Feel free to list the grand tours that were decided on the last day

It wasn’t the last day, it was the penultimate stage. The next stage was a 190k mountain stage won by Roberto Heras. Still almost certain that Pantani would have won, especially considering the remarkable speed with which he was going up mountains.
Anyway, there can’t have been anything funny going on because the exclusion decision was made by UCI president Hein Verbruggen, a man of unimpeachable integrity and a friend of Lance Armstrong :-)

The suggestion is that GC should stand as it was on the night before he was excluded, with the rest of the race being null and void. Lunacy.

Pantani’s family hired a lawyer that argues that men forced their way into Pantani’s hotel room and made him to drink water diluted with lethal amounts of cocaine against his will.

Since he was by all accounts hoovering up industrial quantities of the stuff by then, the idea of him being ‘forced’ to take cocaine ‘against his will’ is pretty laughable (if it wasn’t so sad).

Interviewer: “What motivates you to go training when you get up, look out the window and realise its raining and cold?”

Robert Millar: “Well, you judge how cold its likely to be, look at how hard it’s raining, then realise that Sean Kelly has already been out for two hours without gloves”

Power: 17,808.00 kW

Didn’t Seymour Cray say that building a super computer was primarily an exercise in refrigeration?

I’m imagining that there is national chain that’s amazing for tools that I don’t know about

Like Toolstation[/url] for instance? Branches in MK and Luton.

Mark Prisk, minister of state for housing and local government until last October, who now declares an income of between £15,000 and £20,000 a year from Essential Living, a private rental provider.

£20k a year? Chicken feed

BALDRY, Sir Tony (Banbury)
Deputy Chairman, Woburn Energy plc
Received payment of £3,333 Hours: 4 hrs. (Registered 6 February 2013)
Received payment of £3,333 Hours: 4 hrs. (Registered 7 May 2013)
Received payment of £3,333 Hours: 4 hrs. (Registered 2 April 2013)
etc.
Chairman of Kazakhstan Kagazy plc
Received director’s fees of £10,000. Hours: 24 hrs. (Registered 12 June 2013)
Received director’s fees of £10,000. Hours: 10 hrs. (Registered 10 July 2013)
Received director’s fees of £10,000. Hours: 10 hrs. (Registered 31 July 2013)
etc.

Nice to see our MPs justifying their large salaries and expense accounts isn’t it?

Register of Members Interests Read it and weep

BALDRY, Sir Tony (Banbury)
Deputy Chairman, Woburn Energy plc
Received payment of £3,333 Hours: 4 hrs. (Registered 6 February 2013)
Received payment of £3,333 Hours: 4 hrs. (Registered 7 May 2013)
Received payment of £3,333 Hours: 4 hrs. (Registered 2 April 2013)
etc.
Chairman of Kazakhstan Kagazy plc
Received director’s fees of £10,000. Hours: 24 hrs. (Registered 12 June 2013)
Received director’s fees of £10,000. Hours: 10 hrs. (Registered 10 July 2013)
Received director’s fees of £10,000. Hours: 10 hrs. (Registered 31 July 2013)
etc.

OK to help me on the path to godliness could you tell me which is the true religion with an actual God or Gods?

Yes, its about time this was settled once and for all. Maybe a televised debate followed by a vote from the viewers at home? Then atheists could have one religion to not believe in, instead of a whole array of them.

There’s a very short diversion round the first climb due to preparation for felling of infected larch. Everything else is still open and some trail repairs have been done on the forest garden section (the one with the big dip) and the last descent into Abergorlech.

Damn it Jamie, both ‘S’ words in one post? This doesn’t bode well.

Out of interest how many of you would totally blank another biker crossing your path on a quiet trail?

Funnily enough that happened to me on Sunday. Out with a mate we didn’t see another rider all day until a serious racing snake (full carbon rigid 29er etc) came up behind us and basically pushed his way past us without saying a word. Which we did feel was a little bit rude. Presumably he didn’t see two old geezers and a dog as being part of his sub-culture.

Back in the day we’d always acknowledge other riders, you’d either know them anyway, or would end up meeting them at a race or at the tea stop. But we didn’t wave to little old ladies with wicker baskets and rod brakes as they weren’t ‘proper’ cyclists. I guess people’s definitions of what constitute ‘proper’ cyclists worth acknowledging has changed over time.

However many of the new roadies do not see themselves as part of a sub-culture practiced by a minority group

Agreed (to be sensible for a minute). I think that there’s also the factor that there’s no longer one sub-culture of ‘eccentrics who voluntarily ride bicycles’, but separate sub-cultures of club roadies, MAMILs, MTBers etc. You can even see evidence on here of differences between the gnar shredding DH types and the lycra clad XC crowd.
I wave (well, discreetly raise a hand, or nod) at other riders whether I’m on the road bike or the MTB and definitely get more response from those on the same kind of bike and dressed the same than from those who are ‘different’.

I didn’t bother to read any of page 1 & 2 … I just jumped straight in with my first post on page 3

Exactly as per the STW instruction manual :-)

So why not just ignore it then?

That would be rude. It would be like not waving back at you :D

Try J D Whisker in Welwyn. 01438 798772 (I think)
They’ve been selling Campag spares since Moses was a boy.

Jesus, I think I may have joined the wrong forum here by mistake.

No, you’ve just started a thread on a subject that’s been done to death twenty gazillion times already. Other subjects to avoid are
Is 26″ dead?
Should helmets be compulsory?
Why are CRC so slow?
I bought something using PayPal gift and it hasn’t arrived
Is riding on footpaths OK?
What tyres for [fill in as appropriate]?

Challenge Grifo XS Not cheap but a good compromise (and roll like tubs if you put latex tubes in)

Does anyone here understand VED, it seems a new version of my car (2014) would be £285 pa whereas mine (2007) is £500. Seems hard to believe VED went down ?

Mine just did the opposite. Switched from an 2005 to a 2008 model of exactly the same car and it went up from £285 to £475. Eh? What? Why?

Combined with the two agricultural rust buckets we also run that means I’m paying nearly £1k a year in ‘road tax’, which I think entitles me to ride through as many red traffic lights as I want. On the pavement, at night, without lights, wearing black camouflage.

I get all the hugs I need from my brother Frank ;-)

I missed this. Andy finished the whole press conference instead of abandoning 10 minutes after it started?

Poor little sharky was soon back in the water happily eating other poor little fish.

Not been a bad year on the whole :-)

Iona

Monte Baldo

Swansea Bay

Malham

Mynydd Mallaen

A teeny weeny bit of exposure in places there 8O

By the way OP, 51 isn’t old. I ride with an ex-motorcyclist (trail, trials and enduro) and our combined age is over 125. So enjoy it while you’re still young!

IME, with any demographic its usually a minority of asshats that give the rest a bad name.

There are still a fair number of trail riders using the Brechfa forest and a lot of effort has gone into waymarking the legal BOATs in conjunction with the Treadlightly project. We have a BOAT running past us and meet trail riders on a regular basis. They are almost without exception polite and sensible and happy to stop and chat.
Unfortunately there are also a few who ignore the legal routes, don’t have legal bikes and seem to think the whole place is some kind of playground (including the bunch of tossers who decided that the Brechfa Green was a good place to play).
I reckon I can tell the difference between the two by sound alone; the tossers on crossers have noisier bikes, gun their engines more and repeat ‘fun’ sections again and again.
Peoples perception of trail riders is formed more by the noisy inconsiderate few than by the responsible majority.

Strimmer line?

Stokie, Illinois to West Wales in 5 days!

That sounds like one hell of a ride.

Never seen a CX race where lights are required so they’re not needed.

I have. Merlin Knights Cross in Carmarthen. Run at night, top section of course unlit.

From my level 2 handbook :
Balance and coordination
Ready position
Weight shift
Braking (covering the brakes and effective braking)
Cornering
Climbing
Descending

plus
Negotiating rocky sections
Riding in mud and over roots
Riding with other riders
Pushing the bike

I’m sure a lot of roadies could be sold a nice light XC/Marathon bike. Efficient enough to ride from your door, capable enough to handle the sort of trails these riders would enjoy and comfortable enough to ride all day. Sell them adventure and beautiful scenery, not scary descents and pictures of smashed up riders.

I couldn’t have described myself better! I can just about handle the steep rocky descent stuff when riding with friends who insist on that sort of thing, but I don’t enjoy it for it’s own sake. Riding a bike for me has always been about getting out into countryside and MTB-Lite ticks all my boxes.

It’s refreshing to come across families on bridleways and green routes doing exactly that. They’re riding MTBs (usually over-suspensioned, and far too heavy as a result) but it’s the riding, not the bikes that’s turning them on.

A few comments above I totally agree with, all symptoms of a mature market and a highly developed, segmented and categorised ‘sport’. There’s nothing really, truly new to be done and there hasn’t been for a good few years.

I was in the bike trade in the mountain bike boom years and we sold them literally by the lorry load. I’d doubt if 1 in a 100 were ever ridden off road, they were simply comfortable, durable and made riding a bike cool again. For kids bikes and low-end bikes the MTB is still probably the default purchase.

At the higher end of the market MTBs have become part of a highly specialised sport which requires significant money, spare time and motivation and, despite what we may feel, isn’t viewed by the majority of the population as being particularly cool. There was always going to be a limit to the number of people fitting this bill and most of them have already got several bikes. Changing the wheel size or tyre width isn’t going to revitalize this market, it’s reached it’s natural limit.

Thanks to the ‘Wiggins effect’ (including the Tour de Yorkshire), road bikes are now the cool purchase for people who have spare time, disposable income and reasonable fitness, and this is spilling over to sports mountain bikers. If you’ve already got N+1 mountain bikes what better way to satisfy that new bike itch than by buying a road or CX bike?

A few months back I went for a ride on the Glenfiddich estate. To get there I drove along the Cabrach road … and was left wondering why those roadies would prefer to ride up a ribbon of tarmac being buzzed by cars

Perhaps they prefer riding bikes to driving cars?

Nasty shoe laces though

Probably £50 a pair from Paul Smith :-)

Also on the web http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/29334984

How about Luminator

+1. Mine just started it’s second winter last night

Off out at 6.00. Still riding the summer lightweight with race shoes and shorts. Feels strange to be fitting lights – it’s currently 23.6 outside!

I found it pretty good for general business use. Upload is much slower than download IIRC.

Used to use Avonline here until they managed to run some copper wire up to my remote hovel.
Was expensive, but paid for by my company.
Terrible lag, so no use for video conferencing or online game playing.
Dropped off during heavy rain.
Good for data transfer and email, which was mainly what I needed it for.
No substitute for the real thing but miles better than the alternative.
Found Avonline a good company to deal with.

Some news from Jen’s team :

Jens aims to be the first person to take the hour record in under 55 minutes.

Jens has reconnoitered the course and plans to break away at the first corner.

Jen’s biggest worry is that he’ll lap himself and be eliminated.

I’m sure there are plenty more where they came from :-)

Llyn Gwynant Barns[/url] are worth looking at (though they get booked up very early)