Motivational Posters. Thanks for the lovely frames Dawn. @handmadecyclist #thebadger #hinault #greglemond #renault #lavieclaire #bespokecc
Monthly Archives: June 2013
Mad Dogs and Englishmen…
- Ride Name:
- Distance: 0 miles
- Elevation Gain: 0 ft
- Moving Time: 00:00:00
- Location:
…go out in the heat of New Orleans summer and get they’re arses kicked!
The Badger
A huge shout going out to my great friend Giles for the lovely Badger illustration on the site’s masthead. He posted a lovely drawing of a badger on Facebook, so I asked him to do one of The Badger on a bike. I know a lot of you are probably very keen Badger spotters, so rest assured that there’ll be lots more Badger action in the weeks to come.
Please take some time out your dreary, miserable existences to peruse Giles’ own blog about jet-setting the globe working for The Empire, here.
In Praise of Europcar
How can you not love these guys? They’re such an exciting team. Guaranteed to have someone in the breakaway every day, and able to pull off incredible stage wins. Today was only the first day of the Dauphiné, and it was supposed to be a day for a sprinter, but David Veilleux rode his heart out from the gun to win by almost 2 minutes. They always make the Tour de France much more exciting, and they consistently embarrass World Tour teams that should be kicking their arses.
They are also hilarious. Voeckler is always comedy gold. His face puts out 400 watts alone as he goes through more anguished expressions than Carlos Santana doing a solo.
Now there’s the 19th century bare-knuckles boxer turned bike racer Damien Gaudin. How the hell did he win the prologue of Paris-Nice? The guy looks about as aero as an IKEA store. Then he goes and finishes 5th in Paris-Roubaix by trying to tear off his handlebars. Perhaps his flailing elbows have some magical aerodynamic effect that nobody knows about yet.
David Veilleux might be able to hang on to the yellow jersey at the Dauphiné until the TT on Wednesday. That’s a lot of tv time for the sponsor that’s paying a lot less money than the FDJs and Lotto Belisols.
Oh, one more reason to like them. They ride Colnagos. The fact that there is no World Tour team on Colnago just seems wrong to me.
Italian Style
It’s been a week since the Giro d’Italia finished and once again it was a terrific spectacle. The landscape, the architecture, the weather all combined to create what is probably my favourite of the three grand tours. It’s also a great opportunity to see the Italian teams showing off their incredible sense of style. It seems that the designers of Italian team kits tend to lean more towards the Versace end of the spectrum rather than the Armani. You can keep your Bauhausian, Swiss-influenced understated boring stuff for elsewhere. Italian teams like to make a statement. Why put De Stijl on a jersey, when you can have the Sistine Chapel.
The real scandal at Vini Fantini is not why they signed serial doper Danilo DiLuca, but how they signed off on that dreadful day-glo yellow kit (maybe they knew how bad the visibility was going to be in the Alps).
Of course, Vini Fantini is sponsored by Cipollini bikes. Some of you may be aware that this is the company of retired (shy and retiring) sprinter Mario Cipollini. If not, well, here’s what Italian Style is all about:
Much like the world’s greatest 5′ 6″ goalkeeper, Jorge Campos, who would design his own kits, Super Mario expressed himself artistically through the medium of the TT skin suit:
Back to the present. Through the constant ebb and flow each year of team names and sponsors, it’s warmly reassuring to know that some things will always remain the same. That’s right, Lampre’s kit will always be fucking hideous.
I think the whole Contador ban was a ruse by the UCI to find a way to give Scarponi a Giro win because they felt so bad for him having to, in the words of Spinal Tap’s manager Ian Faith, “dress like an Australian’s nightmare” year after year.
Of course, in every artistic medium there are masterpieces that cannot be denied. So, too, in the canvas that is the team kit, there is one that has just as much genius in it as Raphael’s School of Athens, Michelangelo’s David or the Basilica of St. Peter. I refer, of course, to Marco Pantani’s Carrera kit.