Category: Cycling

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Denial, Act 2

Floyd Landis has, for the moment, a Tour de France title and two blood samples that tested positive for testosterone samples. He won’t get to keep the title if the test results stand, though; cycling officials are ready to strip him of the championship, and the Tour runner-up Oscar Pereiro is saying he wants a yellow-jersey presentation so that he feels like he’s really the Tour winner. So Landis is doing the only thing he can until his lawyers figure out who to sue: launching a media blitz to tell his story, which boils down to “I’m an honest, hard-working guy and I’m telling you I didn’t do anything wrong.” The truth is that there’s really nothing he can say that will get him off the hook. The best case, for everyone, would be the appearance of some incontrovertible evidence that he shot himself up with something, that someone tampered with his samples, or that the test was simply wrong and invalid. Landis could confess. Some lab technician could come forward and say, “I did it.” Or cycling officials could say the test is untrustworthy. Don’t hold your breath.

Instead, speculate about what might explain the positive test result that came back after Landis’s heroic win on Stage 17:

—Landis needed a pick-me-up after getting thrashed in Stage 16 and knowingly took something he shouldn’t have. As I’ve said before, I doubt this because the consequences of being found out were so predictably devastating.

—Landis was doping all along and just happened to get caught after Stage 17. Landis and his supporters make much of the fact he was tested eight times during the Tour and that just one of the results came back positive (in fact, the head of the International Cycling Union says only one of 300 tests administered during the Tour — Landis’s, after Stage 17 — came back positive). But what if he was taking something all through the Tour that went undetected, for whatever reason, until his incredible physical effort in the 17th stage? I suppose you could call this the BALCO scenario, after the Bay Area sports-nutrition lab that distributed performance-enhancing substances that anti-doping tests couldn’t detect. ESPN cycling correspondent Andrew Hood notes that Landis was seldom tested in past years, and also discusses known ways of defeating the current testing protocols.

—Landis doped unknowingly. Maybe a well-meaning trainer gave him a little something extra in his daily dose of vitamins and supplements (not a credible possibility; the probability of detection, and the consequences from it, are just too high); or some enemy managed to slip him something (I shy away from most gunman-on-the-grassy-knoll theories, so I can’t swallow this one).

—Alcohol or cortisone or something else threw off the test results. A real possibility, according to some serious sports-nutrition types, though probably very hard to prove.

—Landis’s samples were deliberately contaminated. By whom? Why? It’s the gunman on the grassy knoll again. Tough sale.

—Landis’ normal testosterone levels are naturally high, leading to a false positive result. If this is true, it ought to be a matter of producing the medical records that demonstrate it.

Take your pick, or come up with your own explanation. I’m still sticking with my instinct that a guy who’s been around the highest level of cycling for so long, who had apparently gotten to the elite level without doping, wouldn’t have done something as suicidal from a career perspective as drug himself with the whole world watching.

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Denial

First, is there a more unfortunate name in the entire world of sports than Dick Pound? He’s the head of the Orwellian-sounding World Anti-Doping Agency (known also by its goofier acronym, WADA). I only mention him because he’s always come across as a supercop-type zealot, and his comments on the current unpleasantness involving the formerly unbesmirched Tour de France champ Floyd Landis remind you of a narc who’s just caught a kid swigging Robitussin. Pound calls the Landis’s situation — it doesn’t really merit the label, yet, of "charges" or "accusations" — "a stunning indictment" of professional cycling. But the sport is in denial, he says:

“They have a huge problem, a
really serious problem, but first they have to recognize it. It’s like
an alcoholic. Unless you acknowledge you have a problem, it’s very hard
to move toward a solution.”

Huh. This is the sport that banned a whole team from the Tour a few years back because doping paraphernalia was found in a team car. It stopped two stars from riding in this year’s Tour because of allegations they were connected with a doping doctor. Many lesser but still prominent riders have been suspended from competition for years for violating doping rules. Now, the Tour winner’s team has outed its champion on the basis of a test result that looks like it’s open to interpretation. You wonder what sort of solution Pound thinks might be needed to correct this sort of denial. Capital punishment?

But back to Landis. Maybe it’s a mistake to apply plain, everyday, civilian logic, but the idea of anyone in his position deciding to shoot up (or whatever) at that stage in the race simply defies belief. The upside from doping would be uncertain at best. The downside would be clear: Disgrace and infamy — exactly what’s raining down on him now, denials and protests notwithstanding. Who would take that chance? Especially after having played by the rules up to that point?

Does it matter, really? Certainly not in the way that it matters when a nation’s leaders decide to gamble with the lives of others.  But even in the sports context, does it matter whether these guys are taking drugs or not? A friend and fellow cyclist in Berkeley, Steve, points to a pretty good essay by a former marathoner, triathlete and sports-doping enforcer who says maybe the most beneficial thing for athletes is to do away with all the drug rules and let the chips fall where they may. He argues that fair enforcement is impossible and that sports at the elite level require such extreme levels of physical punishment that they’re intrinsically unhealthy and that some banned substances could help competitors limit the damage. I’m not buying that — the example he uses aren’t convincing to me — but he challenges the gospel assumption that all sports doping is bad and that all attempts to stop it are good.

We’ll see about Floyd. If I were the betting sort, I’d put my money on him being exonerated. There will be a reasonable explanation for an anomalous test result. But the folks who say the damage is done are right. A few days ago, his story was about a heroic comeback. Now it’s about a desperate attempt to convince the world the heroism wasn’t fake. There’s no way you can make people put that aside and embrace the old story line. More’s the pity.

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Hell on Wheels

It’s late, and we’re getting up early to fly to New York to visit Kate’s family (and see my brother John). So the telling of this tale might be a little truncated. But:

One of my cycling goals this year was to ride three double centuries — 200 miles in a day — because there’s a sort of prize for that feat called the California Triple Crown. I rode my three doubles in April and May — two very tough rides (the Devil Mountain Double and the Central Coast Double, both featuring lots and lots of steepish uphill riding) and one that the cognoscenti have come to sniff at as "easy" (the Davis Double Century, one of the oldest doubles anywhere). I don’t subscribe to the notion that riding 200 miles in a day, no matter what the course, is easy.

A couple weeks ago, I was kicking around riding plans with a friend, Bruce. He suggested doing a local double called Bay in a Day, first run last year. Its unique feature: It circles the whole of San Francisco Bay, which is a neat idea in itself; though it’s a challenge, too, because to keep the ride close to 200 miles and make it all the way around means spending a lot of time in heavily populated areas on heavily traveled roads. Despite the fact the ride’s not yet recognized for Triple Crown credit, Bruce and I signed up — though it developed after we’d paid our non-refundable fees that Bruce had a social engagement he couldn’t break and could only do half the ride.

Then the heat came. By last Friday, the Bay Area and most of California was in the same red zone as the East and Midwest had been earlier in the week. Friday night, the National Weather Service put out a Heat Advisory warning of triple-digit temperatures on Saturday. Among other things, the weather service and local TV weather forecasters warned against outdoor exercise on Saturday. I heard the warning and thought about calling Bruce and bailing on the ride. Then I thought about The Terrible Two, an epic double that starts up in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma County, and is famous for two things: the combination of brutal climbs (present every year) and brutal heat (present most years, including this one). I know plenty of people, including Bruce, who rode The Terrible Two a few weeks ago, or tried to, and I told myself if they could do it, I could, too.

Saturday morning: We rolled out of Novato, in Marin County, at 5:35 a.m. It was beautiful, clear, and too warm, even for a midsummer morning. The water in San Pablo Bay — the northeasternmost extension of San Francisco Bay — was glassy in the calm. We sped along for the first couple of hours and covered a lot of ground; it wasn’t until about 10 that it started to feel hot; within another hour, the air felt overheated and oppressive. Bruce left the route about 11:30 to catch BART back to Berkeley, and I and a couple of other riders I know kept on to Palo Alto, the lunch stop, at mile 108. By then, the temperature was close to 100 and the heat on the road was more like 105 to 110.

So far, I wasn’t feeling too taxed. I stopped for about 45 minutes at lunch and drank lots — several V8s and a couple of Cokes and plenty of water. I knew things were going to get worse. They did: Heading back into the hills east of the Stanford campus and away from the Bay was like going into an oven. I was carrying two one-liter water bottles and a Camelbak that carries another two liters; the water in the bottles quickly became hot and unpleasant to drink; the water from the Camelbak was better, though water in the tube coming out of the reservoir was also very warm. On downhill stretches, the wind was just a solid, unrefreshing blast of heat.

It was 25 miles from lunch to the next rest stop. Luckily, it never entered my mind to have a timetable for that stretch. Whenever the heat started to feel overwhelming, I stopped — at a store in Woodside, where it was 105 in the shade, at a parking lot alongside a big reservoir, once more at an impromptu water stop set up by the ride organizers. It probably took me a good two and a half hours to cover the 25 miles, but the heat wasn’t quite over. Riding up the Peninsula toward San Francisco, I started to plot where I’d quit. Finally, though, about 5:30 in the afternoon, I felt the first trace of a breeze off the Pacific. The temperature dropped into the low 90s, the high 80s, the mid 70s. I imagined I’d feel better if I could cool off, but I was surprised at how much better I felt. Crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, I recorded the low temperature for the day — 63. On the north end of the bridge, the temperature rose 25 degrees, but I was through the worst of it and managed to get back to Novato, the starting point, after 10 o’clock. It was a lot later than I figured on finishing, but I’d made it.

(I wrote a little report for the ride organizers, which I’ll post as a continuation if you’re curious).

Continue reading “Hell on Wheels”

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Heart

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Today, Floyd Landis had to face the Tour de France cameras again. Yesterday, he ran out of gas on the stage’s last climb, hit the wall hard, and lost the Tour’s yellow jersey. Then he gathered himself, told reporters that even though he didn’t expect to win the Tour anymore he’d still give it a shot, and went to bed.

Today? Well, I may have disappeared so far into cycling-race geekdom (along with immediate family members and close friends, some neighbors, and assorted bicycling compatriots) that I underestimate the difficulty in conveying how amazing today was. Landis came out and attacked the field on the last big mountain-climbing stage of the Tour, and this time, he broke everyone else. Talk about heart.

He did not capture the overall race lead, but because of the nature of the last three stages — a relatively flat one tomorrow with limited apparent tactical opportunity for big moves by the race leaders, a time trial on Saturday in which Landis will be a favorite to win, and the short, flat finish on Sunday in Paris — he’s got a real chance to win the Tour. Of course, the thing about this Tour, unlike nearly every Tour for the past 25 years, is that you never know what tomorrow will bring.

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Ready for Your Closeup?

If you’re watching the Tour de France every day on OLN — a bad habit in our household driven by the fact it’s the only place to see the race here in America — you’re well acquainted with the astounding caravan that moves along with the race. Motorcycles carrying TV, video and still photographers and course marshalls and timekeepers. Cars carrying race officials. Team cars — at least one for every starting squad of nine riders — carrying the team directors (the overall race strategists) and sundry VIPs and journalists. Neutral cars to support riders up and down the course regardless of which team they’re on. Overhead, at least one helicopter shadowing the progress of the daily race leaders. One of the more demanding and stressful factors for Tour riders must be the constant din of honking cars, revving engines and churning helicopter rotors.

For fans, though, the presence of cameras rolling along with the riders means that you’re right in the middle of the action. For riders, it means there’s no place to hide when something goes wrong. That’s what happened today for Floyd Landis, the former Lance Armstrong lieutenant who had managed to take the race leader’s yellow jersey this year. After a strong finish yesterday on one of the Tour’s classic tough mountain stages, lots of people had started to feel Landis would go on to win the race. But today — today was another brutally hard day, and on the stage’s last climb, Landis blew up. When one of his rivals accelerated sharply and the group around him chased, Landis simply couldn’t make his legs go any faster or harder. It was stunning to see — at least for Tour geeks who are used to seeing a single rider impose his will on the race.

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Of course, Landis had one faithful companion as he found himself wallowing up the climb, his closest rivals vanishing up the road ahead of him: as usual, a Tour cameraman was there to capture every moment of suffering. All Landis could do was keep turning over the pedals until he got to the top, no matter how long it took.

[Later: Landis avoided the media at the finish, but later gave what Velonews termed an “impromptu press conference” during which he showed a lot of class. One exchange:

Q: Did you know when you were dropped that the yellow jersey was gone?

FL: I knew I felt very, very bad. I didn’t expect to stay close to the leaders. I did what I could. I kept fighting, but I didn’t have much left. I did everything in my power to stay close, but you saw what happened. ]

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Road Sign

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Maybe Floyd Landis, until his disastrous showing today a U.S. favorite to succeed Lance Armstrong as Tour de France champion, should have known trouble was coming when he saw this sign on the first big climb of the day, the Col du Galibier: “Galibier 12%, Jack Daniels 40%.” Someone who’s over there could probably do a pretty decent feature-length article on all the stuff that gets painted on the roads of the Tour route and on the people out there doing the painting.

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July, California

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One of my favorite landscapes: Pleasants Valley Road, running north from the Fairfield/Vacaville area, just north of Interstate 80, up to pretty close to nowhere on state Highway 128. This is one of the places I think of as a real California place: hills and low mountains folded up, the winter’s green grass turned golden in the heat of the early summer, and just three or four miles to the east, the table-flat margin of the Sacramento Valley.

Kate and I were going up to some friends in Fair Oaks, east of Sacramento, on Friday. I took the afternoon and early evening to ride from Berkeley to Davis, about 100 miles the way I go. In the summer, you can count on much warmer weather as you travel from the coast to the interior here. Define “much warmer.” It might be in the low 60s at the beach, low 70s around the shore of San Francisco Bay, and in the low 90s to low 100s as you move from the valleys east of the coastal mountains into the Central Valley. In Berkeley, the transition happens as you cross the hills headed east; there’s a short stretch on one of the roads up there where in the space of 100 yards or so the marine influence vanishes, the temperature rises, the humidity drops, and you’re in the interior.

I could tell Friday’s ride would be warm. It was pushing 80 in Berkeley when I left at 12:30 p.m. I couldn’t have told you how hot it was later, just that it was. Later I saw that the official temperature was in the mid to upper 90s along the route I took; my bike computer’s thermometer, which gets the sun-affected, on-the-asphalt reading, recorded a high of 115.

On my route, you hit Pleasants Valley Road after 65 miles or so. It marks the only place along the way where you have an extended feeling of having left the sprawl truly behind: 13 rolling, twisting miles, orchards giving way to ranches, deluxe estates, and then ranches with orchards. Beautiful even in the heat, though I was less inclined than usual to just drink in the scene.

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Diversions

What I meant to be doing this week was doing a long, hard ride in Washington state (3.75 days, 770 miles). But my crash on the 1st and subsequent slow healing took care of that. It’s hardly the next-best or next-worst thing, but the organizers of the ride, the Cascade 1200, have a pretty neat blog going that really gives a good feel for what it’s like out there (and what it’s like out there is: hilly, very hot, and dry. “Very hot” and “dry” aren’t words we normally associate with Washington, which has a pretty solidly entrenched reputation as cool and rainy. But two-thirds of the state lie east of the Cascades, a range that effectively wrings out storms blowing in from the Pacific and Gulf of Alaska; as in California and Oregon, the mountains wall out cool marine air from reaching the interior, so the summers are hot and dry (and maybe a little more so than usual right now with a high-pressure system keeping rain out of the entire Pacific Northwest).

***

Saturday, when I thought I’d be up near Seattle, riding down the western flank of the Cascades, I was up in the Napa Valley with my friend Pete, doing a short ride. The main event of the day occurred after we got off the bikes, though. Pete and his 6-year-old son, Niko, built a wood-fired stove in their backyard for pizza and bread-baking. A pretty amazing father-son project, the result is absolutely gorgeous. The only question was: Would it work? On Saturday, we dismantled and burned about half of an old oak wine barrel in getting the thing good and hot (nothing’s more fun than an outdoor fire, especially if you can keep it under an acre). Then Niko and Pete made some personal-size pizzas. Then we ate and ate and ate. (Pete blogged the event, complete with pictures).

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Today’s Best Names

Nominated from the pharmaceutical category: Cephalexin and Cefoxatin, members of the cephalosporin antibotic family. The former is oral, the latter injected. I’m taking the former for 10 days after having a rear-end shot of the latter following some complications from the late unpleasantness between me and a local road. Complications? Well, I got four pretty good-sized abrasions when I fell off my bike last week. Three of them are healing just about as well as you could expect. The fourth, a big patch on my left shoulder, has been trouble; I may have suffered an allergic reaction to some antibiotic ointment I tried, from the adhesive on some high-tech dressings I tried, or maybe the thing was just infected from the start. In any case, it blew up into an angry, ugly mess that took on a life of its own (“I am not an animal! I am a human being!”). My whole left arm swoll up, as we used to say in the south suburbs. I went back to Kaiser twice. The first time, on Sunday, the doctor was unalarmed. The second time, today, the doctor blanched and said, “That’s cellulitis.” In a rare show of good taste and non-exhibitionist restraint, I’m suppressing the pictures. A day into the treatment, the thing seems to be responding, though.

Again with the baseball: Dan Uggla, rookie second baseman for the Florida Marlins. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel described his Wednesday exploits thus:

“Uggla became the first second baseman in franchise history with a multihomer game and knocked in a career-high five runs. … With the Marlins up 2-1 in the fifth, Uggla hit the first of his homers as part of four-run inning. His three-run blast to left knocked out starter Jamey Wright (5-5). In the ninth, Uggla sent another pitch into the left-field bleachers, this one from Tim Worrell with two outs and a man on.

” ‘I got lucky twice,” Uggla said. ‘I don’t even think my other at-bats were very good. A couple of balls, I guess I saw them pretty good and put good swings on them.’ ”

Uggla. Apparently it’s a Norwegian and Swedish name.

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How Not to Get Off a Bike

Late Thursday afternoon, I went out for a short ride through the Berkeley and Oakland hills; just a way to wake up my body for a planned 600-kilometer (387.5-mile) ride this weekend. I also wanted to see how my “new” bike — a beautifully painted old Bridgestone RB-1 frame I just had built up with parts from my old RB-1 — handled on a course I know pretty well. The route took me south along Skyline Boulevard past the place where I had a pretty bad crash in January 1991. Whenever I ride past the spot, I remember the fall and the aftermath. It all came back Thursday, too: How quickly I hit the road, the ambulance ride to the hospital, the gruesome picture I took of my face when I got back home.

I turned around, rode back up the hill I had just come down, and headed back toward Berkeley. The road is rolling, with a few short, curving descents and a couple of short climbs. The downhill sections are a little tricky, with some bad pavement. I rounded one right-hand turn, skirted some badly patched asphalt and picked up speed as I headed for a left-hand turn. I was probably going 20 to 25 mph. Just before I got to the curve, I hit a hole in the road and fell hard on my left side. I struck the pavement with enough force that my glasses flew off, lost their lenses, and went skidding down the road. I thought I heard my helmet hit the ground, too, but it didn’t show any signs of damage.

I’m OK. I came out of the crash with road rash on my left knee, hip, hand, elbow and shoulder and a pulled muscle (I think) in my upper back or left shoulder. Oddly, my right elbow also got a pretty good scrape, too, and I had a tennis-ball-sized knot on the inside of my right leg just above the ankle. I wound up going down to Kaiser Hospital in Oakland in an ambulance and spending about four hours there, mostly waiting and watching what was happening with people who were a lot worse off than me. About half an hour after I was rolled into the emergency room, a “Code 3” ambulance (one transporting an urgent case, operating with lights and siren) arrived with a woman in the midst of some sort of seizure; she died about 20 minutes later, about 30 feet from where I was lying. Eventually, a couple of nurses had enough of a breather from the more dire cases that they could spend some time scrubbing out and dressing my abrasions so Kate and I could leave.

What’s shakes me is how quickly and decisively something like this can happen. One second: spinning along, nurturing a picture of middle-aged bike rider as road ace. Next second: lying in the road, groaning, feeling a mixture of shock, fear, pain, and foolishness and wondering, What did I hit? Is there a car behind me? Am I going to get run over? How badly am I hurt? Is the bike trashed? What are my glasses doing over there?

After maybe half a minute or so, I untangled myself from the bike and stood up. A driver coming the other way stopped and asked whether I was OK. I think I told him, or her, that I’d see whether I was or wasn’t. That car moved on. Another came down the hill, the same direction I had been riding. The woman driving, Sylvia, stopped and got out and got me to sit down. I reaized my neck hurt. A cyclist named Dave came down the hill and hit the same hole I did and nearly fell. He cursed and then stopped to help, observing that it was the second time he’d hit that spot and that it was all but invisible because it was in a shady spot. Another rider, Doug, stopped as he rolled up the hill. The three of them convinced me it was a good idea to call 911; Dave made the call, then gave me his phone to try to call Kate; Doug, who lives nearby, agreed to hang onto my bike since I couldn’t take it to the hospital.

After another 20 or 30 minutes, the Oakland Fire Department and paramedics and police showed up. I was put in a neck brace and strapped to a backboard. I warned the paramedics, Elise and Dawn, that I weighed 215 pounds; they hefted me onto their gurney and told me I was the lightest person they’d had to lift all day. Then they drove me down the hill to the hospital. Eventually, I got hold of Kate, and she waited with me until I got cleaned up. When we left, several doctors and nurses, including the young guy who had attempted CPR on the woman who had died, told me to get well and made a point of telling me I needed to get a new bike helmet since I had probably damaged the one I had been wearing.

Friday afternoon, Kate and I went up to Doug’s house to pick up my bike. I was surprised to find that there doesn’t appear to be even a nick in the beautiful paint job (the handlebars are trashed, though). We loaded up the bike and then drove to where I fell. Doug had gone out and spraypainted the rim of the hole, which surrounds a manhole cover. Even though it was about an hour and 45 minutes before the time of day when I hit the spot, the shade was already crossing the road, and, even with the warning paint, I could see how close to invisible the hole was. A foot or so to the right or left, and I would have ridden home without incident (or run into some other obstacle). And I’d be out riding today instead of explaining why I’m not.

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