Bart Brentjens: 1995 UCI Mountain Bike World Champion, gold medal winner at the first ever Olympic mountain bike event in Atlanta, Georgia in 1996 and bronze medal winner at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. I don’t know how you say “bad ass” in Dutch (slecht aars?), but I am sure he has been called it more than a few times.
Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesjå has won more Olympic and World Championship medals than most people have entered races. It’s no wonder that she has a loyal following of “viking” tifosi wherever she races. One look at her career results and it’s easy to see that she just might be the best female mountain bike racer in history. From the looks of it, at 41 years old, she’s coming back for more podium pillages in 2014. Should be fun to watch.
Below is Part 1 of an excellent three part video interview with Gunn-Rita Flesjå conducted by Tomek Hoppe in October 2013.
The above pic was from the Transalp race a couple of years ago (2012 I believe). I only post it here now because A. I like the photo and B. The snow and slush is about what it looks like around here right now and it’s only going to get worse. If I were out on the snirt roads right now there would even be cows (most likely not roaming the roads, but they would be there).
The following post was originally published in XXC Magazine No. 5 (late fall 2009) and is reprinted with permission from the author (which is me). While I no longer have goals geared towards ultra endurance racing (dwindling fitness and a series of blood clots now have me pursuing races 50 miles and under) the sentiment and my love of mountain biking remains.
When I first saw this photo of Philipp Walsleben on Pez Cycling News, I thought maybe he was all sorts of pissed off and slamming his bike down for some reason or moshing to some sort of hard-core Euro-techno whilst hopped up on ecstasy. Or better yet, having some sort of mental breakdown caused by years of huffing embrocation, riding in circles and jumping over man-made barriers, freaked out and started doing a chorus line dance while holding his bike aloft and laughing maniacally like a smoked up Jürgen Klopp going mental on the touch line.
It turns out I was wrong on all counts, he just fucked up a barrier jump. I like my imagination better… I don’t think I’ll read the photo captions any more.
I can’t thank Philipp enough, because if I had not seen this photo, I would not have been inspired to Google search videos for hard-core Euro techno and I would not have discovered this gem…
This post has nothing to do with cycling and everything to do with respect. Read on if yinz wish, if you don’t… well, I really don’t care.
Lately, blogging has been pretty easy and my mind has been pretty generous with topics. Sadly, that ended today. Feel free to read on but I can’t promise much (except a bunch of photos and that the blog is even more lackluster than usual)….
I was poking around the web yesterday and discovered some pretty sweet video from the 1922 Milano-San Remo race (or Milan-San Remo if you have something against the letter o and prefer the English pronunciation). The 1922 edition of Milano-San Remo was 286.5 km long and won by Giovanni Brunero (Legnano-Pirelli) in a time of 10:14:31. Brunero was also a three-time winner of the Giro d’Italia, taking overall victories in 1921, 1922 and 1926.
The video below is a great look at the 15th edition of one of cycling’s classic races.
A well used ceramic space heater sat humming at my feet as I sat sipping my third cup of coffee and staring blankly into my computer monitor. I had long given up on it producing anything worth while and now aimlessly clicked through dead-end after dead-end on Monster.com, hyperbolic football gossip on The Daily Mail and finally full circle back to weather.com where I had started my morning off three hours earlier. I was pleased to see that it was warming up, however I was disappointed to see that all that meant was that it was now 4˚ and not -4˚. Thoughts of climbing on the trainer in my basement now entered my head as I took a big sip of my now ice-cold coffee. Fuck.
