Check out this fixed gear
 

This is pretty sweet.

Stuart O'Grady's Fixed Prolog Bike

it talks a bit much for my tastes.

Nice bars.

"The front brake is a super-light Zero Gravity, tucked behind the fork for better aerodynamics. "

that's sweet!

where is the 'one effing gear' sticker?

He finished 6th 0:02 off the pace. Of course it was only something like 1.2 km.

I just get sick when I see all this money and efort on a bike that will, according to the article, "only be ridden once". Like I was listening to a story on NPR about this new Bontrager wheelset that some teams are going to use for climbing stages. They're so light that after one use they're usually damaged beyond repair and are thrown away.
I know its all about speed and crap, but its so damn wasteful.

tim

Amen

Because if your team leader wins the stage because of these wheels then the advertising benefits far outweigh the costs.

Of course, if you come in sixth, when you're expected to win...well, there's disappointment all around.

uh.. i have a strange feeling they arent going to throw this bike away just cause its raced once.. maybe itll be someones training ride.. or coffee getter.. but i have a feeling its not disposable

it needs electric tape!

looks like a 3rd grader went crazy with the construction paper, scissors, and a glue stick.

That's just what I was thinking. A ghetto powder coat and a few drunken crashes and that thing would be sweet.

That's why I like self-supported races or otherwise limiting the amount of support a rider can receive in a race.

I'd like to see that clacssic grinding athletic endurance put back into stage racing. Sure, it's still hard, but there's something that's very different when your support car has all the supplies you need and should there be any untoward mechanical, they'll swap you a complete bike and fix up whatever just happened.

The man vs. nature aspect is dulled.

I want a disc wheel for my work bike. They're so expensive!

wait... is that a rear brake i see?

Rear brakes are the new black.

So if a more talented racer crashes, but because he's poorer and don't have a support car, he drops out, that' 'man vs. nature' I think when every racer has a back up, it levels the playing field, no advantage over another racer except talent and hardwork.

Thats exactly why I hate it. Cycling is no longer about producing the best rider, its about generating the most advertising income.
Capitalism destroys the true heart of everything it touches.

tim

what do you suppose the gearing on that thing is? it looked pretty burly, for an otherwise froofy ride.

No, no support vehicles.

In fact, it sounds like you're arguing against your own point. Allowing support teams doesn't level the playing field one bit. The poorer racer or team still won't be able to compete with the even more massive resources the richest teams can load into their support vehicles.

A self supported race is one in which the rider must account for everything. It's not enough to simply be a strong racer or even a clever racer. They must be able to plan for the whole environment over the entire span of the race.

sorry if someone posted this before on one of the many giro threads that i didn't read, but ... 54x13? jumping jesus.

you know, with all the attention he's getting the sponsors must be in their own sort of capitalist heaven.

so if track racing really is the nascar of the biking world, even though this bike isn't for track racing, imagine the day when everyone's track bike is all stickered up like that ala nascar. i'm talking about at your local velodrome. can you imagine? yikes.

val.

I feel like my bike is already a rolling billboard and have lost count of how many times the manufacturers name is on it. I'm quite forgiving though because of the way it rides;)

However the person with more money will still have a better chance of doing good than the guy who has $1 in his pocket... Just different ways to spend the same money towards the same goal.

Tour De France Legend from the early years.

In such conditions legends quickly sprang to life. One concerns perhaps the unluckiest of all Tour riders, Eugene Christophe. He was challenging for the lead in the Pyrenees when his fork broke. In those days Desgrange saw the race as a test of man and machine. There were no following cars with extra bikes as there are today. So poor Christophe had to walk 14 km down a mountain to the little village of Sainte Marie-de-Campan where he went to the village blacksmith and beat out a makeshift repair. So strict were the rules that he was fined for having a boy pump the bellows! Under the circumstances his final seventh place at the Paris finish was something of a miracle. (Some idea of the esteem France holds for the Tour can be gained by visiting Ste. Marie-de-Campan. The little stone blacksmith shop where Christophe hammered his fork back into one piece is today a national historic site.)