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Think you’ve got it tough at work? Well, how would you like to head into September just about every year not knowing for sure whether you’re going to have a job next year? Yes, the job of professional cyclist seems like a dream occupation to most racers, and to a large extent it is. But when you can pretty much be at the pinnacle of your sport in the U.S. and still be uncertain about your job status, well, that’s rough. It’s also the reality for a couple of recently crowned U.S. champions. Kevin Monahan may have repeated as USPRO criterium champion in Downers Grove, Illinois, but at least

It was a rough-and-tumble evening of racing at the 2003 USCF National Track Cycling Championships at the Lehigh Valley Velodrome in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania, as T-Mobile’s Chris Witty took the win in the women’s 500 and Jonas Carney took the win in what at times was a heated points race. That points race proved to be dramatic… almost as dramatic as the fight it triggered afterward. Early on, Prime Alliance, Ofoto-Lombardi, T.E.A.M. Fuji, and Navigators spread the points across the board with each trying to make a move that would stick – none of which was successful. Prime Alliance’s

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

EuroBike: Trade show season kicks off in Friedrichshafen

Jonas Carney takes the points win

Nothstein was held to just 10 points

Massie

Levi Leipheimer will return to the Vuelta a España next month for the first time since his breakthrough performance in 2001, when he came out of nowhere to finish third overall. Going into the Vuelta that year, Leipheimer had never ridden a three-week grand tour, but became the first American to finish on the Vuelta podium with consistent strength in the mountains and the time trials. Now he returns to Spain’s grand tour, but in very different circumstances. Following his unfortunate crash in the first stage of the 2003 Tour deFrance (see "Interview: Leipheimer talks about his oh-so-short

Dear Bob;Is it true that in Illinois, an injured cyclist cannot sue anyone fordamages? Isn’t that just a back door way of banning bicycling?FLIllinoisDear FL;No, it is not true—mostly. The case you are referring to is Boubv. Township of Wayne, from 1998. Jon Boub was riding his bike on aquiet rural road in Illinois. He started across a one-lane covered bridge.The bridge was originally built with two parallel sets of planks for thewheels of carriages to run on. Under these planks were the floor joistsof the bridge, running perpendicular to the roadway. Over the years, thegap between these

There’s nothing that says what happened at the European championships will have any bearing on next week’s world championships. But there were certainly a few things that jumped out from the week’s worth of racing in Graz, Austria. For starters there was Gunn-Rita Dahle, who won yet another big race, and is on her way to putting together the greatest single season in women’s cross-country racing history. Right now that honor goes to Juli Furtado who in 1993 ran the table in the NORBA series and won nine of 10 World Cups. But one thing Furtado didn’t win was the world championship (Paola

After much deliberation, American Alison Dunlap has decided to take a pass on next week’s world mountain-bike championships in Switzerland, not wanting to risk further injury to the shoulder she separated in a crash at NORBA No. 2 in mid-June. “Technically it’s healed, but it’s only been nine weeks,” Dunlap explained. “It’s still slow and tentative. The big fear is crashing and re-injuring it. If that happened and I was out for the winter, then there go the Olympics.” Dunlap admitted that she struggled with the decision, and as late as Wednesday morning was still thinking about making the

Estonian Jaan Kirsipuu (Ag2r) won the 178km third stage of the 17th Tour de Poitou-Charentes in a sprint finish Thursday. Ukraine Yuri Mitlushenko (Landbouwkrediet) remains the overall leader. Cipo' still undecided on VueltaWorld champion Mario Cipollini’s disappearing act will be decided by this weekend when he’s expected to meet with Domina Vacanze patron Ernesto Preatoni, according to reports in the Italian press. Cipollini – who hasn’t raced since crashing out of the Giro d’Italia after setting a new stage-win record -- said he will decide whether he’ll start September’s Vuelta a

The second night of the 2003 USCF National Track Cycling Championships at the Lehigh Valley Velodrome in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania played out under beautiful skies with low humidity and moderate temperatures. The fair weather proved to be a big help as times in both the men’s kilometer and team pursuit were quicker than in 2002. Team pursuit qualifiersIn the team pursuit final, the Jelly Belly/Carlsbad Clothing team featuring Tyler Farrar, Mariano Friedick, Curtis Gunn, and individual pursuit champion Adham Sbeih proved to be unbeatable after qualifying first this morning. The squad

Adding to the evidence that new technology isn’t always a great leap forward, one of the new Segway human transporters struggled its way to the top of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, but well off the pace of the machine it may eventually seek to replace. It took six sets of batteries and three drivers, but the Segway eventually made it to the top of New England's tallest peak. The scooter climbed Mount Washington's auto road – site of the annual bicycle race -- in about two and a half hours Wednesday, well off of Tom Danielson’s 49:24. The standup scooter, invented by Manchester New

Bobby Lea, upset winner in the kilo.

Nothstein in the kilo'

Jonas Carney in the kilo.

Jelly Belly team pursuit in qualifying.

Jelly Belly sets the standard

Lindenmuth in the morning rounds

Jenny Reed wins 3-4 final.

Chris Witty surprises Tanya Lindenmuth.

Okay, Tom Danielson he ain't

So after signing a two-year contract, Tom Danielson is headed to Italy to with Fassa Bortolo, alongside 2002 Vuelta winner Aitor Gonzalez and this year's top grand tour sprinter, Alessandro Petacchi. In less than 18 months, the friendly 24-year-old from East Lyme, Connecticut, has grown from Fort Lewis college student/struggling NORBA pack fodder to emerging Euro’ pro. Along the way he’s won some big races — the Tour de Langkawi being the biggest — and learned what he could about European road racing from former Euro pros like Henk Vogels, Chris Horner, Jonathan Vaughters and Nathan

World pursuit champion Bradley Wiggins has announced plans to move from fdjeux.com to Crédit Agricole for 2004. Wiggins, who recently won the world pursuit title in Stuttgart, is following in the tracks of another great British pursuiter in signing up with a team managed by Roger Legeay. Legeay, who was manager of British cycling star and 1992 Olympic Gold medalist Chris Boardman’s team throughout his professional career, said Wiggins showed great potential in his win at world’s as well as his performance on the road this season. The fact that Boardman had been advising Bradley over the

French rider Robert Sassone won Wednesday's 179km second stage of theTour du Poitou-Charentes (UCI 2.3) in France, finishing ahead of Ukrainerider Bogdan Bondariev (CCC-Polsat). Sassone and Bondariev were part of a group of 11 attacking riders inthe stage. Sebastian Chavanel (Boulangere) started the attack, but theleft attacked the group with about 15km to go. They came in just over 1minute ahead of the remainders of the break. Fellow Ukraine Yuri Mitlushenko (Landbouwkrediet), winner of Tuesday'sopening stage, retained the overall lead after finishing safely in themain bunch.The race

Dear Monique:Are cyclists at risk for excess insulin production and developmentof diabetes due to ingestion of large amounts of sugar? We are using sportsdrinks, gels, and energy bars during training, and I know that I couldn’ttrain without them.ThanksRC To address the concern described above, I asked Bob Murray, PhD, anddirector of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute to answer a few questionsregarding sports drinks.Q - Many endurance athletes consume products containing sucrose,and other related sugars during exercise. How are these sugars utilizedduring exercise and why are they so

Keirin and pursuit highlighted the action on the opening day of the 2003 USCF National Track Cycling Championships in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday. Marty Nothstein showed that he hadn’t lost too much of his track fitness when he rode away with the U.S. keirin title, one of two events the Navigators man hopes to take on in the 2004 Athens Olympics. Tuesday’s opening events began with a strong pursuit ride by Saturn’s Sarah Uhl. Uhl, in her first individual pursuit competition, took on former national pursuit champion Erin Mirabella (Frisco Cycling Club) in the final for first

I strongly believe in the use of torque wrenches for properly and safelyassembling bicycles. However, I have become somewhat gun-shy about it dueto unexpected negative consequences of using them that have been relayedto me.Two of these unexpected consequences came from misinterpretation andmisprinting of torque information I wrote in my maintenance books. Onecase, which we went over here on this site, concerned a reader who misunderstooda torque number from the torque table in the first edition of my mountainbike maintenance book. He interpreted the torque setting for a single

Tough enough - Danielson at Sea Otter

Mayo may stay

Nothstein checks the competition

Uhl tops in pursuit

Sarah Hammer

Adam Sbeih

Bobby Lea

Lindenmuth

Girona—With a little extra time on my hands these days I thought I would take the opportunity to fill you in on what’s going on here. First off, I was off the bike for a few days after my crash at the Tour of Holland. I went down hard last Wednesday during the finishing circuits of stage 2. Ironically, we were on the straightest part of the course when the accident happened. A couple guys went down directly in front of me. And being that we were in a crowded field of riders going at a pretty good clip, there was nowhere to go but straight into them. I have no idea what happened really, and

Who turned off the heater? The heat wave is over, finally. Temperatures reached 104 degrees in places. Now it is back to normal summer weather in Belgium. What does that mean? Thermal long sleeve jerseys, leg warmers, earbands, and wind vests. At least things are back to normal. But now you can see how so many elderly people died of the heat with no air conditioning and normal temperatures in the 60s. I think the Belgians are happy to return to the pre-race heat cream on the legs. At least this summer we had a summer, unlike last year when it rained every day for two months. Ah, but late

Levi Leipheimer will be starting next month’s Vuelta a España, but he was never planning on it. The 29-year-old designed his entire season at arriving at the 2003 Tour de France in top form with eyes of making a run for the top 5 overall. But Leipheimer’s season was turned upside down when he went crashing down in the finish-line pile-up coming into Meaux in the Tour’s first road stage. The highly-criticized finish – with a sharp downhill funneling into a narrow twisting run to the finish line – spelled doom for Leipheimer and Rabobank teammate Mark Lotz. CSC’s Tyler Hamilton also crashed,

American climbing phenom Tom Danielson has signed a two-year contract with the Italian Fassa Bortolo squad, the 24-year-old announced Tuesday. “I just signed officially and I am over here with the team right now,” Danielson wrote in a brief email to VeloNews. Danielson made the trip to Italy last week alongside his coach Rick Crawford and legal advisor (and VeloNews columnist) Bob Mionske to undergo discussions with Fassa’s boss Giancarlo Ferretti. Danielson’s remarkable rise — from struggling mountain bike pro at the beginning of 2002 to Mount Washington record holder later that year to

Don't buy this jersey

Maybe Carlos will have a reason to pull out the pacifier at the Vuelta, too.

Dinner Club. Bread bowl chili made with the finest Belgian beer by Cycling Center riders, for Cycling Center riders.

Before the fall: Leipheimer had high hopes for the Tour

Danielson on Mt. Washington

Rabobank's Levi Leipheimer is racing in this week's Tour du Poitou Charentes(UCI 2.3), a five-day stage-race that starts Tuesday in France inwhat will be his final dress rehearsal for the 2003 Vuelta a España.The 29-year-old from Santa Rosa, Calif. crashed out of the first stageof the Tour de France after fracturing a bone in his hip and damaged musclesin his abductors and was forced off the bicycle for two weeks to recover."I had to do 12 days of doing nothing on the couch so the bone couldheal," Leipheimer told VeloNews. "I was starting from zero at theend of July. When you sit around that

1996 USPRO road champion Eddy Gragus (Trek-VW All Stars) won the general classification at the Estes Cycling Challenge, held August21-24 in and around Estes Park, Colorado. In the 3-mile prologue time trial, Gragus beat Ofoto’s Andy Bajadali by a scant eight-tenths of a second, setting up a two-man contest that would carry into the race’s final stage. Gragus took sixth the following day in the hot 84-mile Masonville road race, but was penalized 30-seconds for a centerline violation, putting Bajadali — second at Estes last year to Mercury’s Tom Danielson — in the lead by 19 seconds after

Andy Flickinger (AG2R) celebrated "the most beautiful day" of his cycling career, after sprinting to victory at the Grand Prix Plouay on Sunday. The 24-year-old Grenoble resident took a hard-fought win against Anthony Geslin (Brioches) and Nicolas Jalabert (CSC) at the end of the 198-kilometer race around Plouay. The day started out fast, with the field covering the first lap on a difficult14.4km circuit at nearly 45kph. Early on, a group of 40 riders managed to build a nearly two-minute lead on the field before being reeled in. Flickinger, however, timed his move correctly when he

Britain’s Nicole Cooke sprinted to victory Saturday in the Grand Prix de Plouay, the seventh round of the women’s World Cup. The high pace, nearly 40 km/h, saw to it that there were few attacks until just before midrace, when Jeannie Longo attacked and exploded the group. She was retrieved, however, and 2002 French champion Magali Floc’h took a shot, building a gap of four minutes with four laps to go. She, too, was eventually brought back, and Longo attacked once more, again without success. Then Juliette Vandekerckhove jumped away, and with two laps remaining she held a lead of 20 seconds

Brad McGee (Fdjeux.com) edged two-time world champion Oscar Freire (Rabobank) to claim the sixth and final stage of the 43rd Tour of Holland while U.S. Postal's Viatcheslav Ekimov secured overall victory. McGee, who won the prologue in the 2003 Tour de France and held the yellow jersey for three days, was part of a six-man break that peeled away late in the hilly, difficult conclusion to the five-day, six-stage Dutch tour. Ekimov didn't miss the move in the Limburg region of southern Holland and finished sixth in the sprint to secure the overall title, his first stage-race victory since

Despite crashing in the final corner of the final lap, Team USA's Larssyn Staley captured the gold medal in the women’s 20km points race Wednesday at the 2003 UCI Junior World Track Championships in Moscow. The Beaverton, Oregon, resident, who races for Hot Tubes back home, had lapped the field and accumulated 35 points before the crash – enough to win the rainbow jersey over Lithuanian Agne Bagdonaviciute, who finished with 33 points to claim the silver medal. Laura Telle of Latvia was third with 27 points. Staley was transported to the hospital for X-rays of her back, but was expected to

Second-guessing strategy is half the fun of any spectator sport, and there were a couple of good examples to come out of this past weekend’s USPRO Criterium Championship in Downers Grove, Illinois. Just minutes after the race, in which Kevin Monahan (7UP-Maxxis) beat Saturn’s Chris Horner and Mark McCormack for the race win and the stars-and-stripes jersey, McCormack readily admitted that he might have done things differently if he were presented with the same scenario again. Here’s how it played out. Heading toward the final turn, Horner and McCormack are one-two. McCormack decides to open

Single-day tickets to the 2003 world road cycling championships in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, will go on sale Wednesday, August 27. Tickets will be sold for each day of the October 7-12 event. Upwards of 250,000 spectators are expected to watch 800 athletes from more than 50 different countries competing in 10 different races, according to the Hamilton 2003 World's Organizing Committee. Weekly passes have been on sale since April. Tickets are on sale through Ticketmaster. Spectators can order by phone, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by calling 905-527-7666 (Hamilton); 416-870-8000

Dutch rider Rik Reinerink (BankGiroLoterij) disrupted the sprinters’ party in the 191km fifth stage of the Tour of Holland while wily Russian Viatcheslav Ekimov (USPS) retained the overall lead Friday. Reinerink held out in a long solo breakaway and came through to claim the stage victory some 11 seconds ahead of the main bunch led by sprinter Alessandro Petacchi (Fassa Bortolo), a winner of the Dutch tour’s opening two stages. American Fred Rodriguez (Caldirola) came through 10th. Saturday’s final stage is 213.9km from Sittard-Geleen to Landgraaf in Holland’s hilly Limburg region. U.S.

 “There are no bad dogs, only bad owners” -Barbara WoodhouseDear Bob;I was riding past my neighbor’s home and their dog ran out and knockedme over. My neighbors have made complaints about this dog in the past,but the family sometimes isn’t careful and the dog gets out.Is there any way to recover?Not a chew toyNew YorkDear Not;In the State of New York, the licensing, identification and controlof dogs is contained in Article 7 of the “Agriculture and Markets Law”section of New York Statute. (Please note that these laws were revisedin 2002, so if you look them up, be sure you are using the

Tis’ the season for 2004 product intro's. Our own Lennard Zinn just got back from Specialized’s introduction in Morgan Hill, California, while I caught an early flight Wednesday morning to sunny So. Cal. Wednesday to catch a glimpse of Giant’s 2004 offerings. Located one hour north of Los Angeles, the Newbury Park based Giant USA headquarters is the main base of operations for the second most popular brand sold in the United States (behind Trek). Interesting to note is that Giant not only produces its own bikes and components, but also produces many of its direct competitor’s frames. Only

Russian warrior Viatcheslav Ekimov (U.S. Postal Service) surged to victory and into the overall lead after winning Thursday's 23km time trial in the fourth stage of the 43rd Tour of Holland. Ekimov, the reigning Olympic time trial champion, nipped Postal Service teammate Victor Hugo Peña by eight seconds in the race against the clock. Peña and Ekimov were both part of Postal's victorious team time trial victory in last month's Tour de France. The stage victory is Ekimov's first win since the 2001 season. The 37-year-old Russian walked away from cycling at the end of that season, but quickly

Mountain-bike racing lost two of its greats last weekend in Durango when Mary Grigson and Missy Giove announced their retirements from full-time racing. Giove had already taken a big step back this year, skipping all but one of the World Cups and contesting just three of five NORBA stops. She’ll also be a no show come September’s world championships. Next season the legendary downhiller says she may “show up unannounced at a race or two,” but for the most part she’ll be focusing her energy elsewhere. “I want to promote the sport in some different ways,” Giove told VeloNews. “I’ll still be

Saturn star Nathan O’Neill was set to undergo surgery Thursday afternoon to repair a vertebra cracked after a high-speed, face-first crash suffered at The International on July 31. During a pre-surgery phone call to VeloNews Thursday, the 28-year-old Aussie explained the circumstances that led to the operation, which will involve a titanium screw inserted into his C-2 vertebra, and the removal of the “halo” neck brace he has worn for the past three weeks. “I had an appointment with a surgeon yesterday,” O’Neill explained, “to have another look with an X-ray and CAT scan. As it turns out,

NRS Air

XTC1

Missy

Grigson

MTB News and Notes: Moving on and breaking out

MTB News and Notes: Moving on and breaking out