On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

After predicting we'd see the only SRAM-using team in the World Tour, AG2R, on SRAM 1×11, I started to have my doubts as the days ticked by approaching tomorrow's Paris-Roubaix and I saw nothing. Well, I finally saw this photo from VeloNews of AG2R's star rider, Johann Vansummeren . Nobody seems to remember this guy won the race in 2011. Anyway, while I don't see his chainring, I clearly see shifting paddles on both brake levers. So it seems AG2R is going for a "little" ring, typically a 44, which they won't really use. My picks for tomorrow remain: Bradley Wiggins: He's taken a very analytic approach to preparation, including extended time riding at the front in the races leading up to Paris Roubaix to build form. His approach has been extremely successful in the past, as he's accomplished pretty much everything so far he's sought to accomplish. He needs to arrive in the velodrome solo and that requires some team support but he has Ga...

Results for Paris-Roubaix, which was yesterday, are available on CyclingNews . I was generally occupied getting to the Woodside Ramble for my 50 km race, so missed it, catching only the final results before my race began. My hot pick Taylor Phinney flatted out of contention on Carrefour de l’Arbre with 15 km remaining, so so much for prognostications. But I find it interesting to compare some team and nation stats that aren't reported by the organizers. For each, team and nation, I calculate the number of starters (8 for teams), finishers, points, and time, using a Perl script to parse the CyclingNews results, which are the most parseable on the web. For points, I use the placing (reported by CyclingNews) of each team's top 3 placers, and sum. For time, I take the sum of the times of the top 3 finishers relative to that of the winner, Niki Terpstra . Some interesting results: while United Healthcare finished last in both points and time, they were tied for first with mo...

Still suffering the after-effects of oral surgery, and mourning the loss of my missing tooth, I took solace in watching a pirate feed of the Eurosport coverage of 99.7 of the final 100 km of Milan-San Remo. Unfortunately I lost the feed during the final 300 meters... So why don't I pay for cycling.tv? Because I keep telling myself I'm not going to watch these races any more. Except for this one. Special circumstances. That's it... The result : my man Cavendish didn't win Milan San Remo after all, his sprint tempered by the freezing rain, and once again I sold the remarkable Fabian Cancellara short as he finished an amazing second in a medium-group sprint. Katuscha's Alexander Kristoff took advantage of the work of his teammate, Luca Paolini, to win the sprint. Both of them pack some beef on their frames, something which likely worked to their benefits in staving off hypothermia. Cancellara's 2nd place has continued an amazing streak of podium finishes fo...

This year Cervelo overhauled its road bike geometry, merging the previous R and RS series into a single unified R. I plot head tube angle versus reach for 2010 and 2011 series: the 2011 R series goes from R-like at small sizes up to RS-like in large sizes. On Sunday, Garmin-Cervelo's Johan Van Summeren produced an epic win at Paris-Roubaix riding his modified "R3". Johan's a tall guy: reportedly 2 meters in height, and rides the largest-size Cervelo. From the plot you can see this bike has a 22.5 cm head tube, 2 cm longer than the comparable bike from last year. And you can see every cm of this length in photos of Johan's bike, borrowed from VeloNews: Impressive. Johan is at the limit of the frame's geometry with a slammed -17 degree stem (of course he could have used a retrograde stem to get even lower, but this is generally considered undesirable). This seems to support Cervelo's geometry. But it got me thinking: is this the longest hea...

Normally I don't repost articles here, but I ran across this cutting news on one of my favorite race news sites, VeloCyclingNews.com (sometimes it's down, so be sure to check back later). Brugge, Belgium: Jonathan Vaughters announced today that his Slipstream-Cervelo team was going against its sponsorship and will race Sunday's Tour of Flanders on vintage Alex Singer "constructeur" bicycles. "I came across a copy of Bicycle Quarterly and almost immediately realized this is what would give us that critical advantage on the bergs of Flanders", Vaughters said during a brief press conference. "All these years riders have struggled to overcome the cruelties of these steep, cobbled climbs, and until now it never occurred to us that maybe, just maybe the cobbles didn't need to be so cruel. It turns out for all the research and development done by us and our sponsors, the answer was worked out more than a half-century ago. If only we'd looke...