UCI goes Rimmer again

Apparently the UCI is going to enforce Article 1.3.014 from the UCI rulebook. Which sounds like the sort of nonsense Arnold Rimmer would quote from the Space Corps Directives. While not actually from the Space Corps Directives it is almost as nonsensical; basically saying that your saddle must henceforth be level +/- 3 degrees, and they will be checking.

Mutters FFS under breath. Good job I’ve got a handy level app on the old iPhone so I can make sure I’m not contravening any petty rules.

An even more ridiculous part of the above article is this:

Bottles have been increasingly moving away from their original function of allowing riders to rehydrate towards an alternative use as aerodynamic elements which are integrated into the design of frames in order to improve riders’ performances. It has become essential to regulate the positioning and dimensions of bottles in order to avoid any future deviations and to return bottles to their principal function.

Article 1.3.024 bis will come into effect on 1st January 2013. From that date, bottles will only be allowed to be positioned on the down tube and seat tube. Locating bottles behind the saddle, on the stem, or in any other position will then be prohibited.

Lets take a look at some bottles being used for their principal function back in the 1931 Tour De France…


Tour De France, 1931

Of course for such a blatant transgression or article 1.3.024.bis the UCI would have no qualms in fining Magne, Pelissier and Leducq thousands of Swiss Francs to line it’s coffers.

What article applies to overzealous out of touch wankers?

M-Frame

Mumbos
Best. Ever.

I’ve gone a bit mental with a wide, short focal length lens and some natural light this afternoon. These are the best Oakleys ever. Fact.

I can still remember the day I bought these. Cycling home in the pissing rain having trouble with my contact lenses. I mean absolutely horrible heavy downpour with grit and road dirt being flung up at my face from the road. I stopped in a cycle store on the way home and bought these to protect my eyes for the last fifteen miles.

That must have been 15 years ago and despite the small crack in the top of the frame these are still my cycling glasses of choice. The orange tint adds a cheery demeanour to even the greyest days.

I didn’t get to photograph the spare lenses, the even older M-Frames back home (the ones with the mirrored Heater lenses ahem) the broken Sub Zeroes, and the Blades and Razor Blades and Eyejackets that appear to have disappeared, or the broken Minutes, the prescription e-wires, oo’s, or Flawless.

If you’ve been wearing Oakleys for years and have lost them and just want to reminisce, you could do worse than visit the Glasses at a Glance page at o-review.com.

Singletrack no more

Due to the repetitive and samey nature of Singletrack magazine lately I didn’t even bother to let my subscription lapse, but have actually put in the effort* of cancelling it.

There are only so many articles on Dave A practically inventing bivvying that I can stomach, and frankly I was reading less and less of each issue as it arrived, and only noticing that it was still waiting to be read when the next issue turned up.

I have also had a long standing annoyance at the discrepancy between the words and deeds of the Director of Flowery Wank**.

The first example which wound me up was an exhortation to the rest of us to cycle commute more and go green. This, presumably, was to compensate for the massive carbon footprint he generates going on fact-finding trips to the Arctic***, or taking a parcel to Sweden (we don’t have post or couriers to Scandinavia, apparently), or driving around Europe to pursue a leisure activity. Hey, don’t try and make me feel guilty because running your car on chip fat doesn’t get you the green equivalent of papal dispensation. That just pisses me off.

It next came to a head with the anti-racer article in issue 50. In particular contradictory criticism of racers as dull, yet exhibiting “frat boy boorish behaviour”. This latter was rich coming from someone involved in an incident where a firework was launched towards the family campsite at a large race at 2am in the morning. I have since been corrected – as I, alongside 2,000 other people, was in my tent trying to sleep so didn’t witness the actual incident – that the launching of the firework was the act of two other people. At least one of these others has been man enough to admit it was “stupid and childish” behaviour. Other people, cough, are more belligerent. In which case I don’t expect them to get uppity when I point out the discrepancy between their words and their deeds.

Fortunately, having been held around the throat by an irate parent, Dave appeared to give up going to races after this, which meant the end of his bullying hecklerphone. Now I too have occasionally used a hecklerhone at races, but seeing as other people have tried to take the credit for my witticisms I like to think I have used it with more panache.

Anyway, back to Issue 50. I originally thought that Dave had been writing for effect, in which case it had worked, as they got another article out of it from a pissed off racer in Issue 51. The best reaction to my own words comes when I am writing for effect rather than out of actual belief. For instance I once made a throwaway but deliberately incendiary forum remark about “wide bars being skill compensators”, which was especially effective at revealing those who pigeon hole me as an XC jey-boy and haven’t seen me racing and riding on wide riser bars since at least 1997. The fact that I was merely repeating the caption from an even older Jo Burt cartoon was lost on them.

“What are we here for but to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in our turn”, as Jane Austen perceptively wrote.

But back to Singletrack. Both of the times up I pointed out the discrepancy between words and deeds people said I should make the effort to speak or otherwise engage with Dave to get context first.

The problem with that is that Daves words and actions are public, being as they are published in the aforementioned popular MTB magazine and witnessed by many at events across the land. If everyone who noticed this disparity between public behaviour and public writing – not that I suspect many people do – had to “email him and get the facts before discussing it” his inbox would be, well, probably the same size it is now. But you get my point. I hope. He should live and die**** by the public persona he creates.

Well I’ll be fucked if I’ll pay for the privilege of receiving a magazine that at least used to inspire a response, even if it was irritation, but latterly has become a shelf-filler. Enough is enough. Singletrack lost a subscriber.

The problem is this. In Issue 69 they only go and interview someone with the most interesting ideas on bike and component design around at the moment. If I’d had the patience to wait until my subscription lapsed I’d have been able to get an insight into his OCD.

In this case it is I who has been hoist by my petard.

* OK, so writing an email is hardly exhausting

** his title, not mine

*** Really. You couldn’t make it up. Admittedly this trip wasn’t in a Singletrack capacity. But, come on! I suspect he comes from that cloth of Green that merrily expends CO2 on our behalf to scare us about how bad it is if we don’t change our behaviour. How selfless. Now my own carbon footprint isn’t small – I’m a Westerner for a start – but I hope not to preach about it. Please let me know if I do.

**** Not literally. It’s a figure of speech. I just thought that in this day and age that might need making clear.

Moon on a stick

Looks like Aidan Harding, the organiser of the excellent SSUK 2011, has been a little silly. If you can’t be bothered to read he offered a full refund to those who cancelled, the contingency fund has run out, and people are still crawling out of the woodwork asking for their money back.

cock
No-one had a sticker saying “Silly”

Now, whenever I’ve pre-entered a race and then either not been able to turn up, I’ve never bothered the organiser for a refund. I’ve either found someone willing to stump up something, anything, and have my place, or written it off.

While Aidan made a very generous offer I think that the gentlemanly thing for anyone who cancelled and hasn’t yet received or asked for a refund would be to write it off.

Twenty Years

In September 1991 I walked into Warlands Cycles in Blackburn with most of my September pay packet and walked out with a discounted 1991 GT Karakoram. A bike that weighed 30lbs in stock form, six of which were frame alone.

Rather frighteningly this shopping experience dates the bar ends currently on Kirsty’s Spot as they were the first upgrade. Closely followed by SPDs. Shamefully copying Jason Shackleton I painted them to match the frame. Next came Onza Racing Porcupines, and then three months without beer to save up for the big upgrade…

Early Disc Brakes
Early adopter

Early Disc Brakes
Look at the SPDs. Actually, don’t

Yep, those are Hope mechanical disc brakes. Batch two. Freshly fitted at the factory, which was still at Hope Mill on Skelton Street in Colne, and full of odd parts like custom mini gearboxes.

It didn’t stop there and I ended up with Pro Circuit front forks, Flite saddle and a Royce titanium bottom bracket (which still runs smoothly today in my Dave Yates) to try and make up for all the weight I was adding. Rapidfire pods gave way to thumbshifters running cack-handed under the bars, that one was Brants fault, before finally settling on Gripshift. To whom I have stayed loyal since; at least where gears are concerned.

Potteries Classic, 1993
Potteries Classic, Trentham, 1993*

By 1994 I fooled myself that I was good enough to go custom and I bought a Dave Yates and the GT languished before eventually being donated to a student to take to college.

Warlands cycles closed down in 2009. It was no longer my LBS, and many of the forumtards these days are only after the cheapest deal they can get from an online retailer. Thank you Mr Warland for starting me on a cycling journey that I am still travelling.

* Even not so young readers may remember this as the original venue of SITS. Damn those monkeys.

Bigorexia

Taking the train into and out of London I noticed how many men wearing Levis are advertising (or at least giving away) that they have gone “oversquare”. That is, their waist measurement has surpassed their inside leg measurement. I can, after many years of struggling, now claim to be square. Comfortably so. One of the reasons I have had to wear oversquare jeans for many years has been the difficulty of fitting my cycling thighs into normal cut jeans.

Then, while reading an article on Chinese cyberwarfare in the Washington Time I spotted an article in their sidebar on Steroids in Hollywood. Really?

The article went on to discuss a new phenomenon suffered by teenage and growing lads in the States, called bigorexia. I can see why. Pictures of Zac Effron skateboarding with his top off in magazines like Heat probably don’t help these impressionable youth. But I, fat boy that I am, am immune. I don’t get hung up about these steroid and workout freaks. Because have you seen Zac Effrons legs?. He’s got the physique of a lollipop. He might have a six pack where I have a Watneys Party Seven, but his scrawny stick thin legs look out of all proportion. The man is a spindly legged freak. Bigorexia? Take a look at the malformed proportions of these so-called hunks and get over it boys.

Redneck ride
Suck it in fat boy

As it happens it turns out I have the BMI of a hollywood star, just distributed rather differently.

Chain Pup

Chain Pup
Chain pup. And other stuff

I had been looking for an image of a Chain Pup in a product review stylee – well lit, white background – to accompany my recent posts which mentioned snapped chains. Amazingly I couldn’t find any.

So here’s my contribution to the web. I did find people slagging them off as “too small to be of any use” which, frankly, is bollocks. I’ll admit that the 4/5/6mm allen keys they came with were shonky – and you’ll notice they are missing from the image above due to breakage. Seeing as I always carry a decent set of allen keys on my rides anyway*, which includes a 4mm key with decent length, a Chain Pup is well up to the job of fixing chains.

Or indeed installing them. As was the case tonight when I used it to replace the worn out PC-7 with a brand new, and mightily weighty KMC.

* the free set from MTB Pro if you’re asking. I know there are many such sets still out there

2012. What would you do?

“The Olympic Games is the priority [compared to the Tour] next year”

Brailsford still doesn’t get it.

“He’s done the gold medal thing. [The tour] should be more important for him.”

Boardman does.

We’ve had Olympic success on the track going back past Boardman and Queally and others. Track success has captured the imagination of enough young British talent that we can now put together a team as good as Team Sky Pro Cycling.

The next stage is to get the results in the Tour De France to inspire even more young riders, and to introduce the great unwashed to the joys of the Giro, the Vuelta, and the one-day classics.

Repeating the victories of the past, even on home turf, just doesn’t have that inspiration.

This year we saw Cav finally cross the finish line in green. How long before we can do the double of green and yellow?

FFS

2011 brings a new twist to the Polaris. We have noticed many riders new to the sport, using trail centers and pre-marked routes, do not enjoy, or may not have the experience for a full mountain navigation course.

Polaris website
So not only can’t middle aged IT managers who have spunked their wad on a £3 grand bike not ride the effing things they can’t find their arse with both hands and a map way around the countryside with a GPS and a map.


Sad nick just heard about the dickheads doing Polaris these days

Increasingly I am the sad hipster looking at the people taking up moutain biking these days.