Cycling News and Opinions
Unfair and Unbalanced
December, 2010

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December 30: Happy New Year. The 1949 Paris-Roubaix victory was awarded jointly to André Mahé and Serse Coppi after a lengthy dispute. I got a link to the strange details of the complicated finish and a discussion open as to who should actually be the winner of the race on our Facebook page. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to join in.

December 17: Before I segue to my hizzy-fit, I'd like to welcome the fine people at SRI Importing to our site. Owners Rob and Mary-Lea are the distributors (and really nice people who love bikes) of Viner frames, which are actually made in Italy. I suggest clicking on their link at the top of the page to see thier site. When I owned Torelli I always wanted to import Viner frames but something always got in the way. I tickled to see these lovely frames getting a chance to find homes in North America.

My Hizzy-fit? Some criminal hit a bike rider and took off. That's bad enough. But the prosecutor thought that because the guy is rich (job description: wealth manager) and helps other people make money, he should get an lenient sentence. The plea-bargain is effectively little or no punishment, considering the crime.

This is odious. It just makes me sick.

To get you warmed (steaming, I going to guess) up before your bike ride, you can read the whole story here.

Patrick O'Grady's foaming rant over the whole sordid mess is a priceless gem of righteous anger

December 7: Those soaring commodity prices the financial news guys have been talking about for the last several months are an ill wind that will blow cyclists no good.

Rubber prices have gone through the roof and that means your tires and tubes are going to cost more in 2011. Bike Europe wrote that bicycle tire makers will be raising their prices ten to fifteen percent. Vittoria has already sent out price increases to its OEM (factories that uses their tires to build bikes) accounts. Other makers have said they will have to raise their prices as well.

Floods in Thailand, where most rubber comes from and the concurrent dry season in Malaysia has exacerbated the problem.

Yet, it's not all bad news for American bikies, at least. All the hysteria that the Federal Reserve was going to unleash hyperinflation with its second round of "quantitative easing" might have been a bit premature. The foreign exchange markets haven't crushed the Dollar as was predicted, in fact it's doing rather well, especially against the Euro. Against the currencies of America's biggest trading partners, the Dollar has gained more than five percent. The Euro was $1.34 this morning (it had been at $1.30 last week), well down from its ugly highs of months past.

That new bike or CycleItalia vacation is starting to look pretty good, after all.

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