Eclectic Echoes

It’s official…
iShares cancelled their deal to take over sponsorship of the Phonak team and no new sponsor could be found, so the Phonak team will be no more after this year.

Earlier the Comunidad Valenciana team (formerly known as Kelme), a team with a 25 year history in the peloton and of finding many great champions, will not race beyond August 20th. A great feeder team killed by newspapers allegations in league with the UCI, WADA and Dick Pound. CV was caught up in the Operación Puerto scandal, but all but one member of the team were cleared on July 28th by the Spanish judicial system.

Tell it like it is, like it really is. Give everyone who has been subverted into the conduct that has exposed you the chance to clean it up, or take the risk that … your sport may be flushed down the toilet…

“Who knows, USADA (the United States Anti-Doping Agency) may subscribe to a suggestion that both athletes, in separate sports, were ambushed by a roving squad of Nazi frogmen and injected against their will with the prohibited substances.”
–Dick Pound (head of the World Anti-Doping Agency) in the Ottawa Citizen, Wednesday August 9th 2006 edition

Edit: found a shorter (synopsis) online version of his comments at the Denver Post.

Seems to back up what the former UCI president said of his former friend a year ago:

Pound is the sheriff who shoots everything that moves. WADA should be above all that and he should establish proof before he speaks.

“We will still work with WADA, but not with Pound, because he is not impartial. Athletes have the right to defend themselves even if it’s with the cheapest excuse. You only punish when it’s proven — that’s when you hit them.”
–Hein Verbruggen President UCI 1991–2005, current UCI Vice-President, member IOC

As for destroying the sport…It’s the way officials are handling these cases that is doing more to destroy the sport — leaking information, not respecting riders, painting the entire sport with broad accusations, forcing riders and teams to defend themselves in the media spotlight before any conclusive evidence is available… this is what threatens to flush it “down the toilet”. Strangely enough these are all covered pretty much directly in WADA’s World Anti-Doping Code (pdf). Stranger still is the fact that Dick and many other signatory officials of that code have seen fit cast it aside where it applies to riders rights and organizations responsibilities. Astaná-Würth and Valencia taken out in Operación Puerto –that’s at least two complete teams and some 18 riders wrongly punished for only allegations and forced to defend themselves and their teams in the media. Let’s not even get into the L’Equipe / WADA / Châtenay-Malabry scandal?

Landis, and all the other riders involved in the recent scandals, are not guilty until proven guilty — and they should not have to prove themselves innocent in the media first either. Landis remains the Tour de France champion until USADA and US Cycling concur that he is guilty and impose a ban or sanctions. Only then can the Tour de France strip anything and give it to Oscar “I’m already the champion” Pereiro (you’ll have a long wait for that official fax, and good luck getting a ceremony in France). If proven guilty throw the book at them, but until then…

Personally I can only echo Paul Sherwen’s sentiments:

From my point of view, I’d like to see Floyd fight it and prove his innocence because that would be a way toward saving the sport.”
–Paul Sherwen reported in the Palm Beach Post

Somewhere along the line I must have changed…
There was a time when I considered truing a wheel an exercise in pure frustration. I would take the offending wheel to the local bike shop (LBS) and have them do it, even if it was what they considered a quick and easy job of truing. I did try a number of times, either because the LBS was closed or I was desperate to save a couple bucks. Each time I ended up cursing as I started chasing an out of true spot round and round the rim. Too often the wheel ended up more out of true when I finished than when I started.

It turned out that one of the flats the other day was from a split in the plastic snap-in rim tape (I never should have moved away from cloth tape!). The spoke nipple punctured the tube in the high heat and excessive load (me, still 30lbs over weight) on the bike. Time to replace rim tape, tires and tubes. Since they were stripped down anyways I took the time to true the wheels as well.

Somehow now truing the wheel was like some weird zen meditation. Slowly eliminating the thwack, thwacka, thwack scrape against the feelers of my truing stand a little at a time until at last there was no more scrape laterally or radially. Not to say it’s a perfect true, but real close. I’m not entirely sure what the difference is, except now that I am older and have a decade of marriage and six years as a father I expect I have far more patience. Tammy thinks it may be because I have become more spiritual and more prone to “slow down and smell the roses”.

It could also be the fact that I really need to save the money of having the LBS true my wheels so I can replace the cassette, chain rings, chain and cables. The rings and cogs are all showing extreme wear and the cable stretch has gotten severe enough that I need to adjust them almost daily to ensure clean shifts. I am looking at the Nokon Shift Cables (Shimano road type) as I have seen some good reviews of them for mountain bikes, but have not seen any reviews for road bikes.

Anyone using them on a road bike? Got an opinion?