I love riding on dirt and gravel roads and racing on them can be just as cool. Sadly, as I look out my window it is snowing yet again, adding more inches of the white stuff on to the many layers of ice and snow that have been on the ground since Thanksgiving. So, any riding I do in the next few weeks will probably have to be done with four-inch wide tires.
I have an article that I have been working on for almost a year about short track mountain bike racing (here in the States) and cross-country eliminator racing (in the rest of the world). I may or may not ever finish it, and even if I did, I am not sure who would read it or care. But I digress…
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.
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…
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.
Because mountain biking is not a sausage party and Jacquie Phelan was and is a legend of the sport… and pretty badass.
I got me a case of writer’s block. It’s not entirely my fault, it just that there is NOTHING going on except zero degree temps and snow. OK, there are things going one but I’m talking about things that are worth talking about. The following is a list of things that I thought about blathering on about but realized there was no real point…
