Do Good Guys Wear Lyrca? - Another New Dawn in Cycling

Cycling fans we can smile again! Pat McQuaid has been ousted from UCI presidency and replaced by the UK’s Brian Cookson OBE. Cookson was endorsed by just about every cycling/doping critic around, but we’ll have to wait and see what he delivers. (You can read Cookson’s Manifesto here:
http://www.briancookson.org/files/6313/7208/9499/Manifesto_BC_English.pdf)
Now, my first cycling crush and the only American to ever win the Tour de France, Greg LeMond is back designing bicycles!

For those of you who aren't familiar with the LeMond bicycle, it was originally distributed through Trek until a certain litigious, chemical driven, bully on wheels used his then considerable clout and hatred for Greg to get the line dumped. Call it Karma, call it delayed justice, but the tables have turned. As the bully sits at home in Texas buried under an avalanche of lawsuits, LeMond is relaunching his brand through Time Bicycles.

This is the stuff of Fairy Tales, the Hollywood happy ending! The bullies and the corrupt leaders have lost in disgrace. The Cutters win the race, Dave Stoller gets the girl, the college degree and the pro contract. (If you are a cycling fan but you've never seen the movie Breaking Away, shame on you!).

The problem is, life is not so clear cut; good guys sometimes do bad things, bad guys sometimes do good things and our expectations that everyone has to stay on one side or the other leads to disappointment, pessimism and ambivalence. Look at the riders who admitted to cheating (without getting caught), confessing in order to help move things forward in a positive way. Which side of the good-bad divide do they belong on?  How many times have you said, “What’s the point, they’re all cheaters anyway”? All of them, really? The neo-pro barely making $30, 000 a year? The team that let the most skeptical of cycling journalists travel with the team with 100% access? What about Christophe Bassons? Surely he wasn’t an anomaly. He was racing at cycling’s nadir of doping and yet he remained so true to his ethics that he quit the sport rather than capitulate.

What cycling needs is what life needs, a healthy dose of cynicism tempered with optimism, a commitment by the critics to not just complain but do something about it and hordes of Dave Stollers and Christophe Bassons leading the way.

And if Time Bicycles or Greg LeMond needs someone to write a product review on the new LeMond bikes, just give me a call!