Further to yesterday’s post, a reader chided me for neglecting to mention two news items, the first being this one:
Though in my defense there’s nothing ironic about this at all:
In a strange twist of fate, a fire broke out this week at the Rad Power Bikes retail store warehouse in Huntington Beach, California, Electrek reports. The structural blaze came less than two months after the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) warned customers to “immediately stop” using and dispose of some of the company’s e-bike batteries due to fire hazard. In December, Rad filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, stating it couldn’t afford to recall the batteries.
“We’re working with local authorities to review a thermal incident that occurred at our Huntington Beach store Sunday evening,” a Rad Power Bikes spokesperson told Engadget. “The incident was contained and happened while the store was closed. The cause of the fire has not been confirmed.”
Or suspicious for that matter:
Plus, it’s 2026. A price is a “price point.” A system is an “ecosystem.” And a fire is a “thermal event,” which until recently would have meant this:
50% off long underwear!?! Now that’s what I call a thermal event!
So altogether this CONFLAGRATION AT A BANKRUPT E-BIKE COMPANY is wholly unremarkable and in no way topical or metaphorical.
The other story was this one, which I wasn’t even aware of until I read the comment:
Apparently some wheelsucker caused him to crash and then gave him a big attitude about it:
Vingegaard’s crash came to light after amateur cyclist Pedro García Fernández posted on his Strava account that he had followed the Dane, and also posted pictures of his own descent behind the 29-year-old. Fernández wrote that Vingegaard had “crashed while trying to drop me on the descent of Fuente la Reina” and, after stopping to check on the two-time Tour de France champion, said that Vingegaard “got angry with me for following him down the hill”.
Fernández said in his post: “You can be a professional, but you can also be humble. He was going fast to drop me and ended up on the ground. I don’t make a living from this, and I’m just an amateur like most people, so I don’t understand his anger as a professional about it.”
Annoying one of the world’s top professional athletes while he’s training, causing him to crash, and then complaining he wasn’t “humble” about it seems about right for a typical Strava Fred. In fact, I logged into my own Strava account for the first time since July 15th, 2023 just to take the measure of him:
[That’s my account, not his.]
Presumably this is the wheelsucker:
Yep, looks like your standard issue Fredus ordinarius.
Look, maybe it’s a generational thing, but one of the first things I learned when I started Fredding was that you don’t sit on a stranger’s wheel, and that if you’re looking to engage in anonymous sucking of wheels or other parts you should instead visit your nearest gloryhole, where you’ll no doubt find plenty of willing participants. Sure, you might think that just because someone’s wearing similar clothes and riding a similar bicycle it means they want you to come play with them, but that’s not how this works. When you latch onto someone’s wheel you become their problem. They have to be sure not to change speed or direction too suddenly. They have to manage their expectorations and snot rockets. Granted, being really slow I rarely have a problem with people sitting on my wheel anymore (few have the patience), but it’s happened to me in the past, and it’s rather infuriating:
I suppose another issue is that there’s not as stark a divide between pro cyclists and their amateur counterparts as there is in other more mainstream sports. Your average schlub who plays in an adult softball league knows he’s not Irish baseball phenomenon Shoèigh O’tani, and he’s virtually guaranteed to never encounter him in a sporting setting where he has a chance to derail his season by hitting him with a bat or nailing him in the face with a wild pitch. Fredus ordinarius on the other hand has the same bike and the same type of uniform as his professional counterparts, and even has a racing license and rides on a “real” racing team himself, so he thinks he and Jonas Vingegaard are basically equals. This is a dangerous situation…for Jonas Vingegaard, who’s basically in his office when he’s on his bicycle, and really doesn’t need people who suck at riding bikes distracting him and messing with him while he’s trying to make a living.
By the way, I also used to ride with a pro cyclist sometimes, so I know how people tend to latch onto them when they’re out riding:
And no, I was not one of those people who latched onto him; this was 2009, I was still relevant in the cycling world, and HE latched on to ME for cycling social media points. Speaking of which, one of the strangest things about those rides was reading comment after comment on NYVelocity about how Lance Armstrong was the most despicable person on Earth, then heading out for a ride with him on 9W and seeing every cyclist in the greater metropolitan area kissing his ass. (Yes, I managed to notice this even though I too was busy kissing his ass.)
Finally, speaking of wheelsucking, which tire size is the fastest?
No seriously, which is it? I don’t have a subscription. All I could read was this:
I was early to the wide-tire road bike thing, maxing out the clearance on my road bike with 32 mm Panaracer GravelKing slicks (that measured nearly 35 mm) back in 2020. For me, this was a big benefit of the move to disc brakes on the road. Wider tires meant more comfortable, more capable road bikes.
This raises some important cultural questions. If using gravel tires in 2020 makes you an early adopter of the wide-tire road bike thing then how far do you have to go back to be considered an early adopter of gravel? To answer that I suppose you have to figure out when they started actually putting the word “gravel” on cycling products and determine if you were riding bikes with wide-ish tires on mixed terrain before that. (In those days, what people now call “gravel” riding was loosely referred to as “epic.”) According to a popular search engine, the GravelKing tire was released in 2014, and the first production gravel bike was the Salsa Warbird in 2013:
I suppose that could be, because 2013 is also the year I began to express my ongoing befuddlement with the term “gravel,” starting with the introduction of the Raleigh Tamland, making me a pioneer in the field of Gravel Derision:
It’s fascinating to go back to the days when, for five or ten minutes, they actually believed stuff like mechanical disc brakes and external cable routing made sense because it was simple and it worked:
Raleigh stocks TRP Spyre mechanic disc brakes on both the Tamland 1 and 2. The Spyre disc brakes, unlike most other mechanical disc brakes, are dual-piston, meaning both pads actuate simultaneously, making setup much easier. The Spyre, while not as powerful as some hydraulic options, is more than adequate for a gravel grinder who won’t be burning through brake pads like a ’cross racer.
Cables are routed externally on the downtube with brake housing that runs the length of the frame, which keeps maintenance low, while making it easier on home mechanics to replace cables and housings when the time comes.
Oh, how naive we were…