Jul 23 |
Who Really Won The Tour de France?Now That Was A Tour de Force After last year’s golden daze of cycling mayhem, a first British TdF winner followed immediately by a hugely successful cycling Olympics, it was always going to be hard to get a better Tour. However, this Tour has exceeded all expectations. Finally visiting every single French Department (check), outstanding drama from the word go (check), brief punch through the Pyrenees (check), cross winds and echelons (check) and a kick ass finale up some really big alps (double and sometimes treble check). And finally the kind of spectacle that only the French can provide going down the Champs-Élysées and round the Arc de Triomphe. This Tour had everything. So really it was the Tour that came out on top. The rest are merely basking in its shadow. |
Jul 15 |
Who’s Really Winning The Tour de France (part deux)Back On The Offensive Friday looks like being the new ‘attack day’ on this tour We saw the very briefest of phoney wars being overtaken by full on action as first Omega Pharma Quickstep, then Saxo Tinkoff blew the peloton apart on the way to Saint-Amand-Montrond. Last week it was Cannondale shredding the peloton over some mini-mountains and effectively winning the Green jersey for Sagan, this week it was Mark Cavendish’s team doing everything to eliminate the sprinting competition as they took advantage of some serious cross-winds and the whole show went echelon crazy. Saxo-Tinkoff then blew the remnants of the peloton apart as they sought to claw back some of Chris Froome’s time advantage over Contador, before Cavendish put the icing on the cake and outsprinted Sagan to take the stage. |
Oct 17 |
Nice Cycle RideWent on a nice little bike ride from my gym. I’m trying out a good little cycle GPS app called Cyclemeter, which does everything a basic cycle computer does – speed, duration, pace, distance – but not the highly complex stuff like cadence and presents it all in a much more intuitive way than even high end bike computers. You’ll need a contraption to attach the iPhone to your bike, but there’s a small company in the States, Bicio, that produces a great mounting system. Admittedly it’s for the 3G/3GS version, but it does for the iPhone 4 just as nicely. It’s another example of the iPhone and their developer partners like Abvio exterminating the opposition by making things simple and well designed. It does everything a £50 – £150 bike computer does, but it’s in colour, in real time and generates a pile of easy to understand, easy to use and share online statistical information, none of which my former bike computers could be arsed with. All for a total cost of approximately £25 (iPhone not included obviously). In the same way as I’m worried about Nokia’s future as the World’s premier mobile phone manufacturers, I’d be very worried for specialist sports computer manufacturers like Polar and Cateye, who can look forward to losing a large chunk of their market to smartphones like the iPhone. |