Saturday, September 10, 2011

Winning

Long before some Hollywood jackass (not our own jackass, Hollywood) started using the term "winning", it was the title of one of the primary cycling magazines I remember seeing growing up. It shaped my concept of cycling: steel bikes, lycra, toe clips, no helmets, downtube shifters.


Oh, and winning. It wasn't until I actually started racing a decade or so later that I realized that winning is something that is very rare for most cyclists, and that winning isn't even something I find necessary for satisfaction. I know I have a very small chance of winning any road race and no chance of winning any cyclocross race (I usually hope not to get lapped).

But that's just me. We are surrounded by winners. Let's take a look.

First, is Cam, a fixture of the Durham cycling community, and his team at Road Scholars Porsche restoration. They recently took 1st place at the Pebble Beach Show for their restoration of one of the first Porsches ever produced!!! This ain't no local-cat-five-crit of a car show. This is the real deal.

Here's Cam showing Jay Leno the details of their work:



The car is beautiful, but most impressive is Cam's cool demeanor dealing with a (possibly drunk) Leno. I was always more of a Letterman fan myself.

Then, of course, this video has been circulating of the World Championship-winning downhill run of Danny Hart:



The riding is beautiful, but most impressive is the announcing. There are at least a dozen highly quotable moments in the exuberant commentary--see if you can find them all.

There's actually another video up of a guy pre-riding the course in much dryer conditions and actually looks much more difficult and scary than in the previous video.

Closer to home, JD had a nice showing at the Shenandoah 100. Hopefully he'll give a good writeup of the event.

Other than that, I have no idea what's happening in the local world of cycling. Some people are still riding on the road. Some people are still riding the singletrack. Some people have started cyclocross. I dunno. Someone clue me in.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Talk about winning. Chris just won the SS division of the TORC xc series without even leaving his house. Nice work.
Alex H.

felonious said...

That sounds about right to me. Good on ya.

co2cycle said...

Woo Hoo! I saw that I had a pretty good lead before the final race, but I didn't think I'd keep it. Since I'm still not able to ride, I actually considered taking a small bike out and running the course with it to hopefully get enough points to keep my lead.