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Spanish rider Joseba Beloki is one of those types of riders who never turns down a request for an autograph and always has a smile on his face. Despite three consecutive Tour de France podiums, however, he’s not regarded as a feared rider. With the absence of Jan Ullrich last year, Beloki bounced to second on the Tour podium. Still, it’s one very far step to knock off defending champion Lance Armstrong. In an interview with MARCA, a Spanish sports daily, Beloki admits he has to ride more aggressively if he hopes to seriously challenge Armstrong. “I think I need to change my attitude about

Can a local, small town, restrict bicycle use and mandate that bikes notuse a public road? A sidewalk is available. This is in a suburb of Houston, Texas.Thank for your time.DaveDear Dave;You raise one of the most frequently asked questions in cycling. Unfortunately, the answer varies widely from state to state, and many of the foundation cases in this subject are over a century old! Let's start with the general law that applies to your query and work our way to your specific situation. While the courts have long recognized a Constitutional right to travel, they have not recognized a

Training camp in Tuscany… there are worse fates. Members of the Navigators team trickled in from airports all over northern Italy last week. They found their way over golden hillsides, through vineyards and olive trees, to a tiny town called Castagneto Carducci, which – depending on what map you use – may or may not exist. They’re packed into the only hotel in a five-kilometer radius, six-foot-long bodies draped over micro-thin “twin” beds. Hotel Zi’Martino houses a multitude of professional and amateur European cycling teams for winter and early spring training camps. In fact, the

Just my luck. Take off on a road-race assignment halfway around the world just when half the pro mountain bike teams on the planet decide they’ve gotten their stuff together and are ready to announce their plans for 2003. So if you’ve really been paying attention you probably know a lot of this already; if not here goes. KONAFabien Barel didn’t do himself any favors when he missed his start time at last year’s world championships and was DQ’d from the downhill. But fortunately for the Frenchman, Kona has seen fit to take a chance on him. Barel’s joined by Kona holdovers Geoff Kabush, Peter

Beloki wants to change this year's Tour podium

Navigators in Tuscany

Wedge: A grip on reality

Barel: New contract. New watch?

Leuchs: Maxxis gets a cross-country headliner

Endurance athletes who regularly take vitamin and mineral supplements are likely familiar with the United States Pharmacopeia and have seen their "USP" mark on the label of purchased products. This not-for-profit, non-government organization has established state-of-the art standards to ensure quality products. In 2000, USP created the Dietary Supplement Verification Program (DSVP) to ensure that supplement contains the declared ingredients in the declared quantities. Manufacturers who participate in this program agree to a number of guidelines including random off-the-shelf testing of

Marco Pantani admits his best days could be behind him, in an interview in the French sports daily L’Equipe published Tuesday. Pantani, who won both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France in 1998, said he’s hoping for a solid, but not spectacular 2003 season. “I will probably never be the great Pantani again,” the 33-year-old Italian said. “But it’s irrelevant now. I’m looking to establish a new relationship with my job, to find new serenity.” Pantani was on top of the cycling world when he was kicked out of the 1999 Giro while leading the race when tests revealed a high hematocrit level.

Rabobank’s Bram Degroot won the 112km opening stage of the 30th Tour of the Mediterranean on Wednesday. The Dutch rider bested 2002 World Cup champion Paolo Bettini in a sprint to the finish in Arma di Taggia along Italy’s Mediterranean coast. The 150 riders, who left the start in Taggia maintained a moderate pace until the day’s first major challenge, the col du San Bortolomeo, a category 1 climb at that peaked out at the 69-kilometer mark. Bettini tried his luck with a solo attack, but was reeled back in as Phonak’s Miguel Martinez drove a strong chase. With 20 kilometers remaining, a

Wow, it's been a whirlwind of activity around here. I won't bore you with the down-and-dirty details of trying to push our 2003 Buyer's Guide out the door (I'm beginning to think of it as one of those drunk party guests that refuses to leave your house at 3:30 a.m. when everyone else has split). Instead let's stick to the part where I tell you how I just got back in from a weekend of riding with the Manitou boys down in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. Perfect timing to sneak away from the near zero cold snap that had Boulder firmly in its grasp. Unlike most manufacturers, Manitou chooses to show

Pantani: setting modest goals for '03

Degroot

Bettini

The escapees

Manitou's new technology must be ridden hard to be fully appreciated

Lennard gets dwarfed by Coach Cartwright

I have a question regarding race radios. We have an elite/pro Canadian team that we are just starting up. I have been doing a bunch of research on which race radios are the best for use for our team. I find it strange how little information I can find on this topic. We have tested a few different options and we seem to be coming up short in our quest for a good solution. We have tried the Motorola FRS type radios - they only work when our riders are very close together. If we have one guy up the road they fail miserably. We then tried more robust, higher power radios, which had a better range

Mario Cipollini said he wasn't ready to race for the upcoming Tour deMediterranean (see preview below), so that was enough for the organizers to kick his Domina Vacanze team out of the race. Cipollini said during a press conference Saturday at the team presentation in Egypt he simply wasn't in form to commit to a stage-race so early in the season. Instead, the world champion will make his season debut at Luis Puig (Feb. 23 in Spain). When race organizers heard the word, they decided not to allow his Italian team to the start line. "Cipollini waited at the last minute to tell me

Technical Q&A with Lennard Zinn

Technical Q&A with Lennard Zinn

Technical Q&A with Lennard Zinn

SHARM EL SHEIHK, Egypt -- Mario Cipollini never does anything half-bore. So it was no surprise when his new team - Domina Vacanze - decided to unveil its new sponsorship deal with the world champion, it would be done with typical Italian style and flash. Cipollini and the boys enjoyed a weekend in the warm Egyptian sun, pressing the flesh so to speak with the locals and sponsors and going on two light training rides in the Sinai Peninsula. VeloNews' European correspondent Andrew Hood sat down with a handful of other English-speaking journalists for an audience with the Lion King on

Euro (Egypt) file - Cipollini never does anything half-bore

A view for a (Lion) King on Egypt's Red Sea.

Things got a little crazy at the end of a wild weekend in Egypt with Super Mario

Cipo getting down during the team presentation in Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt

Chances of anything significant happening on the last day of the 2003 Tour de Langkawi were slim when the day started. But when race officials neutralized the race two laps into the 12-lap criterium because of threatening skies, Tom Danielson and his Saturn team could sit back and coast, assured that the 24-year-old from Durango, Colorado was going home with a yellow jersey in his suitcase.

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt - What do you get when you combine sun, sand and sea with a strong dose of Mario Cipollini? One bizarre and very Italian -- with a faux Arab touch - team presentation. Domina Vacanze - an Italian time-share and resort company -- is the new title sponsor for Cipollini's team. This weekend, company president Ernesto Preatoni filled a Boeing 737 with the world champion, seven other teammates, about 40 journalists and a gaggle of VIPs, hanger's-on and friends and flew them down to the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula to formally introduce the team's one-year

The final podium.

Brown and Bongiorno battle in the sprint...

...before having a few words afterwords.

Danielson was quick to credit the work of his teammates.

Saturn started at the front, but didn't have to stay there long.

Cipollini looking like a rock star

Mario Scirea, left, Giovanni Lombardi, center, and Cipollini, meet the locals

One of the girls 'Dances like an Egyptian'

How good could Tom Danielson be? Consider this. In the moments after finishing just an eyelash behind stage winner Hernan Dario Munoz on stage 9 of the 2003 Tour de Langkawi, the 24-year-old seemed more upset by the fact that he’d lost the stage than exultant that he’d just all but locked up the overall title in the fourth richest stage race in the world.

Danielson and Munoz battled all the way to the finish.

Danileson shows the strain of the day.

Green (left) lost touch with less than 3km to go.

Horner was on bottle duty all day.

Saturday's podium.

Stage 10 route

Stage 10 profile

Someday someone will actually pull it off here in Malaysia. Break away from the field early in the race, hammer hard for a few hours, and catch the peloton napping just long enough to grab a solo victory. That day, however, was not today. Despite a Herculean effort from the increasingly famous Koji Fukushima, the eighth stage of the 2003 Tour de Langkawi ended with another mad-dash sprint at the end. And like he did two days before, Australian Stuart O’Grady came away the winner.

I’m stoked.After a weekend of watching the Winter X Games, I’m stoked to learn that, "Dude, great run. Are you stoked?" is apparently a journalistically acceptable interview question. All I can say is, "I’m stoked."I’m just glad the X Games weren’t around when we were kids. Who among us would have survived a childhood of trying to copy those moves? I don’t know how the kids do it. It was bad enough trying to ride no-hands and running into the trunk of a parked car. How can you not watch the Winter X Games, though? Fourteen-year-old kids hucking themselves through the air, all the while

International cycling chief Hein Verbruggen has branded the world sports drug agency as "incredibly weak" and accused it of discrimination in its fight against doping in North America. In a confidential letter addressed to World Anti-Doping Agency president Dick Pound and obtained by The Australian, Verbruggen calls on WADA to lobby the U.S. government and demand it make all of its professional sports fall in line with WADA's doping laws. Verbruggen believes WADA is being soft on pushing the US government to bring its professional ice hockey, tennis and basketball players into line with

"I firmly believe that cyclo-cross is a sport that has a hard core of fans in eight Western European countries. But therefore we must not want to make it a worldwide spectacle." – Hein Verbruggen, the UCI’s Luddite-in-chief, quoted on www.cyclingnews.com I couldn’t agree more. We should leave the worldwide-spectacle thing to Hein, who has been making one of himself for years, with his perverse longing for scratchy wool garments, five-speed friction shifting and shiny steel rims, and keep cyclo-cross where it belongs - in the hands of the deluded little people with their yellow slickers,

Fukushima (center bottom) heads up the day's last climb.

O'Grady got his second TdL win.

Fukushima's face tells the story.

Danielson with team manager Andrzej Bek.

The Telekom Malaysia building.

This long-tailed macaque was one of many seen along Friday's route.

The stage 9 route

The stage 9 profile

Friday’s foaming rant: Our ’cross to bear

Saturn’s plan all along, if it worked, was to have Tom Danielson sporting the yellow jersey come the final day of the 2003 Tour de Langkawi. It just wasn’t supposed to happen this early.

A selection of sights from the middle days of the Tour de Langkawi.

Jan Ullrich seems to be taking baby steps in his long road back to the elite levels of racing. Ullrich hasn't raced since last year's Tour of Qatar but won't be able to race until March 23, when his racing ban is lifted from his positive for amphetamines last summer. Ullrich has been training with Rudy Pevenage and Tobias Steinhauser in Tuscany, riding up to four to five hours per day. So far, the German wires report, there's no major pain in his knees, the Achilles heel that brought Ullrich all his problems last year. According to reports, he's not riding very hard,

Danielson is now in yellow.

Brown was untouchable at the finish.

The break that broke at the end.

O'Neill gets cleaned up.

The stage 8 route.

The stage 8 profile.

The bike room at the Garden Hotel in Kuantan.

A small fruit market along the stage 7 route.

A member of the ever-present police force keeps an eye on things.

Kicked out a day earlier for towing on a team car, iTeamNova’s Ronny Assez checks out the South China Sea during a training ride.

Hawker stall with squid for sale.

South Africa’s team car has seen better days.

The unofficial race mascot.

Figuring out the day’s route.

Stuart O’Grady just shrugged his shoulders when asked the last time he’d won a bunch sprint like the one that concluded stage 6 of the 2003 Tour de Langkawi. “I don’t know,” he said after a brief pause. “It’s been a while.” Indeed, until Wednesday, it had been nearly three years since the Credit Agricole rider had broken through with a win like the one he grabbed at the end of the 136.3km run from Marang to Cukai on another scorcher of a day in Malaysia. Before that you had to go all the way back to the third stage of the Midi-Libre in May of 2000.

Several minutes have passed since the conclusion of the second stage of the 2003 Tour de Langkawi, but Stuart O’Grady’s motor is still redlined. Moments ago two ugly crashes in the last kilometer of the stage left at least a dozen riders bumped, bruised or worse. Among them are several of O’Grady’s Credit Agricole teammates. Normally O’Grady isn’t one for drama, but the cause of all this carnage has been placed on one of his competitors, a young ambitious Argentinean who rides for the Italian Ceremiche-Panaria team. “It was the most ridiculous sprinting I’ve ever seen,” O’Grady recalls.

I am training for my first Ironman (Lake Placid 2003) and am concerned about keeping my iron levels high enough to avoid anemia-which I suffered from this fall, but which is now back to normal. I have also been told that I many not be getting enough protein to sufficiently rebuild and recover after workouts. How much iron and protein do women endurance athletes typically need? TP Dear TP - Since you have already had anemia, it is important that you pay close attention to your iron intake and have your blood work monitored fairly regularly. Iron deficiency is the most common nutrient