Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Last pre-Tour post

Maybe our new guest blogger will fill in the details of the late TdF news...I decided to quit checking Velonews every twenty minutes and instead went down to RFK so I could see a wholesome sport unsullied by drug...oh, never mind.

Ok, the latest is that the Astaná-Würth team won't ride, because by the time the riders who were implicated in the doping were pulled, the team was two riders short of the minimum six needed to start the race.

Astaná-Würth is a team that was actually hastily formed from Liberty Seguros when that sponsor pulled out following the arrest of the team director when this whole Spanish doping thing began in May. (This specific case, I mean, not doping itself.) The Astaná part of Astaná-Würth is a bunch of Kazakhs with money who agreed to take over sponsorship for team leader Alexander Vinokourov. (Vino is pretty popular in Kazakhstan.)

And speaking of Vinokourov, he wasn't one of the riders on the list. (It crossed my mind that if he'd stayed another year at T-Mobile, he'd be the team leader there now...but Vino staying at T-Mobile would have been alternative-universe territory. Everybody knew he was splitting during last year's Tour.) So in other words, Vino is really screwed.

One of the things that makes this story so intriguing for some of us, I think, is the complete lack of the presumption of innocence that we take for granted here in the U.S. In discussing this with my mom earlier today, she reminded me that French law goes the other way, and I have no idea how other European countries work. And of course, the UCI isn't a governmental body anyway. But this spur-of-the-moment punative action isn't something I remember in any other sports I follow.

Oh, and following other sports didn't do much to cheer me up, either: the Nats lost to the Devil Rays 11-1.

Anyway, the Tour starts tomorrow...presumably. (I well remember stage 17 of 1998...) I'm looking forward to a time trial, anybody else with me?

TdF quote of the day

"[I]n the end the Tour makes the stars, the stars don't make the Tour."

-Marcel Wüst, former pro rider, in his reaction to the suspension of the Operación Puerto-implicated riders (reported on cyclingnews.com)

Black bean & roasted corn salad

I first made this salad when we were going to a pot luck and I'd waited til the last minute...the very last minute, one minute shy of "Just pick up something from the deli on the way." To make it my way requires access to a Trader Joe's, which is where I got each of the...elements. I hesitate to call them ingredients, and I hesitate to call this a recipe. It's much too easy.

You need:

A large can of black beans, rinsed and drained

A bag of frozen roasted corn, thawed under hot water (if you aren't trying to make this in under five minutes, thaw it ahead of time. And yes, roasted makes a difference. Man, that's good corn.)

A big tub of the mild salsa, the one with the diced fresh tomato, drained of most of the liquid (I think it's "party size," and it's the one sold in the refrigerated section.)

Roasted red pepper salad dressing (Come to think of it: this did not come from Trader Joe's. The one I use is Seeds of Change)

Mix all the beans, corn, salsa, and a bit of the dressing together in a big bowl.

I was honestly amazed by how many compliments I got on this salad the first time I made it, so of course it is now my go-to salad for potlucks. It's also versatile:

With chips, it is a hearty salsa.

For vegetarians, it can be a main dish (corn and beans, complete protein).

For lunch, wrap it in a tortilla.

For breakfast, use it as an omelette filling.

When you're sick of eating it (it does make a rather large batch), it makes a good rat treat.

It's a whole new Tour--in more ways than one

Victor here, and I'd like to thank my sweetie for letting me blog here now that my own blog has died from neglect. Since she called me at work this morning with the news that two Tour de France favorites have been suspended, I've been reading and doing some research.

First of all, it is possible 2006 winner of the Giro d'Italia, Tour de France favorite, and suspended rider Ivan Basso may have his Giro title stripped from his palmarès. There is precedent for it: In February of this year, the winner of the 2005 Vuelta a España and former US Postal Service rider Roberto Heras was stripped of his title when he failed a doping test after the second-to-last stage of that race. Second-place finisher Denis Menchov of Rabobank was declared the winner.

If these allegations against Basso hold up and he is stripped of his title, that should mean the second-place finisher, José Enriqué Gutierrez of Phonak, will be declared the winner....maybe. It turns out he, too, is implicated in this very same scandal.

Further, VeloNews is reporting:

After a series of crisis meetings Friday between the recently-installed Tour director Christian Prudhomme and the AIGCP, the body which represents the managers of all the teams taking part, Prudhomme was unequivocal in the race organizers' position.

"We're happy about T-Mobile's decision to suspend Sevilla and Ullrich," said Prudhomme, who is directing his first race in place of the retired Jean-Marie Leblanc. "Last night we received official documents from the Guardia Civil (Spanish police) via the Spanish cycling federation.

"We then had a meeting with the AIGCP. During that meeting it was decided that the race's ethical code will be applied to the letter and that none of the riders suspended will be allowed to be replaced. "The sporting directors of each team will now contact the riders concerned."

Fortunately for American Floyd Landis, it seems J.E.Gutierrez was not selected for Phonak's TDF team. (NOTE: These are provisional rosters; last-minute substitutions for pre-race crashes or other emergencies have been allowed in past Tours. Riders marked on this roster with an asterisk are "substitutes;" I confess I'm not sure how the Tour directors are defining "substitute" in this context.). With a full team, Floyd Landis and Phonak may now be considered among the favorites to win this years Tour de France.

This is very much a developing story. I suspect Nic and I will be reporting more throughout the day.

At least she took the day off and isn't risking her job.

The Tour is now a whole new ballgame

I only know one person who is going to be as interested in this news as I am, and he's on his way to work right now. So because I need to get the "Holy s---!" out of my system:

Ullrich, Sevilla and Pevenage suspended

More riders suspended: Basso and Mancebo out

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, this means that the two riders favored to win the Tour de France are out.

(For those who only give half a damn about bike racing and only then if it's an American doing the winning, this is actually good news for Floyd Landis.)

But overall, it's bad news, the doping. I don't pretend to understand the legal workings of UCI, but it looks like the proof that the suspended players doped is that their names were on written records found in the offices of a Spanish doctor arrested in May. They also found a ton of blood, and it seems to me that testing the blood to see who it belonged to would be more conclusive than names on a list.

On the other hand, I'm not jumping up and down saying "They was framed!" I've said before, finding out that any pro cyclist doped...any one of them...does not surprise me any more.

Interestingly, I first got hooked on cycling in 1998, when I stumbled across the live daily Tour coverage on the Internet. The thing that really got my attention was the sit-down strike on Stage 17, when the riders stopped riding to protest to middle-of-the-night drug raids. Now that I've come to love the sport, I hate to see the doping taking the spotlight again this year.

Rain delay II

Make it Rain Delay III...I hear thunder. Time to turn off the computer.

First harvest

On Sunday I was at my parents' for dinner, along with my sister and her kids. I went out to see what I could harvest from our garden, and I called over my five year old nephew, who was playing in the yard.

"Do you like carrots?" I asked him.

"Yes!" he said.

"Well, check this out," I said, pulling one up and holding it out to him. I expected a reaction, but not the one I got.

"That's disgusting!" he cried, backing away. "I don't like carrots that come out of the ground!"

He's so getting a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma for his next birthday.

(I ended up with snap peas, green beans, beets, and the disgusting carrots that came out of the ground, but not a huge amount of any of the above, so I used the peas, beans, and carrots along with fresh basil in a pasta salad. Very nice. I meant to pickle the beets, but I keep forgetting that I've got 'em.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...ow.

Today's Pearls Before Swine.

Stanley Cup

Of course I was rooting for Edmonton to win the Stanley Cup. Once the Caps are out of contention (which for this year was sometime back in 2004) my sympathies tend toward the Canadian teams.

I just don't think of Tobacco Road when I think of the Stanley Cup.

Just like I don't think of Tampa Bay, or Dallas.

Although...now that I think twice...you always hear people talking about Washington being a southern town. We are below the Mason-Dixon line. Hey! Maybe that does bode well for our Cup chances!

(Stop laughing. We have the Alexanders, and the kids in Hershey who just won the Calder Cup...give us another couple of years and a hot goalie...)

Remembering Len Bias

June 19, 1986 was a Thursday. I was just out of school for the summer with a couple of days off before starting my new job, and I spent that day babysitting for a neighbor. I was sitting in their basement rec room watching tv, waiting for the kid to get up, when I saw the news about Len Bias.

My reaction was disbelief: a heart attack? How could a 22-year-old superman have a heart attack?

By the afternoon news, the reports were explaining the heart attack: cocaine overdose. The story I always heard, and I've never felt need to doubt it, was that that was the first time Bias had done coke.

For days afterwards, you saw it on tv, the cops going through the dumpster behind the dorm until they found a little glass vial, the ER at Leland Memorial Hospital.

Of course this was a huge local story. It dominated the summer and made headlines into the next year, and longer, as the grand jury investigations dragged. Over the years you'd still hear it come up, like when Len's brother Jay was killed in 1990. (I was still at Maryland then, and I remember hearing that on the radio just as vividly as I remember sitting on the neighbor's sofa watching the news in '86. My God, I remember thinking. Hasn't that family suffered enough?)

I always thought of it as a local story, though. I was a little surprised a couple of years ago when a coworker of mine, a guy my age who'd grown up in New York, said "I'll never forget where I was when I heard Len Bias had died."

I've seen Lonise and James Bias on the news many times in the last 20 years. The mother's crusade has been drugs, the father took up gun control. I admire the family very much for the way they've worked through their grief to try to help other people, and I heard an interview with Dr. Bias this morning where she repeated the sentiment:

"When Len first died, someone said take lemons and make lemonade. That disturbed me, because it was one of the most painful things that I had ever experienced. It was very difficult for me," Lonise Bias said. "But 20 years later, I have lemonade. That's been the hardest thing _ sweetening this thing that was so bitter by helping other people and learning through life's experiences."

She says she's gratified when people tell her that the shock of her son's death made them quit using drugs, or convinced them not to start. That's what Charles Barkley said:

I was thinking: 'What the hell is up with this cocaine? I should try this once to see what it was all about.' Then, we heard the reports were that Bias only used it once . . . that it was his first time. When I heard that, it scared me to death . . . scared the daylights out of me. It scared me into not trying it even once, not going anywhere near it."

There's a woman who grew up a Terps fan, who watched the story of Len Bias' death unfold, who went to the University of Maryland the next year after. Years later, she was at a party in a nice suburb, hosted by a couple of professionals, and somebody casually mentioned "There's coke upstairs if you're interested." It took a second for it to register that the guy wasn't offering soda, and then she had one thought as she left: Lenny Bias.

Kodiak with a Kodak

It was a lovely early summer afternoon: warm, but not yet humid, perfect for driving around with the windows down and the radio up, enjoying the open road and a pre-rush hour lack of traffic.

And that meant: cops running radar all over the place.

Nope, I didn't get nailed. I got lucky, as I seem to. If I have a guardian angel she apparently specializes in protecting me from tickets. I'll be driving along (breaking the law, let's just admit it for the record, I know I am wrong) and I'll end up caught behind a school bus, or an old man in a hat, or the EZ Method Driving School class of 2006. And I'll start cursing until I round a curve and go through the speed trap at an uncharacteristic mile or two below the limit and with a huge sigh of relief.

Seems I've got to have a change of scene

I am not well travelled. I barely leave my zip code on a regular basis. Even when I go on vacation (that one week a year) I go to the same place I've gone for thirty years.

I'm not bitching about this, I'm just stating the facts.

Last fall I went to Nevada for a friend's wedding, and except for flying (a little phobia of mine), I did appreciate the change of scene.

I'm thinking I should do it more often. The no-fly thing gets in the way a bit, but the other obstacles (the money, the work, the rats) are only obstacles because I let them be.

So I got a wedding invitation from my cousin the other day. She'll be getting married in Quebec, and my parents have even suggested that it'll be cheaper if we drive up rather than fly. I admit: I'm really excited by this prospect. A river that isn't the Potomac. A language that isn't English. A scene I haven't seen.

What is it I like about biking?

I did end up registering for that Century, and every weekend since I registered I've spent the days thinking "I really need to start training for that stupid ride." And several times, while feeling guilty about not riding, I've thought "What is it I like about this?"

I'm whiney, I admit it. There are 363 days a year when the weather is too hot, too cold, too windy, too wet, too bright, or otherwise imperfect for riding, in my estimation. (On those other days I'm likely to find problems with the terrain or the mechanics of my bike.) I'm thinking that this really is not my sport.

So today I actually did ride.

Now, I know what you are thinking...you are thinking that I'm going to list all the great things I got out of being on the bike today, and how I'm filled with a renewed love of cycling and how I can't wait to do 100 miles.

Fuck that.

I used the word fuck so many times today it sounded like I was auditioning for a role in Scarface. Because when you are riding into a 20-mile-an-hour wind, that's the only word that comes to mind. Likewise, it works when being passed by a 120-year-old guy on his velociped or when running out of gears on a hill that sends your heartrate 10 bpm beyond your supposed "max." It also expresses the horror at the conditions of trailside porta-johns.

I could say that biking has one thing going for it: like hitting yourself in the head with a brick, it feels good when you stop. But that's not true. If anything, my knee feels worse.

The only silver lining is that, if I can believe my heart rate monitor, I burned 1094 calories. That's 13 glasses of red wine, which is about what it will take to erase my memory of how much I hated riding so that I do it again next week.

Rain delay

Yeah, that's it...it isn't that I'm too lazy to post, we are just in a rain delay.

Sit back and enjoy this episode of M*A*S*H.

(Have you noticed that the only time you see MASH on tv anymore it's during a rain delay of a baseball game? Reminds me...I took first aid and CRP training this week. At one point the instructor mentioned doing impromptu tracheotomies, and asked if anyone was old enough to have had that in Red Cross training. My comment was "No, but I saw that episode of MASH enough times..."

I bet you see where this is going. Yup, the kids in the class had no idea what I was talking about.)

Which is worse

Boring blog-wise, which is worse, bugs...

...or whining?

And then one day you find ten twenty years have got behind you

I was stuck in traffic this morning in front of an office building where I once worked, in fact, my first job. Something there this morning triggered the memory of my interview, and thinking about it more, I realized I started the job in June, 1986.

My current job is only a few miles up the road, and I thought Heh, heh, haven't gone very far in twenty years, have I?

It nagged me all day, though. Twenty years. Maybe that's why I'm burned out and unmotivated lately, twenty years of Work is Hell. (I once made a pig out of an eraser and push pins.) I don't want to sit at a desk tomorrow.

Twenty years ago, though, I decided that I'd be happy sitting at a desk every day, eating my lunch from a paper sack while reading the paper, and going to happy hour on fiscal new year's eve. About the only part of my fantasy not to come true is that my company doesn't have a slow-pitch softball team.

I'm the happy idiot i thought I'd be, but some days I'm not so happy about it.