German chocolate

Good Lord, the worlds course in Germany sounds like your basic nightmare. Goo on top of ice. Mmm, mmm, good.

Naturally, being a Bibleburger, I’m pulling for Katie Compton in Sunday’s women’s race. She’s raced strongly and smart this season, and it’s not just a question of her being a Yank and a local — I think she’s got it coming. So sue me.

As to the men’s race, I know Tim Johnson and Jonathan Page well enough to say hi to, and I like Jeremy Powers’ style — but I think I’m gonna have to go with Niels Albert, who has been killing it.

That said, Sven Nys is overdue for a rainbow kit, and he likes him some filth. Will his come-from-behind style pay dividends in St.-Wendel? Stay tuned to VeloNews.com. My colleague Charles Pelkey is on the scene, and we’ll all be getting up way too early so you don’t have to.

The traditional grumbling against January

Turkish snoozes away those ol' January blues.

January. Meh. The Turk’ and I both find it too tedious for words.

The upside of cycling in 30-something temps is that your bottles stay cool while your boogers get warm enough for you to bombard the iPod People with drive-by snot rockets as you zip past. The downside is that you have to wear every bit of kit in your footlocker and staying out for more than 90 minutes or so kinda sucks.

Yesterday I thought I’d be smart and toddled off to a nearby junior high school for a bit of solo cyclo-cross on Old Yeller, my favorite Steelman. The grounds there have a rolling nature, there’s a gravel track, some asphalt and a couple of staircases for run-ups, so yeah, perfect for chewing on that cold NNW wind only in tiny bites and getting in some vigorous healthful exercise.

Until the rear tire collected every goathead in Christendom and I had to take five to replace the tube, after first running a finger around inside the tire, probing for sneaky spines invisible from the outside. I found ’em the hard way, as usual. Owie.

This morning the front had gone flat, too. O bugger. That one I fixed indoors, where the furnace is.

The torture never stops

I was up until 10 last night posting ’cross goodies at VeloNews.com, then dragged ass out of the sack at 6:30 this morning to crank on some World Cup stuff. The lads in Igorre all wound up looking like chocolate Easter bunnies, or maybe Zappa on the cover of “Joe’s Garage.” Didja get any onya?

Nary a run, but plenty of fun

It ain’t a cyclo-cross unless you get off the bike at some point and run, son. Sorry, but them’s the rules.

Still, today’s Superprestige Gavere was a great bike race. It’s hard to judge the quality of the surface when you’re watching streaming Internet video in an itty-bitty window, but that said you wouldn’t have caught me out on this course without a mountain bike. Maybe a double-boinger, too. It looked like one hell of a rough ride.

Sven Nys just squeaked past Kevin Pauwels at the line. Ten more meters of pavement and the kid would have punk’d him again. It was that close. Poor old Niels Albert looked like Death eating a cracker when he rolled in for third.

Tim Johnson scored a fine 12th-place finish after a rough start — “f’d the first few corners and paid the price big time,” he noted on Twitter.  Jonathan Page, who in contrast had a great start, rolled in a couple places behind Timmy J; VeloNews‘ man on the scene, Dan Seaton, says Page spent a bad night with the gut rumble, then cramped up on the bell lap.

Here’s mud in your eye

Judas Priest. Today’s Superprestige cyclo-cross in Hamme-Zogge looked like a cross-country run through an open sewer in Hell.

If you missed the live streaming video, you can catch an edited recap at the series website. It’s worth watching, believe me. One of the running sections took a minute-fifteen to cover, and there was more than one running bit. Eight-and-a-half-minute laps. Filth everywhere. My kind of race.

World champ Zdenek Stybar looked like someone had stuffed him head-first down a septic tank, and Niels Albert wore a pained, muck-slathered expression that said, “Fuck this noise, I’m going to get a job in a nice dry factory somewhere.”

• Late update: Katie Compton and Tim Johnson both crushed it today in Fort Fun. It looked like a fun course, a little tackier than yesterday’s, which you’d think would favor a powerful dude like Ryan Trebon, as it clearly did KfC. But after a fast start the big guy popped like a nickel rubber and that was all she wrote. Meanwhile, Todd Wells screwed the pooch while bunny-hopping a barrier and was hauled away on a stretcher, which is rarely a fun way to leave a race. You get to be an old duffer like me, you git off an’ run them sumbitches.

’Cross comes to Fort Fun

If I didn’t have to work weekends I’d be up in Fort Collins today and tomorrow, spectating at the New Belgium Cup.

But I do, so I’m not. If you’re in the same boat you can catch the action live via streaming video over at VeloNews.com.

• Late update: Jesus, these guys suck. No focus on the real action, no details of same, lousy camerawork, no sense of timing. It’s like watching your dad’s home videos, if dad smoked a lot of weed. I updated my Flash Player for this? I don’t care how many Clif Shots Colt had — I want to know what lap folks are on, splits between the leaders and the chasers … you know, all that boring journalisticky kind of stuff.

• Even later update: Bad ugly mud up there at Fort Fun. Brick-making stuff, like the evil adobe goo we have in sections of Palmer Park and Sondermann Park, as I discovered the hard way. Now I stay the hell out of those places after a bout of what the Irish call “soft” weather. The Fort Fun car washes will collect many quarters tonight, while local motels endure the dread Brown Towel Syndrome.

Coyote ugly

More dry, dusty cyclo-cross today, domestic and foreign alike.

At the U.S. Gran Prix of Cyclocross stop in Kentucky, Georgia Gould laid a humiliating beat-down on the women’s field, outclassing everyone for a second consecutive day, while Jeremy Powers took over from Tim Johnson in putting the ol’ Louisville slugger to Ryan Trebon.

Across the pond in the Czech Republic, Zdenek Stybar played the Roadrunner to Niels Albert’s Wile E. Coyote, going “Beep-beep” and then kapweeeng on the bell lap, leaving Albert standing there with his jaw on the ground, his Acme® ’cross bike collapsing into a pile of parts underneath him. I swear I actually saw the course rise and settle under Stybar’s wheels as he rocketed along to keep his undefeated streak intact in front of a partisan, boisterous crowd in Pilzner (mmm, beer).

I didn’t get out myself, unless you count a bout of leaf collection and removal in tandem with Herself. A neighbor uses our maple’s leaves for compost in her extensive garden, and it looks like we’ll have a record haul this season — we’ve already collected six bags’ worth and there are still a few green leaves on the tree.

Don’t touch that dial (what dial?)

The only thing missing from the old days is the sound: Doooooooooo. ...

Cyclo-cross weather in Bibleburg today. Well, not quite — so far it’s merely blustery and cool, not soggy and muddy. But the day ain’t over yet.

I rolled over to Monument Valley Park and did a leisurely hour of ’cross, dodging dog-walkers, joggers and spectators at a kiddie soccer match, then rolled home to start my shift in the VeloBarrel. Imagine my surprise when the promised live video coverage from today’s U.S. Gran Prix of Cyclocross race did not eventuate. As we speak I’m staring at the online equivalent of a test pattern and a smattering of snarky comments from pissed-off would-be viewers.

I’m reluctant to be harshly critical of the gang at CyclingDirt.org, having recently watched Herself prep feverishly for a streaming videocast of a meeting and knowing next to nothing about the technology and procedures involved.

Still, damn. I’m glad I’m not selling ads for these folks. This is like telling everyone about this really cool party you’re throwing but giving them the wrong address.

Don’t blink or you’ll miss your ass getting kicked

After all these years of covering bike racing, you’d think I’d quit being surprised by how friggin’ fast the Euro pros are — especially when it comes to cyclo-cross.

I watched today’s UCI World Cup kickoff via streaming video and I had to keep picking my jaw up off my belly button. Judas Priest. It was like the top-10 dudes were on rails and jet-propelled. Plus eight of them were bunny-hopping the barriers. Remember when it was unusual to see someone like Sven Nys riding the boards? Not any more, Bubba. If you can’t do it, you ain’t shit.*

Tim Johnson, who is not exactly a back-of-the-packer, finished 26th — more than three minutes down on winner Zdenek Stybar, who is world champ for a number of very good reasons. When he lit it up it was hasta la vista muchachos.

One of the best parts of watching the race online was hearing the squeal of cantilever brakes as the big boys damped a little velocity diving into an off-camber turn or a hairy descent. Fuck a bunch of disc brakes. What a real ’crosser wants going into a dicey bit is a little speed modulation. You want to stop, hit something. Or someone.

* Full disclosure: I can’t do it. Draw your own conclusions.

Steel we got; Campy, not so much

Lots of chat in comments about The Good Old Days®, when men rode steel and Campy.

I missed those halcyon days of yesteryear, having come to “serious” cycling late in life (I didn’t start racing until I was in my mid-30s). During high school and college I rode a series of Schwinns — five- and 10-speed Varsity and Continental behemoths — but when I took up cycling again in the early 1980s it was astride a Centurion LeMans (either a 10 or 12).

The old Pinarello ’cross bike. It went from me to Dr. Schenkenstein, who eventually cracked the top tube doing something manly.

I had the chance to do the right thing when I went shopping for my next bike. But instead of buying a Bianchi from a local shop that is no longer in existence I went to the Dark Side and bought a Trek 560 from Criterium Bicycles. it was a purple-and-yellow monstrosity that looked like a rolling pustule. An acid flashback must have driven that particular purchase.

A couple more Treks followed. First came a mountain bike (an 830 Antelope, I think), then a 1200 (broke the frame at the right rear aluminum dropout in a city-limits sprint outside Española), and finally a 1500 (a courtesy upgrade from Trek with steel dropouts).

I finally went Italian with a Campy-equipped Pinarello Prologo TT time-trial bike (an old Team Crest machine bought used from Denver Spoke), but this was a mental lapse, on a par with a bald-headed fat bastard who thinks that driving a Maserati will get him laid.

Next came a series of road and mountain Specializeds in steel, aluminum and carbon (we had an amazingly compliant rep in Santa Fe, ol’ Special Dave). My first “real” cyclo-cross bike was a steel Specialized Sirrus road bike that a frame-building acquaintance doctored, adding canti’ posts and subtracting the chainstay bridge.

’Cross is what finally put me back on the road to steel for real. My first really real ’cross bike was a Day-Glo yellow Pinarello, bought cheaply with the assistance of Tim Campen, then at Veltec. Then I met Brent Steelman at Interbike Anaheim and all hell broke loose. First it was a Steelman CC in Excell steel, then a series of Eurocrosses in Dedacciai, Reynolds and True Temper, even a time-trial bike (another mental lapse, but screw it, I’ll start racing multisport again, just you wait and see).

I’ve since ridden a ton of aluminum, titanium and carbon bikes from a variety of manufacturers — Bianchi, Voodoo, LeMond, GT, Look, Cannondale, Jamis, you name it — but I still reach for the steel first. Usually it’s the Nobilette or one of the Eurocrosses, but I even like the inexpensive steel from outfits like Soma and Voodoo, and it’s hard to find a shop rat who doesn’t ride something from Surly.

And there ain’t a Campy-equipped bike in the lot. Not among the rolling stock, anyway.