The Oxford Comma

Introduction

A friend of mine asked me recently, “Hey, did you blog about the Oxford comma?” This was basically entrapment. Having posted 690 times to albertnet, I feel like all the easy topics (e.g., bike gearing, pasta, flatulence, cycling, the spelling of “kindergartner”) have been exhausted, so I struggle to come up with new ones. Thus, an inquiry like this is basically an assignment.

Herein I will explore the raging debate around the serial, aka Oxford, comma: what is it, who uses it, should it be used, should we care, and why do we care?

What is the Oxford comma?

When a sentence includes a list of things, the Oxford comma is the one placed before “and,” as in this example:

“I bought some gum, a lighter, and a knife.”

Opponents of the Oxford comma would omit that final comma:

“I bought some gum, a lighter and a knife.”

Opponents assert that this final comma is redundant because “and” gets the job done by itself. Proponents cite the lack of clarity that can result if this comma is omitted, as in this classic example:

“We invited the strippers, J.F.K. and Stalin.”

Had the Oxford comma been used in the above sentence, nobody would be wondering if J.F.K. and Stalin were strippers. Obviously you could dodge the grammar and say clarity is achieved by knowing that neither world leader looked good naked, but that’s cheating.

Strong opinions

I emailed three of my wife’s former newspaper colleagues (the “recovering journalists,” I call them) to get their take. Ed immediately wrote back, “I don’t like the Oxford command [sic] anyway [sic], shape or form!” Rachel opined that “the Oxford comma is redundant and ungrammatical,” gave some rationale for her position, and concluded, “I will die on this hill.” The third, Monique, was the most emphatic of all, declaring, “I literally included this line in a [résumé] cover letter: ‘Colleagues know me as positive, trustworthy, calm in a crisis and always ready to battle the Oxford comma!’”

Oddly, when I inquired with my bike team email group, most of the responses were the opposite. Seven supported the Oxford comma, one didn’t care, and one wrote “depends.” My friend Pete, who started this whole thing, and is also a cyclist, is strongly for it. And this article in Bicycling mentions that American pro cyclist Chad Haga is a big fan of the Oxford comma. So why are cyclists different from journalists? I’ll get to that. But first…

Should we use the Oxford comma?

I favor the Oxford comma, for the simple reason that many writers don’t have the judgment to decide, on a case-by-case basis, whether that final comma is needed. A journalist might pause to consider the matter, and would understand sentence structure well enough to make the right call, but so many people wouldn’t. Therefore, we should have a simple rule that can be applied every time. The comma in “apples, bananas, and pears” isn’t hurting anything.

I suppose the recovering journalists would argue that the “extra” comma slows things down—and journalists are all about speed. Their greatest fear seems to be that the reader will lose patience and stop reading. I suspect this is somewhat inaccurate, because the traditional audience for newspapers has all but evaporated, and those (like me) still willing to pay for a home subscription actually love to read, and aren’t in a constant panic about it taking too long. (Never mind that the doomscrollers end up reading a tremendous amount, though in tiny bite-sized pieces.)

Meanwhile, not all text is news, and when clarity is lost in certain contexts, such as law, the effect can be disastrous. Long ago, when I was working my first corporate job, our office split off from the parent company, very acrimoniously. I was charged with reviewing the split-off agreement, which included language around how long our consultants could continue using software that had been developed in-house. Due to the lack of an Oxford comma, it wasn’t clear whether all six software applications could be used, or just the last one in the list. I almost spoke up about this, but for some reason I just didn’t. (Maybe I was just tired after a futile debate with my boss over apostrophes.) Well, lo and behold, the former parent company ended up suing us for continuing to use all six apps, and though we eventually prevailed, the lawsuit wasted well over a month, cost gobs in legal fees, and was a massive distraction. I should have spoken up … but if the Oxford comma had been the law of the land, I wouldn’t have had to.

This kind of thing surely happens a lot. Some years ago, as described in this New York Times article, a Maine dairy company had to pay $5 million to drivers because the overtime policy, as written into Maine law, wasn’t clear about what types of work were exempted. The lack of clarity opened the door to the (ultimately successful) overtime claim. As if the $5 million wasn’t bad enough, Maine revised the law very crudely. You see, they couldn’t just add the Oxford comma, because they were dead set against it. As described here, “the Maine Legislative Drafting Manual … specifically instructs lawmakers to not use the Oxford comma.” So they came up with a grotesque new construction: “The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment; or distributing of” is how they arranged their sequence. They just replaced the Oxford comma with a semicolon, understanding that punctuation is required before the “or” but refusing to make it a comma. I think anyone who cares about words and grammar would agree that’s a monstrosity, and that this overly zealous adherence to the anti-Oxford-comma stance is absurd.

Of course the anti-Oxford-comma group would say fine, use it when it’s truly necessary, but omit it the rest of the time, because it’s jarring and slows the reader down. An essay in the Daily Californian states, “As readers, our brains are trained to pause when we see commas.” Well, yes, but when reading a sequence, we pause at each comma (which is what they’re for) and we also pause for the implicit comma suggested by “and.” If we didn’t, we’d get tripped up. Frankly, I think the lack of comma slows me down because I find it jarring—it’s like being clotheslined.

That this lack trips me up, but doesn’t bother the recovering journalists, suggests I’m reading different stuff, such that this serial comma seems normal to me. My favorite magazine, The New Yorker, famously defies the Associated Press Stylebook in always employing it. (Mary Norris, their “comma queen,” explains her rationale here.) The Oxford comma is also employed by most of the novelists I read. (I just spot-checked the last one, Tana French, and have confirmed she’s indeed in the pro-comma camp.) On a hunch, I searched the index of Vladimir Nabokov’s Strong Opinions to see if he weighed in on this matter, and while there’s no entry, the opening sentence of the book happens to employ this comma: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.” As for the absence of serial commas in the Times, I don’t exactly read that paper anyway … I usually just skim it.

So why do cyclists seem to promote the Oxford comma? My wife’s theory is that more of us are engineer-types, and I will say that the loveliness of bicycles as mechanical objects is a big part of the sport’s allure, whatever our background. Moreover, anyone who has to properly dial in spoke tension, brakes, and indexed shifting generally has a healthy respect for being methodical and precise, even at the expense of time and effort. I will go one step further and suggest that road cycling is a good way to learn patience. I rode up Mount Diablo yesterday and was acutely aware how long that takes … halfway up the climb I thought, “Cool, only half an hour to go” and then realized, wait, that’s a long time to suffer in 90-degree heat. (And then it’s two more hours riding home.) To me, the kind of brisk, comma-avoidant sentences favored by journalists are aesthetically at odds with the experience of long-distance cycling, which is so often a slog. I don’t spin the pedals like a hamster … I like to stand up and mosh away at a low cadence … shove, shove, shove. The brief lull at the top of each pedal stroke is a bit like a comma.

Should we care about the Oxford comma?

Two things have stood out for me in researching this post. First, the responses to my inquiry—not just those that supported my position, but also the ones that didn’t—were a joy to read. Well, actually, not all of them. The one who replied “Who gives a f—?” didn’t please or inspire me. (Another replied with that comment but only to direct me to this Vampire Weekend rock video.) Apathy toward language bothers me in this era of STEM-obsessed non-readers who prefer podcasts and YouTube over the written word. My second observation is that reading various articles about the Oxford comma has been an extremely pleasant way to pass the time. (In addition to what I’ve quoted from, several other articles, like this one, greatly amused me). Readers and writers who get fired up about linguistic minutiae are my people. What side of the fence we’re on is less important.

Case in point: my friend Trevor took me to task, years ago, for using two spaces after a period. While I debated this heartily at the time, I have now conceded that he’s right … not because two spaces was never helpful, but because lots of modern software doesn’t handle a pair of spaces correctly. It’s just not worth fighting modern convention. But what I didn’t expect, when I conceded this point, is that now, years later, seeing two spaces looks wrong to me. My taste has adjusted, which is a reminder that opinions can be malleable … but apathy is absolute. 

Why do we care?

Where the Oxford comma debate is concerned, one thing is perfectly clear: those with an opinion hold it strongly. But why should this be, when the matter hinges on such a subtle point, and the English language is so convoluted to begin with? I suppose that once you’ve made up your mind what’s right and what’s wrong, every instance of the “wrong” usage feels like an affront. Perhaps it’s the same way we respond to fashion: once we’ve decided fanny packs are dorky, we wouldn’t be caught dead wearing one, even though a whole lot of people (mostly tourists, it seems) just love them.

The Oxford comma, then, could be considered a matter of fashion, just like anything else. In his New Yorker essay “A Tale of Two Cafés,” Adam Gopnik examines the phenomenon of two perfectly good neighboring cafés in Paris, the Flore and the Deux Magots, one of which is always preferred and the other shunned—even though their popularity flip-flops over time, according to the whims of Parisians. Gopnik quotes a “dour friend” who sums up the matter as intrinsic to human nature:

The relationship between the modishness of the Flore and the unmodishness of the Deux Magots isn’t just possibly arbitrary. It’s necessarily arbitrary… The reason that, when you place any two things side by side, one becomes chic and the other does not is that it’s in the nature of desire to choose, and to choose absolutely.

I think that’s a big part of it, anyway. Beyond that, the Oxford comma is just plain correct. I mean, isn’t that obvious?

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Is Cycling Safe During the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Introduction

You know what? Pandemics are overrated. This COVID-19 thing is causing a me lot of uncertainty … how do I balance responsible risk avoidance measures with trying to have some semblance of a full life? This post examines the question of whether cycling outdoors is a reasonable and responsible activity during shelter-in-place. I base my conclusions on personal experience, feedback from bike teams I’ve surveyed, and a popular—but contested—article on the subject.

Confusing advice

If everybody shelters in place, we’re told, and if we all wash our hands constantly, everything will be fine. Or at least … well, it won’t be fine, actually; everything is going to get a lot worse. But you should shelter in place anyway. You probably won’t get COVID-19, unless you do, and even then you’ll probably survive it, unless you don’t. Young, healthy people either experience mild, flulike conditions, or hospitalization and even death. Nobody knows for sure. Just shelter in place because we know that will help. This will all be behind us sooner or later, or maybe much later, or even later than that. Don’t worry, the bubonic plague only lasted for four years, unless you consider that it actually started in Constantinople 800 years before it hit Europe.

Should we wear masks? For months the CDC said not to bother, but now it says we should. (I, for one, have been pro-mask all along, though not enough to wear one, until recently.) A mask probably won’t help us from getting COVID-19, but it may help us not transmit it. Not everybody believes in masks, though; in my neighborhood, only about half the pedestrians I’ve seen wear them. About the only thing we all agree on is that we need to be stockpiling toilet paper.

Sometimes we want to believe something because it looks like good news. A family friend sent us this article contending that here in the Bay Area, many of us might have immunity already because COVID-19 may have arrived here as early as November and we’ve built up a “herd immunity.” It’s tempting to credit this with how well we’re doing compared to other metropolitan areas. The rate of infection in San Francisco county is 1 in 1013, vs. New York at 1 in 80. In Alameda County, our rate is 1 in 2063; Westchester County, adjacent to New York, is at 1 in 50.

The problem is, the herd immunity article is pure malarkey. I was skeptical right off the bat because I don’t understand how herd immunity is supposed to work … the article just says “Herd immunity in [sic] the idea that a large percentage of a population has already contracted the virus which would slow the rate at which it spread to others.” Wouldn’t a large-scale infection increase the rate at which it spreads? Isn’t that the whole rationale behind shelter-in-place?

Beyond that, I’m shocked at how many grammar and punctuation errors there were in the article. Don’t these journalists have editors? The source, KSBW Channel 8, also seemed a bit obscure for such an important story, so I googled around to see if other publications had corroborated any of this. In the process I found this article totally debunking it.

Knowing I’ll never get totally reliable information from the news, I figure at least I can base my own behavior on the letter of the law: the official shelter-in-place policy promulgated by the county. Most of it was pretty clear from the beginning, except the rules around bicycling. The original shelter-in-place order prohibited “non-essential travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, automobile or public transit,” suggesting we shouldn’t bike at all, but it also said we’re permitted to “engage in outdoor activity, provided the individuals comply with Social Distancing Requirements as defined in this Section, such as, by way of example and without limitation, walking, hiking, or running.”

Cycling is covered by that “without limitation” clause, but this guidance still wasn’t as warm and fuzzy as what the county later published. When they further tightened, and extended, the shelter-in-place order, their updated Frequently Asked Questions document included this note: “Bike repair and supply shops are considered an essential business.”

So cycling is allowed … does that mean it’s safe?

Knowing I was allowed to ride my bike for exercise (but not transportation) did help. For a while, I continued to ride outdoors, only by myself, and giving other cyclists as much room as I feasibly could on the assumption that six feet wouldn’t be enough when cycling. After all, the Berkeley Bicycle Club stopped its team rides well ahead of shelter-in-place due to the “snot rocket” problem. (That’s their term. I have generally called them “snot comets” … perhaps mine have a longer tail.)

My experience, though, was that my rides seemed more hazardous than usual, and not just because of the threat of infection. The problem was the other people out getting exercise, whose adherence to the social distancing rule often took them right out into the middle of the street. In one case, a jogger was giving a hiker six feet by running right down the middle of Wildcat Canyon Road, next to the double-yellow line. I couldn’t pass them by going into the oncoming lane, because I was heading into a blind curve. I had to hit the brakes and go between the two. They probably weren’t too keen on my violation of the six-foot rule, but what was I to do?

Meanwhile, I’ve had joggers and pedestrians wander right out in front of me without looking, on the assumption that nobody drives or rides on the roads anymore. In one case, also on Wildcat Canyon Road, I had to brake and call out, “Yo,” because this jogger running across the road was totally oblivious. I made my “yo” just loud enough to be heard because I didn’t want to scare the crap out of the guy, but he was totally caught off guard anyway and scurried one way, then the other like a frightened squirrel. When he made it to the road shoulder he regained his composure a bit and yelled, “Shut up!” It was bizarre … I’d said one thing, comprising one syllable, simply to alert the guy of my approach. I hadn’t uttered another peep. Perhaps the added mental strain of social distancing has people a bit flustered.

But the most unsettling behavior I’ve witnessed is cyclists wanting to draft or race me. Twice, guys rode exactly six feet behind me to benefit from my slipstream, and when I picked up the pace to drop them they’d speed up as well. Granted, they weren’t presenting a threat to me (based on how wind resistance works), but I didn’t want to pass my germs along to them. As a hayfever sufferer I do sneeze from time to time; also, I might not remember to call out before launching a snot comet or a loogie. Thus, in both cases I had to hammer to drop these drafting riders, which is annoying because I’m getting old and like to set my own pace. A couple times, when I caught up to someone going roughly my speed, I pulled over to stop, wait a while, and start back up.

The most annoying incident came when I caught up to a guy going up Spruce, a fairly long climb before you leave the city limits. I started to pass him, and then he sped up and rode next to me. I continued to accelerate and so did he—so he was basically half-wheeling me, while I was way out in the road to give him his six feet. So I thought, fine—you’re faster, I’ll drop back. I gave him about a twenty foot gap and continued at his pace. But then he started to tire out, so I had to keep lowering my own speed to maintain the gap. This pissed me off to the point that I finally shifted up several gears, stood on the pedals, and completely attacked. This worked fine, but it was early in my ride and not how I like to warm up.

The other thing that unnerved me during these rides was that I didn’t see anyone on the road I knew, and very few club racers (who normally comprise like half the riders I’d see). Where were all the veteran cyclists? Did they know something I didn’t? I’m not knocking bike enthusiasts and I truly love the idea of more people taking up the sport (which is why I coach high school mountain biking). That said, cycling is a complicated sport, and those who have done it for decades learn subtle lessons over time. For example, I once hurled while leading a four-rider paceline and was amazed to see that the rider on the very back of our line was the one who took it in the face. I’ve also noted, with wonder, that when riding in a headwind, I can sometimes clearly hear the conversation of riders in another group like 100 feet ahead because their voices carry in the wind. When it comes to judgment calls, sometimes there’s no substitute for experience. It’s never a bad idea to take cues from the experts. So where were they?

Ultimately, and partly based in input from my wife, I stopped riding outdoors and went to riding only on my rollers, indoors. I lasted about a week before I started going crazy.

The Belgian-Dutch study

Right around the time I started contemplating heading out for another real ride, a guy on my road team sent around an article in Medium, an online magazine, titled “Belgian-Dutch Study: Why in times of COVID-19 you should not walk/run/bike close to each other.” Not long after, I received the same link from a cycling friend in Colorado. Within a couple days this rebuttal made the rounds as well. The rebuttal, and this coverage in cyclingnews, contend that the article has gone viral (though I’m not sure exactly how that claim is established or what threshold something must reach before it’s declared viral).

My initial reaction to the article was positive, since it validates concerns I already had around the increased risk of passing on a virus when breathing hard and riding fast, vs. simply walking by somebody or standing near him or her in a line. A friend of mine works for Ansys, the company whose software was used in the study, and he vouched for the accuracy of the modeling done (while acknowledging that the level of threat presented by aerosols cannot be determined by the study alone). This blog post by Ansys gives an interesting overview of how such studies can help.

I will say that I took the article with a grain of salt based on its source, medium.com, which states at the top of the screen, “Anyone can publish on Medium per our Policies, but we don’t fact-check every story.” In this regard it’s arguably even less trustworthy than KSBW since it’s not purporting to be real journalism to begin with. I have a bit of experience with these auto-publishing sites: I once submitted a restaurant review to Patch.com for a fictitious new restaurant, Vostock, specializing in Antarctic cuisine. I gave no indication my review was a farce. (That would, after all, spoil the joke.) Here’s an excerpt: 

The Antarctic Chaika for $10.25 is shredded gull brined with slush and served with pickled gull eggs, steamed ice, black gravel and a little pile of yellow snow. The presentation of the dish was simple and the aroma was enticing without being overwhelming. The gull was tender and smoky, but I began to lose interest after a few bites. Nothing about the ice or gravel really stood out either. The entrée felt like, well, discomfort food, and I had the vague feeling that someone’s grandmother does a better version.

As I discovered from the reader comments, a couple of people didn’t get the joke and were shocked to discover a restaurant in their town blatantly defying the Marine Mammal Protection Act. One guy was really offended. This is the problem with Internet “news” sources: something about the official-seeming format can put people off their guard. Naturally, there are quasi-authorities who capitalize on this.

(The Daily Mail in the UK ran an article about the Belgian-Dutch COVID-19 study titled “Horrifying simulation reveals the dangers of jogging during the coronavirus pandemic.” Horrifying? Really? Looking over that filthy rag, I can’t say how many Brits actually take it seriously. Perhaps it’s no more trusted than The Onion … I can only hope.)

Criticism against the Medium article was mainly around the study not being peer-reviewed; the lead researcher has acknowledged that he spoke to the media about his findings before publishing them, in the interest of getting his info out sooner. This breezy attitude has drawn yet more criticism, and pedestrians and cyclists are predictably bickering about the article’s implications across the various social media platforms to which it has spread.

Myself, I’m not about to discredit the idea that we need to be more careful when riding than when walking, nor the idea that this study presents legitimate information. Meanwhile, having seen how quickly things change in these strange times of pandemic, I went out and rode again to see if behaviors have changed. How viral is this article, and how influential?

More tales from the road

I rode on Saturday morning and the first cyclist I encountered gave me a very wide berth. The second seemed oblivious, due to headphones, but was well to the side of the road so I passed easily. Then I came across a couple sets of clustered riders like these ones.

Note that I cropped this photo; I was much farther back than it looks. I found a long straightaway where I could build up a lot of speed and use the left lane to pass them. I suppose it’s possible the members of that trio were all related and/or live in the same household. But this next group? (Look closely, there are four of them.)

The guy on the recumbent is clearly crashing the party … I have never known regular cyclists to mingle with recumbent riders. (In fact, those who choose recumbent bikes are almost by definition iconoclasts, loners, and pariahs.) This was the most hazardous group because they were descending by the time I encountered them and thus not going so slowly, plus the recumbent guy was wobbling a fair bit in the middle of the road, as they do. I passed them at top speed, sprinting while holding my breath so my head felt like it’d explode.

As I reached the twisty, steep part of Wildcat, I caught up to a guy who was clearly somewhat new to the sport. Not only was his speed pretty low, but he didn’t know to put his inside pedal up through the curves. In a perfect world he’d have perhaps sensed me behind him and pulled off to the side as a courtesy, but he didn’t. No worries … I patiently rode about 20 feet behind him, taking the descent at the most leisurely pace of my life. One reasonable argument against cycling right now is that it carries the perennial risk of injury, and it’d be a shame for a fallen cyclist to tax a hospital’s resources when they’re already so slammed.

Things got a lot better on this little road, a favorite of mine because I’ve encountered exactly zero other cyclists on it, ever (and it’s closed to cars). I won’t disclose its location unless you ask, so I can vet you for gnostical turpitude (e.g., a willingness to lead a group ride over this road in the near future).

I did encounter, to the side of this road, a gathering of some sort of worshipers in a clearing. They were in a big circle doing some kind of séance, or prayer, or sun salutation. They were the regulation six feet apart, but no more. For their sake, and in case I encounter one of them at the grocery store later, I hope the virus sticks to the letter of the law as assiduously as they do.

A brief survey of veteran cyclists

I saw a ton of cyclists on that ride, but mostly casual enthusiast types and only four riders whom I recognized, which seems like not many given how long I’ve been in the Berkeley area club racing community. Again, this makes me wonder if veteran cyclists’ assessments of this activity differ significantly from mine. So when I got home, I created a survey and sent it to my road team, a UCSB cycling alumni group, and a few other cycling friends. I sought to learn the following: 

• Were they still riding outdoors, and if so how much;
• Were they influenced by the Medium article and/or did they agree on its conclusion as a matter of common sense;
• Are they riding more indoors, and if so are they doing virtual group rides via the Internet (e.g., on Zwift)

The second and third questions were out of curiosity and also to test a hypothesis: could I be seeing more cycling enthusiasts, vs. racer types, simply because the those in the former group simply don’t own stationary trainers, much less the expensive kind that interface with the Internet?

A total of 26 riders responded to the survey. Here’s what it turned up.

Outdoor riding:

Still riding outdoors at all?	23 out of 26 (88%)
Riding outdoors the same amount as usual?	10
Riding outdoors but less often?	12
Riding indoors more often	8
Not riding at all	2
Indoor only	1

I had an “other” category, with plenty of space for comments, and though many did add color, nobody indicated they were still riding in a small group and/or drafting.

Medium article:

Article made me reconsider riding outdoors	0 out of 26
Article influenced how I ride outdoors	10
Article had no influence	5
Haven’t read the article but probably will	4
Haven’t read the article and probably won’t	6

Of those who read it, 10 of 16 modified their behavior somewhat but didn’t stop riding, and  5 weren’t influenced. My general impression is that the article wasn’t a game-changer. My pals either dismissed it, or felt it simply corroborated common sense.

Virtual group rides:

Don’t ride indoors at all	10 out of 26
Participate in virtual group rides frequently	2
Participate in virtual group rides occasionally	2
Ride indoors and are considering trying out virtual group rides	3
Ride indoors but are not considering virtual group rides	8

Some highlights from the survey response comments:

• No more mountain biking :-(
• I’ve always ridden outdoors alone – I hate riding with people because they’re slower than me ;-)
• If you can smell them you can get corona
• “Software modeling” – you sound like an art major
• I think it’s a bunch of charlatans who want to publish papers
• The roads are emptier now than any time in the past 30 years. Maybe you can ride indoors “with” Peter Sagan, or your friends from around the globe, but you don't get to lean a bike over in corners, feel the exhilaration of descending, get fresh air, see new & interesting sights, etc.

Conclusion

As with so many matters of personal safety, I don’t see any simple answers or magical truths. Given how infrequently, hastily, and ineffectively my children wash their hands, I don’t kid myself that my risk of COVID-19 is totally up to me. As with life, I have to manage my risk as best I can, making compromises where necessary to keep myself sane. 

On the balance, I’ve decided that includes leaning my bike over in corners, feeling the exhilaration of descending, getting fresh air, and seeing new and interesting sights. I’m resting a lot easier about riding outdoors now, having some assurance from my fellow cycling veterans that I’m not crazy. (Or at least no crazier than all the people hoarding toilet paper.)

More reading on the pandemic

• Shelter-in-Place FAQ
• E-Book Options During COVID-19 Lockdown
• The Toilet Paper Hoarding Conundrum
• More COVID Chronicles – Baking in Place
• When Will the Pandemic End?
• What Are Hospitals Like During the Pandemic?
• How to Talk to Your Cat About COVID-19
• Teleworking During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Why Don’t The Dutch Wear COVID Masks?
• Travel Tips During the COVID-19 Pandemic
• COVID Wristbands

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Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Beer!

Introduction

I got the idea for this post from the co-founder and CEO of Spoon University, which is a website devoted to a) educating college kids about how to “eat healthier,” and b) teaching college kids how to be online journalists. ( All Spoon content is written by students.)  The other day, the Spoon CEO said something like, “We have our most illuminating ‘moments’ when an article is shared widely, which happens when it strikes an emotional cord,” and as an example she cited a popular recent Spoon article about a beer based on Ben & Jerry’s chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream.

I want college kids to love my blog and forward my posts, so I am taking on this subject myself.  Since I’ve already been scooped, I’ll just have to do a better job with this topic than the college kids did.  Watch me try.

The existing literature

I expected the main Spoon article to read like Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, but it was fairly down-to-earth and mostly just covered the basic facts:

• New Belgium Brewing is making a beer “inspired by” Ben & Jerry’s chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream
• This is the second beer New Belgium has produced on this Ben & Jerry’s theme
• They’re donating $50,000 of the proceeds from this new beer to a nonprofit environmental organization called Protect Our Winters

When I researched the topic on mainstream news sites, I really didn’t get any more information—so these Spoon kids seem well on their way to writing like the pros.  All the stories I found read like thinly veiled press releases.  And yet, this very minor news tidbit—another new seasonal beer!—has really generated a lot of press.  How did this indifferently reported story become so popular?  My theory is that people just really, really like beer.

Case in point:  I used my smartphone to photograph a beer recently, and because I’d accidently left Location Services turned on, Google Maps asked if I wanted to share the photo with future users investigating the pizza place where I snapped the photo.  It wasn’t a great photo or anything and didn’t capture the ambience of the place, much less showcase the pizza.  It was just a photo of a glass of beer, for Beck’sting.  But I thought heck, I’ll let Google use it.  They asked for a caption.  The beer was in a glass bearing the name of the pizza place, so after deliberating for 1/100th of a second I posted the caption “Pizza and beer … am I right?”  Amazingly, this photo has had 56 views already, despite the fact that you can easily tell from the thumbnail that it’s an utterly pointless photo. 

So:  beer.  People love to think about it.  Maybe beer + ice cream is some kind of magic pairing, capturing the minds and hearts of college kids everywhere.

What can I add to the coverage?

I will go further than the available news stories on this beer by answering the following questions:

• Does drinking this beer increase one’s sex appeal?
• Is it a good beer?
• Is it a gimmick? 

As luck would have it, I’m traveling on business right now in the very locale where New Belgium is test-marketing this beer.  At an airport bar I ordered it, speaking really loudly so the attractive woman next to me would be sure to hear my bold and interesting choice.  I took a sip, and then waited.  I expected the woman next to me to say, “Well … how is it?”

After a minute or so she hadn’t said anything.  Had she not heard my daring, planet-saving order?  At this point the beer was two-thirds gone so I figured I better step up my game before it was too late.  “Hi,” I said to the woman.  This utterance didn’t come out very loud for some reason.  In fact it came out as kind of a high-pitched croak.  (Chocolate-chip-cookie-dough beer is only about 6% alcohol so it wasn’t exactly liquid courage, and I’m a shy person.)  The woman just stared at me like I was her dog and had just made a mess on the carpet.  But I wasn’t about to give up.  Summoning all my verve, I said, “Airports and beer … am I right?”  At this, the woman abruptly got up and walked away, leaving half her cocktail behind.

Conclusion:  drinking this seasonal ale does not increase one’s sex appeal.

So how was the beer itself?  Well, let me preface my commentary here by saying I don’t consider myself an expert on beer.  Honestly, I bristle at the very idea of a beer expert.  I would hate for beer drinkers to end up sounding like wine aficionados, with all their fancy language.  Unfortunately, this may already be happening. 

Official reviews of the last Ben & Jerry’s-themed beer

Consider the following highlights from the amateur reviews on beeradvocate.com for last year’s New Belgium Ben & Jerry’s-themed seasonal beer, Salted Caramel Brownie Brown Ale.  (Each bullet is from a different reviewer.) 

• No idea why this needed salt added
• I can't pick up on any caramel or certainly not salt
• There is some overly sweet caramel
• A little bit of sweetness
• Mostly sweet
• Despite the name, this is not sweet
• I was surprised at the lack of sweetness
• Smelled fine, but the taste was sweet without much balance
• Taste about matches the smell
• [Smell is] a barely-there whiff of metal and vague creaminess. The taste has more going for it—heavy notes of homemade vanilla vodka, macadamia nut, and cocoa butter
• Light brown, amber hues
• Clear amber brown
• Clear reddish brown
• Chestnut/mahogany brown
• Translucent brown
• It's damn near black and almost completely opaque
• Definitely tastes like a brownie
• The beer has a strong brownie flavor
• You could say there is a slight brownie flavor
• Not really a caramel brownie flavor
• Honestly, if I didn't know it was supposed to taste like salted caramel brownie ice cream, I would have thought it was just a standard brown ale 

Okay, nobody agrees on whether or not it’s salty; whether or not it’s sweet; whether or not the taste matches the smell; whether or not it tastes like a brownie. And nobody can even agree on the color. What the hell good are these beer people?

Thus emboldened by the state of the art in beer-blathering, here is my experience drinking the new flavor, Ben & Jerry’s-inspired chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ale.

My taste test

I did not start with the beer at 48 degrees, as one reviewer thoughtfully did.  This was an airport bar, remember, where all the beer is near-frigid.  But you know, had I been pouring this at home, I’m not sure what I’d have done.  On the one hand, it’s inspired by an ice cream, so perhaps it should be drunk chilled.  On the other hand, it’s kind of inspired by cookie dough, so maybe it shouldn’t be all that cold.  I would probably need to consult the brewer on this.

I did not pour it into special stemware designed for beers.  I suppose I should have asked for this, at the risk of pissing off the bartender, in order to demonstrate my sophistication to the attractive woman next to me.  But this didn’t occur to me, as I was a bit preoccupied about my upcoming flight.

I also forgot to smell the beer.  This was before I’d started researching this blog post, remember.  And I don’t know a soul who actually makes any special effort to smell his beer.  Nor do the beer drinkers I know swish it around in the glass to check the “legs” (though six beeradvocate.com reviewers mentioned “lacing,” their descriptions being variously given as “light lacing,” decent amount of lacing,” “web-like lacing,” “spotty lacing,” “no lacing,” and “some lacing”).

All of this said, I have much to report on the flavor.  My first quaff (since I’m unabashedly incapable of sipping beer) set off a major alarm in my brain, as in:

WHAT

THE

FUCK!?

Have you ever raised a glass to your lips thinking you were drinking one thing, but it turned out to be another?  Like, you think it’s water but it ends up being lemonade?  Or you think it’s orange juice but it’s grapefruit?  And for a second you’re totally freaked out, and then your brain figures out what’s going on, and you’re greatly relieved?  Well, I had that experience with this beer, big-time.

Of course I’d expected it to taste a bit like chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream, and also like a beer.  But I was completely unprepared for the actual flavor, which was—get this—not at all that of chocolate chip cookie dough, but of fully baked chocolate chip cookies.

Look, I get it that it’s difficult to match the exact flavor of an ice cream, especially from a specific manufacturer like Ben & Jerry’s.  But New Belgium Brewing Company has a reputation to protect, and there’s no other way to say it:  they really shat the bed with this beer.  Don’t get me wrong, I was able to finish it, and actually by the end—once I’d totally recalibrated my sense of what it could be—I was able to enjoy it on its own terms.  But that initial taste probably caused me to make a really bad face, like when you drink wine that’s turned to vinegar, and that’s probably why that good-looking woman at the bar dissed me so hard.  Maybe New Belgium can fix the recipe, or at least change the label to “Nestle Toll-House Chocolate Chip Cookie” or something.

Counterpoint

Look, it’s no fun bagging on an experimental beer, from a socially responsible, solar-powered brewery I happen to like.  And it’s especially bad when they’re doing something good for the environment with their new product.  In a way I feel like this has been an evil review, and that because of my harsh honesty, our oceans may warm up even faster, and many species may die.  But I have a responsibility to the truth here.

Which is a funny thing to say, actually, because so much of this blog post has actually been completely untrue.  Yes, you read that right:  within this essay I have flat-out lied.  That whole thing with the woman at the bar?  Pure fiction.  The fact is, I don’t buy beer at airports because it’s a fricking ripoff.  I also don’t try to get the attention of women, other than my wife (and I know that if I’m looking to win her favor, beer isn’t the way to do it—I’ll build the FLÜNDTRAÄG she brought home from IKEA).  Moreover, the new beer celebrated by Spoon University isn’t even out yet.  If New Belgium has a test market for this beer, I’m not aware of it.

But don’t worry, not everything you’ve just read is a lie.  All those conflicting beeradvocate.com review snippits were real.  And the bit about the that Spoon article being widely forwarded, and lauded by the CEO as having produced a strong emotional response?  That’s 100% true (though you’ll have to take my word for it).  And my implicit point about these novelty beers being a gimmick (though a harmless one) does smack of some kind of greater truth, doesn’t it, despite my beer tasting having been fictitious?  I mean, when you and I do get around to trying this beer, isn’t it inevitable that we’ll come to this “nice gimmick!” conclusion one way or another?

Why would I lie?

So why would I lie like that?  Look, let’s get down to brass tacks:  with the modern media, and the blogosphere, and this new era of journalism, and Reddit, and all the sharing and re-tweeting and recycling that goes on, there’s really only one measure of success:  how widely read something is.  So I decided I had to go well beyond the “moment” that the Spoon article created.  What’s the first thing you’d google after learning of the existence of a new seasonal beer?  You’d want to know if it’s any good, right?  I suddenly had this opportunity to scoop everyone, just by lying!  So I took it!  And I’m not sorry!  After all, if you’ve made it this far into my post, you must have gotten something out of it.  Maybe you smugly enjoyed the pathetic tale of me (supposedly) striking out at the bar.  Or maybe, like me, you dread the ascent of beer from a basic working man’s beverage to something snooty and epicurean, and appreciate the satire.

And if you’re now smarting from having been led on, maybe feeling a bit foolish at your own gullibility, here’s what to do:  immediately forward this article to all your friends and tell them how great it is.  When they get to this sentence—the one you’re reading right now—they’ll know they’ve been punked—by you—and they’ll go punk their friends, and all this will create a global “moment,” and make me famous!  So go on.  Do it.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Can Too Much Exercise Damage Your Heart?

Introduction

I get a lot of bike-related articles in my e-mail, mostly via my bike club.  When I get an article from two separate feeds, I know it’s something big.  So it was with a recent front-page story in Velo magazine, “Cycling to Extremes.”  (I read the online version, available here.)  The subtitle:  “Are endurance athletes hurting their hearts by repeatedly pushing beyond what is normal?”

What is normal?  Alas, for American adults “normal” is almost nothing; a CDC survey found that nearly 80% of adult Americans get less than 2.5 hours of exercise a week.

But forget about averages and those who don’t exercise.  The point of this Velo article is that ageing endurance athletes—i.e., guys like me—seem now to be in danger.  The article declares, “In the case of endurance athletes who have competed for years — whose hearts have exceeded the threshold of normal heart rates for decades — going above what is normal defines them.  But it may also be killing them.”

In this post I examine the reactions of my pals to this disheartening article; indulge in some knee-jerk denial; examine some other anecdotal evidence; evaluate the article’s claims on the basis of the literature cited; and (perhaps most importantly) provide a scheme for greatly advancing the study of exercise-induced heart complications among the middle-aged.

 Reactions

My first reaction to seeing this article was, “Oh, crap.  I hope nobody forwards this to my wife.”  (She’s the designated worrier of the family, which leaves me free to pooh-pooh everything.)  But then, I’ve got people depending on me, so I thought I better take the article seriously.  First I looked at how my pals were reacting.  “Hummmm....this is a little scary,” one e-mailed.  Another replied, “Yeah very scary.  I routinely get dizzy when I get up - something that’s happened my whole life but” and here his e-mail ended abruptly.  (Had he collapsed mid-sentence?)  One guy mentioned an athletic 50-year-old pal who suffers from a heart issue like what’s described in the article.  Other responses:  “I have to admit, this article gave me pause, especially the way I like to ride bikes ... hung over, and hammering as hard as possible,” and “Alas, all along I thought I was doing something good for myself.”

Of course it’s tempting to deny the whole thing.  The article has some serious flaws—which I’ll get to in a minute—and I almost shrugged and thought, “Typical FUD, designed to sell magazines.”  But I resisted the urge.  After all, just because an article is flawed doesn’t mean its central assertion is false.  Besides, I respect the cautious position my pals have taken, and this isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the mystery of brilliant athletes suddenly dropping dead.  The article mentions two marathoners who died while running, and I also recall Matt Wilson, a local rider who died while cycling in 2011, and Steve Larsen, a guy I raced with as a junior, who died while running in 2009.

Never mind that my own heart has behaved perfectly my whole life (at least, as far as I know).  It’s possible I’m doing damage now that will only become a problem in ten years.  After all, I know guys who have smoked for years but don’t have lung cancer.  Yet.

I mulled over this article for about a week and a half, and just when it was starting to drift toward unconscious dismissal, I mentioned it to a cycling friend (my age) who said, “Oh, yeah, someone told me about that but said maybe I shouldn’t read it ‘cause it might bum me out.”  Why would it?  Turns out this guy has had a heart problem for some time now:  he’ll be riding along, just cruising, and suddenly his heart rate will go from like 140 up to over 200 and stay there for 30, 40 seconds.  Uh oh.

The “lumping” problem

My chief difficulty in deciding how much to worry, and whether or not to change my approach to cycling, is that of “lumping.”  Is it right to lump myself in with the guys cited in the article, and with the marathoners, and with Steve Larsen?  Is it right to lump runners in with cyclists?  And is it right to lump various heart problems together and treat them like one phenomenon?

Let’s take that last question first.  The Velo article uses two case studies to make its case:  Lennard Zinn, who while bicycling suffered symptoms of “his heart [flopping] like a fish” and beating way too fast; and Mike Endicott, who collapsed and lost consciousness during a cross-country ski race.  Was Endicott’s heart also racing?  Well, not at first.  Endicott’s words:  “Something was beating inside my chest.”  The Velo writer describes it as “his heart still doing something strange inside his chest” which led, after an hour or so, to ventricular tachycardia and “an immediate, unexpected loss of heart function.”  This seems a lot different from what Zinn experienced.  Were these two suffering from the same specific heart problem?  It’s not clear.

The article states that Zinn was diagnosed with multifocal atrial tachycardia, but Endicott’s exact diagnosis isn’t given.  The article talks a lot about atrial fibrillation (AF):  is this the same as tachycardia?  Again, it’s unclear (though this FAQ suggests not).  Moreover, the main study the article cites concerns “myocardial fibrosis, a condition that involves the impairment of the heart’s muscle cells, called myocytes, through hardening or scarring of tissue.”  Does myocardial fibrosis lead to tachycardia and/or fibrillation?  Do Zinn and Endicott suffer from myocardial fibrosis?  Once again, the article doesn’t say.

It’s not just this article that’s vague about this stuff.  I did a tiny bit of research on Steve Larsen’s death, and turned up something surprising:

Google’s big-font summary makes it pretty clear this was a heart attack—but it wasn’t, according to the first article cited.  Nothing else has been written to further clarify this matter; the autopsy itself apparently ruled out heart attack.  And yet people seem to remember it as such.  Two years after Larsen’s death, when I was corresponding with a friend about Matt Wilson, my friend wrote, “Steve Larsen was the guy who had a [fatal] heart attack two years ago here in Bend.”  Meanwhile, I’d always remembered Wilson’s death as having been from a heart attack, but in researching this now (for example, here), I can find no specific cause of death.

A dearth of data

Let’s get back to that Velo article.  My temptation, when presented with such ambiguity, is to read the research articles on which the article is based.  But the article, while making lots of vague references to unnamed studies, doesn’t provide much.  For example:  “Over decades of exertion, the myocardial cells of the heart begin to simply fall apart, and you’re left with an unhealthy ticker. Or so these new studies suggest.”  And:  “Long-term endurance exercise results in a five-fold increase in the risk of developing AF.  A review of the relevant research finds many small studies that correlate long-term sports activity with AF....  While none is conclusive, collectively they indicate a pattern.”  What studies?  What relevant research?  There are no citations given here; no footnotes; no hyperlinks.

The article does cite two specific studies.  One involved rats, and I’m going to dismiss that.  (My heart is bigger than a rat’s; rats don’t live 40 or 50 or 60 years, which is the age group I’m trying to learn about; humans cannot be made to exercise as hard as rats.)  Velo also cites a study published in The Journal of Applied Physiology:  “MRI studies revealed that some 50 percent of the veteran [>50-year-old] athletes had myocardial fibrosis....  In age-matched controls — people of the same age who didn’t compete — and young athletes, there were zero cases of the disease. Furthermore, the fibrosis was significantly associated with the number of years spent training, and the number of marathons and ultra-endurance marathons they had completed.”

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere!  I looked at the study itself to get more information.  You can read it here.  My big issue with this study is that it only included 12 veteran athletes.  Of these, 2 had previous heart conditions (1 probable previous mycarditis, 1 probable previous silent myocardial infarction).  The Journal study is candid about its limited scope, acknowledging that “Like many studies of this type, the numbers of veteran athletes are small (largely because this is a small and unique population), and generalization is difficult.”

And yet, without the ability to generalize, what are we supposed to do with this (largely anecdotal) information?  My frustration is that I feel I ought to evaluate and possibly modify my own behavior based on these cautionary tales, but I have no solid basis for assuming that my behavior matches the profile of the overworked athlete who may be damaging his heart.

Velo addresses this problem of definition by quoting Dr. John Mandrola, a heart rhythm doctor:  “What’s too much? That’s the $64,000 question. Though I will say it’s a little like what the judge said about indecency: ‘I know it when I see it.’”  Well, this just doesn’t do me much good, because I’m not about to go to Kentucky to visit this doctor, in the absence of any symptom of any problem.

I see four possible ways to respond to this information. 

1. I could completely ignore it—but I think that’s irresponsible. 
2. I could simply err on the side of caution, and ride less often and less hard than I currently do—but isn’t this completely arbitrary, since somebody who rides twice as much as I could similarly tone it down “a bit” and still be riding way more than I? 
3. I could continue riding exactly how I currently do, while adding myocardial fibrosis to the pile of things I regularly worry about (which will increase my cortisol levels to the detriment of my health) while feeling guilty for being such a poor custodian of my body.  No thanks. 
4. I can try to get more information about this, with a whole lot more data, so I can more reasonably evaluate and (if necessary) modify my behavior.

Number four wins, and that’s where my proposed solution comes in.

The solution

We need more information!  We need more than two anecdotes and a lot of vague references to “these new studies” and “the relevant research.”  We need more than studies on rats, and we need studies of more than 10 veteran athletes.  By “we” I mean “society,” and actually society is already really, really good at harnessing massive amounts of data and crunching them to derive useful judgments.  Think of how effectively Amazon predicts what we’ll want, and how well the advertising industry can anticipate, and create, our desires.  What if we could find a ready source of “big data” for studying the effect of gonzo endurance athleticism on heart health?

But we have it already!  It’s called Strava!  This social network has 8 million registered users, of which 1.2 million are active and something like 190,000 have premium accounts.  (These are estimations since the company doesn’t reveal these numbers; click here for details.  Suffice to say, this is a lot deeper pool of data than 10 test subjects.)

 The number of Strava users isn’t even the best part.  It’s the quality of the data set.  Consider the type of athlete who goes so hard, and so long, and so often, that he or she is actually at risk of causing heart damage.  How many of this type wouldn’t be on Strava?  The gung-ho Strava cyclist is exactly the kind of person who might overdo his or her training.  In other words, Strava members comprise the perfect group for studying this stuff. 

I’m envisioning a splash screen that pops up when the Strava user logs in.  It asks, “Are you willing to participate in an anonymous study about heart function and rigorous aerobic exercise?”  I’d guess most users wouldn’t have a problem with this.  And anybody who’s having heart trouble would probably be eager to participate, to better understand it all, and could indicate the nature and frequency of his or her problem.  Such a study could quite feasibly have millions of workouts per day to crunch (the average workouts logged per day being around 6 million last year, as detailed here).  You’ve got your control group and your heart-oddity group both covered, right off the bat.

And what great data there’d be to crunch!  You get exercise frequency; exercise duration; heart rate; and history (e.g., how much a rider’s performance is improving or deteriorating).  You could start to develop very precise profiles of those whose hearts are misbehaving.  Is there an age threshold beyond which these symptoms most commonly present?  Are there frequency, duration, and/or intensity thresholds below which no errant heart behaviors are observed?  What is the rate of heart trouble for riders exactly my age, who ride (on average) just as often, and in exactly the same heart rate zones I work out in?  Of those who work out like I do but who are 10 years older, how many have developed heart trouble?  Five years from now, when we see an even more comprehensive integration of “big data” into our lives, we’d probably have even more ways to correlate the data.  (We might know, for example, whether frequent purchases at Starbucks or BevMo factor in to the cardio health equation.)

Conclusion

For now, I’m going to assume that the hectic pace of my life, my many familial obligations, my relative sloth, and my unaggressive riding style will keep my heart in good shape.  I’m not going to bother shopping my Strava idea around, because I’m confident  that the Strava folks themselves, looking for a way to actually make some money, are bound to get the attention of the insurance people, who I assume are always looking for ways to avoid open-ended batteries of complicated tests.  I envision all of this happening without any effort from me, probably years before I start getting into the dangerous years where my heart starts “doing something strange inside [my] chest.”  And if you want to forward this link around to speed up the process, please be my guest!

Biased Commentary - Froome, Nibali, and the “Dick Move”

Introduction

As I recounted in my Biased Blow-By-Blow report of Tour de France Stage 19, there was some post-race mudslinging.  Vincenzo Nibali had attacked right when Chris Froome was stymied by a bike problem.  Nibali went on to win the stage, and then Froome complained about it—first to Nibali after accosting him near the podium, and then to the press.  In an epilogue to my report, I bashed Froome for this, concluding, “Froome, man, get some class!”

Well, a reader of this blog—perhaps the reader, who in this particular case is not my mom—wrote me to say, “I kinda disagree with you about Froome’s comments after the race.  It didn’t seem like whining to me.  While Nibali didn’t really threaten him at any point whatsoever, it did look like a dick move at the time when he attacked.  Nibble looked over his shoulder, saw that Froomey was stopping for some reason, and then he attacked.  I thought that was generally frowned upon?”

In a perfect world, I’d always get comments on my blog posts, and could fill up these pages responding.  I’d never have to think up a topic again.  So, even though the whole matter reeks of soap opera, I’m going to respond.

Quick recap

As reported in cyclingnews, “Nibali revealed Froome verbally attacked him after the stage in the podium area.  ‘I won’t say the words he used because they’ve too harsh and it’s not nice to say them. He was very angry but I don’t know what his problem was. Lots of things happen in a race....’”  Froome acknowledged the post-race altercation, telling the press Nibali’s attack  was “very unsportsmanlike and not what the Tour de France is all about” and adding, “I told him just what I thought of him.”

Reactions to Nibali’s attack

While watching the attack unfold, I predicted there would be post-race blather about Nibali’s move.  As I wrote in my blow-by-blow, “Wow, Froome has something wrong with his bike!  He’s looking down at his drivetrain, clearly puzzled at all the whizzing gears and such.  He’s getting dropped!  Nibali, meanwhile, is attacking!  If anything comes of this attack, he’ll be compared to Contador and ‘chain-gate....’”

(In case you’re a cycling fan who spent some time under a rock, or a normal person who doesn’t waste his or her time with cycling gossip, “chain-gate” refers to an episode in the 2010 Tour de France when Alberto Contador clearly took advantage of Andy Schleck’s dropped chain to launch what proved to be the race-winning attack:  in Paris Contador ended up first place in the GC by 39 seconds—exactly the time he took out of Schleck in that stage.  The blow was perhaps lessened 19 months later when Contador had the title stripped, due to a doping offense.  The whole matter became even more irrelevant, at least to me, when Schleck’s brother Fränk tested positive, was suspended, and neither brother ever achieved anything remarkable again, which tells me Fränk’s positive test scared Andy straight, meaning he’d been a doper all along anyway.)

I watched this race via a live Eurosport feed, and neither commentator—Carlton Kirby nor the former Irish champ Sean Kelly—made any mention of the attack being unfair.  At least, nothing I remember.  Those two had chatted before about racers not behaving perfectly—like Rafal Majka pretending his radio wasn’t working earlier in the Tour when he failed to support his leader—but they didn’t get up in arms about it.  Kelly chuckled at remembering how a PDM teammate of his was similarly insubordinate during a grand tour.  “He couldn’t have blamed a radio, though,” Carlton pointed out, to which Kelly laughed, “No, he tore the instructions to pieces in front of our director!”  I’ve seen this laissez-faire attitude before on Eurosport, like when Mark Renshaw head-butted another rider during a final sprint and commentator David Harmon cried, “Renshaw gives him a good battering!” (To which Kelly replied, “That’s your job in that situation, making sure your man doesn’t get crowded out.”)

On the other hand, when I watched a replay of the NBC coverage, I was surprised at how indignant Phil Liggett got.  He missed the attack initially, because they were on a commercial break, but when they returned to the action Phil reported, “This happened literally seconds ago, Chris Froome seemed to have a problem, I didn’t see actually see it, we’re gonna have a look in a moment, and this will be taken [as] a very dim view of this, because Nibali saw the stopping of Chris Froome and launched an attack at the front.  Well, whatever happened to Chris Froome, it’s a dim view, and a black mark for Vincenzo Nibali.  You don’t attack a rider, that’s a gentlemen’s agreement when the rider is down from no fault of his own.”  When they showed the replay, Phil’s voice rose a few octaves:  “Let’s show you now what happened here.  The yellow jersey had something wrong with his gears I think ... Nibali looks right at him, saw it, and accelerated!  That’s not very sportsmanlike and I think the press will tell you that!”  (This is about 2 hours 2 minutes into the footage if you want to have a look.)

Actually, other than the press reporting both sides, I didn’t see much else in the way of criticism.  The official ASO stage highlights commented, but without much bile:  “The champion of Italy benefited from Froome’s mechanical problem on the Col de la Croix de Fer to escape from the yellow jersey group.  Then he caught and passed Pierre Roland on the final descent.”

Was it a dick move?

Okay, forget what everybody else said about it.  Let’s get down to brass tacks:  was Nibali’s well-timed attack a dick move, or not?  I suppose that first we should look into the matter of whether Nibali actually saw that Froome had a problem.  As reported in cyclingnews, Nibali claims he didn’t:  “When I looked back, it was to look at [teammate Tanel] Kangert. We did the race on the Col de la Croix de Fer and were planning to make a big attack.”  So:  was this true?  Let’s look at a couple snapshots from the replay that Phil got so heated about:

Well, Nibali is clearly looking back.  But he really does appear to be looking at Kangert.  In the first photo, Kangert is pretty well eclipsing Froome, which isn’t hard to do because Froome is so damn thin, he’s practically 2-dimensional.  If we look at the next shot, a second later, it’s even more apparent that Nibali is looking at Kangert, but we can also see that Froome is really slowing down—look at how Quintana (in white) has passed him.  Could it be that Nibali has noticed this, and senses that there’s a bike problem?  Possibly.  And he could have heard something over his radio.  But all this is far from obvious.

What really is obvious is that Nibali had to know sooner or later, as he continued his attack, that Froome had had a mechanical.  Here’s a photo a bit later of Nibali clearly looking back at the struggling racer leader:

Actually, there are three guys looking back at Froomie in that photo, and I don’t see any of them waiting up!  And think about it.  You’re Nibali, you’re the defending Tour champ, and you’re having a crappy Tour.  You’re in 7th overall, 8 minutes behind Froome, but only 25 seconds behind 6th (Robert Gesink) and 1:24 behind 5th (Contador).  The podium is almost 4 minutes away, but the rider currently in 3rd on GC is Alejandro Valverde, who (possibly due to an impossibly complicated doping program) has a history of really bad days in grand tours.  So Nibali wasn’t attacking Froome to begin with.  He was attacking everybody else.  Of course he won’t pause his attack to let Froome join the party.  And let’s not pretend there was anything definitive about his initial gap on Froome.  They’re climbing, after all.

But you know what?  This analysis is beginning to drag, so let’s assume that Phil Liggett was right and this was totally a dick move by Nibali.  Now we can ask some other questions.

Could Froome have known it was a dick move?

If you watch that footage (or at least refer to the snapshots above) you’ll see that wherever Nibali was looking, Froome was looking down.  Hell, Froome always looks down.  I’m surprised he hasn’t run into a fricking post by now.  He’s the downest-looking, and looking-downest, racer I’ve ever seen.  Here are a couple of snapshots I took more or less at random when I was watching the race.  Looking down, and looking down.

And at the crucial moment of Nibali’s attack, Froome was certainly looking down, as I reported live during my blow-by-blow commentary:  “Wow, Froome has something wrong with his bike!  He’s looking down at his drivetrain, clearly puzzled at all the whizzing gears and such.”  At this moment, Froome was rightly more concerned about what was wrong with his bike than what was happening ahead, so he wouldn’t have seen Nibali turning his head, even if Nibali wasn’t eclipsed by Kangert.  So I doubt he saw the (putative) dick move.  He just guessed about it.

Speaking of guesswork, let’s remember that Phil Liggett was also guessing about the dick move.  His accusation of unsportsmanlike conduct began, “Chris Froome seemed to have a problem, I didn’t actually see it, we’re gonna have a look in a moment....”  He claims that “Nibali saw the stopping of Chris Froome and launched an attack at the front,” but he hadn’t actually seen this yet.

Similarly, Nibali—when caught up in a Stage 6 crash caused by Tony Martin—initially guessed (incorrectly) that it was Froome’s fault.  Probably because he hates him.  That brought about the pair’s first post-race altercation.

Should Froome have cared about the dick move?

Whether or not Nibali knowingly capitalized on Froome’s mechanical, and whether or not Froome saw this, he obviously learned soon enough that Nibali was benefiting from the situation.  On a gut level, this would obviously have pissed him off, because he hates Nibali to begin with, and was surely nervous about anything fouling up the status quo of his eerily, suspiciously powerful Sky team controlling the pace.  But once things settled down and Nibali was away solo (with Valverde safely back in the GC group), Froome—being a professional—should have seen this move for what it was:  a blessing. 

A blessing?  Yes.  Nibali was no threat to Froome’s GC ambitions.  But, being a serious GC threat to Robert Gesink, Alejandro Valverde, and Alberto Contador—all present in this group—Nibali had now created a situation where all three riders, and their three teammates in the group, had to chase, giving Sky carte blanche to just sit on.  And if Nibali stayed away, he’d snap up the time bonus at the end, so Quintana couldn’t get it.  Meanwhile, a solo victory by Nibali would remove that extra motivation for Quintana at the end; how much faster might Quintana have gone if he could have nabbed a stage win?

But okay, racing isn’t a mellow affair, Froome was chock-full of testosterone (not all of it synthetic), and perhaps it’s inevitable that his blood (thick like jam) would boil when his enemy took advantage of him.  I can’t expect Froome to have appreciated, at the time, how good Nibali’s move was for him, since he’s not exactly a tactician.  But after the race, when the results were posted, should he still have been angry?  Granted, Quintana had taken 30 seconds out of him, but that had nothing whatsoever to do with Nibali, and Froome still had a nice cushion.  Meanwhile, Froome had taken over a minute more out of his other rivals.  And he wouldn’t have won the stage anyway, since Quintana was obviously stronger at the end.  For my money, Froome should have shrugged, reflected that all’s well that ends well, and moved on.

Should Froome have said anything?

All right, I’ll go one step further and excuse Froome for being angry even after the fact.  Maybe he’s a hothead, he doesn’t like to share the limelight, and he’s bitter at having urine thrown at him and people spitting at him.  Maybe it takes a long time to come down off all that adrenaline and reflect on how good things actually are.  But should he have whined to the press about Nibali’s tactics?

This is where I refuse to cut Froomie any slack.  By complaining, he just came off looking petty and small.  After all, he was still on top!  He was on the cusp of winning his second Tour de France, over a route that (due to its lack of time trials) so little favored him, he had considered (or pretended to consider) not racing it at all.  He was still the alpha dog, and in no position to complain about anything!  Poor Nibali, criticized all year for not winning anything, got this stage win but was still almost 7 minutes down and, as a defending champ with only an outside shot at even making the podium, was still the cyclist equivalent of a dog huddling under the couch, tail between its legs, sobbing in that lugubrious doggie way.

Moreover, Froome should have recognized that some journalist was bound to bring up Nibali’s tactics, so the question still would have been raised, and the notion of Nibali’s treachery would have seemed more legit coming from the press instead of a sulking, petulant adversary.  And fielding this question would have given Froome a great chance to boost his (clearly sagging) image by playing it cool.  “No, there was nothing amiss about the atttack,” he could say.  “Nibali is a true champion and that was a brilliant stage victory.”  In the context of his ongoing feud with Nibali, Froome’s comment would have been widely reported, and he would have looked gracious, classy, and magnanimous.  Meanwhile, he’d be extending an olive branch to Nibali, which would be a wise move professionally—after all, it’s never good to have enemies in the peloton.

My final comment, this being (after all) a biased analysis, is that Froome looks like a pretty big hypocrite when he gets on his high horse about Nibali’s attack being “unsportsmanlike and not what the Tour de France is all about.”  What is the Tour de France all about, Mr. Froome?  Doping?  Riding for a team that’s so obviously lubed we all can’t help but think of US Postal?  A team that, instead of engaging in intelligent tactics like Movistar showed in Stage 20, merely bludgeons the entire peloton to death, stage after stage, by going to the front on climbing stages and having teammates (some who aren’t even climbers, like the track racer Geraint Thomas) set so high a pace, true tactics become unnecessary and the race becomes boring?  Is the Tour de France all about being so abnormally strong you can afford to neutralize everybody, even the sad sack who, having totally given up on winning the Tour de France, is just trying to save a little face with a stage win?  And then complaining later because you didn’t get your way on absolutely everything?

Based on this close analysis, I’m sticking with my original conclusion:  Froome, man, get some class!