Tour Fever: Catch It Before It Catches You!

The Tour de France:

Raise your hand if you have Tour Fever!  (If you raised your hand you don't have Tour Fever, because the first symptom of Tour Fever is an inability to lift your extremities.  So stop trying to game the system.)  As the big day approaches the news headlines are coming fast and furious, and the latest one tells us that eternally petulant rider David Millar has been left off the Garmin-Sharp Tour team because he is sick and old:

"In years past we have approached the Tour with multiple leaders, and multiple goals," team CEO Jonathan Vaughters said. "This year, we approach it with one clear leader, Andrew Talansky, and our roster is designed to give him the best support possible. We are very sorry to leave David Millar home due to illness. His experience is unparallelled and his contributions to the sport and our team are undeniable. We wish things were different for David, but as we look ahead to the Tour, we believe we have selected a strong team and we are committed to helping Andrew build on last year's success."

This has made him very upset, because naturally the Tour de France should be his own personal rolling retirement tribute:

For the record, I was going to be ready for the Tour, so sad my team didn't believe in me, after everything we've been through. Not cool.
— David Millar (@millarmind) June 30, 2014

For the record, inasmuch as he's ridden the Tour 12 times without winning it, I'd say that Garmin-Sharp do believe in him--specifically, they believe in his inability to win the Tour, which he's demonstrated time and time again.

Oh, and he's getting rid of his bike:

For Sale. Been raced, not much. Battery fully charged (I think). Good condition. Reasonable offers please. pic.twitter.com/aFuGc5P5aB
— David Millar (@millarmind) June 30, 2014

Yes, when Dave gets angry the bike is the first thing to go:



Presumably he'll get something more suited to his new status as a retiree:

C'mon Davey Baby, you know you want it.

I don't understand why Millar is so upset.  Isn't he part-owner of the team?  Why does he even want to keep riding at this point?  Does Jeff Bezos still pack up orders in the warehouse?  It's like Millar is a part-owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant, yet he's upset that they won't let him help with the food prep because he has a cold and he kind of sucks at it anyway.  So what?  Have some dignity!  Put on a nice suit, hang out in the dining room and mingle!  Why do you want to put on those stupid stretchy clothes and ride with the busboys all day anyway?

Plus, Millar's got it way better than Jonathan Vaughters, who never finished a single Tour, even with unfettered access to EPO:

In 2001 a wasp ended his Tour de France, and in 2014 he's still enduring WASP stings in the form of David Millar's testy tweets:

(I realize he's technically Scottish, but he looks pretty WASPy to me.)

In other news, did you know that 94 percent of cyclists in Oregon stop at red lights?

Nearly 94 percent of people riding bikes in Portland, Beaverton, Corvallis and Eugene stopped for red lights, a forthcoming Portland State University-based study of 2,026 intersection crossing videos has found. Of those, almost all (89 percent of the total) followed the rules perfectly, while another 4 percent entered the intersection just before the light changed to green. Only 6 percent of riders were observed heading directly through the red light.

What a bunch of woosies.

Speaking of "woosies," do you know some people don't ride bikes because they don't find them comfortable?

Well, it's true--at least according to some design douches who have just launched a Kickstarter campaign.  But not to worry, because they've got the "problem" licked:

One day it occurred to us, office chairs have evolved over time to make the user more comfortable and therefore, more productive.  As we worked on our latest project, a light bulb went off....  Why hasn't this same concept been applied to bicycles?

Yeah, those "light bulbs" keep going off, don't they?  Someone needs to go to every design douche studio in every gentrifying city in the world, unscrew all the light bulbs, wrap them in dinner napkins, and stomp the fuck out of them like glasses at a Jewish wedding, because all this redesigning-the-bike crap has got to stop.  Just because you plant your ass on something all day doesn't mean you need to apply its design to bicycles.  I spend a lot of time on the toilet but that doesn't mean I need a bike that flushes.

But hey, they're doing it to make the world a better place!

We want to get everyone riding!  To that end, we focused our efforts on understanding why people do not regularly ride bicycles and we found that comfort is one of the main reasons that keep people from riding more often. 

Not everyone should be riding bikes, and if you can't get comfortable on one of the many, many, many types of bicycles already out there then you might be one of these people.  So what?  Walk.  Ride the subway.  Take the bus.  Lease a fucking Hyundai for all I care!  As long as you drive it responsibly and don't run me over I'm completely fine with it.

Instead, we get this:


Get a load of this crabon piece of crap:

Nice job.  It's a Serotta Size Cycle you actually ride.  Way to cut out the middle man, design douches.

And of course the most important question is the one everyone would have asked about this bike seven years ago is: "Can I make it into a fixie?"

Well, the answer is a resounding "Yes!"--though for some reason when they say "fixie" they show a time trial bike:

And then when they say "track bike" they show the bike David Millar should be riding now that he's been put out to pasture three weeks early:

Okay, I see what they're going for here--they're invented a bike that can change along with you.  Maybe they're on to something in that regard.  If they can also add technology that will convince design douches like the ones in the video to leave New York City and move back to wherever it is they came from then I'll gladly help back this:

(Why don't you guys skip the bike and design yourselves a haircut?)

Alas, instead they, instead they want to put "more bikes on the road:"

Though if that's the case I don't know why this guy is on the sidewalk.