Chicago has been a little Seattle of late - wet. Very wet. Mow the lawn in August wet. No scorched earth anywhere to be found wet. The USPro Crit weekend was no different. Wet and wild. The rain let up for the pro race but was steady, As were the crashes. The field slowly shrunk throughout ending with only 50 some riders. Canadian Martin Gilbert outpaced American Kirk O’Bee to the line for the victory with O’Bee pulling down the stars and stripes jersey for National Pro Criterium champion.

Pictures here

Tested out my new Nikon Zoom lens at stage 1 and 2 of the Tour of Elk Grove.
Chris Horner and Fast Freddie Rodriguez from team Predictor Lotto were in attendance plus all the top US pros.

See the pics!

The Tour De France thought to have fallen into B movie status starring drugs dope doctors and disgrace has once again shown that when the players hit the stage nothing can stop the best damn show on TV.

With 7 time award winning boss of the show Lance Armstrong gone from the set and all the ramp up publicity focusing on negatives no one knew what to expect. But the Tour delivers with the hearts, legs and character of 190 racers placed onto the grandest stage, every day bringing new subplots and star characters.

1. Website -Tour de France 2007
2. Versus channel - Tour de France on TV
3. Online - Live coverage
   

Floyd Landis stands accused of doping on the way to victory last year in the Tour De France finally gets his day in court. Two weeks of testimony in a California court. TDF victory, millions of dollars and several careers hang in the balance, even part of the sport itself. A TDF winner has never lost his title.

Landis is from a Mennonite family. His parents acknowledge telling him cycling was the devils work and he would go to hell for pursuing such a career. His father once followed Floyd out in the middle of the night in the rain to see what he was doing. Floyd was riding his Schwinn beater bike in the Pennsylvania hills wearing sweat pants (couldn’t show skin) with a flashlight taped to the handlebars. He flew the coop and became a world class cyclist. Floyd was unlike anyone else in racing. He’d never had cappuccino, knew nothing about hotels, girls, food… the outside world. But he liked riding wheelies up mountains. He once registered a rating higher than Lance Armstrong on the most critical performance test in a training camp. He seemed to thrive when others suffered. Teammates called Floyd’s world “Planet Floyd”

Greg LeMond is a 3 time TDF winner and one time Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the year. Mr. Lemond has developed somewhat of a deserved reputation as saying really wild stuff in public over the years. Lance Armstrong envy is what some label it. Greg coulda won 10 Tours but was shot by a shotgun while hunting. He won one more and then developed blood poisoning from the lead. He was to be America’s cyclist but had to watch Armstrong take that title and all the personal and financial awards that come with it. All the while Greg knew these guys were cheating, at least he’s convinced they were.
Greg is by all accounts from a wide variety of people a really really nice excellent guy. Just put a mic in front of him and his personal troubles seem to inform his public comments.

So the trial begins and the prosecution calls Greg LeMond as a witness. This Baffles viewers as what the heck does he have to do with any of this? Well more than anyone could have dreamed of evidently.

LeMond testifies…

1. Sometime in the last year - LeMond calls Floyd to discuss Floyd’s accused drug use which has Floyd banned from cycling, loosing millions in revenue and defense funds and in danger of losing his Tour De France title. Greg says Floyd should come out tell the truth. Floyd says “if I do I’ll hurt friends and family”. Greg says “let me give you an example of what happens when you hide and awful truth …” and goes on to describe for the first time ever to anyone outside of family how he was sexually molested as a child.
2. Fast forward to the night before LeMond is to testify in a two week case on Landis’s drug use. LeMond receives a phone call from “Uncle Bill” who says if LeMond “shows up in court the next day he will tell the world where Greg used to hide his weenie”
3. Police trace the call to an associate of Floyd Landis.
4. Next day in trial LeMond drops some serious bombs - (A) Molested as a child  (B) Got a phone call from uncle Willy last night.
5. So folks are thinking, man this is sad really really sad, LeMond has gone off the cliff. More wild accusations, molestation, late night phone calls…
6. Then it got wild.
7. Floyd’s lifelong friend and personal business manager walks up to LeMond in court and apologizes. Boom!
8. Witness intimidation is a felony in California
9. Test tubes? Blood samples? Hardly. Jerry Springer has people flying out pronto.
10. Today Floyd’s lead lawyer announces to the court that they have fired Floyd’s business manager on the spot.
11. Business manager states he had 1-2 beers and made a huge mistake and didn’t mean to intimidate the witness.
12. Suddenly there’s several felony’s in the air and the entire proceeding is simply to determine if someone violated the rule of a sport.

LeMond unplugged: Former Tour champ meets the press
http://velonews.com/news/fea/12273.0.html

I hadn’t seen but one Little 500 race in the 20 years since I had ridden - 20th anniversary for Team Posers! An old teammate got me an infield pass (Nice!!) and I just happened to have a brand new lens for my camera to go with the unbelievably perfect weather.
2007 Little 500 Photos

The bikes have advanced a good bit from our old spot welded AMF Roadmasters. Aluminum frames, rims, spokes bar and stem but still have the one piece crank and block pedals. And the riders still have to ride the cinder track at Armstrong stadium! What’s cool about this race is you only get four tries tops. There’s no practice races, no way to simulate it. You win or you loose and never get to try again.

The race got off to a smooth start and within the first ten laps the key teams - Cutters, Phi Kappa Psi, Dodds house, Black Key bulls and Major Taylor began to make their presence felt. From that point on it was pretty much a five team race that busted the field up and left teams one or more laps down. There were many attacks with one or two teams getting a gap but it was always shut down by fresh riders after an exchange. Some of the leaders bobbled exchanges and had close calls but all managed to stay upright and on the lead lap.

In the closing laps all teams had their sprinters setup and on the bike. The pace slowed. The tension and pressure built as it was coming down to a one lap race. The Cutters grabbed the inside lane with three laps to go and continued to lead on the last lap into a headwind down the backstretch and the dicey final turns. Coming out of turn four onto the final straight with a tailwind the Cutters were unstoppable. Victory number eight for team Cutters.

All and all a great race and a great weekend - Enjoy the photos!

The 2006 Tour De France is gearing up and ready to go. So is the media and authorities. Like vultures feeding on a career fulfilling feast they swoop down upon the biggest events not with the interest of cleaning up the sport but of making their career defining moment on the biggest stage they can find. Will there be any actual racing? Will the winner get 5-10? Good gawd it’s like champiosnhip wrestling….

I made my first remote connection in 1992, using a Macintosh “cube”. BBS’es and file transfers were the purpose. Soon I was online with both Windows and Macs using programs such as Crosstalk.

While intriguing, it wasn’t until I logged onto the Internet in 1994 that I was hooked. Using a 386 PC with a 9,600 baud modem I hooked up to the Internet via Chicago service provider AIS. Their package came on one floppy and included the entire Netmanage Chameleon set of tools.

I’ve never really used the internet for entertainment, though I did check “The Spot” and such in the early days (they had an image map for entry!). My use was much more the gathering of information and files related to my job as a multimedia technician with CMI Business Communications.

My purest internet experience was “watching” the 1995 Tour De France live on the Internet. Coming into work each day I would log on and hit “refresh” every ten minutes or so for four+ hours, “seeing” stages of the Tour live, something that was impossible in any media form in the United States at that time. Didn’t hurt that when I emailed the crew covering the race that my college friend and racer James Startt emailed back “I’m in the back of a van going up hill with a laptop….”