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dumb and dumber
it's not so very long ago that i had a go at eurosport's coverage of the giro d'italia, not because of their excellent broadcasting of every stage, but for the paraphernalia that surrounded. on many of the stages, we were treated to glaringly obvious comments from the eurosport expert on the back of a motorbike, which varied between jens voigt, alberto contador and adam blythe and inevitably, hannah walker stood at the foot of a climb or at the 1km flag, telling us something we could already see by ourselves. i would scarcely deny that, due to their palmares, the above were anything other than experts, but in the words of big bang theory's sheldon cooper, "it's not that you're not good at what you do, it's just that what you do isn't worth doing."
following the end of each stage, several of the above experts would collect in an apparently grandiose studio set with orla chennoui to discuss at length most of which we had already seen over the past few hours (or half hour, if watching the evening's highlights). little of this seemed necessary, and precisely none of which altered the outcome of the day's stage. at this point, i'm happy to admit my regular disparagement of cycling punditry, which i believe to be surplus to requirement under most circumstances.
according to my opinion, this, deliberately or otherwise, is dumbing down what we used to call the beautiful sport, and unnecessarily so. i know that many other sports suffer from wall-to-wall punditry, none more so than soccer, though american football gives it a good run for its money. however, i'm inclined to think that cycling is a sufficiently minority sport to be viewed or followed by self-styled experts, already sufficiently well aware of how it all works. eurosport pay testament to this via the occasional opportunity to watch commentary free.
much of this has been preceded, however, by those who wish us to think they're on our side. consider the youtube video by a well-known cycling broadcast concern, explaining, in great detail, how to ride in the rain. i'm assuming that engendered exactly zero views in scotland. and then i receive an e-mail missive from a popular cycling apparel purveyor, providing me with a guide to riding in hot weather. chance would be a fine thing. no disrespect, but i believe we're perfectly capable of dealing with such matters by ourselves.
and then, so it would appear, the process continues. on arriving at debbie's at saturday lunchtime, as i commence my perusal of the comic, while awating my double-egg roll, i discover an editorial highlighting a facelift of the magazine, featuring a new body text typeface, reputedly to make for easier reading. given that the comic has been around for well over 100 years, are they implying that, for the bulk of those years, it has been difficult to read? during a cursory examination of the newly designed contents, the impression was of less, but more widely spaced text, and increased photographic content.
if i'm correct, the insinuation might be that, either the contemporary cycle sport fan is less well educated than his/her predecessors, or that the content has been dumbed down in order to attract a new legion of fans who are in need of hand-holding while they are led through the intricacies of the sport.
either way, it smacks of condescension and pandering to the lowest common denominator. i would think that the bulk of the comic's readership and/or subscribers (similar to those watching the home of cycling), are particularly well-versed in the sport, and consider themselves the equals of those who edit and contribute to the magazine. we probably all gained the knowledge we currently possess by various means, but made simpler and more accessible nowadays by means of the internet. it therefore seems unfortunate that the so-called powers that be are happy to risk losing us old-timers in favour of ingratiating themselves with recent adherents who may, ultimately, decide not to hang around.
just tell it like it is, even if it means leaving out the motorbike and the word on the street in favour of commentators who know their stuff, like brian smith. and i believe the majority of us can read paragraph after paragraph of small, closely kerned type just fine without encroachment from an increased number of images.
just saying.
monday 24 june 2024
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................technique
in the world of drumming, there are two distinctly opposite corners, with guys like jim keltner and jay bellerose in one, and thomas lang and virgil donati in the other. the latter possess a veritable mountain of technique which tends to be on display every time you hear or see them, while keltner and bellerose, though hardly bereft of technique, tend to play a great deal more sparsely and, dare i say it, with greater empathy for the music in which they are involved.
as an aspiring teenage drummer, my first exposure to someone that impressed me from the get go, was 1971's the yes album featuring a young bill bruford on drums. though my fascination with a multitude of drummers during the ensuing 50+ years has never quite ended, bruford is still the standard by which i, rightly or wrongly, tend to judge the others. bill retired from public performance around 2009 at the age of sixty, but there are many recorded performances from which to learn and to enjoy, several of which he has posted on his popular youtube channel.
however, for the vast majority of amateur and semi-professional drummers, the demands are likely to be closer to messrs. keltner and bellerose than they are to lang, donati or even bruford. though i'm quite comfortable playing in five, seven or nine, in truth, almost everything i am asked to play, along with many, many others, is either in four or two. yet i still practise far more complex stuff pretty much every day. i have managed to convince myself that so doing is simply to keep my skills sufficiently honed to participate in any pipe band performances i might be asked to join, given that such drumming demands particular ability with drum rudiments. these are skills rarely called upon when playing 'country roads', 'all right now' or anything by my least favourite band, 'runrig'.
i can also fool myself into undertaking continually more complex sticking patterns to allow me to fulfil my tutoring duties at the local secondary school, but i'm not entirely sure those are entirely necessary. however, leaving all the above to one side for the moment, in truth, i practice percussive complexities regularly, because i enjoy doing so, even though i'm pretty well aware nobody really cares.
but i do.
and in case you were beginning to wonder, i figure there are direct parallels when attention turns to cycling. though i've made overly strenuous denials that i will have nothing to do with anything that looks like a structured training plan, that hasn't stopped me riding through the long grass of uiskentuie strand, carefully following the narrowest of sheep tracks in the possibly mistaken apprehension that so doing is improving my bike handling abilities. in truth, i have no desperate need to improve as a cyclist; i have no intention of straying towards the competitive fringes, and there is scant need for me to ride more quickly than is currently the case.
however, the parcours that is the sunday morning bike ride features the col du rspb, an average of 7% that i would dearly like to ascend at the speed i managed in my younger years. so while the latter is approached with doom and gloom from gruinart flats, there's always the hope that its continued inclusion can be dragged kicking and screaming from my muscle memory and allow an upward alacrity hitherto unseen. it hasn't happened yet, but you just never know.
the same can be said for pedalling technique. following careful observation of the professionals, might it still be possible to pay closer attention to my own manner of pushing those pedals in a quest for infinitesimal improvement? and should fortune favour the brave, would i actually notice?
yet for all the effort i once committed to ascending, a bit like the columbian riders in the 1980s, i have entirely neglected any thoughts of going downhill more easily and perhaps more speedily. it turns out there is actually an art to descending; you need only observe tom pidcock to prove that particular point. however, it is an art, or skill, that i have yet to successfully acquire. when riding in provence around ten years ago, without fail, and with hands cemented to the brake levers, i could confidently predict i would be last to the bottom of any hill by quite some margin. i'm not too bad on islay hills with which i am well-acquainted, yet despite no demanding necessity to do so, i'd still like to visibly improve.
the answer, probably for the majority of us, is that we continue to strive past all definable logic, because we enjoy it. your own sunday ride may well bear similarities to the velo club's rural pootle, where the average speed and power output has your garmin chuckling to itself. every now and again, it's fun to accept the challenge of reaching debbie's more quickly than was achieved last week, and i'd like to think it's why i'm just as happy to slog my way through a galeforce headwind come winter time.
we don't have to do it; we just want to. technique for technique's sake. and there's nothing wrong with that.
sunday 23 june 2024
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................really?
in and around the turn of the century, a colleague and i were involved with a collaboration between highlands and islands enterprise (hie) and british telecom (bt), the original aim of which was to provide wall-to-wall broadband for the island of islay, long before the technology became a part of everyday life. the thinking, at the time, was that being able to demonstrate the effectiveness and veracity of the technology on an allegedly remote scottish island, would have provided bt with a saleable product that could be replicated across the country. after all, if it worked here, how much simpler would installation be in less remote rural locations?
however, as the technology developed, apparently in ways unforeseen by either hie or bt, the proposed offerings available to the islanders became diluted to the level of almost complete pointlessness. the final result was a solitary website, described as a portal to the island, featuring accommodation and travel information, as well as a loosely described interconnectedness between islay businesses and organisations, despite the prior existence of two similar websites of considerably longer standing. the embarrassing culmination of this, following months of training, travel and information courses, was a half-hearted launch of said website in a tent at the annual islay show. that was in the days when launching a website was a big deal, and press releases were issued by all and sundry to announce similar events.
substitute the word 'bicycle' for 'website', and we seem nowadays to be in the era when the release of a new model is deserving of acres of print and a large smattering of videos. the latter are mostly at the behest of either a concerted press launch in an attractive location, or the supply from a fleet of test models to favoured outlets such as gcn, dave arthur, cycling weekly, road.cc, or cade media to mention but a few. that is precisely what has occurred in the past couple of days, as pinarello foisted yet another variation of their dogma series upon a velocipedinal public who already knew it was coming.
those who spend at least some of their waking hours within these black and yellow pixels, may recall that i pointed out the less-than-subtle tactic employed during the recent critérium du dauphiné, when ineos clearly had the new bike on the roof of their team vehicles, and their mechanics pretended to be outraged that cycling journalists had been so bold as to film and photograph the reputedly clandestine machinery. and it may fall predominantly to team ineos riders to highlight the bicycles in public, given the somewhat exhorbitant cost of acquiring your own personal model for the £12,600 recommended retail price.
however, all that is as maybe, and depending on your desperation to own a new pinarello dogma f, with its reputed 0.2% aerodynamic gain, or indeed, your ability to pay for it without re-mortgaging the house, or selling a kidney, you might welcome the news, or prefer to get on with something more interesting instead.
incidentally, i note that colnago almost simultaneously launched the diet version of tadej's v4rs, simply named the v4. visually almost identical to the slovenian's giro winning bicycle, the latter sports less salubrious groupsets and is far more bank account friendly; less than half that of the pinarello at £5,500. perhaps the notable fact that the v4 will not be appearing at a tour de france near you has curtailed colnago's enthusiasm for inviting journalists to tuscany, or posting out a model or two to the above youtube outlets.
so, is it time to put the (hydraulic disc) brakes on new bicycle launches? by all means, advertise every last minuscule technological advancement contained within its carbon frame, but can we please dial down the melodrama, especially if one of the purported developments features the decimal point in front of the quoted percentage. we all know what a new bike looks like, and we're all more than aware that all announced improvements designed exclusively to benefit the likes of tadej and geraint, won't make one iota of difference to the likes of you and i on the sunday morning bike ride.
image: pinarello
saturday 22 june 2024
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................legging it
according to velominati, via the final of their rules (and one that tadej seems happy to flout on a regular basis), #95, you ought never to lift your bike over your head. this particular rule, however, may have less to do with a sense of fair play and the style council, and a tad more to do with the common knowledge that road cyclists generally possess the upper body strength of a twelve year-old girl. how embarassing would it be to take victory on the summit of a pyrenean mountain, clamber off to the adulation of the spectators and throw your back out when trying to raise your impossibly light carbon bicycle above your head? very much a case of 'don't try this at home'.
regular advice to the road crew would generally consist of remaining all but motionless from the waist up, an instruction that the late lord carlos of mercian was wont to ignore from the outset. it's also a contortion that alerts even the most inept of cycling commentators to the strugglings of those in the breakaway, when the shoulders begin to rock'n'roll.
this is not some arcane flight of fancy that is solely applicable to the professional classes. wrangling the handlebars to your will on steep climbs, is inevitable if only to maintain some degree of upper body firmity when faced with the imposition of an unfair gradient. under less extravagant circumstances, the upper torso contributes very little to the expression of forward motion. the latter is reckoned to be the sole preserve of the legs, or 'guns', as velominati would surely describe them, on the basis of their being guardians to surely the most powerful muscles in the body.
it may truthfully be that the habit of wearing bibshorts is more at the behest of displaying sculpted musculature to an adoring public than any concerns over inadvertently attracting oil stains from the chainset.
though a particular benefit of persistent hard cycling is a strengthening of the cardiovascular system, there's little doubt that it's the legs that will promulgate such a healthy state of physical being. it is the latter that experience the rapid onset of lactic acid burn, training for which can either lessen the pain, or assist the brain in the pursuit of tolerable suffering. however, recent research by the university of copenhagen has learned that a year's worth of heavy resistance training around retirement age (something of a moving target in modern-day britain) results in the preservation of vital leg strength in later years.
oddly, a recently published report in the guardian newspaper singularly failed to mention cycling in any of its paragraphs. instead, the article suggested lifting heavy weights with your legs three times a week for those circling retirement age, could prove highly beneficial in the long term. i confess that, apart from lifting my four year-old grand-daughter when she sits on my shins, i have never considered any specific indoor leg-strengthening exercises. i am, however, content to struggle manfully on the 7% gradient of the col du rspb every sunday morning, followed by an almost laughable attempt at rouleuring the flat road between ballinaby and saligo into a strength-sapping headwind.
in attempting to verify the predicted outcome of their research, the university observed 451 people around retirement age involved in a regulated ageing study. split into three mixed gender groups, one undertook twelve months of heavy resistance training, one experienced moderate-intensity training, while a third group continued in the relatively lethargic manner to which they had become accustomed. those in the first group lifted unspecified heavy weights, three times per week. having measured bone and muscle strength prior to the study's commencement, they were again measured after one, two and four years.
those with the hardest workload appear to have maintained their leg strength over time, while the other groups experienced a loss of strength in their legs. with allied research appearing to show that a person's overall health suffers increased debilitation when mobility is restricted, maintaining leg strength may prove of greater importance to long-term health.
those of us who indulge in at least a few kilometres of increased velocipedinal exertion each and every week, are surely manoeuvring ourselves into the upper percentile of a healthy society. and the best part is that such an achievement can be acquired while doing that which we love doing. it may be that we will struggle to fight off our children's offspring when they attempt to steal our seat cushions, but evidence would suggest that we can easily run away from the consequences.
cycling is life; the rest is mere detail.
friday 21 june 2024
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................no competition
the following will undoubtedly prove just how out of touch i am with modern life, and just how close i have become to emulating the angst of my tv mentor, victor meldrew (from the tv series one foot in the grave). however, if no-one speaks up, things are almost bound to go from bad to worse.
in the days before the interwebs were fully-formed, my chosen vocation required that i remain au-fait with the functional possibilities of the apple mac computers i employed to achieve financial remuneration. a part of this process involved subscribing to one or two macintosh computer publications, one of which arrived each month with a cover-mount compact disc (remember those?). contained within each shiny plastic disc was a number of folders containing a wide variety of software compatible with the aforementioned computers. these included software updates, product demos, useful and useless items of shareware, and inevitably, one folder entitled games.
in each and every case, that folder remained unopened.
we have previously discussed my lack of a competitive gene, a condition that has left my numerous cycle jerseys bereft of safety pin holes resulting from the attachment of a race number. in every case, even during the sunday morning bike rides, i have no particular desire to race any of my velocipedinal peers to the village sign at bruichladdich; nor do i much care if i'm the last to reach the summit of the col du rspb.
it is a trait that was unknowingly crafted in my junior years, upon realising that not only could i not play the card game of snap!, but that i had no particular interest in doing so. nor was i overwhelmingly desirous of playing any of the board games that occupy childlike minds. monopoly, scrabble, draughts, snakes and ladders and several others no longer recalled, gained cursory attention, but i would never be the one to suggest playing. when older, i learned how to play chess, my sole claim to fame being the beating of the school chess club champion, even though he was the one telling me how to move the pieces towards victory. i had to be told i had won.
at college, i managed to easily dispatch the colleague who explained to me how to play snooker; only on realising that it was a game requiring unpossessed skill, was i soundly beaten in every subsequent game. that would doubtless explain my sudden loss of interest. however, while all the above might have engaged a portion of my grey matter, they singularly failed to engender any improvement in physical fitness. but in my defence, i should point out that i had no real interest in that particular aspect of life either. so the fact that i ignored the computer disc games folder was, i believe, almost predictable.
however, the discovery of cycling, and particularly the road discipline, while hardly fostering any sense of competition, made substantial inroads into my physical and mental health, both of which are alive and well even today. which is why, to a certain extent, i despair in advance for those who are currently heading towards adulthood, or have reached its foothills.
the youngest member of the velo club is in his mid-forties, whilst the eldest - the mighty dave-t - is now in his eighties. yet every saturday, i head out on my bicycle to ride around 70km on my own, before choosing to do likewise in the sunday morning peloton the following day. i would hardly categorise this as sporting activity, due predominantly to the lack of any blatant competitiveness, but there's little doubt that it has a great deal to do with our collective fitness levels. but i've a notion that, for those very reasons, we have found it all but impossible to recruit any youthful domestiques
so, you might ask, what is my point?
along with my tuesday edition of the guardian newspaper, came a supplement entitled 'the future of video games and esports'. the problem, as i see it, is the conflation of video gaming and the allusion to a sporting component. if i understood the gist of the eight-page pullout, the word esports relates to video games with a competitive element. to that degree, perhaps these are every bit as innocuous as playing monopoly to discover who ends the game owning the most amount of property and money in the bank. however, to the best of my knowledge, no-one ever suggested that monopoly become a part of the olympic games.
so it appears that esports are essentially computer gaming tournaments watched by those with lesser abilities than those being watched. it genuinely appears that there is precious little sporting activity included. one of the included articles within the feature took the form of an interview with a professor of ethics and games technology (?) at staffordshire university. i believe i would not be incorrect in assuming that the selfsame university is unlikely to be the employer of a professor of cycling, despite the latter potentially not only involving genuine sporting aspirations, but health and transportational benefits to boot.
on the following page, another interview with an interim course director of esports at the same university, in which he revealed that the educational establishment has recently opened an esports facility costing £2.7 million. personally, i have no problem with people playing computer games, nor indeed of attending university course to learn how to produce, broadcast, develop or write the software. i am also given to understand that islay's high school proposes to introduce an esports class in the coming years. but appending the word sports seems reminiscent of prefixing any industrial process with the word bio to pretend that it's environmentally beneficial.
playstations, gameboys and xboxes are specifically for gaming. sporting activity, such as proper cycling, is an entirely different bucket of valve caps, entirely undeserving of being preceded by the letter e.
and don't you forget it.
wednesday 19 june 2024
..........................................................................................................................................................................................................the popular kids?
eurosport launched a couple of years after mrs washingmachinepost and i moved to the hebrides, but it was a few years later before we succumbed to the dish on the wall and donated money on a monthly basis to rupert murdoch's sky tv. this inadvertently brought us into contact with eurosport, a channel that, as far as i can recall, did not exist in broadcasting terms, as a separate entity. not being even remotely sports-minded, it was a couple of digits on the remote control that were rarely, if ever, pressed in sequence, a situation that changed for the better when eurosport commenced broadcasting coverage of the tour de france in 1991.
unlike the modern programming that bombards us with largely unnecessary punditry, in the early 1990s, before the invention of british eurosport, the tv footage began within the final couple of hours of each stage, and we would be treated to the dulcet tones and inveterate ramblings of the inimitable david duffield and his eventual sidekick, the somewhat disgraced, david harmon. however, confidence was frequently undermined by sudden changes in programming, the over-running of prior live broadcasts, and often immediate switching to the next event the second the winner had crossed the finish line.
i'm led to believe that the change in broadcasting habits was the recognition that audience figures might increase if efforts were made to explain the intricacies of grand tour cycle-racing. hence the punditry. no longer was eurosport solely concerned with entertaining the cognoscenti, but keen to include as many of the great-unwashed as possible. however, with the arrival, in 1999, of british eurosport, though grand tour coverage continued to excel, the british suffix, almost with one fell swoop, led to the exclusion of certain european races that were apparently considered to be of little interest on this side of the channel.
it is a salient fact that change is an integral part of life; nothing stays the same forever, and john donne's epithet that 'no man is an island' turned out to be every bit as applicable to corporate life as to that of the individual. america's discovery channel began to take an interest (financially and otherwise) in eurosport in 2012, eventually leading to full ownership in 2015. meanwhile, discovery channel itself had become a part of warner brothers, a conglomerate that acquired a majority stake in play sports network, an online broadcast startup based in bath in england, created by simon wear and mia walter. play sports network is also the parent company of youtube cycling broadcasters, global cycling network (gcn).
as corporate matters go, often unrelated to the sports in question, change rarely ends for reasons entirely unrelated to the aforementioned sports; in our case, cycle racing. the arrival of gcn+ brought us a second on-screen logo when it appeared that the tail had begun wagging the dog, eurosport's cycle programming seemingly becoming the preserve of gcn's personnel.
to almost bring the story up to date, it was gcn's relationship with play sports that had it feature in the same sentence as eurosport, but when discovery announced last year, that it was selling play sports, gcn+ was effectively closed down. and though it seems that gcn's dan lloyd retains some jurisdiction over the choice of commentary teams apportioned to each event (in cyclocross, for example, jeremy powers was originally employed by gcn, and could still occasionally be heard offering expert comment while we watched mvdp leave everyone trailing in his dust), from a live broadcast point of view, global cycling network appears to have had its day.
things almost appear to have come full circle with the recent announcement that warner brothers/discovery (wbd) has sold the play sports network back to messrs wear and walter. wbd will retain a minority interest in the company, but keep hold of the broadcast rights for all the cycling events previously streamed on gcn+. however, it appears that matters might not end here, with wbd explaining their continued minority stake "...with a view to working with Play Sports Network's leadership on the long-term development of the business."
thankfully, despite all the above listed manoeuvres, cycling seems not to have been lost in the crowd. there has been no apparent diminution of effort on our behalf, and the fact that eurosport offers virtually complete coverage of track cycling and not only the european cyclocross season, but north america's too, generally reckoned to be a minority interest wrapped up in a slightly larger minority interest, that forms a small part of the original minority interest, is viewed by most of us as highly welcome succour to the brave. while the cycle industry ponders its next economic move, it really is of great comfort that armchair viewing, despite its convoluted back office, remains as healthy as ever.
that surely means that we're still the popular kids.
tuesday 18 june 2024
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