HA! JACKED UP!

So at superweek last year I was trying to survive 2 hour crits, going so hard I dislocated and unhinged my jaw to facilitate better airflow into my pathetic, kiddy-balloon style lungs, and out of knowhere this dude in the Uraguay-an national team kit (which I recognized from geting jacked around by two different Uraguay guys at the AVC a couple years ago) rides up the curb on the inside and bunnyhops back into the street and gives me a full body-check which sends me into Dave McCook, who gets pissed, starts yelling and body-checks me right back into the curb. I stayed upright with some magical powers and by closing my eyes and thinking of how retarded it would be to crash in the middle of the field with 30 minutes to go, surrounded by a hundred guys who are all faster than me.

Anyway. The Uraguanian ends making an absolute KILLING by winning every prime over 10 dollars for 5 races straight by riding 200 meters in front of the field for lap after lap after lap. Stories run rampant about his vicious and idiotic riding style and terrible personal hygiene.

Then USACYCLING.ORG drops the megabomb:


"COLORADO SPRINGS (February 16, 2006)

USADA sanctions Uruguayan rider

The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) announced today that Alvaro Tardaguila of Montevideo, Uruguay, an athlete in the sport of cycling, has accepted a two-year suspension after his sample tested positive for the prohibited substance recombinant human erythropoietin (EPO) and an anabolic agent.

Tardaguila’s two-year suspension begins on October 17, 2005, the day he received credit for serving a voluntary suspension. He is disqualified from the Downer Avenue Bike Race held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and all subsequent events. USADA handled this case of a Uruguayan athlete as directed under the UCI rules since Mr. Tardaguila tested positive at an event in the United States

Bikeless Post

Today I'm not talking about anything related to bikes. I'm all in a tizzy about The Great Danish Cartoon Fiasco. This whole thing is getting way out of hand. Here's the timeline:

Danish cartoonist draws a frame of a dude with a turban, a bomb and the word Mohammed written on him.

Muslims get pissed.

Everybody freaks out.

An Israeli newspaper reprints the cartoon in an article explaining the outrage.

An Arab newspaper reacts, creating a contest calling for reader submissions of offensive anti-jew holocaust comics.

The same Israeli newspaper reacts to the reaction, calling for ITS readers to send in thier own offensive anti-jew holocaust comics, saying (I'm paraphrasing but I swear I'm not making this up) "when it comes to jew-bashing, no one will beat us at our own game."

Today (from opb.org) "In the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, cleric Maulana Yousef Qureshi said he had personally offered to pay a bounty of 500,000 rupees ($8,400) to anyone who killed a Danish cartoonist, and two of his congregation put up additional rewards of $1 million and one million rupees plus a car."

Holy crap. Over million bucks plus a car for the assasination of a cartoonist? Are you kidding? Is this for real? Are we that evil? WTF?

DT

Hey Yo New Guys, What's Up?

Season's coming faster than i care to think. I think Tuckie that skinny wanker is showing up in mid-March. Scotty'll be over as soon as it stops raining (so july or august?) and I don't know about the rest. Looks like the team's taking shape for another year. People from all over the place will be fighting the power in orange. Bring it. More kiwis, an east-coast yank and portlander by way of... some other places. So to Ian, Kirk, Logan and Richard: welcome to the crew. Also Steven Beardsley and Heather V will be joining me on the track this year. Boo-ya.

Today's crash brought to us by steep tracks and toe-clips.

Seahawks, Rectangles and Malaysian Crashes; a Recap

Today's Crash Of the Day courtesy of racing in January and the Tour of Malaysia.

Saw a bunch of bands for free last night. Most impressive was The Rectangles. Kind of like Cars songs played by a combination of every early 80s english punk band ever. Singer was the nerdiest ever, looked like he had just crawled out of a stormtrooper costume. He was spazzy to match. So uncoordinated he fell off the stage twice. Tried to climb on top of his keyboard (which was perched on top of a rickety two-leg key stand). Thought he was going to swan-dive into the crowd at any moment, but he ended up staying up for an entire song as the 9 keys he was standing on droned on and on and on... classic.

Not normally a huge football fan, but go Seahawks. It's 2:10 and we're watching pregame on the bigscreen shop TV...

Wierd. Never know who's gonna walk into the shop at Jay's side sometimes. Congressman Earl Blumenauer's wandering around in spandex checking out accessories for the pair of Trek Portlands (his and hers?) he's about to purchase... He looks skinnier than he does on the news. Nice guy though. Funny seeing people like that out of thier element. Maybe in a neon windbreaker instead of a red power tie. Makes my life interesting.

Pregame shows crack me up. What are these guys saying that hasn't been said for the past 2 weeks every day on espn or in any sportsbar in the country?

How 'bout that sun eh? eh? Wonder what Ping-Pong's doing right now.

URGENT NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT:

SAUL RAISIN WINS THIRD STAGE AT MALAYSIA
What an animal. US U23 (u24 now?) slays em' on the big stage. Awesome.

Two Ways To Hate Yourself

Way #1: Lactic/Analactic/Vo2 Threshold Testing.

Went to the always impressive Nike campus yesterday to spend some quality time in the top-secret super-shwank athlete testing facility. It was like walking into a Austin Powers scene. Huge electronic locked doors with giant "RESTRICTED AREA" signs on them. Lots of brushed aluminum and diamond plate steel all over the place, huge rooms with cameras everywhere, the odd human skeleton model here and there, and lots of prosthetic feet laying around. That was probably what struck me the most about the facility. The feet. Everywhere.

The testing itself was brutal. My shiny new bike was set up on an electonically controlled trainer that measures power output in the form of watts. The idea is, the rider goes through a load period of 4 minutes at a certain wattage, at the end of which you get a rest of 30 seconds to a minute while the lab people draw blood and analyze it to determine how much lactic acid is circulating in your body. Then it's back up to load, with another 4 minutes at 40 more watts than the previous load. Over and over. If that's not bad enough, you're doing the entire process with your nose blocked off and a mouthpeice jammed in your face so they can record how much CO2 you're expelling and how much O2 you're taking in with every breath and how often and bla bla bla. You get to repeat the load over and over and over with increasing resistance until you collapse or throw in the towel.

We started at 150 watts, made it to a full load at 330, a sustained heart rate of 210, white and red spots in front of my eyes, a splitting headache, loss of motor skills, and an inability to communicate.

I have only hurt that bad once on a bike (new zealand, tour de vinyards, takaka). I wanted to spit the mouthpeice out, I tried, I couldn't.

I won't get the official results unil later today, but at one point on my final effort I overheard one of the lab techs (sorry guys I'm not so good with names) mutter "holy shit" under her breath as she watched my breathing and lactic rates. Hopefully that's good shit...


Way #2: Listen to Bill O'Rielly

Honest, it was a mistake. I was just flipping through radio channels looking for a traffic report and I heard an irate old man screaming about (i swear I'm not making this up) Muslims all deserve the stereotype of terrorist extremist because "all of the 9/11 hijackers were followers of the Koran." A soldier back from Iraq tried to argue for reason and (surprise!) O'Rielly attacked him.

ACTUAL QUOTE: from the blowhard about religious extremeism. "I think I know what I'm talking about, I wrote a book on the subject."

ugh...

GP d'Ouverture La Marseillaise, France

trees hurt.
DT