The Cycliste Moderne, October 31, 2006

I have not written for a while due to the man keeping me away from bikes that and the fact there has not been a lot of true bike stuff to write about. So here we go:

Head Injuries are Bad

I had been getting a lot of rides in prior to the time change. Last week, however, things got sidetracked as a result of me slipping and falling down my garage stairs. I hit my head on a filing cabinet, gashed open the back of my head, bled all over the place and spent the rest of the week trying to make my brain work right. As a result it was late in the week before I felt well enough to go for a ride. Once I finally got rides in on Friday and Saturday they were not very good rides as it did not take long for my head pain to return. It reaffirmed to me the importance of protecting your head when you ride because as my wife put it, “if anything happens to your brain, we are pretty well screwed at Cycliste Moderne.” A week later I am still dealing with a constant headache and occasional brain scatter.

Tour de France Launch

The ASO announced the route for the 2007 Tour de France. Notwithstanding the speculation as to the course next year which proved to be incorrect, i.e. no return to Mont Ventoux, no return to Puy de Dome for the first time in a generation, no team time trial, a fairly classic route was announced. However, the one big change is the fact that the first individual time trial does not come until Stage 13, until after the race goes through the Alps. With two individual time trials of 54km and 55 km in the last eight days of the Tour before sandwiched around three tough mountain stages in the Pyrennees, next year's Tour will be boring for two weeks and incredibly exciting for the last week. Unfortunately, I will be at a conference that week and likely not to have access to Tour coverage on VS. (what OLN has become now that it also has football and boxing). We will talk more about this in coming editions.

Competing Trade Shows

Velonews.com and Bicycle Retailer and Industry News both reported this week that the organizers of Eurobike, Europe’s largest cycling trade show, were going to go head to head with Interbike, America’s largest cycling trade show, starting next year. Eurobike will come to Portland, Oregon, next year. Typically, a few years after two trade shows take each other on, neither exists. Hope it does not happen, but it may be a lot of fun to road trip to Portland next fall.

Operacion Puerto Shake Out is Good for Lawyers

I kind of wish I was a Euro-Bike-Lawyer at the moment. Between the contractual disputes over the ProTour license for the Astana team, the Spanish judiciary’s announcement that its investigative files cannot be used for discipline until the criminal investigation is concluded, the Italian cycling federation’s absolution of Ivan Basso, threats of litigation over the injury to careers and reputations after the exclusion of ten of the biggest names in cycling from the Tour de France, and the contractual negotiations of all the riders who are now looking for teams, Euro-Bike-Lawyers are fully employed right now.