Jurgen van den Broeck pulled out of the Tour de France yesterday, before the sixth stage. The day before, he injured his knee in a pile-up just 200 meters before the end of the fifth stage.
Last year, he finished fourth, thanks due to good showings in the mountains and in time trials (his specialty). Most analysts believed that had an outside chance of winning the race.
Interestingly, his first full season as a professional was the one that included Lance Armstrong's penultimate Tour victory in 2004. He remained with the team for two more seasons and seems not to have been involved in the scandal that cost Lance his titles.
Here is van den Broeck in last year's Tour:
If he can ride through that, he can overcome his knee injury. I wish him well.
Today, in parades all over the nation, we will see bicycles decorated for the occasion. Some are embodiments of patriotic fervor, like this bike:
I'm not sure what brand it is, or whether it's even made in the US. It has an American flag on its seat tube, but it looks new enough not to have been made here. Still, it looks like an old American cruiser; it even has an Ashtabula crank--unlike the retro-repro models, which usually have cheap three-piece cotterless cranks.
But I'm not going to quibble. For contrast, here's something with a more contemporary flair:
"Jersey Knitter" decorated those bikes a few years ago for the parade in the Garden State community of Montclair. I would imagine that when those colors spin, the visual effect might be like a pinwheel firework.
In contrast to those examples of patriotic pedal power, here's a Dutch-style city bike decked out for the most American of holidays:
In some weird way, this bike makes sense. If nothing else, the white bike makes a good "canvas", if you will, for the color palette. Also, in a weird way, it makes sense historically. After all, were it not for the Dutch (and French, Spanish and Poles), the American colonies might not have gained their independence from the British crown. In fact, the Netherlands was the first nation to recognize the United States of America as a sovereign country.
Plus, the Dutch gave the world Mondrian. What would Look bicycles and the LaVie Claire team used for their logos if they didn't have Mondrian's compositions of lines and primary colors?
Pretty much all things that can be done--and a few things you wouldn't want to do--on a mountain bike have been done in Moab, Utah.
They include this Fourth of July celebration. At least, I hope it was a Fourth of July celebration. Otherwise. there are at least a couple of really crazy cyclists in the Colorado Plateau's Mecca of Mountain Biking.
