Biased Blow-By-Blow - Vuelta a España Stage 20

Introduction

As I’ve blogged before, there’s a benefit to bike race coverage that doesn’t try to be unbiased or fair.  Sports fans have their favorites and so should commentators.  So read on if you want a blow-by-blow account of today’s final mountain stage in the Vuelta a España, where the American Chris Horner will try to defend his leader’s jersey on the brutal Alto de L’Angliru, the legendary “Esp” (especial?), as in beyond-category, summit finish.

Biased Blow-By-Blow - Vuelta a España Stage 20

“Welcome back, it’s just 46 more km of ... hell, really.”  So says Declan, the Eurosport announcer who should let his co-announcer, Sean Kelly, talk more.  But it’s not hell ... not yet.  They’re just pedaling along the flats, Euskaltel driving the pace on the front for no reason I can see. 

The photographer has chosen to film a hawk.  This must be a nod to my older daughter, an avid birder, but if so it’s in vain because I couldn’t convince her to watch this coverage.  Speaking of children, I’ll be late to my younger daughter’s soccer game for this, a slight that will probably come out twenty years from now on her therapist’s couch.  But come on, Horner’s in the lead!  And today finishes atop the legendary Alto de l’Angliru, which is a beast at 12.5 km (7.8 miles) at an average grade of 10%.  It’s even hard to say!  It’s easy to say “angry Lou,” but that’s unfortunately not how it’s pronounced.  It’s angli-rou, which wouldn’t be so hard except we can’t resist saying “angry Lou.”  It’s kind of like how we say “mars-ca-pone” when it’s “mas-car-pone,” dammit.  So, yeah, a brutal climb.

I guess Euskaltel is working to get Sanchez higher in the GC.  He’s all the way down in ninth, but only four minutes out of fifth.  It’s kind of amazing how tight the GC is so far.  Fourth place Joaquim Rodriguez (Katusha, and gesundheit), or Joaquim Rodriguez Oliver if you want to give in to his greed and use all three of his names, is less than two minutes from the race lead.  Alejandro Valverde Belmonte (Movistar) is only 1:06 down.  And of course Vincenzo Nibali (Astana, and Italian, thus only two names) is just three seconds back.  The parcours preview for this stage on cyclingnews.com started out, “After so many tough uphill finishes, it is hard to believe that the battle for the red jersey will still be close by this point.”  True enough, and yet here we are.

I reckon the race is approaching the category 1 Alto del Cordal, which looks pretty brutal.  I can’t imagine much will happen on it as far as the GC riders, since the Angliru is so fricking long.  I mean, why jump the gun?

Okay, I guess this is as good a time as any to have our uncomfortable conversation (or really an uncomfortable monologue since you’ve gone all quiet on me).  Yes, given that this is an unbiased blow-by-blow, ungoverned by normal journalistic standards, determined to call a spade a spade and sometimes calling a club a spade, I should broach the topic of whether Chris Horner is doping.  Certainly the normal debates have been raging on various websites, and the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport has calculated that Horner’s average ascent speed (rate of vertical gain) has broken all the old records.  Not bad for a guy who’s pushing forty-two years old and has only one top-ten grand tour result in his palmares.  On the other hand, he’s been a pro since 1995 and (to my knowledge) has never even been formally accused of doping.  Seemingly alone among his generation, he came through the USADA smackdown completely unscathed, never mentioned by any of the other guys who were singing like canaries about their own doping and everybody else’s.

I guess all I can say on the matter is that I’m able to enjoy this Vuelta without worrying so much about doping.  Maybe it’s because I’m still numb from the travesty that was the Tour de France this year.  Or maybe it’s because having given Nibali the benefit of the doubt during the Giro, I don’t mind extending the same courtesy to Horner.  Maybe it’s because Horner has raced for so fricking long, it doesn’t seem that unlikely that he’d finally be figuring this sport out (vs. a total upstart like Froome who comes out of nowhere to absolutely dominate the Tour).  Maybe it’s because Horner, who has become a true climber over the years, time trialed like a climber in this Vuelta—that is, really poorly—which is at least realistic.  Whatever the case, I’m not thinking too hard about it.  It’s kind of like when I’m at a decent, though not top-end, restaurant in a foreign town, and I’m thinking about getting a burger, and I know I should ask the waiter if it’s grass-fed, but I also kind of don’t want to ask because I really do feel like a burger and if it turns out to be grain-fed I might just get it anyway, so I kind of don’t want to know.  Of course I wouldn’t order a burger at a place like Jack in the Box (slogan:  “E. Coli at no extra charge!”) or Burger King (slogan:  “Razing Brazilian rain forests and passing the savings on to you!”), which would be analogous to cheering on a known doper like Valverde or Di Luca.  But in the case of Horner, as with Nibali, nothing egregious prevents me from being able to believe what I’m seeing.

It’s starting to rain, and according to these Eurosport blokes the Angliru is known for terrible weather.  (The summit is over 5,000 feet.)  Clearly Nibali doesn’t mind bad weather (his performance in the rain- and snow-saturated Giro was downright studly) but Horner prefers the heat.

“Nicholas Roche has unzipped his jersey, showing his bare chest, and he’s a big man as well,” Declan declares.  Hmmm, I think he may have a thing for Roche!  A little subplot in the Eurosport coverage?  Well, nothing I have the time to delve into.  “He’s running hot today,” Declan continues.  Criminy, I need to stop tracking this, because I still haven’t managed even to spot Nibali in the peloton.  It was easy when he was in the red leader’s jersey, at which point I had trouble keeping track of Horner because he was in the blue polka-dot climber’s jersey for awhile and then this white jersey whose meaning I never figured out.  (Normally it’s the best young rider’s jersey, but obviously that’s not the case here unless the race promoters are having a little joke.)

Horner is riding really assertively, reeling in some Euskaltel boys himself.  It’s almost disconcerting how confident he is.  Interviewed after yesterday’s stage, he said, “It’s fantastic to put the red jersey on again, although I wasn’t expecting it until tomorrow...  I feel like I’m in good shape and I expect to win this Vuelta.”  I guess I’ve read too many Greek plays to hear such things without thinking of hubris.  But then, Horner really does look amazingly strong and I like how frank he is.  Lance Armstrong’s false modesty was never convincing to me.  He’d be interviewed with three stages to go in the Tour, and he’d be leading by like eight minutes, and yet he’d go on saying, “The race isn’t over yet.  It’s still a long way to Paris.”  Yeah, right.  But today is different, with four riders within two minutes of the lead.  So much could happen.  Nobody can afford to be too confident.

So it’s a pretty small lead group at this point.  Two riders are up the road, almost five minutes ahead:  Kenny Elissonde (Francais des Jeux) and Paolo Tiralongo (Astana).  Behind them are a few other guys about half a minute back.  If their lead seems to hold, maybe I’ll figure out who the other guys are, but five minutes on a climb like this really isn’t much.

The race is well onto the Angliru now, with the leaders about 10 kilometers from the finish.  Nibali is staying right on Horner.  The pace must be pretty high because Michele Scarponi (Lampre) has just been dropped, and he looked pretty good yesterday.

The GC group is under the 10K banner.  Katusha is pushing the pace at the front, obviously looking to set up Joaquim Rodriguez.  I wonder what bothers him more:  people calling him Joaquin (with an “n”), or people calling him J-Rod?  Maybe this is what fuels his outbursts.

Speaking of names, as I seem to be doing, it’s worth pointing out that Lance and Levi nicknamed Horner “the redneck.”  I’m not exactly sure why they’d call him that; I imagine Bend is sort of like the Austin of Oregon.  Bend has more microbreweries per capita, or perhaps period, than any place I’ve ever been.  It strikes me as less redneck a place than Boulder, actually.  That said, I can easily picture Horner behind the wheel of a big pickup truck, looking out the window and saying, “Are you boys lost?”

Wow, the grade is 17% on the section the leaders are riding.  They—the announcers, not the leaders—are saying most riders are rocking a 34x28 or 36x28 today.  (No, the fact that these pros are riding compacts doesn’t make me feel better about having one.)

Nibali has attacked!  So far, Horner hasn’t responded.  This could be dangerous because Tiralongo (Nibali’s teammate) is up the road and could drop back to help.  No footage of Horner at this point.  Wow, Nibali has some pretty big balls ... figuratively speaking.  I don’t think anybody expected a move like this since he has seemed so vulnerable the last few days.

There’s Horner, dragging Valverde and J-Rod, and maybe not looking so good.  But then, who would on this kind of grade?  It’s about 6 km to go for the leaders ... not sure what that means for this group because I don’t know the gap anymore.

Nibali looks pretty good.  He’s on a 21% grade riding in the saddle.  Horner seems a tiny bit overgeared, riding out of the saddle.  J-Rod goes around Valverde to get Horner’s wheel.  You can tell they’re all dying.

Elissonde is now leading the race.  Presumably Tiralongo is dropping back for Nibali.

Valverde is dropped!  Horner is drilling it.  He’s got Nibali in his sights.  Assuming he closes the gap, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Rodriguez counterattacks as soon as they make contact.  He’d love another stage win, of course; moreover, though he probably couldn’t take enough time to win, he could make it to the podium by taking 51 seconds out of Valverde.

Well, I’m no oracle.  Horner and J-Rod have caught Nibali and Horner, not J-Rod, countered (albeit tentatively) and now Nibali has neutralized it.  And now J-Rod goes!  He didn’t launch himself ballistically like he did yesterday though ... they easily get his wheel.

They’ve caught Tiralongo (at least I think it’s Tiralongo).  Valverde continues to suck wind off the back.  The lone leader, Elissonde, has 4km to go ... gap is under two minutes.

This could come down to the time bonuses.  Horner either needs to drop Nibali or be really sure he can take him in the sprint.  Traditionally, Nibali is the more explosive rider, but this has been a weird Vuelta.

Horner has so much to lose here.  No American has ever won the Vuelta, of course, and according to cyclingnews.com, Horner doesn’t even have a contract for next year.  I read yesterday:  “Horner may feel like his value will increase if he wins the Vuelta. That’s that always the case.”  No, that extra “that” is not my typo.  It’s cyclingnews’s.  I can’t tell whether they meant “That’s always the case” or “That’s not always the case.”  Anyway, Joop Zoetemelk won the World Championship road race at age 38—it was supposed to be his last race before retirement—and subsequently got the best contract he’d had in many years, possibly ever.

Nibali is attacking again!  Horner is right on him.  Nibali’s shoulders are rocking ... he looks a bit less strong than Horner.

Tiralongo has been dropped.  It’s just Horner, Nibali, and Rodriguez.  Whoah, there goes Nibali!  He’s really drilling it!  Horner is coming right back though.  Now it’s just the two of them.

And now Nibali goes again!  He’s really grimacing.  But he’s getting a pretty decent gap!  This could be the defining moment!  Man, imagine attacking on a grade like that when every fiber of your body is saying “Survive, survive.”

Between this spotty video and all the spectators with their flags and such, I can’t see anything.  It’s really foggy, too.  Screen keeps freezing.  Nibali and Horner are together again.  At least, that’s what Kelly is saying.  The screen is as pixilated as an Atari video game.  They keep showing Valverde, off the back.  Is it because he’s Spanish, or he’s all the camera crew can get footage of?

The camera bike has ground to a halt on the grade!  We’ve lost the footage completely.

New camera; now we’re looking at Elissonde, still in the lead with just under 2k to go.  Oh, man, he’s dying.  It’s “only” 16% here but he’s bent over the bars in agony.  He’s weaving on the road.  My daughter has just offered me a piece of dried seaweed.  She doesn’t care about the Vuelta.

The camera bike is running again and frantically chasing down the GC riders.  He’s passed Valverde.  Threading through the crowd and finally he’s back up to Horner, leading Nibali.  Now a screen-eclipsing ad.  Curses!

Nibali is now dropped!  It’s probably too early to say for sure, but a big gap has opened up.  Horner passes a couple more stragglers!  He’s drilling it!  His cadence is still not so very high and it’s painful to watch.  But he’s really going well, rocking the bike with those crazy-wide bars.  Yesterday Declan said of those handlebars, “Incidentally, just look at how wide his handlebars are. Apparently they were put on by mistake a couple years ago and he liked the feel of them.  Looks like a little man trying to look like a big man.”  Does this aside bother you?  Good!  It’s working!  This is called “building suspense.”

Ellisonde has a minute on Horner ... he’ll probably make it to the finish as the winner.  But man he’s suffering, head down, looking over his shoulder. Fortunately for him there’s a bit of downhill just before the finish.

Now he’s zipping up his jersey.  It’s so foggy, visibility is like 30 feet.  He blows a little kiss to nobody.  And he’s got the win!

Horner is hammering, on the drops now.  He finishes the stage!  Ahead of Nibali!  He’s got this Vuelta in the bag!

Nibali is approaching the line, and Valverde passes him for the third-place time bonus.  Horner is on the ground now.  Man, he really looks old.  My online correspondent writes, “Horner needs a haircut.”

I’d love to stick around and watch the podium festivities, but I’ve got to run and catch my daughter’s soccer game.  Suffice to say, Horner appears to have this Vuelta locked up, despite being old enough to be my brother!

Man vs. Compact

Introduction

Cyclists are a weird breed. On the one hand, we really know how to suffer (at least the non-poseurs among us) and much of our sport consists of slogging away brainlessly on some climb—so you’d think the expression “strong like bull, smart like tractor” would apply to us. On the other hand, there’s a tremendous technical aspect to the sport: heart rate, nutrition, power output, pacing, and then all the myriad bike-related concerns like materials, aerodynamics, frame geometry, and gearing—which suggest we’re all nerds. So: are we brutes or nerds? Ultimately we’re both.

It may not be obvious to the non-cyclist, and particularly to the non-male non-cyclist, that something arcane like bike gearing can say something fundamental about the manhood of the rider. Well, it can and does. Whether a male cyclist is a nerdy gear-head type or not, he is required to be aware of the statement he makes (like it or not) with his gearing choice. In a previous post, I wrote about how the rear cluster of cogs on a bike factor into the manliness equation; here, I’ll discuss the front end: the crankset and its chainrings.

If you feel that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, and that moreover a woman needs a bicycle like a fish needs a man, this post is probably not for you (unless you read it with the sole goal of discrediting me). But if you are a cyclist, especially a male one, or are married or otherwise conjoined to one, read on!

Gears and machismo

Some years ago, when chatting with my wife, I became aware that not everybody understands the link between bicycle gearing and manhood. Here’s a brief background. A high gear helps you go fast on flats or downhills. A low gear gets you up the hills. Your choice of gearing determines how fast you can go (the high end) and how steep a hill you can climb (the low end). The larger the front chainring, the higher the gear. The larger the rear cog, the lower the gear. All of this can be precisely calculated mathematically, but there’s an aesthetic component too: a giant front chainring is macho, and a large rear cog is embarrassing. I’m aware that some males are so secure in themselves, or so ignorant, that they don’t even notice such things. I pity those males.

Perhaps you think this link between gearing and machismo is my own personal hang-up. Well, it’s not. Members of my bike club recently got into a protracted e-mail discussion about whether to use a “compact crankset,” which is a relatively new offering from the industry. The discussion stemmed from a link somebody forwarded around to a blog explaining (with very nerdy language and graphs) why a compact (which has a 50-tooth outer chainring and a 36-tooth inner chainring, aka 50x36) is superior to the more standard 53x39 setup. While the benefit of the compact is clear, there are downsides, with the manliness factor chiefly among them.

One of my teammates wrote, “When riding my compact people would regularly spot my weedy [50x36 compact] gearing then deliberately bump into me in the coffee shop, spilling my drink, spit on me, or worse, and then laugh at me when I declined their offer of a fight. With my current 53x39, on my other bike, no one messes with me for fear of the total ass-kicking my manly gearing implies in spite of my weedy build.”

Another rider, one of the best climbers among us, who finished a stellar fourth place in the Everest Challenge stage race, wrote, “Alas, at my ripe old age and being an Everest enthusiast I did make the switch to a compact last year and like it. The only downside that I’ve experienced is that it does tend to shrink your genitals.” Another guy chimed in, “I just glanced over at my bike and feel like very unmanly ... yes, I race with a compact. I, in fact, have a brand new Dura-Ace 53x39 sitting in a box, waiting for me to turn into a man.”

Historical arcana

Back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, any kid getting into bike racing was all but required to learn about gearing, because there were limits as to how high a gear he or she was allowed to use. (The idea was to produce “higher overall cadences and lower overall stress per pedal stroke.”) After every race, the top finishers had to report to the “roll-out” area, where a referee would put the bike in the highest gear, and measure out how far it rolled in one pedal revolution. If the bike rolled too far, the racer was disqualified. The “intermediate” age group (age 14-15) could use up to an 85-inch gear (gear inches being the rollout distance divided by pi). This restriction equated to a 53-tooth chainring with a 17-tooth small cog (i.e., 53x17), or a 44-tooth chainring with a 14-tooth small cog. The older “junior” age group (age 16-17) could do a 95-inch gear (53x15 or 45x13).

Other than juniors, though, nobody thought too much about chainring size. Road bikes only ever had two chainrings. The inner ring almost always had 42 teeth (though cheaper Japanese bikes often had 40), and the large ring almost always had 52. (Juniors seeking an edge could use a 53 and still pass the roll-out.) Tourists, who were generally referred to as “fat tourists,” had triple-chainring cranksets, but no other road riders used them. (When mountain bikes came along they always had triples, for various legit reasons.)

Evolution of wussy gearing

As road cycling became more mainstream, however, a problem developed: gearing standards were being developed for racers, but a new breed of wealthy enthusiasts was unable to make it over climbs with racer-like gearing. Thus was born the 39-tooth inner chainring. My friends and brothers and I went right out and bought them, because going from a 42 to a 39 up front meant we could use smaller cogs in back, which gave us a tighter range of gear ratios (and looked cooler, which was probably the main point). When I raced in college I seldom used a rear cog larger than a 19, and boy did I feel cool. Meanwhile, an enthusiast could use a 39 up front and a 24 in back and still do okay.

As ever weaker and wealthier enthusiasts joined the sport in the ‘90s, the triple crankset—with a tiny third chainring for climbing hills—became common even on non-touring bikes. I was shocked when Shimano introduced a triple version of their top-end Dura-Ace crankset. This was a bit like if Tabasco came out with a non-spicy version for kids.

I can’t stand the look of a triple crankset. To me, it’s the equivalent of white socks with khakis and loafers. There’s just so much stuff there, and moreover the rear derailleur needs to have a longer cage. Above all, it makes your racing bike look like a touring bike. There’s nothing wrong with a touring bike—if you’re touring. (That said, my wife and I used mountain bikes for our big bike tour.) A triple on a racing bike that’s supposed to be sleek and fast—I just can’t handle it.

Thus, when the compact came out—both rings just three teeth smaller than standard—I was glad. It’s a nice compromise and enables a racer-type to handle the steep hills without his bike looking ugly. Since its introduction, I’ve seen the number of triples dwindle among angry bikers, and I’m grateful.

The compact paradox

So if the compact crank is such an elegant way to give low gearing to a bike, why does it cause so much angst to male racer-types? One answer would be that we shouldn’t need it—after all, we raced for years with 39s. But the Bay Area, especially the East Bay where I live, is full of brutally steep climbs. My standard 90-minute ride includes over 3,000 feet of climbing in just over 20 miles. My favorite climb averages an 11% grade for two miles. I’m not as strong as I used to be. Do I fantasize about putting a compact on my bike? I do.

But if I did that, I’d have to live with myself. When a man heads toward middle age and resorts to lower gearing, something inside of him just dies. Meanwhile, a compact crank costs about $600. That’s if you buy Dura-Ace, anyway, and I’m not about to step down to the inferior Ultegra crank just because I’m not man enough to push the gears I used to. Spending money to get around human weakness is arguably one of the greatest problems facing mankind and I refuse to participate if I can possibly help it.

Paradoxically, the aesthetic presentability of the compact ends up being a problem of its own. The stigma of a larger cog in the back (which also achieves a lower gear) is a lot more obvious to the observer, so to run a compact instead is like trying to fool everybody. The compact doesn’t scream “wanker,” but a riding buddy noticing your higher cadence on a steep climb is likely to figure out you’ve got one. The trained eye will have no problem discovering it.

Recently I reunited with an old friend I hadn’t ridden with in over twenty years. He’s a big strapping guy, a former Marine, and of course we were both curious to see how the other has held up over the years. Still an athlete? Check. Willing to tackle gnarly climbs? Check. Cool bike? Check. But then he turned a discerning eye to my drivetrain. “You’re not running a compact, are you?” he asked, dismay lurking in his voice. I was so relieved to be able to say, “Of course not!”

The result

As a consequence of my stubbornness in a) riding a standard crankset, and b) wanting to ride the big hills, I’ve had to resort to using a rather unpleasantly large cog in the back: a 27. After spending my whole childhood working my way from an embarrassing 32-tooth large cog to ever-smaller ones (a 12-17 was my coolest rear cogset), I’m spending my adulthood going the other direction. Until I bought a 12-27 cassette a couple years ago, I hadn’t resorted to gearing that low since I was a pre-teen! (In that light, the junior gear restriction can seem pretty silly.)

I do take some heart from the pros, who aren’t above using the larger rear cogs, or at least considering it. I came across a quote about the Dutch rider Laurens Ten Dam (who won the brutal La Marmotte road race in the French Alps the first year I rode it):

oooo“Ten Dam said his success today [in the Mt. Baldy stage of the Tour of California] came in part because he asked his Twitter followers which gear to use on the stage today - a rear cassette with a maximum 25 tooth cog or one with a 28? The answer came from his former teammate Rory Sutherland, who said, ‘If you don’t use a 25, then you’re a “watje” (wuss).’

oooo ‘And what did he show up to the race with? A 26!,’ laughed Ten Dam.”

Conclusion

I’d be self-delusional if I thought I was a really studly guy. Not only do I not have much hair on my chest, I have very little chest to have hair on in the first place. Plus, I don’t have cool razor stubble like dark-haired dudes. And, I drive a station wagon. But at least in this one tiny realm—compact vs. standard crank—I can hold my head up high.

As for that 27-tooth rear cog, at least I’m not trying to pass myself off as a strong man. I have low gearing, yes—but I own up to it. And every so often, I swap out my rear cogset to a good old 12-25, just to cheer myself up.

dana albert blog

Corn Cob

On a recent ride with my bike club, I got some ribbing about this blog from my friend Marty. (Marty can give me all the flak he wants, because the first words I ever spoke to him, back in’88, were “I have no respect for you,” in a heated moment after he beat me in a bike race.) Apparently referring to my tendency to blog at great length on trivial topics, Marty suggested I write a blog about corn cobs. Corn cob, in this context, refers to a rather small bicycle gear cluster in which each cog is just one tooth bigger than the next. This gives a racer great precision--but no range--in choosing a gear to pedal in.

"You could write an essay about each cog," Marty teased, "or better yet, you could write a sonnet, an ode to the corn cob!" So, here it is.


Ode to the Corn Cob

When I was nine I had a ten-speed bike.
I loved it, though it suffered from the curse ooooooooooo2
Of tires not as thin as I'd have liked,
And of a spoke protector, even worse.

We didn't call them spoke protectors though,
As "pie plate" better mocked how big they were. ooooooio6
They caused the largest cog to seem to grow--
A mean illusion, awful to endure.

A bigger cog meant lower gearing, see;
The stuff of weaker boys, embarrassing. ooooooooooooo10
We longed for smaller clusters, finally free
Of pie plates. Lack of metal was our bling.

At age eighteen I realized my dream:
I ran a straight-block corn cob, plate-less, clean. oooooo14


oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 
Footnotes & Commentary

Line 1: Bike

I got the bike when I was nine. It was a Fuji Junior, bright red, and it’s still on the road today, now piloted by my nephew Jake. That’s him (with his mom), on the very Fuji of my childhood, in the photo above. This was my first bike: my brothers and I were unique in a) being pretty late in getting our first bikes, and b) getting ten-speeds long before any other kids. What a glorious day that was when I had my very own bike to ride and no longer had to run alongside my brothers and their friends as they rode up and down our neighborhood streets.

I really did love that Fuji, and defended its honor passionately when my brothers called it the “Fudgie” and told me that it was made by “Fuji Heavy Industries.” My brothers also loved to tease me about my bike being called “Junior,” as opposed to their coolly-named Motobecane Nomades. It’s hard to imagine why I was so ashamed of “Junior,” but clearly I was, because at some point I actually painted over the decals with red touch-up paint. (As for Fuji Heavy Industries, they don’t make bikes. They make Subarus.)

The bike had Suntour shifters and derailleurs, which I noticed when with great delectation I examined every last feature of the bike. Suntour seemed like a really cool word. I didn’t grasp at the time that it was brand of component; I thought Suntour was a sub-brand of the bike, as though Fuji was the make and Junior was the model and Suntour was the sub-model, like they do with cars now (e.g., Honda Acura Integra Basilica XLS, Sport Series). I remember riding up and down the block joyously singing “Sun-TOO-or BYE-sick-UL!”

Missing from the Fuji now are the toe-clips. I know I had them because—like everyone—when I first got them I kept forgetting to loosen the straps, tipping over again and again.

Line 2: Cursed

The bike was not cursed—I was. I wasn’t alone, of course; also cursed was every other kid who was painfully aware of the uncoolness of his bike based on its not resembling a pro racing bike in every detail. Kids—heck, humans—make a lot of trouble for themselves scrutinizing everything and placing it within a rigorous, heartless hierarchy like this.

Line 3: Tires

The original tires were 24 x 1¼ inch. (The small wheel diameter made it possible for the frame to be a reasonable 18 inches while still allowing me to straddle the bike.) I dreamed of tires that were only 1 1/8 inch wide, which is what my brothers had by then. Oh, how they lorded that eighth of an inch over me. I became fairly obsessed about it. Eventually my brother Geoff crashed his bike (I believe he was riding at night and hit a brick) and totaled his front wheel. Unable to find a replacement 24-inch wheel, my dad bought a 600C, which had an aluminum alloy rim instead of steel and was thus much better. Not wishing to reward Geoff for his foolishness, my dad put the 600C wheel on my bike and Geoff got my old wheel. This was all well and good until the mandatory bike shop safety inspection a couple weeks before my first bike race, the Red Zinger Mini Classic, in 1981. My bike failed the inspection due to worn-out tires, and the shop only carried the 600C tire in the 1 3/8 inch width! Man, that is really fat. The mechanic lectured me at length about how tire width really doesn’t matter and skinny tires won’t make you go faster. His unspoken assumption was that aesthetics shouldn’t matter to a kid—but why not? I guarantee his tires were nice and skinny! To my great relief, my dad found a 600C x 1¼ inch tire in Denver for me.

Line 6: Mockery

Not all the mockery was in the direction of pie plates in general. Much of it was directed at my pie plate in particular, which my brothers convinced me was even larger than theirs. That my bike was different from theirs singled it out for all kinds of contempt. It didn’t matter that their French bikes had those awful plastic Simplex shifters and derailleurs. To this very day, despite having spent his teen years as a bike mechanic wailing about the awfulness of French bikes, my brother Bryan won’t concede that my Fuji was better. “Are you kidding? Never!” he says. “The Motobecanes were elusive, romantic French bicycles, with light-weight derailleurs and wedge-shaped tires! I remember loving that Nomade like it was a girl. Your bike was made by a Heavy Industries factory in Japan, mine by French people, who made racing bicycles, and knew about love and stuff.” My dad had bought the Motobecanes at Basque Sports in Boulder, and every time we drove by the store in the car, we’d all chant its name, both in homage and because it was such a hard name to pronounce. The “–sque” butting up against the “S” in “Sports” created a hissing effect that, since we couldn’t avoid it, we ultimately accentuated: “Basques-ssk-ssk sports-ssk-ssk.” (Nobody ever knew or cared where my Fuji came from.)

Line 8: Awful to endure

It wasn’t just the size of the pie plates that rankled us. I couldn’t find room within the sonnet to address the issue of pie plate rattling, so I’ll mention it here. Mine didn’t give me much trouble, but my brothers’ pie plates rattled like crazy. Finally Geoff couldn’t take it anymore and figured out a solution: he took a length of surgical tubing, maybe half a centimeter in diameter, sliced it lengthwise down the middle, and ran it along the edge of the pie plate, so it was held in place by the spokes. This worked for awhile, though the tubing tended to peel off eventually. He solved this by sewing it on there with kite string or dental floss or something. Eventually the tubing turned yellow and brittle in the sun, making the pie plate look more ghastly than ever. As you can see from the photo above, the pie plate on my old Fuji is going strong. I doubt it has ever occurred to Jake to despise it.

Line 9: Gearing

It seems intuitively obvious to me, as it did when I was a kid, that a larger cog indicates personal weakness. When I really think about this, I see that math is involved, and it wasn’t until I read my sonnet to my wife, Erin, that I realized how much I take for granted when it comes to the proportions of bike components. Imagine: she can look at a large freewheel and not pity the bike owner at all! But then, she didn’t have, as a pre-teen, a gear chart taped to her stem, showing which front/rear gear combination represented the next highest or lowest gear. Bryan, at fourteen or so, actually wrote a computer program to plot the gear inches on a logarithmic scale. Gear inches refers to the number of teeth on the chainwheel up front, multiplied by the wheel diameter in inches, divided by the number of teeth on the rear cog. Any teenager I rode with then knew by heart not only that, say, 52 x 13 was a 108-inch gear, but exactly how fast that gear would propel him at top cadence. Bikers were nerdier then, I think.

When I started racing, my brothers helped me strip down my bike, ditching the reflectors, replacing the stem-mounted shifters with down-tube ones, and removing the so-called “chicken” or “suicide” levers, those brake-lever extensions that made it possible to brake while riding on the tops of the handlebars. I distinctly remember Geoff, at age thirteen or so, sawing off the chicken-lever stubs with a hacksaw so the bolts would sit flush. We/they also removed the chain-guard on the crankset, which now strikes me as a step down aesthetically (it was a giant, pretty, chrome thing, and I remember well how often I had a grease print of the chainring on my pant leg after the chain-guard was gone). The rear mech is a Suntour V-GT Luxe, which my dad installed along with a larger freewheel to give me—you guessed it—lower gearing, which of course was a bit humiliating. Why me? Was I such the runt that I alone needed lower gearing? Oddly enough, the larger freewheel actually made the pie plate look smaller—but just try telling my brothers that. The bike never did shift very well after that “upgrade,” which is why in races I’d often get dropped in either the highest gear or the lowest. This doesn’t mean I didn’t get dropped when using other gears—I mostly used those two gears, and always got dropped.

Line 14: Straight-block

When I upgraded from the Fuji to my first Miyata, I went from a 32-tooth large cog in back to a 28, and I was thrilled at the sleeker, racier look. It still had a pie plate, but it was aluminum, and not as shiny, thus less conspicuous. A couple of years later I bought some wheels from my brother Geoff that had the same 28-tooth cog, but with no spoke protector. That was a huge step forward; I think my ego doubled that day. At age fourteen I started racing in the United States Cycling Federation races, where your smallest cog couldn’t be smaller than 17 teeth—far lower maximum gearing than I’d been riding in the Mini Zinger. (The idea was to save the youngsters’ knees.) It was practical to run a straight-block freewheel with that limitation; even with only six cogs, you could do 17-18-19-20-21-22, with 22 being a totally reasonable gear for getting up just about any hill in the Boulder area.

The next year I moved up an age group and was allowed to have a 15-tooth cog, and I went to the new Suntour 7-speed freewheels, and had an almost-straight-block of 15-16-17-18-19-20-22. Still, a 22 was the freewheel cog equivalent of sensible shoes, and I wanted something more bold. Finally, I switched to Shimano gear cassettes and for the first time could easily create custom combinations for specific races; for example, if I was racing with the adults I could use a 12-tooth cog. At last, I could build the highly impractical gearing combinations that fully satisfied my vanity: for criteriums or bike club photo-shoots I’d set up a 12-17. (Shimano wasn’t doing 7-speed yet.) What a rush that was as a teenager, to look down and see not a giant cluster with a humiliating pie plate, but this tiny little freewheel, a man’s freewheel, a svelte cluster fit for a real racing bike, and above all a highly visible manifestation of my strength. It was like the bicycle equivalent of giant muscles. It never occurred to me that to most people, perhaps even to you, it’s just a bunch of damn sprockets and whatnot that don’t really mean anything.

So did I outgrow all this macho nonsense? Of course not. I still snort at pie plates (though they’re made of plastic now). After a couple of months of dating Erin (back in ’92) I quietly removed the pie plate from her mountain bike. (She never noticed.) As for gearing, the modern-day equivalent of a giant rear cog is of course the triple front chainwheel, which accomplishes the same thing (i.e., addresses the same weakness). A triple requires a longer derailleur cage, which I equate—with a shudder—to that old V-GT Luxe on the Fuji. If a friend, new to cycling, asks me about triples, I’ll tell him they make sense given the hills around Berkeley. But a triple for my own bike? Are you kidding? Never!
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