thewashingmachinepost



..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

it's cycle racing dude, but not as we know it

coors classic dvd

an interesting contrast in viewing options. i spent the past weekend and three days this past week watching some exceptionally good cycle racing from belgium on cycling.tv complete with the morecambe and wise of cycle commentators, anthony and brian. and that's the way i like my live cycling, and there are a large number of like minded folks all around the world. even in america.

so it's been a major culture shock to be spending my evenings reviewing this three disc offering from velopress/prendas reprising the much loved red zinger/coors classic bicycle race from across the pond. not only is the scenery quite spectacularly different (cycling round lava flows in hawaii on disc two) but the presentation is wildly at odds with even phil and paul or even duffers and sean. don't get me wrong, i don't mean that the americans did it all wrong, it's just that they presented their cycle racing in a much more melodramatic manner, which does eventually become a mite tiring after three discs/eight hours of video footage.

however, bear in mind that the coors classic started life as the red zinger classic in 1977 (celestial seasonings anyone?) prior to a sponsorship change in 1980 when it was renamed after the coors brewery.

and as if the race needed any street cred, europe's major import of the time, bernard hinault arrived on american soil to trounce american team-mate greg lemond on both sides of the atlantic. and no, greg didn't look any happier this time round. and just to show that there was no sexism evident in either the racing or the coverage, much is made of the women's edition of the race, with the everlasting jeannie longo bringing continental winning to the americas.

despite early footage being culled from 16mm footage intended for 'movie theatres' the quality of the video on all three discs is reasonably good, though 70s/80s american tv output always seemed a bit washed out. probably the unintentionally funniest part are all the blokes wearing enormous elton john style glasses, even some of the racers and the almost de rigeur headbands and casey jones caps. and did you really used to have cables coming out the top of the brake levers and gear levers on the down tube grandad?

as an historical artefact, this is, overall, a bit of a triumph and velogear are to be congratulated for assembling such a diversity of sourced material relating to one of the finest trans national races to be held in america. we all know the domination a certain american imposed on the european peloton in recent years, and we have to respect that this is his heritage even if he was too young to take part. disc three contains a strange bmw documentary extolling the virtues of their motorbikes being used by the race marshals (you just know that they would have been as competent on a fleet of kawasakis), and the bizarrest and arguably most entertaining clip is twelve minutes of cycleball with germany against czechoslovakia. the agility of these guys on very odd bicycles would put most of today's 'cool kids' on freestyle bmxs to shame.

three dvds and eight hours of footage for £32.95 is not a high price to pay. it's well worth the money and the racing is an interesting style change from the belgian classics or the tour de france. available from the ever eclectic prendas.

if you're already on that side of the atlantic, you can acquire a copy from velogear.com for $59.95.

take the day off, watch them all and get square eyes.

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

the big screen

plasma tv

if you're a regular watcher of cycling.tv (and let's face it, who isn't?) you can't have avoided hearing anthony and brian pointing out that if you're a premium channel subscriber, you can choose the data rate at which you watch your cycle racing. entirely dependent on your broadband connection, you can watch at 100kb, 200kb or 800kb. there did used to be a 400kb choice too, but that one ran away.

and, as wisdom would have it, the 800kb stream (their highest data rate) will apparently support tv quality pictures if you plug your computer into a 32" plasma telly (or variations thereof). with the highly restrained and impoverished washingmachinepost budget, the nearest i'll get to watching one of those is in a showroom window, but to be honest, why would i want to?

up until the advent of cycling.tv, we all had to watch what cycling there was on eurosplot, which was always better before it became british eurosplot, but it always meant displacing the mrs on a sunday afternoon when she was watching whatever dross was on mainstream telly at the time. either that or having it taped while at work during the week, thus preventing mrs washingmachinepost from watching afternoon tv, then being forced to watch a grainy videotape on the offspring's portable in the evening. sound familiar?

but now we can watch the three days of de panne while pretending to work, or the tour of flanders wearing a pair of ipod headphones on a sunday afternoon, while mrs washingmachinepost continues to watch 'castaway island' or somesuch. forget all the talk of plasma and lcd televisions - if you're married or have a significant other, let them have the remote control and watch it on your 24" imac (well, 15" macbook pro).

it's all about the bikes

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

computer games

cyclepowermeters.com

cycle training has come a long, long way since fausto coppi's 'ride a bike, ride a bike, ride a bike'. nowadays you have to have your heart rate, cadence, speed and power output. and you don't just want the numbers on a box on the handlebars - you want to be able to come home after that six hour ride and download all the data into a computer and spend the next six hours poring over the coloured graphs trying to figure out where you have room for improvement before doing it all again the next day.

there are a couple of high profile devices for achieving the above: the cycleops power tap hub as used by phloyd and the srm chainset as used by everyone else. but let's face it, you either need to be a member of a professional cycling team or a particularly well funded individual to own one of either. a powertap sl 2.4 costs about £1000, and that's before you build it into a wheel, while the srm pro system costs at least £ 2000. what's a poor cyclist to do?

read more

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

lime

lime

well, don't say i didn't warn you. it appears that not only will trek launch their 'fun' bike with the new shimano 'coasting' three speed electric gearset on april 1, but they've called it lime. and in a neat piece of co-marketing, have managed to have themselves featured on the apple computer website. they have also produced desktop images (see left) that are incredibly reminiscent of apple's ipod ads. it seems that trek's project one design team happily while away their non-cycling hours on apple computers (the post wholeheartedly approves). and the lime website has a cool tune to go with the flash graphics

even more interestingly, lime is now a trademark - i say interesting, because i was not aware that it was possible to trademark colours. will we soon hear anthony and brian telling us that the 'chap in the leader's yellow jersey (trademark) etc, etc...?

anyway, while the bicycle looks very similar to the sort of thing that wins the shimano design contest at the taipei show, it seems that trek are aiming very much at the lapsed or never started cyclist who has become glued to his/her automobile. on the website for lime (which even has its own blog) the 'how does it work?' bit states the following: ...kind of like the automatic transmission on your aunt edna's buick'. well, not really.

lime seat

for storage - of a limited nature - the (bontrager badged) saddle splits in the middle and flips forward where you can pop your ipod and a pack of cards in the hollow recess. heaven help you if you bought sunday's new york times. the whole thing smacks of re-inventing the wheel, but that's marketing for you.

sure, it's easy for those of us on italian carbon fibre to sneer, but to be honest, if it gets more folks on bikes, particularly in america's obese, car ridden culture, then they can paint it any colour they like.

good luck to them, but i still don't understand why something with three gears needs a computer to select the right one. still no word from shimano uk, but i've also asked trek if they plan to introduce the bike in the uk. word when when i find out.

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

the quest 2 - spinning wheel productions - £19.95 prendas ciclismo

the quest 2 dvd

there's next to no information about this movie on the dvd box, so i have no idea whether it was sheer luck that the spinning wheel people decided to follow the saunier duval prodir team through the 2006 tour de france as scot david millar resumed his pro career. but those of us watching in english (it is, after all, a predominantly spanish team, if you exclude rinero and simone) can be very happy that it worked out this way, because his somewhat irreverently healthy attitude to three weeks of hell on a bike lifts what could have been simply a good cycling documentary to a rather momentous film.

it's certainly not the first time such a movie has been attempted (or succeeded) but i find this way of viewing the tour - or any other major race for that matter - infinitely more satisfying than just watching the edited highlights dvd that inevitably surfaces a month or two after it's all over. for most of the movie we are in the team car, even from the bottom to the top of alpe d'huez (how cool is that?). and of course, no matter how often you've 'sat' in the team car before, every team's different.

although the saunier duval prodir team is the province of mauro gianetti, it's directeur sportif, matxin fernandez who is the real star of the movie, whether handing out bottles to riders (who tend to hold on to those very bottles for an awfully long time, especially on the steep bits - i hope prendas are sending out edited versions to the uci) or acting as referee between de la fuente and bouygues telecom rider beneteau after a sprinting contretemps. a man with (several) colourful languages.

the coverage of each stage profiles a different sd rider and phil ligget's excellent narration keeps the overall in perspective with relevant race coverage from eurosport and others. with de la fuente's early grasp of the polka dots (before rasmussen took them permanently) the movie has more than just millar's comeback as a central proposition - how lucky can a film crew get? but best of all, the whole thing is just plain exciting.

the music is (happily) a long way from being naff, while the editing and production have raised the bar enough to give others a scare. to be honest, the only fault is some of the spelling in the subtitles (i think that's known as nitpicking), but best of all, it only costs £19.95 and postage is currently free. buy it along with 'the quest one' (saeco cannondale at the 2003 giro) and prendas will only relieve you of £35, saving £4.90.

now if you don't mind, i'm off to watch it again - it was great.

the quest 2 is available from prendas ciclismo now

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

trois vitesses

shimano coasting

do you remember when you were a kid you had a bike with a sturmey archer three-speed gear on which you did the daily paper round and which weighed more than some of those £15.99 for two full suspension heaps that you see in the sunday supplements? well never mind if you didn't, i did. so for the purposes of the rest of this article you can have a shot of mine.

everything was dead simple - apart, possibly, from removing the rear wheel - you just pushed the lever from one to two to three depending on how steep, flat or otherwise was the tarmac under the wheels. only the big boys with the three pockets on the back of their jerseys had derailleurs and ten speeds, and went quickly up and down the nearest stretch of dual carriageway. well, apparently the sturmey archer simplicity is no longer simple enough for some - well, shimano.

being introduced on bicycles from trek, raleigh and giant in america during the coming weeks, shimano's coasting works on the principle of a dynamo in the front hub that senses the speed of the wheels (you know, the sort of thing that the rider used to do) and sends the resulting information to the inevitable computer chip housed near the pedals. this nippy chippy controls the hub gear on the rear wheel and changes up or down depending on what information it has received.

rather obviously, shimano states that the system is not intended for performance cycling (no kidding) and possibly not even for inclement weather - which would rather rule out most of the uk. while this strikes us at the post as one of the more pointless pieces of cycle technology, we did ask the uk shimano distributors if we were likely to see bicycles featuring this technology on this side of the pound, but as yet, the answer hasn't arrived.

i doubt many of us will miss it if it stays away, and i include all those of you who are happy to be recreational cyclists.

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

words of the future

shane charlton

just a few lines below, we're carrying a feature on shane charlton, a 17 year-old, self proclaimed 'start of the future' from fife in scotland. but rather than just let thewashingmachinepost write about shane, we thought we'd let shane write about shane.

so we have. click here to read his interview.

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

just when you thought you had it sussed

fulcrum chainset

so first we have shimano with their dura-ace love it or loathe it chainset design and external bearings, followed by sram finally getting their act together and producing a groupset to rival (pun intended) the big two, before campagnolo finally capitulated and released carbon only at the top end, bearings affixed to the cranks and the redoubtable 'hirth coupling' to join the two sections together on the middle of the bb shell.

but as if that weren't enough choice for the self-respecting cyclist, fulcrum have announced at the taipei show that they have introduced their own carbon chainset in standard and compact sizes. if you think that it's remarkably similar to the aforementioned campag offering then you can go to the top of the class. it's not really a secret anymore that fulcrum is a camapgnolo owned and manufactured brand, presumably to allow fitting on bikes where the principal component sponsor is not campagnolo. this makes a lot of sense with wheels, but i'm blowed if i can figure out why we need campag chainsets with a red 'f' on them. since the cranks are constructed from multi-directional carbon and employ the same split coupling, there really is no difference.

they are available in two flavours - torq rs (699 grams) and torq r (751 grams) - and similarly to campag ultra torq, you can fit the chainset with only a 10mm allen key (wrench).

this is not to cast doubt on the efficacy of the chainsets themselves, but it seems like 'it's marketing jim, but not as we know it'.

available from october this year.

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

credit where credit is due

shane charlton

much is said about the youth of today (much of it by me) and how many of them seem all too happy/unhappy to sit back and wait for their seniors to provide for them. total lack of initiative. only that's a rather sweeping generalisation, because there are always one or two insistent on breaking this mold, one of whom is seventeen year old scots (fife) cyclist, shane charlton.

according to a very comprehensive 'begging' letter, shane has the clear aim of becoming a world class cyclist. however, due to a conflict between his age and the necessities of full-time training, funding is somewhat hard to come by. so the lad has shifted his derriere into gear and sent out a comprehensive letter asking prospective trade sponsors if they would be willing to provide anything (everything?) from a carbon bike downwards.

his stated aim for the forthcoming season is to compete in division 1 and 2 road races throughout the uk as well as the national junior series, possibly the elite criterium championship and major track events. as part of the scotland team, supported by scottish cycling (who, incidentally, have a very fetching jersey for sale on the site) and the braveheart fund, he has the opportunity to race in belgium from may onwards.

his overall aim is to represent great britain at the junior world track championships, selection for which takes place at the end of june.

it is not generally the policy (you mean we have one?) of thewashingmachinepost to profile specific cyclists, scottish or otherwise, but the boy has quite an impressive website as well as a rapidly improving palmares. so if any of those reading have the wherewithal to give shane some assistance, click over to shanecharlton.co.uk and contact him direct. we think he deserves it just for breaking the modern teenager cliche.

read shane's interview here.

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

fausto coppi by jacques augendre. published by bromley books
157 pages illus. (b&w) £14.99

i couldn't really have organised this better if i'd tried.fausto coppi the previous piece about items of rapha clothing is inextricably linked to purveying style on a bicycle, which is what rapha are all about. and here we are with a review of a book about one of the most stylish cyclists ever to head the peloton: fausto coppi.

weirdly, the first chapter starts with his death at the age of forty from a misdiagnosed case of malaria (the italian medical profession refused to believe it to be the latter and spent their time trying to cure influenza and pneumonia). this only serves to underline what a major loss to the world of cycling coppi's death was when, through the remainder of the book we find out just how this italian transformed cycling in the forties and fifties. it is often alluded that coppi could have had an even greater palmares had the second world war not intervened (though the same could conceivably be said about others of this era)

david bromley and i are generally agreed that the book's greatest 'selling point' is its photography, and photography that heavily underlines the grace and style of coppi on and off the bike. but fausto coppi had all the go necessary to complement the show: in 1950 coppi triumphed in paris roubaix. in second place was maurice diot who crossed the line exclaiming 'i've won paris roubaix!' when the journalists pointed out that coppi had crossed the line over four minutes previously, he replied 'i know, but coppi is out of this world'

fausto coppi

in the same year's fleche wallonne coppi left the peloton, caught a breakaway group and increased the pace. 'i was just able to hang on to his wheel by the skin of my teeth,' jean chateau related, 'when i realised that he was no longer holding on to his handlebars. he was riding along no-hands, casually peeling an orange and pouring water from his bottle over his head. seeing that completely demoralised me. it suddenly struck me that i was really wasting my time in bike races'.

this book was originally published in french in 1997, with the english edition as reviewed published by bromley books in 1999. at the time of writing this review, there are only one hundred copies (no pun intended) left. and bromley books have reduced the price from the original £29.99 to an absolute gift at £14.99. once they're gone, they're gone. don't let such a beautiful volume portraying one of the world's finest ever cyclists pass you by. click over to bromleyvideo.com to order a copy. you really won't be disappointed.

top of page.

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................