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FROM THE SUMMIT
It has been a couple of months since I have addressed you in this forum. Thank you to Wynn Kageyama for filling in for me last month. Summer is in full swing and club meetings are on summer vacation. We will meet again it he first week of August. The pizza rides are going well, and are being led this month by Dan Amaral. Dan will be hosting the Chipotle rides this month. We will be meeting at three different Chipotle restaurants this month and heading out from there. Thanks to Dan for mixing things up and thank you to Chipotle for hosting us. The big news this month is, of course, Lance Armstrong's return to the Tour de France. Following the disbanding of Team Discovery, Lance will be riding for Team Astana along side Tour veterans including: Levi Leipheimer, Chris Horner, Alberto Contador, Andreas Kloden, Yaroslav Popovych, and Jose Luis Rubiera. Lance has once again rejoined the ranks of professional cycling to, "raise awareness of the global cancer burden". With the start of the Tour less than a way, I can hardly wait to see how it plays out. If Lance is planning to win, he still has some fierce competition. With names like Cadel Evans, Carlos Sastre, Oscar Pereiro, Denis Menchov, Christian Vande Velde, and Frank and Andy Schlek, there is much competition. Even before I became a road cyclist, I was a fan of road racing. In 1998, I had a roommate in Tahoe named Rob who was a CAT 2 road racer and an expert level mountain bike racer. Rob taught me a lot about professional road cycling. He taught me about the strategy and positioning within the peleton. Thursday nights on OLN featured road racing, and that year we watched all of the spring classics, the Giro, the Tour, the Vuelta. I immediately loved listening to commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. To this day I try to work as many "Liggettisms" into my daily life as possible. I am extremely excited to see Lance back in the peleton of the Tour de France. Although he has stated that he will support Alberto Contador, I hope that he gets his eighth Tour victory. I have been disappointed with the Tour since Lance left. The Tour has been tainted with doping scandals, and this year is no exception. At the time I am writing this, Thomas Dekker has already been banned from the Tour for testing positive for a performance enhancing substance. I think that the Tour needs Lance to help recover it's image. Lance has always been an inspiration to so many people. I hope to see him on the podium in three weeks. See you on the road.
Jeff G |
