Author: Cris Bloomfield

Big weekend. Lots of catching up with old friends over beers. Slight problem with memory loss on occassion and no riding. Ah well, there’s plenty of time for biking ahead.

Singletrack have put together a fairly comprehensive coverage of the new Race Face kit, not surprising that they’ve done that given the sponsorship they now seem to be carrying. Guess there’s some fairly big bills to be paying to run that site. Big Jonny has been paying his bills by other means and ones that aren’t always acceptable with some people.

Seems there were a fair few big names to be seen at Interbike, there’s some photos of the stars up here. Worryingly, Corty looks very like David Miller. Here’s some of the best kit I’ve seen from the show in this gallery from Cyclingnews.

Giant HQ in Nottingham was broken into on Thursday night and a load of bikes stolen from the warehouse. Bit of a bummer, but if they want to find them they should start looking in the Meadows, it’s the sort of place that they’ll start turning up. Bit like our shop and the bikes being seen all over Salford. Not sure how professional it was, but you can bet that Giant will have insurance for such things and potentially it could have been a lot worse.

Busy around here right now. Conrad is okay, but has a sore head and fingers that are recovering from being broken. He was lucky, his bike wasn’t. It’s a write off.

Biker is back in the UK from Switzerland and is heading up North to the bright lights of Manchester tonight, as is my sister. It’s going to be a full house and a bit of a session tonight. My liver and kidneys are going to be feeling it tomorrow.

The shop website has been up and down and back to it’s old self before returning to normal over the last few days. The hosting server it was all sitting on packed up apparently. Bad. Back now though and the custom build up section should be appearing soon, more here.

Conrad was knocked off his bike tonight by a reckless driver. I picked up the wreckage from the Accident and Emergency Unit at the Manchester Royal Infirmary earlier on. Fortunately it looks like Conrad is going to be okay. His bike might not make it. More news soon.

Everyone has coverage from Interbike at the moment. Try Singletrack, Bikemagic and Cyclingnews for starters. There’s loads more on each of those three sites if you do a bit of surfing.

Shiny new kit everywhere. What’s hot? Well Race Face have been keen to do this before anyone else thought of it and who can blame them? The spiel is:

The new Race Face X-Type bottom bracket and crank system uses outboard bearings and a hollow pipe spindle (think along the lines of XTR and ’04 XT), but the Race Face offering permanently attaches the left hand crank to the spindle. Should be available in XC, “All-Mountain” and DH versions.

Also new is this Virtual Pivot Point Santa Cruz, the VPP-Free, fitting into the long travel freeride market in between the Blur and V10. Pink Bike have lots of photos and early thoughts on the beast.

And Shimano have been having some technical difficulties with their new XTR wheelset. MBA cover the problems and the fix here.

I’ve been doing a bit of (re)design work on the shop website based on a revision I knocked up a month or two back, the new look is here.

Well it had been planned for a few weeks and finally for a few of us, today was a shop staff ride. Well it was supposed to be Conrad was there, but when we called to pickup George from Cambridge from his digs in the leafy suburbs of Manchester he wasn’t out of bed and the verdict was that it was probably unsafe to move him. SP didn’t show up, presumably deciding that riding with a bunch of mountain bikers on springy full suspension bikes would do his credibility no good at all and it seemed opted for the delights of the club hill climb.

Anyway we rode out from Chorlton along the banks of the Mersey on the Transpennine Trail towards Stockport, later taking in such delightful parts of Greater Manchester such as Reddish Vale and then Broadbottom, Hyde and into Glossop. This is where a seemingly well laid plan was exposed to be not quite so well thought out, as the prospect and reality of riding 35lbs of fully active suspension bike up and over Chunal is a bit different to riding a road bike.

Conrad of course disappeared over the horizon in no time and eventually even I managed to grind to the top and then descent down to the Bridleway up and over Middle Moor and past the Shooting Cabin, before descending down to the Kinder Reservoir. It was a bit blowy up on the tops and most of the slog up across the fields towards Brown Knoll was against the wind.

On the ride up Oaken Clough, we bumped into a guy who had just taken a spill on the descent and was recovering from the aftermath. Fair bit of blood, but his Giro seemed to have done its job. From Edale Cross the fun began as we rattled down Jacob’s Ladder and rolled into the station cafe without (too) much drama. After a good 5 hours on the bikes and some good miles put in, tea, bacon butties and chips were well received.

This is a bit off the wall.

David Millar devastated the field in the World Championships time trial today winning by over 1 minute 25 seconds. Millar’s been on the up in cycling for a few years and it’s fantastic to see him take the rainbow stripes at last. Following on from his recent stage win in the Vuelta, Millar now has the Olympics in his targets as his next goal.

Only problem is with the ongoing feud between the UCI and WADA, cycling may not even be in the Olympics. As Bikebiz has reported: At the World Championships in Hamilton, Canada, WADA president Dick Pound threatened to exclude cycling from next year’s Athens Olympics if it doesn’t adopt the new WADA anti-doping code. A new rule in the Olympic Manifesto makes it obligatory for sports to sign up to the code.

The UCI has stated previously that it believes cycling is being unfairly targeted by WADA.

Chilly has some more photo’s from Dusk til Dawn up on his site, Giant Pygmy, in the photo section, take a look.

Will the music industry ever learn from trying to control music on the Internet? Probably not before they’ve lost several billion. They need to learn to find a way to work with the Internet, not against it. It’s like trying to swim against an approaching Tsunami.

It’s raining outside. She’s off in paradise again, but at least the flat’s tidy. I’m a bit less of a wreck today. Going riding this weekend all seems so much more feasible now.

E-Bay has a lot to answer for. Scumbags and scammers are taking their game to an all new level and this hasn’t been helped by the fact that E-Bay have refused to pull items that are not genuinely what they claim to be and then ignore confirmation from the genuine manufacturing company that the product is infact a fake. Like some rather dodgy Oranges that are discussed here, here and over here.

Talking to Tony today, I starting thinking about whether or not there is some kind of aspirational ladder that mountain bikers subscribe to? Now I guess many mountain bikers would love to be able to ride bikes all day everyday, in fantastic areas around the world and still be able to live a comfortable lifestyle, but there are very few people who can afford to sustain that lifestyle for any great length of time.

I suppose the very best freeriders fall into this category. There isn’t the pressure to be at the peak of physical fitness that is associated with cross country racing or the pressure to get results for the sponsors like with the downhill scene. Tyler Klassen and the boys on the Drop In road trip fit into this perfect picture, riding the best trails all over Canada and North America, Helibiking, etc. Are they the lucky ones?

What comes next? Is it the bike journo’s that get paid a small in terms of salary, but do get to ride thousands of pounds worth of kit and test all the latest products in return for writing and reporting their findings to the world? Or maybe the trail builders whose hard graft goes into moulding the ups and downs, corners and berms, but then as reward they get to be the first riders to test their handy work and ride new trails?

Elsewhere on the ladder office bound cyclists sometimes express their wish to work in the relaxed environment of a bike shop, whilst bike shop workers would love to be paid as much as some office workers, but always seem to be wishing for more opportunity to ride their bikes and be treated as more than just someone who works in a bike shop (especially by fat balding rude South Africans on Bromptons).

Now as for people who work for the importers and distributors, well I guess some of them never see the products other than in pictures or on screens, but talk to people about product all day long on the telephone. Others probably talk about it and show it to people all day long in the hope of selling it, but rarely have any time to go cycling and use it themselves. Whilst somewhere at the top of the ladder some people have made so much money from cycling that they’ve moved on to other sports and now don’t ride at all.

I guess it’s all swings and roundabouts. The grass is always greener on the otherside and if you want to go biking there’s always a way to make time and if you don’t there’s always an excuse. A new bike should be arriving soon. I’m beginning to get excited because it going to be an even better reason to ride more.

I predicted it and I’m suffering the consequences. Fresher’s Flu has me well and truly by the throat and it ain’t pleasant. Fortunately drinking seems to help.

In the pub on Saturday, whilst drinking some medicinal Guinness, there was some talk about British custom frame builders and I learnt a new name that was regarded with same prestige as the likes of Roberts and Yates. That was reasonable local establishment, Flagstaff’s. I was therefore a bit shocked to read this tonight:

Steel-meister George Longstaff of Newcastle under Lyme – the internationally-recognised maker of trikes, tandems and other custom-builds – collapsed on a Longstaff owner’s ride yesterday. He died before he got to hospital (From Bikebiz).

That’s tragic. Sympathies to all friends and family.

The World Road Race Championships started today, but Cipollini won’t be there to defend his title. Read why here.

Jan Ullrich has gone from stating that he wants to win the Tour de France on a Bianchi at the recent Italian EICMA show (where there was some fantastic glitzy kit, including the shiny Dogma Ego) to a rather different response. The drug popping and occasionally porky German has returned to his former Telekom team, which is to be relaunched as T-Mobile. This has of course made him loads of friends in Italy.

Mention the wonderful new IMBA UK website and what happens the next day? IMBA membership pack rolls through the letter box including some rather garish IMBA socks. The great sock swap is now in full swing.

It’s been a busy week and bikes haven’t really been at the front of my mind. I can feel myself getting ill. Bastard. Still want to get out tomorrow, even if it’s only for a bit of a ride.

There was a link to rathergood.com posted the other day. Particularly impressed with their ‘cover’ of Electric 6’s recent song. A few will have already suffered the wrath, others may still enjoy/hate it. Guess you have to be in the right frame of mind.

And I still can’t make up my mind whether I like this or not. One think keeps me from liking it, it just sounds so god damn gay bar.

Salsa used to sponsor the MBUK team when JMC was riding for them. Back then I think Ross Schafer still hand a big hand in the production of every frame. These days the name lives on, but production has shifted. The bikes are still great, so check them out here.

Ross speaks about warranty issues over at Dirt Rag.

Well sometime reasonably recently the IMBA UK site relaunched itself. Things have been pretty quiet and it’s all been pretty low profile since the formation of the UK arm of the organisation, but there must have been a hell of a lot of stuff for the UK IMBA crew to sort out, something which can’t have been easy when they’re all doing it as volunteers. So what’s it all about then? Well as it says on their site:

We all ride our mountain bikes to enjoy the buzz of a tough outing, to socialise with friends or to soak up the countryside atmosphere.

Few of us expected to go trail building, or to campaign to defend trails or work to open new ones. But to get the network we all want, that is just what we have to do.

IMBA UK aims to help you to help this to happen by providing a supportive structure which will allow us to speak more effectively with government, councils and land managers, and at the same time provide the facility to share problems and circulate best practice between members.

IMBA UK intends to be a fully democratic organisation working for its members. But to be effective we need to have a strong membership base which truly reflects the needs of the UK mountain biker.

So the UK needs an IMBA UK – and IMBA UK needs you!

The new site’s jam packed with forums and information, so for more go and check it out.

Lurking somewhere in a corner of the rothar.com site is the singletrack magazine information bureau which has details of the content of all of the magazines to date and the increasingly popular suitably far-fetched and made-up cover for the next issue, which should be out in December. Find it here.

Series two of Drop In is hitting the airwaves out in Canada. Pink Bike have the first instalment available for download from their website, cruise over and take a look.

The World Road Champs are approaching and Specialized now have all their 2004 product on-line.

Snowed under with work at the moment. Heras won the Vuelta and Pettachi did it again. Is he the next Zabel? Will Heras replace Lance at USPS when he steps down? Will Armstrong manage a sixth tour victory?

Questions, questions, questions and I’m too tired to think up any answers.

GT are back. Not owned by the same people as before, but they’ve resurrected the brand and launched a new range of bikes. There’s more from Mike Davis over at Bikemagic.

The following was posted on bikebiz and is an interesting slant on an ongoing issue. James Annan sent in a short MPEG of a rider crashing at low speed, on the flat, thanks to a front wheel pop-out. He doesn’t link it directly to his ‘disk brake/QR/wheel ejection’ design flaw theory but it demonstrates, he says, the severity of injuries likely from crashes that fork designers could prevent.The 3MB MPEG can be downloaded from here. James’s comment was:

“I believe the separation was due to a stripped thread on the QR, and the wheel literally fell out as the rider lifted the front wheel over a kerb so it looks superficially unrelated to the disc brake, but of course it is disk brake riders who routinely overtighten their skewers (and yes, the rider does have disk brakes). Perhaps a useful warning to those who say ‘just do up the skewer tighter’?”

“Regardless of the cause, it is I think worthwhile as an illustration of the severity of these crashes. Even though he was rolling on flat ground at a gentle pace, he hits the ground directly head first, sustaining facial injuries and a smashed helmet, without even getting his hands off the bars to cushion the fall.“