Between Snowstorms

Yesterday afternoon I pedaled along the Queens and Brooklyn waterfronts to Coney Island.  More snow was on the way, so I wanted to get a few miles in.  

Along the way, I encountered a few things I expected, such as snow piled (deliberately?) on the bike lanes and ice patches.  

And on the Coney Island Boardwalk:

Even the sea and sky seemed to reflect the storm's residue:

The funny thing is that the Verrazano Narrows promenade (the one that passes under the bridge), which I rode on my way home, was snow- and ice-free--and teeming with people out for late-day walks.  I think I saw two or three other cyclists.

I admit that I wasn't riding fast.  But it was good, all good.

 

Another Kind Of Justice

 The second Senate impeachment trial continues today.  But I am going to talk about another kind of justice:  the poetic kind.

One fine day in 2017, Juli Briskman rode her bike in Sterling, Virginia.  Minivans passed beside her.  That in itself is not unusual. Even the fact that they were black would not have been noteworthy, especially given the proximity of Ms. Briskman's route to the nation's capital city.

But she knew who was in one of those vehicles:  the owner of the nearby golf course. She made a gesture toward him because she knew he probably wouldn't have heard what she might have said:  Truck Fump.

All right, that's an anagram of what she could have said.  So you know what kind of gesture she made.  Who among us has not made it at motorists who cut us off or did other things to endanger us?

Normally, such an incident would go unnoticed.  But someone posted it, and it went viral.  Someone brought it to the attention of her employer--a government contracting firm.  As a result, she lost her job as a marketing executive because her bosses decided she'd violated the company's code of conducted.

Now, there are all kinds of ways people deal with the loss of their jobs.  They depend mainly on the fired employee's circumstances and temperament:  They can look for another job, sue, go into business for themselves, go back to school or pursue something they've always wanted to do, among other things.

Juli Briskman decided to run for office.

In November, she won a seat in the Algnonkian District of the Loudon County Board of Supervisors.  Sworn in last month, her new job includes overseeing leisure facilities.  

In that capacity, she's already helped to build bicycle lanes in her district.  Oh, and she's worked to remove a Confederate monument and release funds for COVID-19 relief.

And she's a Democrat.

Hmm...a Democrat working to build bike lanes and remove Confederate monuments--and release funds for COVID-19 relief.  In just a few weeks, she's managed to accomplish three things Mango Mussolini would hate.  It sounds like poetic justice to me.

Photos in this post by Brendan Smialowski, from Getty Images.

Braking His Enthusiasm

Sometimes the old questions become new again.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Specialized's decision to have two of its teams ride nothing but clincher tires with tubes on all except one-day "classics" races. They were, ironically, answering a question in the way many of us did two or three decades ago, when high-performance clincher tires and rims became available.  What made Specialized's action all the more interesting is that Roval, the wheel supplier to those teams, decided to offer two of their lightest wheelsets only for tubed clincher tires, thus bucking a trend--fueled at least in part by Specialized itself--toward tubeless tires.  All the more intriguing is that Roval's parent company is--wait for it--Specialized.

Now a four-time Tour de France winner is speaking against, if not bucking, another industry trend that Specialized has helped to foster. 

For this season, Chris Froome has switched teams--and bikes.  For the past ten years, he rode a Pinarello with rim brakes (what most of us ride) for Team Sky/Ineos. That run includes all of his Tour, as well as other, victories.  Now he is riding for Israel Start Up Nation and, as is customary when changing teams, he's also changing bikes.  His new main bike Factor Ostro VAM, and it's equipped with disc brakes.

Froome likes everything about the bike except the brakes.  While he admits that "they do what they're meant to do," he says he's "not 100 percent sold on them yet."  

Chris Froome.  Image by Noa Arnon.

Now, elite racers like Froome are hardly "retrogrouches."  As Eddy Mercx once famously observed, the function of a racer's bikes is to "win and make money."  So they normally welcome whatever will give them an advantage, and many old-timers imagine what they could have done if they'd had the kind of equipment today's pros use.

But Froome makes some of the same complaints about discs we've heard from other riders:  "constant rubbing, the potential for mechanicals, the overheating, the discs becoming warped on descents longer than five or 10 minutes of constant braking."

We've heard those complaints from Froome, other folks riding at all levels today--and from riders back in the 1970s, when I first became a dedicated cyclist.

In those days, discs weren't offered by as many companies--or as widely-used--as they are now. Then, almost all bicycle disc brakes in use were found on tandems, which of course require more stopping power than single bikes.  There were legitimate reasons, other than "retrogrouchiness," why other cyclists didn't use them:  They were even heavier, more cumbersome and complicated than they are now--and even more prone to failures.  In fact, Phil Wood's disc brakes may have been the company's only unsuccessful offering.

What tells us a lot about the state of disc brakes in those days was that they weren't adopted by the early mountain bikers, who retrofitted their old balloon-tired bombers--or built new frames--with cantilever brakes.  One reason was that Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher and all of those other dudes barreling down northern California and New England fire trails were engaging in what would be branded as "downhill" riding in the '90s.  In other words, they were subjecting their bikes to at least one of the conditions Froome describes.  

In a way, Froome is dealing with an issue that faced cyclists of the 1970s and 1980s, just as those Specialized teams dealt with one that confronted cyclists a decade later.  And, while Froome hints that, for the moment, the new answer may be the old answer, those teams are answering it in the way many of us did all of those years ago.