Podium Cafe - All Posts

Update on the FSA DS

2025-02-19T11:54:42-05:00

Hi all, as of right now I have no further information about our site, and I am assuming we will be unable to offer the game for 2025. But! If you stop by our Reddit page there is discussion of potential alternatives. I apologize for this mess, I thought we had an understanding about keeping the game going, but I guess not.

BTW the game has nothing to do with SBNation, who have been extremely gracious and supportive throughout, including leaving the lights on in the Cafe for now. I really enjoyed the closeout period with the Cafe, all the joy rehashed from the past. One more round of the VDS would have been a nice way to cap it off. If anything changes, I’ll post something. And if we get an alternative mechanism going, I will definitely let you guys know. I encourage you to carry on with this, via MOUA’s post or in comments here. Thanks!

FSA DS Opening Coming ASAP!

2025-01-11T12:54:48-05:00

Photo by DIRK WAEM/BELGA MAG/AFP via Getty Images

[Update Feb 5] It’s about to happen, I promise! And as suggested in the comment thread, with the site changes taking extra time, we are planning to start the competition with the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, returning to our original format before the UAE Tour elbowed its way in. All due respect, World Tour points are a thing, but the real start of the season for many of us is when they roll out of Gent on March 1. I have never been a fan of February racing myself, or at least of taking it seriously. I’m happy for the riders to get in some high intensity training. Just don’t make me orient a decade-plus-long running fantasy game around their glorified training rides. Okay?

Sorry, that got a little rant-y. Anyway, if you joined the FSA DS for the UAE Tour, I hate to disappoint you, it was never my inention. But otherwise the 2025 season is going to be off the charts, and from March 1 to ... whenever they run out of steam in late October, it will be game on here. Thanks for your understanding!

There has been some confusion/ doubt in our resolve to run the FSA Directeur Sportif again this year, but doubt it at your peril! For now I will take advantage of SBNation leaving the Cafe running a bit longer for a few notes:

The FSA DS landing page is where all information will be available, once we start the competition.
That page is under repair, because without the Podium Cafe being operational (which we assume will happen at some point) there... we had some linkages built in that need to be changed. Superted tells me it’s not that big a deal but it’s not nothing either.
We intend to open the comp on Feb 1, as always, give or take half a day. Hopefully there are no surprises. The pricing is done, and I can’t wait for your reactions!

Anyway, stay tuned, don’t stress over the DS page being down, we got this.

New Black Cyclones, by Marlon Lee Moncrieffe

2024-12-31T09:00:00-05:00

Biniam Girmay | Alex Broadway / Getty Images

Title: New Black Cyclones – Racism, Representation and Revolutions of Power in Cycling
Author: Marlon Lee Moncrieffe
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Year: 2024
Pages: 212
Order: Bloomsbury
What it is: Marlon Moncrieffe’s follow-up to Desire Discrimination Determination in which he again addresses the issue of racism in cycling and raises some challenging questions about the ways in which we might rid cycling of its colour bar
Strengths: Moncrieffe acknowledges that none of the solutions available to us are simple
Weaknesses: If all you think is needed to solve cycling’s racism problem is assimilating some Black riders into the sport, you probably won’t like some of the issues raised here by Moncrieffe

fmk

New Black Cyclones – Racism, Representation and Revolutions of Power in Cycling, by Marlon Lee Moncrieffe, is published in the UK by Bloomsbury (2024, 212 pages)

Cycling is a white sport. Think of a cyclist and chances are you’re thinking of a white cyclist.

A few years ago, asked to think of a cyclist, chances are you would have been thinking of a white, male cyclist. Today, there’s a good chance you’ll be thinking of a white, female cyclist.

What changed?

On one level, we did. Society changed and we changed with it. On another level, the sport changed. Women are more and more prominent in the sport. Conscious decisions were made to make that happen.

What will have to change in order for cycling to stop being seen as a white sport? What will have to change in order for more people to think of a Black cyclist – male or female – when asked to think of a cyclist?

Early in New Black Cyclones – Marlon Moncrieffe’s follow-up to his wildly successful Desire Discrimination Determination: Black Champions in Cycling this time with a more forward-looking perspective – the author discusses a social media poll he came across in 2022 which asked the question “Who is the greatest cyclist?”. After taking suggestions, the choices were narrowed down to four: Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Marianne Vos, and Other. As you might expect, Merckx won.

“Still, what this cycling poll and some of the public responses to it gave to me was the Eurocentric view on ‘greatness’ in cycling and cycle racing. The dysconscious racism in this was the tacit acceptance of dominant white cultural norms that have been passed on and learned as unsurpassable ways of knowing cycling; this culturally imbedded narcissism sees nothing else other than itself when describing the sport. The way of seeing and knowing ‘greatness’ in the sport of cycling has been colonised by an obsessive hegemonic Eurocentric focus on those racing cyclists who achieve their victories on the European stage in the Grand Tours, the Monuments and Classics. I am talking about the inculcation of the populace through perpetual reproduction of a Eurocentric narrative hyped by cycling commentators and the cycling media. These are the processes by which a Eurocentric view of cycling maintains its authority and dominant position.”

That poll, it could have offered Major Taylor as a choice. It could have offered Koichi Nakano as a choice. And let’s be fair here, Taylor’s successes on and off the bike, Nakano’s 10 World Championship victories, they earn both of those men a shot at the title. But because of the Eurocentric bias of the sport – personally I would argue the situation is worse than that and cycling is Tour-centric – they can’t be considered to be part of cycling’s pantheon.

There, then, is just one area in which the sport could change. Dear Peter Cossins, will you please, please, please stop writing the same Tour-centric books about the sport. Thanks in advance, Cycling. The very existence of New Black Cyclones could itself be an opportunity to embrace that change. Bloomsbury, the House that Harry Potter built, has been a strong supporter of cycling throughout the sport’s boom years in the UK, putting out books by the likes of Cossins, Brendan Gallagher, Alasdair Fotheringham and co. Not all Tour-centric, but all Eurocentric in their take on the sport. Now, they’re finally asking if there’s more to cycling than they’ve been showing you.

Or there is the smaller change: more Black cyclists in the peloton. This has been an ongoing project in the sport over the last 10 or 15 years. Pat McQuaid – who may have been making up for his own past, or may just cynically have been buying votes, or may even have been genuine in the initiatives he pursed here – made considerable efforts to bring more Black African cyclists into the peloton. Brian Cookson largely dropped the ball on that one during his brief time at the top of the sport. David Lappartient today, well he made sure that an African country would host the 2025 World Championships. That’s a small step in terms of representation, but an important one, nonetheless.

But cycling alone cannot fix this problem. Black African cyclists face a problem with visas, as the Ugandan rider Charles Kagimu explained to Moncrieffe:

“When I am preparing for a race and I am thinking about the visa situation, it affects my mental capacity. It increases my stress levels. Most countries in my part of Africa do not have embassies. If I can’t travel from Nairobi where I am based, I have gone elsewhere to travel. Having to apply for a visa doesn’t put you in [a] great situation, depending on the relationship between the country you are from and the country you are applying for. East African countries were colonised by Britain. You expect to have embassies that have decision-making, but the visa application must go to South Africa instead. The issues I have had with visas are to do with cycling. The process is hard for all African cyclists. I know white cyclists from Africa have had some problems but not as huge as the Black cyclists. It’s more about colour.”

One way around that is to focus on Black cyclists from Europe or America. More could be done to address the ethnicity gap in the sport, especially by British Cycling which, in a quarter of a century or so since John Major opened the Lottery’s purse strings, has been notably poor in identifying and developing Black talent. Or we could embrace more grassroots initiatives, such as Tao Geoghegan Hart’s decision to sponsor a Black under-23 rider at the Hagens Berman Axeon team. But while a lot of responses to that initiative were glowing, you do also have to consider the wider way in which it could have been seen:

“Many of these responses did not contemplate critically this intervention which to me epitomised the exclusive power of white sanction – the power of determining and enabling Black people to access white systems and structures. What I was seeing was like Roald Dahl’s privileged and wealthy ‘Willy Wonka’ character offering a ‘golden ticket’ to a poor ‘Black’ Charlie to enter the World Tour cycling factory for a brief moment only.”

Moncrieffe does praise Geoghegan Hart – “In taking the knee and raising his voice I think [he] was generous and brave to use his public profile and power as a Grand Tour winner to call for a transformation in the white-dominated sport” – but that fear that he was just another Willie Wonka dolling out golden tickets to Black Charlies, that shouldn’t be dismissed. Any solution that encourages the view that to be Black is to be a charity case is only adding to the problem it seeks to solve.

That shouldn’t be news: Bod Geldof has faced the same criticisms for many years now. But cycling, in its desire to do good, doesn’t consider the negatives. Take, for instance, the way some have turned Africa into a dumping ground for used kit:

“I met and spoke with one African cycling charity leader who had experienced this. She wanted to remain anonymous for this book but she showed me that she had been given around 25 pairs of cycling shoes, but they didn’t have the necessary cleats and pedals for immediate use. She had no way to obtain these items, as her charity was based in a rural part of the country, a four-hour drive from the capital city, with no specialist bike shop or the funding to obtain cleats and pedals for the shoes. The cycling shoes remained unused, gathering dust in the boxes that they came in from the UK.”

These criticisms of current or recent initiatives, they are not to suggest that New Black Cyclones is a book brimming with negativity, a book that just criticises the ways in which some people seek to address the issue of racism in cycling. It isn’t. For the most part Moncrieffe – as he did in Desire Discrimination Determination – celebrates the people he talked to during the course of writing and researching this book. In America, where he was promoting Desire Discrimination Determination, he met members of various Major Taylor cycling clubs and came to see Taylor as the Jesus Christ of the Black cycling community in the USA:

“in his human form as an outstandingly skilful and powerful Black cyclist that would attract huge public followings to watch him perform miracles on the bike before their eyes; in the afterlife, Taylor is the spiritual force conjured by the Black cycling community as their icon and their idol to follow – the Black Cyclone. Taylor as a force of self-empowerment, resilience and self-belief is the inspiration for millions of people who have come to know his story.”

Or there are the Black cyclists Moncrieffe met on visits to South Africa, Rwanda and Sierra Leone and the Afrocentric cycling utopias they are actively building today. After listening to them, one radical solution Moncrieffe offers is for Black cycling to emulate the West Indies cricket teams of the 1970s and 1980s:

“The Windies brought together as one phenomenal force the best cricketers from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua and Barbuda, and Guyana. They created their own way of playing a sport that in white circles is the epitome of British colonialism, breaking the traditional mould and blowing all their opponents away. […] It could be useful for some of the national cycling bodies of the Caribbean islands and across the African continent to apply the Windies’ approach to future team formations in future Commonwealth Games, World Cycling Championships and Olympic Games. This would be a challenge to the status quo in cycling.”

Such utopian thinking, it isn’t always about producing the end envisaged and Moncrieffe acknowledges this, admits that individual national federations are hardly likely to embrace change like this. But it is thinking like this that is needed if we are to avoid double-edged solutions that treat Black cyclists as charity cases.

New Black Cyclones offers no easy answers. But it does raise some challenging questions as to how far cycling is willing to go in order to embrace a more diverse peloton. Is assimilating Black African talent into the European peloton as far as we are willing to go, or are we willing to embrace what Black African cycling might offer the sport?

New Black Cyclones – Racism, Representation and Revolutions of Power in Cycling, by Marlon Lee Moncrieffe, is published in the UK by Bloomsbury (2024, 212 pages)

Fin

2024-12-31T02:04:38-05:00

and some last 2025 FSA DS instructions

This is it. I do not know when SBNation plans to turn the site off (read-only mode), but I assume it is by January 1.

First things first, as I’ve signaled before, the FSA Directeur Sportif is cued up for another go-round. Not sure about 2026, but 2025 is on. I can’t deprive myself of the chance to price Tadej Pogačar after his megamonster year. Or deprive all of you of the dilemma that price will pose. I could never look Ursula in the eye again if I missed this chance. The instructions for playing are simple: just go to the FSA DS site and login. By February 1, 2025, you should find everything you need there. Though not sooner (stay tuned).

Other stuff...

I’m busily setting up a WordPress blog for if (ok, when) I do get the itch to write. And please feel free to continue chatting at our Reddit.

I can be followed on Twitter, or Threads (chrsfnt), or Bluesky (chrispodiumcafe). As is true for many of you. Please do follow me there so I can follow you back. Please post in comments any other links you would like people to know about.

I recommend following Michael Baumann’s Wheelysports newsletter, which I find to be very similar to our approach here. Michael is a professional writer, mostly about baseball, for some of my favorite pubs, but it’s only a matter of time before he publicly admits that his true sports love is the Tour of Flanders. [That’s my guess. I don’t know him well, just corresponded a bit, but I have a keen sense of who might be a cobbles addict.]

*****

I won’t miss the cycling, because the show, as always, goes on. I won’t miss Belgium or Italy because I intend to go there again, with a bike or two. I won’t miss riding because I plan to start all of that up again in the spring. I won’t miss the great stories of the past two decades because I can revisit them. I confess, I do like just writing, I am vain that way, but whatever I needed to say, I finished up saying it already. That’s a life lesson. Not all journeys are endless. [Except, of course, Journey’s. That’s another life lesson, about what vanity really looks like. I digress...]

But I will miss the community. It was always about the community. I remember in the earliest days you could call up a world map which would show where people had logged in from. San Francisco! Minneapolis! Brussels!! Riga! Where is Riga? It was fascinating, and though anecdotal at first, it did become an actual community, not just wired together but connected, in that exciting way that sports brings people together.

I had the privilege of being a central figure here, but that’s not what I will remember most. What I will take with me is an accident of geography, being just about farthest from the action (time-zone-wise) such that by the time I would show up to the live chat, everyone was already there. The Cafe that I walked into so many mornings, latte in hand, was a building full of old friends, humming with activity and chatter, jokes and race-talk, with a big screen bringing the action to all of us. Knowing there was always a place to sit, a race to watch, and good friends to watch it with... that is what it was always about. Thank you.

Cobbles Are Forever

2024-12-28T17:52:54-05:00

Photo by Tim de Waele/Corbis via Getty Images

A look back at the whole Flanders thing and what it meant to the Café

This final* post is appropriately dedicated to, uh, for shorthand let’s call it Belgium and the Classics. Shorthand because it naturally includes France and the Netherlands to a significant degree, not to mention riders from around the globe. To the extent that concerns the thing I wrote about the most, that would be the cobbled classics, though it’s hard not to loop in the Ardennes as a necessary tangent. And cyclocross as another necessary tangent. You get the picture. The purpose of this post is just to play a few of the hits, nothing more.

[* Nothing is ever final!]

*****

Cycling’s Mooiste

My cycling fan origin story is one I’ve mentioned a few times. It was the ‘80s and Greg LeMond was everywhere, including contesting the finale of this weird looking race over cobblestones where by the end the riders’ mud-spattered faces resembled performers in a minstrel show as they circled the velodrome in a place I’d never heard of, a town in France’s industrial north. The gloomy skies, the early spring atmosphere, hardly alive with greenery — it seemed like something else, especially in low-aperture photographs from the European cycling mags I bought in Harvard Square, my only access to the images of the sport in spring.

It is really an aesthetic thing. There is a still, peaceful beauty to rural Flanders in spring, the mud, the small roads, the dour churches, it all seemed very authentically Belgian to me, even before I knew anything about the country (it was a pretty good guess though). Add in a dash of mystery to this area of Europe, an artifact of my American cluelessness, and I was hooked. You might say they had me at “cobble.” That this peaceful bliss is sporadically shattered each spring by the cycling traditions (and in winter by cyclocross) just made it all the more exciting to me.

And the racing. Pitiful as it was, my own racing experience enabled me to see these places as the setting for fantastic events. I had spent enough time on rough surfaces or going up sharp climbs to understand that you didn’t need majestic mountains to have a thrilling race. Even without that background, I doubt it would take long to get what makes de Ronde special, but anyway for me it all clicked into place. By 2006, I had begun to see the classics season, roughly 3-4+ weeks, as on par with a grand tour for fun, intrigue and glory. From a blogging perspective, it helped that nobody was saying all that much (in English) back then, as compared to the Tour de France. But even if there were no niche to fill, I was going deep on the classics, and hoping there would be an audience here to go with me.

Turned out, it wasn’t just me, not even close. I couldn’t possibly recap all the work that people collectively put in around the classics, particularly the cobbled ones, but suffice to say that it was extensive and involved practically every editor or Cafe member inclined to generate content here. As much as any one subject the cobbles made the Cafe what it was intended to be — a unique community hanging around together and reveling in the best Cycling has to offer. It is no coincidence that the closest we came to creating a literal cafe was a tradition in the early years where everyone in the live thread was encouraged to quaff a nice stiff ale at the precise moment the men’s Tour of Flanders hit the lower slopes of the Koppenberg. It was usually just prior to 5am my time, on a Sunday when I was expected to spend quality time with my kids. I have zero regrets.

Francois Lo Presti, Getty

The Modern Golden Era(s?)

Timing counts for a lot, and the Podium Cafe coincided with some of the most memorable racing the Classics have ever seen. Usual caveat about how past eras are hard to compare, and I’m not calling the 2000s the ultimate iteration... but it’s been pretty great. And by great, I don’t mean just top characters and fun races — that is practically inevitable. I mean eras of great champions defined by compelling head-to-head drama. As they say, the value of a victory comes down to who finished second.

When the Café began in 2006, there were several notable vets around such as Peter Van Petegem, Magnus Backstedt, Leif Hoste and George Hincapie, but in 2005 Tom Boonen had marginalized all the old vets and seized the Flandrien mantle, achieving the Ronde-Roubaix double. Then, clad in the rainbow stripes, he opened his next campaign with a second resounding win in Vlaandriens mooiste. That was quite an individual story. We saw him coming in 2002 and by ’06 he was astride the cycling world.

Photo by Tim De Waele/Getty Images

But the week following that magic ‘06 Ronde, it became a golden era. Boonen wasn’t the only emerging star circling the podium; Fabian Cancellara’s Paris-Roubaix debut in 2004 (4th place) served notice that he was somebody. It would be a moment before he would break through at Flanders, but the ‘06 Hell of the North was his real coming of age. Cancellara powerfully attacked and left Boonen in the mire, soloing away with a slight help from a train crossing, and other dramatic twists.

Photo by Tim de Waele/Corbis via Getty Images

From there the golden era went on pause due to ill-timed health stuff (mostly Fab), but in 2010 it all came roaring back to life. Cancellara’s Flanders-Roubaix Double, both direct challenges to Boonen that he couldn’t answer, made it clear that we were witnessing two all-time stars. I don’t need to repeat any of this, you guys know. But I’ll just thrown in one last note that this drama played out mostly on the old Flanders course, in all its beautiful madness. It’s the narrative that keeps on giving.

Photo by Tim de Waele/Getty Images

We are in the second great era of the 2000s right now, although it’s not (yet) Boonen-Cancellara because Mathieu van der Poel hasn’t had anyone challenge his hold on the cobbled monuments... yet. But Wout Van Aert is still around and due for a year without shit luck, and Tadej Pogačar seems determined to assert himself more this coming spring. Tom Pidcock is somewhere in the picture. Maybe a decade from now we won’t see the 2020s as any special era of competition, but it sure seems like we we’ve been denied exactly the kind of rivalry that would make it so by the fickle fate of crashing.

Being There

If you love these races, you really should try to go in person if possible. It is very different to absorb all of the atmosphere — the place, the scene, the steadily building anticipation toward one or more moments of witnessing the spectacle right in front of your eyes. It is not at all like watching on TV. You may or may not know exactly what is happening in the race, except for that time when it passes by you, although information is easy to come now. Traditionally it was a choice to forego the information for the spectacle. Even then, it was well worth it.

I covered this a bit in the meetup post, our 2010 trip, but I actually spent two weeks playing journalist from E3 Prijs to Paris-Roubaix, taking in everything there was of the cobbles season apart from the smaller races (Handzame, Nokere) and Dwars door Vlaanderen, which ran three days after Milano-Sanremo back then. Taking in races as a fan or journo, in person, is naturally very different from our normal consumption, and in Belgium it is its own garden of delights. As an American, attending sports usually means parking at the stadium and finding your seat for however many hours (and yeah, de Ronde is a bit like that now too). But this was a different world. A few random experiences:

E3 is special in that you can take in the start and the finish with relative ease. They’ve moved the line, but with 4+ hours to make the trek across the river, I’m sure it still works. But in 2010 the finish was smack in the center of town, in front of the pubs, making it a cool place to spend the day.
Gent-Wevelgem was notable for one thing: if you go to the start in Deinze, you can hop on the train to Wevelgem, along with like 20,000 Belgian cycling fans crammed in with you. It’s kind of a straight shot from Gent to Deinze, Waregem, Harelbeke, Kortrijk and eventually sleepy Wevelgem. Nowadays the race makes a big deal of its tours of the WWI battlefields, and that or the Kemmelberg are watch points, but the rail-rolling party is pretty cool.

Chris Fontecchio

Hardcore fans have long used cars to hop around and see the race from several places, but by far the best — and maybe the last — place for this is Paris-Roubaix. You could drive around the old Flanders course but you had to know your Flemish roads or you risked getting hung up by the race closures. Paris-Roubaix, on the other hand, has an A-route running parallel and the race traverses it on bridges. Twice we have gunned it from Compiegne to an early cobbles spot to the Arenberg Trench, just pulling off the highway and hoofing it to the course, and running back to it for the next move. Oh and the other like minded drivers... you can tell some of them have done this a lot, and they aren’t gonna get cheated.
Flanders, I guess you can do this, but the stadium finish makes it an ideal race to sit in one spot, or walk between two places, and not worry about being fit to operate a motor vehicle. This is the land of great beer, right?

Hup Jens!

I could carry on way too long, but the only other point worth mentioning is that if you’re a cyclist you must bring a bike. For a million different reasons, but mostly because when the Super Bowl isn’t happening, you are not invited to run out and try your hand at kicking field goals. Guessing the same rule applies at Old Trafford, and just about everywhere else in the major ball-sports world. But the great cycling venues belong to the public, except on the one day a year (or so) when they are closed for a race.

Greatest Hits: The Flandrien Faceoff

We found innumerable excuses and formats used to revisit cycling lore, but of this one I am most proud. In 2013, we ran a 64-entry single elimination tournament to determine the all-time Cobbles God, the Flandrien Faceoff! Here is the explainer post, and yes, it was inspired by the NCAA basketball tournament that runs in the US the same month. Our four brackets (we made actual brackets) were current Belgians, past Belgian stars, current foreigners and past ones. I roped Ursula into this rather lengthy commitment — 65 subjective mini-posts where we break down head-to-head matchups and put them to a deciding vote by readers. Ursula couldn’t have refused even if every fiber of his being had not been screaming yes.

One key element is a feature of SBNation’s called the story stream, where you start a stream with a topic and a token opening post, then attach all the follow-up posts so that readers can work through as little or as much as they want. This may be the only time we used the format, and it was perfect. This screenshot will give a flavor of it:

You may not have bought the whole thing, but if you wanted to dive deep into Round 1 of the Oude Flandriens Bracket, clicking on the story stream would bring up all of the matchup posts. The vote function has long since disappeared (it had a timer) but the matchup posts were where you would cast your ballot. SBNation has made its rep with really great tools.

This is the sort of thing I could read again, years later, and enjoy. [This post could have come out three days ago if I hadn’t fallen down the Faceoff rabbit hole.] If interested, you could go into each story stream, in this order:

Round 1— Oude Vlaandriens; Nieuwe Vlaandriens; Oude Buitenlanders; and Nieuwe Buitenlanders. That’s “foreigners” for you buitenlanders. Each bracket stream has all the individual matchups.

Round 2— All four brackets in one story stream

Round 3— 16 Left

Round 4— the Regional Finals

The Final Four was just one last round where you picked among the regional finalists, rather than two phases. It was time to be done. The surviving entrants were too elite to insult with anything else. Only one problem... the end result is lost, without the vote totals! But I know the answer and will put it in comments.

Random Oddities

Cuddles the Cobble came into being like any stone, in that he was there all along, going back many thousands of years, but only recently took his final shape. The name “Cuddles” emerged as a slander of Cadel, as in Evans, a great rider but seemingly an oddball personality who, unfairly or not, inspired his fair share of snark. But Cuddles the Cobble emerged independently, almost mysteriously, and all I know is that by the time he became one of the prominent voices of the Café, he was already... kind of a jerk.

Speaking of cobbles, did you know that we connected up with Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix, long before they became the household name they are now? I don’t recall how it started (recurring theme; also it predates my current gmail account) but I had heard of the guys who formed cobbles cleanup brigades across northern France, even going so far as organizing actual, professional repair of some stretches of pavé to preserve them and their inclusion in the race going forward. I did an email interview (language barriers be damned!) and that led to a brief fundraiser for Les Amis, where we raised enough money to qualify for our own cobble trophy!

Jimbo directed the effort and eventually it was awarded to someone on some race-result-guessing pretext. Nothing lasts forever... except probably that rock.

And last but not least, I wrote a book.

For the Love of the Cobbles, by Chris Fontecchio

It was a self-published effort which had limited commercial appeal to begin with, and next to none now, being a decade out of date. But I loved writing it and even sometimes take a peek back at it, for nostalgic kicks. Really, if the purpose of this post is to try and sum up my love of these races, I already did this in 2016. Just for fun, that March I declared “Boonen Week,” doing one last lap on the great Tom-Fab rivalry, as Cancellara was cruising to retirement and Boonen just gamely searching for his form for one last effort. I declared Boonen the main story — which not everyone would agree with — given his roots and the fact that he owns or shares the record for most wins in E3 Prijs/Harelbeke/Saxo Bank, Gent-Wevelgem, de Ronde van Vlaanderen and Paris-Roubaix.

I actually downloaded all of the articles from Boonen Week into the book’s appendix, and I’m glad I did, to spare me the trouble of trying to remember them all. They were:

How Terrific Was Tom? Part 1
Part 2
Who got next?
What made him great— his teams
And finally, how Fabian and Tom made each other great

Looking back, what this all means is that Tom Boonen is my spirit animal. I only met him once, in a scrum before a 2009 Tour of California stage, and he was a nice, cheerful guy, probably a joy to talk to if he wasn’t a mega-star whose life was under constant media glare. If I go back to Belgium, maybe I will find a way to say hello, if he is around and has an unbothered moment, or if some other pretext arises, but I won’t count on that.

No matter. He’s a person and a stranger, and the spirit animal comment is more about the effect his career had on me and my work here. Among our first posts were talking about his Tour of Qatar rampage — I was following him before the Café started — and I watched his final race in person, the 2017 Tour of Flanders, where he seemed to loom over the peloton enough to allow his teammate, Philippe Gilbert, to solo away for the win. Another recurring theme. We knew Boonen wasn’t his old superstar self, and probably some people really did write off his chances completely, but for me I would have never said never.

In the seven full seasons following his stoppage, I kept on with the classics and didn’t really dwell on his absence, but in retrospect it really was never the same. The rise of van der Poel and Van Aert re-enlivened the scene and it has continued to be fun. But the linkages to the old course have faded away (is anyone from the 2011 edition still racing?) and that time feels like a completely separate experience.

I had nothing to do with this photo, and I will cherish it always.

*****

I sign off next week with no regrets. In addition to the classics, I will miss geeking out on the Giro d’Italia, another specialty, and I could do a deep dive on my love of Italy, or the Tour, or cyclocross as an extension of the classics... but no, it’s time to let go. I will follow up with a post on where you can find us. There will be a VDS, there will be a conversation space (see the Reddit post), and lastly I will create a writing space when I can’t stand not to say something. The only finish line for me and my love of Flanders and the Classics is... uh, the ultimate finish line. Stay in touch!

Only At the Cafe...

2024-12-22T15:59:42-05:00

A handful of things that made it unique around here

I have no idea how to structure this post so I’m just gonna get into it. Things got kind of strange at times, probably a function of American fans in our Editors’ circle. When your favorite sport delivers the best it has before lunch, you have all sorts of time to indulge the ideas knocking around your head. Keep in mind that the online cycling content alternatives consisted of CyclingNews and VeloNews, not known for weird humor (stupid editorial standards!). A lot of our ideas seemed to get ripped off over the years, or maybe they weren’t so original such that the similarities were inevitable. I don’t even need to cite the FSA Directeur Sportif, our fantasy cycling game that Clydesdale and I dreamt up and SuperTed Supercharged into the current staple it has become. Anyway, stuff we got up to, you can find elsewhere now.

But some items, nobody was going there but us.

The Grisly Death of Girbecco

The 2009 Giro d’Italia was a memorable affair, as the organizers threw themselves a 100th birthday party, full of special events. The race switched its general orientation, starting in Venice and staying up north before finishing in Rome. It included a Milan criterium, a Coppi stage from Cuneo to Pinerolo, the resurrectioin of the Block Haus, a climb of Vesuvio, and a concluding time trial ending at the Roman Colosseum. To spice it up further, the Giro brought on a mascot, Girbecco, and... I don’t know why we became so obsessed with him(?) but we did.

After several posts seeking commentary from the cartoon goat of the Apennines, where Girbecco was given space to chirp our coverage, we then decided that the whole thing was a huge success and began lobbying the Tour de France to come up with its own mascot. Hearing nothing, we did the job for them. And I present...Tourbecco.

Then, well, things got dark. First, Girbecco was reported missing the night of the Rome stage, with little information to go on. Tragically, his murdered body was found a couple days later, under bizarre circumstances. The following week, Tourbecco was introduced to the media in France, and displayed his own brand of edgy commentary not unlike his cousin. He then participated in covering the 2009 Tour de France, but shortly after he too went missing. Rumors started flying about who was or was not a zombie, and whether Tourbecco’s death was staged. Vueltabecco went into hiding shortly after being unveiled in Madrid, and has remained out of the public eye. The Becco family had suffered enough. But nobody could forget the haunting images from that time.

It was a very distressing time for the sport. Fortunately, the various events wound up in the Italian justice system, where the matter is still pending after a series of convictions and reversals.

[Images were a collaboration between Jimbo and Crashdan, swapping photoshop details til perfection was achieved.]

Playing With Dolls

Not all of the long-running hijinx here involved acts of extreme violence. One of the sport’s compelling characters in 2009 was Heinrich Haussler, a dual citizen who shared German Cycling’s love of hair styling with Australian Cycling’s ... Australian-ness. With a great season, Haussler was in the news enough for us to find out that his nickname was Barbie, because of the Ken doll hair look. But we couldn’t ignore the Aussie cliché opportunity, and before long Barbie Barbie was born. And brought to life.

The full Adventures of Barbie Barbie seems to be inactive but several editions can be found here, here, and here.

[All images, doll positions, clothing creations, dialog... hell, this was a Majope joint through and through.]

Know Your Cow

WillJ, a/k/a CyclingChallenge (@cyclingalps) is a presence all his own, the most active member when it comes to exploring the famous climbs of the Tour de France, plus all the hidden ones you really need to know about. If you have a checklist of iconic roads to tackle yourself, chances are Will has ridden them and will happily give you the download on what you need to know. Visit his wonderful website or follow him on social media for a sense of what I mean.

But by far his most unique contribution was introducing us to the real inhabitants of the Alps. And they Pyrénées. And the Dolomites.

Will J

Mountain passes look like fun in spring (sometimes) and summer, but they aren’t generally human-friendly on a large, year-round scale, for all the obvious logistical reasons. You know who doesn’t need roads, or restaurants, or walkable shopping? These guys. The bovine inhabitants of Europe’s large mountain ranges have all they need in each other and plenty of delicious, delicious grass. They do seem to find the summertime trickle of humans entertaining, however, and Will — having spent about as much time at their altitude as to qualify for Swiss citizenship — has discovered what makes them entertaining as well. Any Belgian could have told you that cows and bikes are inseparable, but to the North Americans (outside of Colorado), this was news.

Enter the Cow Calendar. Let me emphasize that this was not a Podium Cafe bit, it was all Will. But we were happy to host any and all of Will’s photo projects. The Cow Calendar existed every year through 2023 (AFAIK) and sold online to Cafe-sters and others. I had one on my office wall and got a couple requests from co-workers for the purchasing info. I’m counting on Will to add in whatever he wishes to share.

And then there were the Marmottes...

Marmottes Without Contracts

Inevitably, Will’s love of mountain creatures met Majope’s love of dolls. There was an additional tie-in via the FSA DS, where Will’s teams carried the Marmotte name and... well, Majope was not going to just let that pass. She adroitly seized upon the pitiful performance of the Lady Marmottes, Will’s 2011 Women’s DS team, as the team members opened a dialog with their disappointed (or complicit) directeur. These riders were largely left off of the next iteration of Will’s team and the Marmottes Without Contracts series was born. See the midseason check-in, and don’t miss the series finale... a star-studded affair!

The Binary Nature of Existence

Are you sensing a trend? Like, that maybe Cycling is about bigger things than just winning races? And that, with Majope’s help, they can be best explained through dolls? Through the White Unicorn and the Black Unicorn, who are still available for advice concerning your team. Some gifts just keep on giving. Although I asked both about Tadej Pogacar, and while the White Unicorn was supportive, the Black Unicorn told me to stay away, in no uncertain terms. Does it know something about the 2025 pricing? Never underestimate the Black Unicorn’s access to life’s hidden secrets.

To be fair, before they became fantasy savants, the Unicorns were known for their commentary on the sport’s big questions. Everyone has a little good and bad in them, whether they know it or not. And while we could see shades of it on our TV screens, the Unicorns helped us go deeper in exploring the many shades of cycling morality.

And Now For Something Completely Different: A Look Back At Civility

Risking getting into humblebrag world here but one of the first things I bring up when talking about the site is how civil the community is. Some of what I know about this is second hand — people coming in here and saying that they are glad to have found a more positive space than wherever they came from. I can’t confirm those descriptions, but I do know very well that the tone is a big thing. Always has been. A few things to consider...

Timing is a part of it. By the time things got rolling here in 2006, even in the early stages of social media we had been through a few spasms of incivility to see what the negative potential was for disrespectful behavior was. We weren’t so green as to ignore the issue. But we didn’t just lash out at anyone who crossed a line. Not because we are therapists by training, but because of him. He who must not be named. Rhymes with Schmance Shmarmstrong.
Just about everyone coming here in those early years was spurred on by Armstrong, the dominant figure in the sport — even registering in American pop culture — from the start of the new millennium, and still hovering over it in 2006, retired or no. Most American fans loved Armstrong at some point, but the doping murmurs were deafening, and we parachuted into a divided atmosphere. It quickly became apparent that people had intractable positions and disagreement was baked into the community, so we forbid commenters from bringing up either Lance or doping generally in certain places, particularly the live threads. Here, preserved for posterity, were The Lance Rules. We created posts specifically for people to wade into the controversy (see What We Talk About When We Talk About Lance), creating a venting space rather than letting it pop up where it wasn’t welcomed. So yes, we owe Armstrong a wry thanks for making us reckon with civility practices.
Oh, and I would be remiss for not giving some credit to the nature of Cycling. Compared to ball sports, there are a lot more heroes than villains, to the average fan. Cycling teams used to have stronger national identities and it was possible to exult over the home crew, while disdaining everyone else. But it’s not a sport where you have to pick sides. I personally find myself rooting for about half of the big names. Or I did before we started playing the FSA DS anyway. But you get my point — there isn’t the built-in compulsion to pick sides and attack, not to the degree of ball sports.
But a lot of the positivity is just a reflection of the personalities at the Cafe. I think I’m a pretty positive person, for better or worse. Gavia too. Jens, by Scandinavian standards, is downright ebullient. Conor, Andrew, Douglas Ansel — the editors have tended toward the light side. That matters.
Finally there are THE Editors, people who actually assumed some editorial responsibility, or spent enough time commenting or posting as to gain a sort of de facto leadership place here. I don’t want to try to name them all, but let’s just say we have people across Europe and North America who were capable of upholding the site’s civility rules. For practical purposes, the geography part mattered. When tempers flared, someone was usually able to respond and defuse it quickly. I can’t tell you how many times I woke up on west coast time having slept through the occurrence and resolution of a potential conflict. Had it been up to me, the comment threads would have burned to the ground before I could respond. Don’t underestimate how important this was!

So that is some background. I am grateful to everyone over the decades who came to this site with the right spirit, or at least found it quickly, and contributed to it being the friendly confines that it has been. I take pride in there being some more prickly personalities that eventually were brought around to our ways, which I can understand is not easy. Text isn’t a suitable substitute for in-person communication, especially among strangers. I get that it’s easy to take things the wrong way (you might be surprised to learn just how defensive I can be? or maybe not), and not just reflexively make the effort to turn around a negative interaction. So I appreciate people’s ability to make this as pleasant as it has been, whether that came naturally or through deliberate effort.

*****

Please feel free to bring up other nonsense that happened here, I am sure I am forgetting plenty. Oh and I love that this post will live on the front page indefinitely.

Cafe Within-the-Cafe: The Bookshelf, Revisited

2024-12-12T13:53:32-05:00

A Cafe Bookshelf

I don’t know exactly why, but ... I just like words. In some ways this site’s roots were only tangentially about cycling and really was just a continuation of my literature studies. Yes, I was a lit major, and not a very accomplished one. Like, at all. The study of literature requires a dedication and focus beyond what regular people OMG A SQUIRREL!!! Where was I?

Oh yeah, literature. There are a lot of ways in which the Podium Cafe came along at the right time — post-Lance (whew!), but meeting the heightened interest in the sport with something there was not enough of: English language chatter. The situation was even more dire if you ventured into a bookstore, where even a solid attempt at a sports section would include a few token works on Cycling, mostly with Armstrong on the cover. By 2006 you could find more online, sportswriter books about a race or series of races with legendary names attached — Sam Abt! John Wilcockson! But the sport was due for a rise in book-length works... and boy did we get it.

I christened the Café Bookshelf in early 2008 as writers like Joe Parkin, Matt Rendell, Jeremy Whittle and Richard Moore saw their works break through in the US, even without Lance in the title. I started writing book reviews — something no other English website seemed to catch on to, and before long, I got an offer from a fella in Dublin, by the handle “fmk,” who shared my love of cycling books and writing about them. And the Cafe Bookshelf became what it is today: the most comprehensive assembly of in-depth Cycling book reviews, in English at least.

*****

I shouldn’t love reading about sports as much as I do, right? It wasn’t something I admitted to my lit profs, but when I was a bored and kinda lonely tween, following a move to a new town, I started haunting the public library, not for great works of literature but fun, readable sports books. Older me would undoubtedly turn his nose up at the one about the injured kid who threw the touchdown, or the other injured kid who hit the big home run (I am totally imagining what these books were actually about because... it doesn’t matter). Mixed in were a few biographies of great ball sports legends. They were fun reads and met up with my sports-obsessed imagination. I didn’t need any help or permission or even a device charger to pass a reasonably fun afternoon. So while I grew all the way from there into collegiate-level study of literature, and developed a fondness for a well-crafted sentence, I had no reservations about signing up for a senior-level seminar entitled American Sports Fiction.

Top Five Books from my American Sports Fiction Class:

Shoeless Joe
The Dixie Association
The Natural
The Celebrant
The Universal Baseball Association Inc., Henry J. Waugh Prop.

I think we read something that wasn’t about baseball, but I don’t remember. Anyway, because I felt some regret after graduation about not being a better student of literature, I would often read about other books, with the New York Review of Books or New York Times book review section the two best ways to geek out on literature without actually consuming (or, gasp! generating) anything of note. This introduced me to the book review as an art form — where the writer went beyond talking about the book, to introducing the context in which it should be considered. A review of a book on post-war Vietnam, for example, would consist of a not-insignificant discussion of the history before even turning to the book, possibly after the jump.

I don’t know when I first attempted to reproduce this format, emphasizing contextual discussion before turning to the red meat, but I do remember trying it to some degree, and I distinctly remember chatting over email about this with that “fmk” fellow, known to you all now by his real name, Feargal McKay. We agreed that this approach made the reviews worth doing, versus droning out some basic points about the book and giving it a thumbs-up or down. Feargal was committed to book reviews well beyond my abilities and over time, with occasional exceptions, he took it off my hands. What resulted was the Cafe Bookshelf as it now stands, in all its comprehensive glory... and plenty of time for me to geek out on the Giro d’Italia parcours and the like.

I am profoundly grateful to Feargal for his great, very substantive work, and his dedication to the craft. His reviews were exactly what I’d envisioned, a room of their own within the Cafe, complementing the site while also representing a stand-alone thing... a presence. I felt compelled to write this post because no effort to look back at what we did would be sufficient otherwise.

Seven Books I am Going To Buy Because of Feargal’s Reviews:

Dear Hugo, Herbie Sykes’ fictional tribute to Hugo Koblet.
Sprinting Through No Man’s Land, about the 1919 Tour.
End to End, riding from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
Riding in the Zone Rouge, another post-WW1 book.
The Ascent, about the rise of Irish Cycling.
Anquetil, Alone whose title says it all.
Cycling’s World Championships, The Inside Story! How can you go wrong?

Some fun facts!

Our very own Majope is a significant published author. She had her pet causes around here early on, most notably creating a fabulous world revolving around Heinrich Haussler. She. wrote an excellent review of a book about Mark Cavendish (searching for the link).
Feargal is a published author, and I got to write a review of his first work, The Complete Book of the Tour de France. (Emphasis on “first.”)
I wrote a book (self-published), called For the Love of the Cobbles, and Feargal wrote a review of it.
I will confess, I picked nits in my review of his book not because I had any real concerns — as I said then, if you want one book on 100 editions of the Tour which would spark your interest in just about any of the 100 editions (then) that merited interest, this book was a perfect gateway drug to a... I dunno, rabbit hole doesn’t do it justice. Maybe prairie dog town? Anyway, I believed (and still do) that Feargal would not have respected any review of his book that was all positive. They don’t call it “literary criticism” for nothing.

So that is the story of the Cafe Bookshelf. When this site gets turned off in a few weeks, the Bookshelf will remain just that, a series of posts sitting on their virtual shelf, available to read for some undetermined length of time. Please keep enjoying Feargal’s work and the work of our other occasional reviewers.

Chris’ Five Favorite Books about Cycling:

Dino Buzzati, Giro d’Italia. The best cycling book ever. Don’t make me implore you again.
Richard Moore, In Search of Robert Millar. Review here. Moore was a beloved personage in the cycling world via the Cycling Podcast, and his charm comes through in this personal journey. Slaying the Badger is his greatest work.
Herbie Sykes, Eagle of the Canavese. The story of a double Giro champ not well known, Franco Balmamion. All of Sykes’ works are worthwhile.
William Fotheringham, Fallen Angel. The Coppi story. Both Fotheringhams are prolific biographers of the sport.
Matt Rendell, The Death of Marco Pantani. Rendell is a must-read.

Beyond Virtuality... The Meet-Ups!

2024-12-07T23:57:24-05:00

The Internet Can’t Contain the PdC Community!

Maybe everybody thinks they were born at exactly the right time, but personally I can make a pretty good case. I can say I remember the 60s (maybe a couple days?), I saw Apocalypse Now! in theaters, and a bunch of other stuff, but all of that is debatable. What is not is that people my age have the healthiest understanding of modern technology, especially the internet. We can remember clearly what life was like before it. [Funny story, I used to play basketball in my friend’s driveway while, I found out much later, his dad was helping to invent the internet, sometimes just 100 feet away in his home office.] We have the pre-internet perspective of how life was, and I’m not just talking about being able to use a rotary phone.

And yet, I was young and childless enough (then) to be able to engage with the ‘net to a reasonable degree, particularly social media. Starting as it did in 2006, the Podium Cafe was populated for a while by people unaccustomed to making online friends. We were the last generation to be suspicious of relationships that didn’t form face-to-face, but as opposed to our parents, we were open to the idea that it wasn’t necessarily a recipe for disaster, on par with picking up hitchhikers at night on the freeway.

So because this is a sports fan community, and a rather civil one compared to the ball sports world, we inevitably started planning in-person gatherings at races. I personally have been at six events where we got organized as a community and had a solid quorum, which are rounded up below. I know other PdC folks have done similar things. And because all of my experiences wound up confirming the real, meat-space-style friendships that I thought I was making online with you guys, I want to spend some time reliving the events we shared. Here we go!

Sui Juris

Levi, King of Cali

2009 Amgen Tour of California

Background: Being in Seattle is not a great way to connect to pro cycling, at least logistically. You can meet the occasional athlete (hi Tyler Farrar!), but the events themselves are far away in both space and time. For a while, though, the Amgen Tour of California occupied a spot in the World Tour calendar, first as an elite February training stage race, and later as a more intense, but less well attended alternative to the Giro d’Italia in May. And it was a short flight to Seattle.

The Gathering(s): The race moved around a lot, up and down California, a state roughly the size of Italy plus Switzerland, but the time trial was held in the wine country above Santa Barbara, and the next day’s start was nearby(ish), so we plunked down at a bungalow in Los Olivos on the ITT course, and hosted a larger gathering that same night. Sui Juris, Crashdan, Jimbo and I shared the rental house, and I think we even made Crashdan sit on a bike once. Gavia, LyneL, Clydesdale, NikkiCyp, and a few more whose names elude me joined in the fun. This may explain the lack of clearer memories:

Clearly those narrow frames hindered my vision and I had no idea what was happening.

Racing Highlight: It was an ITT, so it was more like a steady stream of fun moments. I guess you could say seeing Lance Armstrong race at a time when it didn’t (yet) make us angry?

Non-Racing Highlight: I could take the high road and say catching a friendly word with Tom Boonen on the startline in Santa Clarita the next day. But if I’m being honest, it’s Sui Juris losing his car keys, touching off some anxious moments, only to find them sitting on the trunk of the car. Glad he chose the white Oldsmobuick and not the red Mustang or whatever passed for a sporty rental option in podunky Saint Babs International Airport back then.

Crashdan!

Links: Here is an announcement of festivities and an ITT thread, from Crashdan.

2010 Ronde van Vlaanderen

Background: One of the highlights of my life — which you are really supposed to reserve for family events... but! My brother was with us, we rode the cobbles together, and he met Fabian Cancellara at the baggage claim! So this counts. I arrived a week early to play at being a journalist at the pre-Ronde warmups, and Mr Van P showed up in time for the gathering to get rolling, including riding the Flanders Sportive the day before the big event.

The Pub, with adjacent Emergency Frituur

The Gathering(s): Flanders Eve, at the Pub (now called Martiko), right on the Grote Maarkt. Solid turnout including Jens, tedvdw (a/k/a Superted), JSallee and his friend (E., forgetting her pdc handle) who got the hero photos, Omnevilnihil and his friend Celerity, Mathieu G and friend and their Quebec flag, Albertina (who we rode with that week), and of course Sui Juris. All met for the first time, except for my bro and Sui, and tedvdw if you count sharing a pad starting the night before. Pete and I were late because we rode so goddam slow at the Sportive, in part because we had to hit every warmup hut in between snow flurries. Also the 150k sportive on the old course caught nearly all the cobbles, which I ceased to regard in purely benign terms. But being cleaned up and dragging our carcasses over to that toasty-warm pub, feasting on stoofvlees, frites and trappist ales, while meeting this group of PdC first-ballot hall of famers... just unforgettable.

Subsequent gatherings the next day in the same spot for the Women’s race departure, the Muur van Geraardsbergen for the rest of the day, the GP Dottignies the next day, and the Scheldeprijs on Wednesday. Probably some other stuff, lost in the fog of time and trappist ales.

ef2204 PdC Photogroup

Boonen vs Cancellara. 2010 RvV Kapelmuur

Racing Highlight: Take a wild guess. Recall that we are talking 2010.

Non-Racing Highlight: A lot to choose from, but I will go with the calm after the race went by, having descended the Kapelmuur and parked ourselves at some outdoor tables along the Vesten (mid-Muur), with beer service from the adjacent pub, and watching the finale and aftermath on a giant screen, tingling over what we just experienced. What a day. Even better than talking to Cav in the HTC team car as they got stuck behind a truck during a recon of the Koppenberg.

Links:

Mark Blacknell

Looville Croo

2013 Louisville CX Worlds

Background: Cyclocross had crept into my Flanders-obsessed brain by 2010 — thankfully, as it was a great era in the sport’s history. It started catching on in the US too, with CrossVegas bringing the pros over (ask me about Bart Wellens racing in Seattle!) and the amateur scene catching fire, including my neighborhood race ranking #1 in the world by participation (over 1000 finishers this year!). So when Louisville announced a bid to host the Worlds in 2013, I thought it seemed bonkers at first. As the event approached, though, I got familiar with their new, cleverly designed Eva Bandman CX park, and it made sense.

Then the event arrived and boy, did things get crazy. Heavy rain and snow swelled the Ohio River beyond its banks, and what seemed like a sweet venue on many levels was scheduled to be submerged on Sunday, when the elite events were set to go off. On Friday, while I was in the middle of a one-on-one interview with Marianne Vos (I know!!), word came down that all four events were happening Saturday to wrap up before the waters rose. That meant four events back-to-back, with junior men, open/elite women, U23 men and elite men in what would go down as quite a day for the sport. Kind of cool, unless you ask any fans from Europe booked on Saturday flights, sneaking over to catch the elites Sunday. Somewhere in Belgium, in a Sven Nys Supporters Pub, you can hear people muttering “fuck Louisville!” into their beer.

Ohio River (womp womp)

The Gathering(s): Also bonkers! We rented a large house about 10 miles away, so we could have a great space, even a hot tub! But the snow Thursday made a holy mess of things, and the planned party fizzled. But we had a post-race huddle close to the event at a place called Sergios, packed to the gills and boasting a huge, Belgium-facing beer list, so it worked out nonetheless.

And of course we were hanging out at the decisive hill location, our PdC banner on display, with Sui Juris, Ant1, Megabeth, Drew, Elvisgoat, his son (future major shredder), and lots of other friends with or without PdC handles.

Racing Highlight: The Women’s race was it. The course started off covered in snow and ice, and the tricky hill was just non-stop action of the slipperiest kind. By the men’s race it had melted, and while still muddy and slick, it was more predictable. Nys winning the elusive rainbow though...

Non-Racing Highlight: Uh, well, with Sunday off and nobody flying out til Monday, we hung out all day drinking (etc.), watching the Super Bowl, and hitting golf balls in the snow.

I know that look!

Links:

Race Day coverage

Sui’s mega-photo gallery

Post event wrap, where I am proud to have typed the sentence Mathieu van der Poel is almost certain to be a guy who, in a decade, we look back and say “I saw him when he was a teenager.

Kevin Ledanois, U23 champ

2015 Richmond Road Worlds

Background: Following Louisville, the decision to award the Road Worlds to a middling Southern city was a complete head-scratcher. The Virginia capital had no particular connection to the sport, and we all feared that the terrain would make for dull racing. At least when the Worlds came to Colorado Springs in 1986, the culture and terrain were a clear fit. We didn’t complain though, before, during or after.

The Gathering(s): Having learned from Louisville, the PdC House was all about location, and we ended up in a row house just a block or three from the finishing circuit course. While it ended up being an open house most days, the official PdC event was at the New York Deli, a sprawling indoor/outdoor pub not far from home base with the food and beer list worthy of our crowd. This was perhaps our biggest gathering of all, though as usual I was not sober enough to track something as difficult as a head count, but between the official event and many hours along the 23rd street cobbles it was quite a crew. I can’t possibly name them all, but Crashdan, Jimbo, Sui Juris, Drew, Jens, Megabeth, JSallee and Ant1 were at PdC House, with appearances from many, many PdC regulars: Elvisgoat, Majope, Lyne, Hapagal, (Joy), French Kheldar, ... the failure of my memory is a recurring theme in this post.

Racing Highlight: I’ll default to the last race, the Elite Men, with peak crowd energy and the big moves happening on 23rd Street, in view from where we stood.

Ant1’s Handups

Non-Racing Highlight: Antoine’s beer handups were a microcosm of the weekend, just easy, awesome fun. Also Jimbo accosted Eddy Merckx on our way back from the pub party and Eddy... let’s just say he has mastered the art at spotting and quickly eluding drunken admirers.

Links:

Boonen’s last rodeo

2017 Ronde van Vlaanderen

Background: Seven years wiser, we returned to Flanders for a second week of watching and riding. The course had changed to its current iteration, and the internet had brought all the nuances of the Ronse-Kluisbergen-Oudenaarde triangle into our homes. I had been riding my trainer to a video circuit in there, picking up the Koppenberg, Oude Kruisberg, Oude Kwaremont and Paterberg. 2010 was exploration; 2017 was confirmation.

The Gathering(s): I don’t remember declaring any formal thing. Jens rented a spectacular place in Ronse with lots of outdoor space, a giant (working!) hot tub, a walk-in fridge stocked to the gills with beer, all in the heart of the Flemish Ardennes. The party didn’t need any declaring. Drew, Jimbo, Sui Juris, Megabeth and Jens were the regulars, welcoming WillJ, Broerie, Pigeons, Susie H., and my/Drew’s high school friend Paul to the perpetual hot tub.

Racing Highlight: This was another unforgettable Flanders, with the tension of Phiippe Gilbert’s way-too-early attack building steadily from his first Paterberg pass to his last, aided by a huge screen showing the various developments. Gilbert never had much of a gap, which made for 90 minutes or so of nailbiting fun.

Ypres

Non-Racing Highlight: The riding. Which one... it’s so hard to choose. the options were Broerie’s Secret Ardennes Circuit, Will’s curated West Flanders History Tour, and the Paris-Roubaix sportive. I’ll go with the middle one. Injured Drew was able to trail by car what was our version of Gent-Wevelgem’s history tour that they have pivoted to recently. It was more than a bike ride.

Links:

Jens Kicks It Off

Flanders Day!

After Flanders Notes

The Magic of Flanders by Bike

Vos chasing Brand

2022 Fayetteville CX Worlds

Background: Our cup ranneth over. For some reason, without many American athletes, we got another round of ‘Cross worlds, brought to Fayetteville, Arkansas by the Walton family of Walmart fame. They have lavished some of their wealth on cycling causes, and who am I to complain?

The Gathering(s): With kids in the fold, this was more of a family affair. The hanging was by the course.

Racing Highlight: Hard to pick one. The general theme was that the venue, a pretty dreamy network of trails, had a lot of vertical, essentially a big hill that the race course went up and down various ways. But a warm, dry spell made for fast, tight racing.

Non-Racing Highlight: Just a lot of good friend time. Fayetteville is probably fun if you know it, but we didn’t.

Links: Just the race recap.

*****

Please, jump in here with additional details and tales of your own meet-ups with fellow community members. And of course, the Cafe may be stopping but the gatherings will go on! Please stay in touch y’all!