the sense of being ahead. This really fires the adrenaline, fortifying your efforts. In a TTT, you may sense that you’re going fast, but anything that goes wrong can shake your faith in your team’s ability to win. We’d lost Dan, and now we’d lost precious seconds regrouping. But I wasn’t deterred. After all, a rider like Trevor wouldn’t have lost contact if we weren’t absolutely flying. This thing was still winnable.

At the end of the third leg, before the final turnaround, was a small hill. Trevor was in the lead, and Eric was on the back—and then, suddenly, he wasn’t. And he wasn’t calling out—he was either in denial, or felt tempted to cash it in. I was frozen, and then Trevor yelled, all the way from the front, “COME ON, ERIC, GET BACK HERE!” It was shockingly emphatic, and seemed to put the fear of God into Eric. He fought his way back to JP’s wheel, and we were together again. But how much had it cost? It seemed like forever, but couldn’t have been more than five or six seconds. Of course, such handfuls are the difference between winning and losing.

After the turnaround, we were on the home stretch—but it was a long home stretch. The pinging of Trevor’s bike’s lock-ring was like the ticking of a bomb. It looked like our race could go in almost any direction, and only one of them good. I was ready for this thing to be over. And about two miles from the end, I really hit the wall. I had never suffered so badly in my life. I was merely miserable while in the draft, but once at the front I was in full crisis mode. Our group was like a prison cell: there was nowhere to go for respite, no early parole, no escape until I’d served my full sentence. I stared at the bike computer, making sure the speed didn’t drop, willing the number to stay frozen, forcing my body to keep up the necessary effort. I kept promising myself that after five more seconds, I’d pull off and go to the back, but then—reminding myself that my teammates weren’t feeling any better—I’d renege on my promise and commit to another five seconds. When I finally couldn’t take it anymore, and it felt like my legs were going to shear off from the effort, I’d finally pull off.

But going to the back didn’t give immediate relief. This is because slowing down, even the minimum amount necessary to drift back, means you have to speed back up to latch on. That little acceleration was almost more than I could do. This is why people fall off the back of TTTs. Every latching on felt like a sprint. In fact, after a while I had to switch to the cow-horns and actually get out of the saddle to catch Trevor’s wheel. Every time, it felt like falling off a cliff and trying to catch myself by grabbing a clump of grass as it flew by.

JP noted this and the next time he dropped back, he eased in between Trevor and me, changing the lineup to give me the benefit of his larger draft. An added benefit: whenever I was latching on the back, Eric was beginning his pull, and (given the bad day he was having) he was the rider least likely to accidentally speed up. The final benefit was that JP, who had more juice left than the rest of us, started taking incredibly long and fast pulls, which inspired me to fight harder when it was my turn at the front. He really kept the group together.

With the lineup change my sprits improved. Sure, I was maxed out, but nobody ever won anything without paying the price. But I yearned to improve my efficiency in the transitions. Because I had to stand up to sprint onto JP’s wheel, I had to switch to the cow-horns every time I dropped back. I could feel the difference this made in wind drag. So I tried something new: getting out of the saddle while still on the clip-ons. Mistake. To my horror, I completely lost control and swerved so hard that the saddle clubbed me in the butt, almost knocking me off the bike. Then I overcorrected and swerved in the other direction. I was going down. Our Nationals dream was over.

But then, somehow, I regained control, and—with a fresh jolt of adrenaline—was able to get JP’s wheel. Now I was good and pissed off. No more screw-ups. Nothing was going to stop me. No crash, no self-doubt, no despair. I wanted to die, but I didn’t want to quit. It’s hard to describe how this resolution worked. Every so often you hear some fool saying, “I’m a great athlete because I can just turn off pain.” That’s a load of crap. A great athlete turns on the pain, and leaves it on. I kept forcing the pedals around to increase the agony, to punish my body for wanting to falter. And gradually the finish line came into view.

The last two hundred meters of the race were completely unreal. Time slowed down. We slowed down. It was a slight uphill, and into the wind, and we were just human, after all. There was no way to keep up the speed anymore. It was like riding underwater. The finish line seemed to be receding. I felt like a toddler hanging on the edge of the swimming pool watching his beach ball slowly float away. We were all out of the saddle in a full sprint, but minus the speed.

Finally we oozed over the line and fell completely apart.

You’ve never seen such a sorry-looking bunch. We were moaning, whimpering, all our legs had seized up. We were weaving like drunks. Somebody caught me or I would have gone right over. But in a sense our race wasn’t finished yet. We had to know: was it all in vain? What exactly had we done out there, anyway?

My brother Geoff, the team mechanic for Cal Poly, ran over and said we’d taken six seconds out of them. This was disconcerting: though Poly had won the Nationals TTT the previous year, we’d beaten them all season by a larger margin than this. We could see the Berkeley team in the distance in their final approach, and they were going faster than we had, but it didn’t look like they would make it. We crowded around the big digital clock, and when our time was reached, they were still out on the course. We’d beaten them—and by the time they got in, we’d taken over half a minute out of them. They could see us jumping up and down and cheering, and they looked like they were about to cry, having to eat their words. Of course, we hadn’t won yet: CU was still out there. Again, the suspense was agonizing, but unnecessarily so. They lost by around forty seconds, and we became national champions.

We were celebrating before most teams even knew we’d won. But the full impact of what we’d accomplished was hard to grasp all at once. It dawned on us gradually and wonderfully all evening.

During the criterium the next day, fate returned to its normal bastard self. The bottom bracket in my loaner bike fell out, as if carrying out the threat that Trevor’s bike had made in the TTT, and my races-finished record went to 1-and-5. Eric abandoned due to some random mechanical. JP got stuck in the back, and with no support Trevor was out-gunned, losing what should have been a certain victory in the Omnium. And yet our spirits were high at the awards ceremony that night, as we donned our stars-and-stripes jerseys and gold medals. You can’t win them all, but we had won a very big one indeed.

A final note

This version of my story isn’t exactly what appeared in dailypeloton.com. The original version ran almost 7,000 words so I trimmed it down. I also revised the ending, where we waited for the final teams to finish, because my original version was inaccurate. I based it on the recollections of three of my teammates, all of which matched one another but were nevertheless wrong. For an examination of this unintentional fiction (and my original account of the finish), click here and scroll down to “Gauchos win national TTT championship.”

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From the Archives - If I Had Defended Floyd Landis

Introduction

Almost eleven years ago, the American professional cyclist Floyd Landis won the Tour de France, or seemed to until a few days later when it was reported he’d tested positive for testosterone. I immediately wrote a fake newspaper article advancing an alternative explanation for the high levels of testosterone in the rider’s blood. I considered submitting this story to the Daily Peloton, which has published a dozen or so of my articles. But I decided instead just to e-mail the story to my bike pals. My rationale was that until Landis’ guilt was firmly established, I didn’t want to make light of his situation in a public forum.

Two years later, when the last of Landis’ appeals was finally crushed out and it was pretty obvious he’d truly doped, I submitted my story to Daily Peloton with a timely new spin: “If I Had Defended Landis.” They ran the story (with a couple extra caveats). Years later I discovered that many of my articles are no longer available on Daily Peloton’s website due to some server problems. So, in advance of this year’s Tour de France, I have decided to give the story a new home on albertnet.

(Interesting side note: I discovered recently that most of my article, along with a PDF download, are available on the Kool ‘N Fit website. Kool ‘N Fit is an aerosol analgesic designed for athletes, and I’d mentioned it in my story. The Kool ‘N Fit marketing team posted my story here under the headline “Floyd Landis pouring KNF on his privates?” and commented, “LOL we did not see this coming.” I see on their website that their reprint has been viewed over 65,000 times, which is way more pageviews than any of my albertnet posts has received.)

If I Had Defended Landis – July 11, 2008

Now that CAS has dismissed Floyd Landis’s final appeal, it may seem as though his sad fate—to be the first cyclist ever stripped of a Tour de France title for a doping offense—was inevitable. But the law is complicated enough, and public opinion fickle enough, to have brought about a completely different outcome. If Floyd Landis had hired me to defend him, and had gone along with my unique defense strategy, things could have turned out much better for the hapless cyclist. Rather than lay out my approach in its entirety, I offer you here a snapshot, in the form of a hypothetical news story, of how I could have already begun to iron out his case, mere days after his positive test.

Landis’ Latest Shocker

Scandalized cycling star blames failed drug test on night of debauchery

July 29, 2006

The story of Tour winner Floyd Landis took yet another turn today when the cycling star gave a bizarre explanation for his failed drug test. “There’s no need to wait for the B sample,” Landis said at an impromptu press conference. “I can explain everything.”

Shyly admitting that he was just too embarrassed to come clean before, Landis read a brief statement declaring that his above-limit testosterone:epitestosterone ratio was the result of a night of debauchery with Phonak teammate Axel Merckx and two other Tour riders. “My religious upbringing resulted in increased physical response to unclean images. A night of shameful behavior pushed my naturally high testosterone levels past the legal limit. I did not behave in a manner befitting a professional athlete, but I did nothing illegal.”

While Landis elaborated as little as possible during the press conference, Merckx seemed to bask in the limelight, providing a flurry of lurid details. “It all started the night after his disastrous ride on Stage 16,” he explained. “My dad [cycling legend Eddy Merckx] called me and said, “‘Axel, you gotta do whatever it takes to wake that guy up.’

“First we had a couple of beers. One thing led to another and next thing you know we’re looking at Internet porn. Like most of the guys, I’ve got hotbabes.com bookmarked, but Floyd had never even seen it. I guess with his [Mennonite] upbringing he got into computers a little late. Anyway, he got more excited than I’ve ever seen him in a bike race. He got so embarrassed he went into the bathroom and poured a bunch of Kool ‘N Fit on his privates.”

Kool ‘N Fit, an obscure sports product developed in the early nineties comprised of equal parts alcohol and marketing hype, is not on any banned list. “It wouldn’t have given Floyd any performance advantage, but it did keep him awake after his second fifth of Jack [Daniels],” Merckx laughed. Too worked up to sleep, Merckx and Landis and two other Tour riders, José Rujano (Quick-Step-Innergetic) and Juan Miguel Mercado (Agritubel), drove two hours to 17 Etapes, a strip club in Grenoble. “I told Floyd, ‘Before you come out swinging tomorrow in Stage 17, you’re gonna go out swinging at 17 Stages,’” Merckx quipped. “It was quite a scene there. At the door they asked Floyd for ID and he couldn’t understand why. Dude’s been asked to piss in a cup hundreds of times but he’d never been carded in his life.”

Merckx was quick to point out that while they saw some graphic acts at the club, Landis managed to behave himself. “He broke some new ground for himself, sure, but he steered clear of the Champagne Room,” Merckx said. “As always, he was the consummate professional cyclist and obeyed the age-old rule of no sex during a grand tour.”

Merckx explained that the four stayed until the club closed and returned to their hotel mere hours before the start of Stage 17. Rujano passed out on the floor of his room and missed the race entirely. Mercado, reeling from a terrible hangover, dropped out 30 kilometers into the stage. “It was a rough morning, that’s for sure,” Merckx said. “Poor Floyd was still sporting a Woodrow at the start line. I was really worried until he spotted Pereiro in the yellow jersey. Then, man—I could hear the blood rushing out of his member.”

Asked how it was possible for him to channel his pent-up sexual tension into improved athletic performance, Landis replied, “Aw, hell, I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager. Don’t forget, I went to a public high school.”

To investigate whether or not suggestive images could really account for such a swing in testosterone:epitestosterone levels, the Daily Peloton contacted Professor Guido Norbiato of the Faculty Of Endocrinology and Metabolism, Luigi Sacco University Hospital, Milan. Norbiato explained, “I’ve been looking through the medical literature on this, and there have been a few studies. A 1998 study found that static pornographic images drove the T:E level up anywhere from 1.14 +/- 0.07 to 1.52 +/- 0.09 in normal ‘red-blooded’ males. The increase ranged from 30% to 90% in the different subjects studied with an average of 43%. Live sex shows drove it up further, anywhere from 1.21 +/- 0.08 to 1.68 +/-0.10, or 40 to 93% with an average of 55%. This still wouldn’t be quite enough to explain Landis’ increase, but then, the study didn’t include any Mennonites.”

The question is, will Landis’ defense put the issue to rest? Reached for comment, WADA president Dick Pound, whose name takes on new significance in light of current events, was unsure. “It comes down to the definition of ‘natural,’” he stated. “We’ve confiscated Merckx’s laptop and will investigate every cached URL to see what websites these guys visited. I’ve seen stuff out there that’s clearly unnatural.” Pound then flushed bright red and refused to take any more questions.

UCI President Pat McQuaid expressed grave concern about the impact Landis’ revelation will have on cycling. “We’re having to scramble now to develop an Internet ‘acceptable use’ policy before the sport’s reputation is tarnished further,” he lamented. But the ultimate impact of this development has other media entities increasingly optimistic about the sport’s future. “Already the doping story was increasing interest in cycling,” said Outdoor Life Network producer Ralph Edwards. “Drugs represent about the only nexus between cycling and more mainstream sports like baseball. Linking a Tour champion with booze and women may be our best way to reach other OLN viewers, like those who tune in for our Bull & Rodeo shows. Landis may have just blazed a trail between cycling aficionados and the NASCAR set.”

While Landis’ account of his positive A sample has met with widespread skepticism, it has helped to explain circumstances following his incredible comeback victory in Stage 17 from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Morzine. “His post-race behavior did reflect something closer to, well, outright horniness than the effect of a doping product,” said Phonak team physician Dr. Denise Demir. “Just talk to the podium girls.” Sure enough, when the Daily Peloton contacted Stage 17 podium girl Evette Bellefemme, she told us, “You know, it really was weird. The podium routine is always the same—the winner gets three kisses on the cheek from each of us. I’ve never had somebody kiss me back before. And then he asked for my phone number! Mon Dieu!”

The next step in clearing his name will be for Landis to submit to a battery of tests designed to establish the effect of lurid images on his natural testosterone levels. Dozens of fellow Tour riders, in an act of apparent solidarity with Landis, have signed up to participate in the study as a control group. “It’s a completely new test, of course,” said Pound, “but the medical community has been very responsive and our panel is already complete. We should have an answer within a few weeks. Landis may yet be innocent, regardless of the results of the B sample.”

Whatever the outcome of Landis’ doping investigation, chances are good that he will be fighting a difficult public relations battle, and has more than a little explaining to do at home.

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For a spoof on how I’d have defended Lance Armstrong, click here.

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Nevada City Classic - my Daily Peloton article

What is Daily Peloton?

Before I started this blog, the only writing I did for a non-personal audience was the occasional article for the Daily Peloton (http://www.dailypeloton.com/), an online magazine of pro cycling news. I don’t often see big races in person, so my stories are generally at the outer edge of what the dp audience is probably looking for, but cycling is something I enjoy writing about. That said, I hope you can see from this blog that cycling is not the focus of my life. Since Daily Peloton has no use for articles about mud baths, computer keyboards, the destruction of perfectly good cars, or children’s books, this blog made more sense as an outlet for my writing efforts. And ever since I’ve started blogging, I haven’t had much extra time and energy to dream up cycling-related articles for dp.

A pressing story

After the Nevada City Classic criterium on Father’s Day this year, however, a dp article idea presented itself to me. In fact, this idea pressed itself upon me with some vigor and wouldn’t leave me alone until I turned it into a story. (The timing of this endeavor was poor, as the day after the race I left on a big road trip with my family.) I hadn’t gone to the Nevada City race with any idea of writing about it; after all, it’s a big race, and actual journalists would be there. Which begs the question, why should I ever submit stories cycling to dp, when there are people who do this for a living?

It was only after reading the articles by the real journalists that I decided to write my own. The race had been a blast to watch in person, and I felt there was more to the event than the online news stories were set up to convey. To mainstream cycling magazine, this was a race among dozens of others on the calendar—not so different from a swimming race, say, or a basketball game. To do the race justice, I felt, somebody needed to explore one of the most glorious aspects of bike racing: a sense of place, and how the place is the race.

The venue

I grew up as a swimmer. My whole family was into it. We had the bumper stickers on our car (“Swimming keeps kids clean,” “I’d rather be swimming”), we were on the swim team (the Red Barons and later the Poseidons), and we even subscribed to a swimming magazine. That magazine was the most boring I’ve ever seen—pages and pages of charts of the times swimmers clocked in different races around the country. My brother Max actually got into it, memorizing times and such, but I never could.

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The problem was, the sport itself was as boring as the magazine: the same pool, day after day; the same workout, lap after lap; the same guys at practice, week after week. Your chances of meeting up with a stranger in the pool and duking it out, just for fun, were exactly nil. Your chances of seeing an owl swoop over the pool: nil. The chances of one workout being significantly different from another: nil. The chances of a swim meet presenting a pool that varies from the one you practiced in: nil. Sure, there was the old us-vs.-them territorial rivalries; we were swimming for Boulder, against, say, the team from Cherry Creek, but where this meet happened really didn't matter so much.

Basketball is more exciting to me (to watch, anyway), but it still presents the same problem of venue: it never fundamentally changes. In fact, the fixed, carefully delineated court is crucial to the sport. As with swimming, everything is uniform, nationwide. There’s a scene in “Hoosiers” where Gene Hackman’s character, the coach, takes a tape measure and shows his humble players that the dimensions of the court where they’ll be playing some big championship are the same as at home—that the “home court advantage” the other team may have is purely psychological. The teams are representing their hometowns, but the location of the court doesn't shape the action.

Cycling and the importance of place

Road cycling is completely different. The venue is all-important. There is no attempt to normalize the course; on the contrary, the most famous races gain their following from the difficulty and uniqueness of the terrain. Just say their names, and the cycling aficionado will get a dreamy look. Alpe d’Huez. Paris-Roubaix. Mount Ventoux. The popularity of these races, and their importance, derive from the history that builds up around each, largely owing to how it showcases the prowess of the racers it attracts, and how it challenges them based on its unique difficulties. The Amstel Gold race has the headwinds. Paris-Roubaix has the cobblestone roads. Alpe d’Huez has the steep pitches. The course defines the race, and the growing legend of the parcours eventually establishes the importance of the event.

Compare this to sporting events where the importance of a game stems mainly from the official status assigned to it. Take the Super Bowl, for instance: the venue is immaterial, as it changes from year to year. This game is the most important and most-watched event on the football calendar simply because the team that wins is declared the best American football team on Earth for that year. Sure, the big playoff and championship games deserve their importance because (in principle) the best teams have earned their right to play in them, but this doesn’t change the look or feel of what you, the fan, witness. You’re especially excited because of how the game shapes the rankings, not because it’s guaranteed to be a better game than what you’d watched all season.

The fans

Watching a great bike race, you’re especially excited because not only are the racers punishing each other, but the epic course is punishing all of them. You can see the suffering and appreciate it on its own merit, because you’ve pedaled a bike up a big hill and know how hard that can be, and maybe you’ve ridden this very road and know how especially steep or long it is. The official place of this race on the Pro Tour calendar, and the points assigned, are matters of trivia as you watch the drama unfold.

Fans have a huge role in establishing the look, feel, and excitement of a race. In most ball sports, the important games will always have a sold-out stadium. The most important games will usually turn away more fans than the less important games (I’m told the Super Bowl largely favors those with the money to travel and cover the ticket cost). But in bicycle racing, it’s much more democratic: the locals, or others willing to travel, can always get a place on the side of the road, for free, if they’re willing to get out there early (camping out there in many cases). True, these fans only get to see their heroes go by once, but on the other hand, they’re six feet away, or less. They can push a struggling rider up the hill. They can see the faces of the riders. This is what fans will always come to watch, regardless of whether or not UCI points hang in the balance.

My Nevada City story

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This is why I bothered to write my own Nevada City story, a couple of days after the mainstream online journals had already covered it. There was room, at least on the Internet, for another story: a closer, deeper look, a ramble even, about this event. The existing stories weren't inappropriate, based on the place of this race in the calendar, its lack of points, and its domestic-only field, but I feel this event warranted a bit more. I wanted to write about the difficulty of the course, and how this has helped it historically attract—and continue to attract—the very best American cyclists. Why was Lance really here, anyway? Why did he brave this dangerous criterium course, so close to the Tour de France? What makes this race special? What made this year’s edition particularly exciting? What was it like to be there?

I hope I succeeded in getting deep into the history, the charm, and the exhilaration of the Nevada City race. Here’s the link to my story:

http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=15048

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Other dp stories

While I’m at it, here are links to other stories I’ve done for dp:

2003 La Marmotte (an epic “cyclo-sportif” race I did in France):
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=4565

1990 Collegiate Nationals Team Time Trial victory:
http://www.dailypeloton.com/danaalbert.asp

2003 T-Mobile International bike race — a spectator’s eye view:
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=4794

Confessions of an Un-Doper—an exposé of my own performance enhancement regimen (in three parts):
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=6072
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=6084
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=6118

Five Seconds on a Mountain Pass – a discussion of descending and speed wobble:
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=8468

2006 La Marmotte– my second (and likely final) stab at this event (in three parts):
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=10194
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=10193
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=10192

2006 Red Zinger / Coors Classic Reunion:
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=10293

Interview with Coors Classic director Michael Aisner (in two parts):
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=10318
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=10319

“Punish me, young man!” (a big-ring tale):
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=11924

A veteran’s dictionary of modern biking usage:
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=12411

“If I had defended Landis”— a humor piece on the sad tale of Floyd Landis’ positive dope test:
http://www.dailypeloton.com/displayarticle.asp?pk=13040