718

This is post #718 of Midlife Cycling.

That number just happens to be the Area Code of Queens, where I have lived for a decade.

So I thought it appropriate to make this post an homage to cycling in the Borough of Homes.

Here's an image from the Queens stretch of the Five Borough Bike Tour, which passes just a few blocks from my apartment:

Of course, I can't write a post like this without including an image from Kissena Velodrome, the "Track of Dreams".

And, pardon me if this seems immodest, but I simply had to include an image from one of my early posts:

And, finally, no Midlife Cycling post about cycling in the 718 area code would be complete without a photo in Socrates Sculpture Park--directly across the East River from Roosevelt Island and Manhattan's Upper East Side--taken by none other than Velouria (of Lovely Bicycle fame), who inspired me to start this blog in the first place:

Lance's Offenses: Neither The First Nor The Last

Tonight I saw the 60 Minutes segment on Lance Armstrong.  I don't think I learned anything new from it.  Then again, I didn't expect to.

I'm not going to debate about the genuineness of Lance's confession or whether he doped in the last two Tours he wrote.  It's all getting tiresome, really.  Call me a cynic, but I don't think anyone--the investigators, Lance's teammates or Lance himself--is telling everything he knows.  And anytime Lance or anyone else is accused of doping, someone will say, "Well, everybody was doing it."  Be that as it may, the affair is a mess.

All right, I'll say one more thing before I get to what prompted me to write this post.  Lance and certain other people, of course, have an interest in his being cleared of the accusations and lifting the ban on his competing.  On the other hand, if Lance was indeed doping and did, in fact, make his teammates take the same drugs he was taking and threatened anyone who wouldn't, or who spoke of it, then there were also people who had a vested interest in denying it, or simply looking the other way.  Yes, I'm talking about UCI officials, among other people.  They were probably looking at Lance as a ticket to the American market.

Anyway, what I now find far more interesting than the question of whether Lance doped or not is the degree to which he controlled the Tour, and much of the racing scene.  One rider--Tyler Hamilton, I believe--said, in essence, that what Lance wanted, Lance got.  He was well-connected and, according to some riders, if you didn't go along with him, you could be essentially run out of the sport.

It got me to thinking about the ways in which a few athletes manage to control a competition, and not only with their athletic domination.  It's long been suspected in cycling and other sports that a few top-flight competitors conspire with each other to control the outcome of contests.  

It's not hard to imagine in a sport that's as individualistic as cycling.  In stage races like the Tour, teams compete, to be sure, but most people watch the races to see the performance of individual riders.  (Probably the only team sport about which the same thing could be said is basketball:  There were a lot more fans of Michael Jordan than the Chicago Bulls, for example.)  Track events and time trials usually pit individual riders against each other, so it's easy to think that there are conspiracies.  

Velodrome d'Hiver

In fact, collusion was very commonly attributed to the races at the old Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris.  Of them, journalist Pierre Chaney wrote:

There was a lot of talk about the relative honesty of the results, and journalists sometimes asked themselves what importance they ought to place on victories in these six-day races. The best of the field combined between themselves, it was known, to fight against other teams and to get their own hands on the biggest prizes, which they then shared between them. This coalition, cruelly nicknamed the Blue Train [after a luxury rail service patronised by the rich] imposed its rule and sometimes even the times of the race, the length of the rest periods. The little teams fought back on certain days but, generally, the law belonged to the cracks, better equipped physically and often better organised.

Chaney was writing about races during the 1920's. One could be forgiven for thinking that there is indeed "nothing new under the sun" and that whatever Lance's offenses were, they were neither the first nor the last, neither the beginning nor the end.

From Brazil To Florida: Fragmentos do Cotidiano

Today I'm going to plug another blog I enjoy:  Fragmentos do Cotidiano.  It's a cyclists' blog, but it's also interesting for the photographs and stories of daily life in Brazil.  It's in Portuguese, which I can more or less understand because I can read Spanish and French.  But even if you can't do that, the photos are worth looking at.

Here's one that reminded me of cycling in Florida:

From Fragmentos do Cotidiano

I couldn't get over how much the layout of that bike lane, and that intersection, reminds me of the ones nearest my parents' house.  The trees and sky also look like what I often see when I'm in the Sunshine State.

And the light is very much like what I'd see on a partly cloudy-to-overcast day when I rode down Palm Coast Parkway to the bridge for US A-1A.  Some things are universal, I guess.