A few weeks ago Carla proudly took her place in the front row of her new HTC Highroad team as it was introduced to the media. And now sadly she's gone at 23. My condolences to her teammates, friends and family.

I'll keep this short since you'll all be curious and feeling more than a little peckish for some real cycling fare around here. Well, I'm pleased to announce Rêve (french for dream) the new venture I've been secretly working on with my friend Wilfred de Kruijf in the Netherlands.

Rêve (pronounced rev) gives accomplished recreational cyclists the ultimate experience of riding a complete grand tour (tous les 21 étapes) as part of a team. In 2011 we'll take a group of 15-25 riders to France, in 2012 we hope to take teams to all three grand tour routes.

There are three unique keys to the Rêve forumula: a strong team concept; documentary photography; and timing - we ride one day ahead of the grand tour itself, to maximize the grand tour atmosphere.

These events will be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to test yourself, and I don't have to tell any of you it will be the hardest physical and mental test you've ever done on a bike.

It's an expensive proposition, just as it is for professional teams to mount a grand tour campaign, and the commitment of time to training and the trip is considerable. That said, I hope a few of you will dig into those savings to line up at the Passage du Gois with us. I can promise that riding into Paris will go into the books as one of the best things you've ever done.

Now jump to reve.cc and have a good read.

Somewhere on a secret test track in Germany, Apple engineers are putting the final touches on an application that didn't make it to yesterday's iPad launch. Rumor has it that Jobs was uncharacteristically restrained from pressuring the team to deliver the project, code named Colossus for the main stage presentation. Charles Forbin Jr. who heads the Colossus team is part of Job's trusted inner circle and a good friend of Bradley Wiggins.

This rendering leaves little doubt that Apple is about to dramatically change the landscape (or portrait) of cycle computers; its a frontal assault on Garmin, who Jobs has been annoyed at ever since his Garmin eTrex malfunctioned during a lunch hour hike to Hidden Villa.

Details are starting to emerge about Colossus and at least two pro teams have been seeded demo versions of the iPad and Colossus in recent weeks. Sky is reportedly one of those teams. With the iPad's public debut, expect to see the test unit on Wiggins Pinarello very soon.

Wind tunnel testing has shown that the low profile iPad has impressive drag numbers despite its size. Deda has fabricated several prototype stems with a revolutionary vacuum mount that channels low pressure behind the headtube via a specially ported fork. Amazingly the vacuum is strong enough to secure the unit on the worst pave Belgium has to offer. Perhaps we'll see it make it's first race appearance at Paris Roubaix if it passes the UCI's technical review.

So here's the lineup of features slated for a release late March. As the world's largest bike computer by a factor of 20x, the iPad's 1024 x 768 pixels can display an astounding amount of data. In other words why wait to analyze ride data until after your ride, when you can do it all, "so simply and easily on the iPad" while you are riding. All the basics are covered: speed, distance, time, vertical speed, vertical distance, grade, and power of course. Colossus goes much further, leveraging the iPads accelerometers to provide critical data about acceleration and deceleration vs. power in the peloton. With the potential demise of team radios riders will increasingly be left to their own devices to decide race tactics. Precisely what Job's engineers have in mind.

With an iPad running Colossus mounted on the bike, that device will provide an unprecedented flow of decision support data... data that may mean the difference between getting in the move of the day or getting back in the team car. Complete local weather, rendered in stunning detail on the touch sensitive screen, including critical cross wind alerts (Alberto will order three). And it will respond to several cycling-specific gestures being developed by a disgraced former member of the Italian national team.

Is the picture getting clearer; the iPad and Colossus are going to change cycling forever. Need to know how much water, exactly, you are carrying back up to your team, Colossus will calculate weight to a tenth of a gram. Imagine a journeyman pro having this data available when his contract comes up for renewal.

Cycling specific iPads will indeed have the back mounted camera expected by so many pundits. By projecting an image of the road and front wheel on the screen with a data overlay (Apple refers to this as a heads down display mode), much of the unit's apparent mass is rendered invisible. In the interest of safety an emergency zoom mode is automatically triggered in the event of a front tire blowout, giving a rider precious extra seconds to watch the tire come off the rim. I'm going to reserve judgment on whether this will make the iPad's bezel look even bigger.

Expect to see three accessories during the second quarter. iPans, an ingeniously designed set of front panniers that connect to the iPad, the iProw mount that allows the iPad to be mounted vertically on the front of aero bars (the camera now fires directly forward meaning a rider can stay tucked longer); and finally a rear mount compatible with Fizik's ICS system so that team members in the draft can see exactly what gear and speed their lead out man has dialed in.

Given the fantastic video capabilities of the unit I'm already imagining Cavendish running his iPad behind the saddle. Visualize an afterburner animation as he lights it up... it's sure to scare whatever crap is left in the peloton every time he gets out the saddle.

Some features that were part of earlier prototypes will not make the initial launch, most notably the fish finder. The unit will ship with an ebook entitled, the Rider's Guide to French Brothels. Now that's an immersive experience. I'll be lining up to buy one, unless Steve reads this and sends me one for evaluation.

Rapha Condor continue to keep it graphically simple and attractive as they add Sharp Electronics (Sharp4Prostate Campaign), Paul Smith Jeans and Malmaison Hotel Group to their sponsors for the remainder of 2009. The new kit will debut at the Tour of Ireland. Cool.

Note to Radioshack: this is how you do it.

Saturday and Sunday I photographed 13 pairs of cycling gloves, edited and printed a mountain of work and still managed to squeeze in a 30-mile trail ride Sunday afternoon with Juli. This morning I was back at Phil Wood for a couple of hours, flew home to grab my bike for the ride in, took care of regular Monday business, then high-tailed it home on the bike before driving North to Palo Alto and dinner with Simon Mottram and Slate Olson from Rapha. Palo Alto resident and Slipstream President, Matt Johnson stopped by and chatted for a while. Tough day for his team today with Christian Vande Velde breaking a couple of ribs and having to retire from the Giro.

Tomorrow I catch a 6am flight to Portland for a much-anticipated day with Brian Palmer of the washingmachinepost. We're scheduled to visit with Sacha White at Vanilla and Ed Dalton at Showers Pass. Wednesday morning its back to Phil Wood for more photography.

Tip from Matt: The rest of this year's Giro will be broadcast on a pay-per-view basis by Universal Sports using the same Adobe-powered Race Tracker technology that was universally praised during the Tour of California. Individual stages are $3.95 and the whole race is $34.95. Tune in.

With a bit of luck the glove feature will be up Thursday... promise.

Most of the heavy lifting on the site is done. The net result looks quite similar but under the covers it's leaner and meaner. There are still a few optimizations to go that promise even more improvement in loading speed for those of you reading Velodramatic regularly. A new gallery and comprehensive archives will follow shortly. And yes, I'll eventually get round to a cycling post.

You wouldn't know it to look at the frequency of posts in the last month but I've been hard at work tuning up Velodramatic for the year ahead. Between keeping up with changes to the WordPress platform and delving into the code for a new theme (more architectural than visual) my head is just about ready to explode. Earlier tonight I thought I'd passed under the 1 km banner and could see the finish line but I miscalculated the effort and discovered I was spent as the php peloton rushed past on either side.

I hate to devote any of the scant few brain cells I have left to plumbing when there are stories to tell and pictures to share. This is just the way the world works today, whether we like it or not we're stuck learning about networks, routers, ISPs, browser caches, SEO, expires headers, subdomains etc. etc. Work and life combine and parallel each other in unexpected ways that inevitably involve an IP address and limited bandwidth.

I kid myself that my bikes are a refuge from the technological maelstrom that surrounds us. And then I remember the Garmin GPS on my stem and the carbon frame beneath me that would make F1 teams from a few decades past jealous. Electronic shifting is out there and by all accounts it's great. You can't escape.

With luck I'll sort out the remaining issues, all to do with my custom pages... bikes, gallery etc. and have the new show on the road tomorrow night.

As you no doubt noticed I've been taking a break from publishing these past couple of weeks. Lots of holiday-related chores to catch up on, two new kittens (we now have five cats), dental and medical checkups... in other words life in general needed a little extra attention.

Yesterday I made my annual New Year's day pilgrimage to the summit of Mt. Hamilton, and the single speed project was completed this week. I'll have posts this weekend about both experiences. In the meantime I'm working on a new architecture for Velodramatic that should make the site load faster and enable a range of new features I've been planning. If things appear broken or don't work in the next few days rest assured I'm on it.

Hope you all enjoyed yourselves.

Latest Press Release from the Armstrong Camp.

The route of the 2009 Tour de France strikes me as innovative and very interesting. From its start in Monte Carlo with a 15k time trial, to the reinstatement of the team time trial, to stages in my old hometown of Girona all the way to another visit to my old friend the Ventoux, I could not have hoped for a different Tour.

While there has been a fair bit of tension and numerous disagreements with the Tour and its organizers, I am well aware that there is new leadership at ASO and I look forward to upcoming conversations and to a mutually beneficial future together. Whether it's promoting the Livestrong global cancer campaign or making the biggest bike race in the world the gem that it deserves to be, I look forward to next year. I would also like to recognize the UCI and commend them for their aggressive stance against doping, a stance that is unmatched in all of world sport.

Lastly, as to the leadership of the Astana team in 2009. It is illogical to pre-select a leader for any race in October of the previous year. We are blessed at Astana to have the strongest team in the world and I look forward to riding with all of these great riders. I have been around long enough to know that cycling is a team sport and I am fully committed to supporting the strongest rider in any race. Whether that's me, Alberto Contador, Levi Leipheimer, or Andreas Kloden.

Interesting that this comes on the heels of today's comments from Eddie Merckx (as reported by Velonews), who might be considered an Armstrong insider, suggesting Lance wouldn't ride the Tour de France again. I get the feeling Lance is quite happy to settle the question of Team leadership "on the road." He neatly sidestepped the escalating discord with the ASO a few weeks back by suggesting he didn't need to ride the Tour, but I have the feeling it's still firmly in his sights. Today's rapprochement is an interesting step in this chess game.

I just received a press release from Lance Armstrong's Manager Mark Higgins concerning Pierre Bodry's proposal to retest samples from the 1999 Tour de France. While conspiracy theorists on either side of the issue will have a field day whatever the results, Lance issued the following statement today.

Today, Mr. Pierre Bodry, the new head of the French anti-doping agency proposed that they retest samples from the 1999 Tour de France. Unfortunately, Mr. Bodry is new to these issues and his proposal is based on a fundamental failure to understand the facts. In 2005, some research was conducted on urine samples left over from the 1998 and 1999 Tours de France. That research was the subject of an independent investigation, and the conclusions of the investigation were that the 1998 and 1999 Tour de France samples have not been maintained properly, have been compromised in many ways, and even three years ago could not be tested to provide any meaningful results. There is simply nothing that I can agree to that would provide any relevant evidence about 1999.

In addition, the Independent Investigation concluded that the French laboratory, the French Ministry of Sport, and Dick Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, all behaved improperly with respect to the 1999 Tour de France samples. The Independent Investigation concluded that both Mr. Pound and the French laboratory engaged in improper conduct that violated a number of regulations and laws. After the report of the Independent Investigator was issued, Mr. Pound's conduct was submitted to the IOC Ethics Commission and the IOC Ethics Commission censured Mr. Pound.

What the Report of the Independent Investigation did recommend, was that the issues of the conduct of Mr. Pound, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the French Ministry, and the French laboratory should be submitted to an independent tribunal, in particular the Court of Arbitration for Sport, the Court for the entire Olympic movement, to address the issues and improper conduct identified by the Independent Investigator. Two years ago I agreed to have all of these issues aired and decided by that tribunal, but WADA and the French Ministry refused. If Mr. Bodry would now like to re-examine the past, he must start with presenting the issues of the misconduct of the French laboratory, the French Ministry, and WADA before a proper tribunal.

To avoid any questions going forward and to avoid any distractions from my primary purpose to launch a global campaign against cancer, I am working with the man who has been the leader of the world anti-doping community for the past twenty-five years. I approached Dr. Don Catlin in August and proposed to him that he should develop a comprehensive drug testing protocol, to test my blood and urine as often as he believes is appropriate, in order for him to determine categorically whether I have taken any performance-enhancing drugs. As I have stated, I have given Dr. Catlin my permission to post all of my testing results on the internet. Dr. Catlin is developing a protocol that will be available to other athletes who may want to subject themselves to such a rigorous drug testing regimen that Dr. Catlin or other leading anti-doping experts can determine whether they have used performance enhancing drugs.

In 2005 VeloNews reported that Christiane Ayotte, Doping Control Director at Canada's Institut National de la Recherché Scientifique was surprised that samples stored since 1999 could still show evidence of EPO when tested. That had not been the experience in her lab. Now three years on, and a full nine years since the Armstrong samples were taken the French authorities would like to retest. I fully support new protocols that call for long term profiling and storage of samples for future study, but given the particular circumstances around this case, this looks like persecution.

The independent investigator ruled against the French authorities already and this just seems like another attempt to spin the wheel in the hope of getting the result they want. It's a no win situation for Armstrong. If he agreed he'd be throwing out his earlier vindication, and if he declined (which he has today) the innuendo machine can continue its work.

On the road Lance is nothing if not cool and calculating. Frankly I cannot imagine that if he had doped that he would come back to the sport with so much on the line; his legacy; his endorsements; his charity; and most importantly the hundreds of thousands of cancer survivors that continue the fight because of his inspiration. No one with that much spiritual responsibility would risk destroying so many hearts. In their zeal to find fault, I wonder if the French authorities have considered the true human cost of what they are doing? Let it go.

This morning’s press conference with Lance Armstrong, Don Catlin and Taylor Phinney took an unexpected turn when Greg Lemond, seated in the front row (two seats to my left) opened the question period with a hardball aimed straight at Lance. The tension broke over the room like a giant wave as all cameras swung in the direction of the three time and first American Tour winner.

Sitting so close I could reach out and touch him, I watched him breathing nervously as he attempted to articulate his long-held frustration into a question ostensibly directed at Don Catlin, who will head up Lance’s personal doping control program, but clearly it was targeted at Lance. To his credit it was Lance, and not some conference handler that recognized Lemond with the first question. Given their personal history the topic couldn’t have come as any surprise.

Lemond rambled a bit in the delivery but essentially he made the argument that physiological factors (oxygen uptake) were the true baseline and indicator of athletic performance (or performance enhancement). I was struck by his large hands, hands that look like they’ve done a lot of manual work; his big fingers fidgeted with his phone which seemed to be recording the exchange.

Catlin, who I spoke to briefly after the throng had dispersed, confirmed he hadn’t been able to follow Lemond’s argument. In any event, after letting Lemond speak for two or three minutes, Lance cut things off. “Greg, we’re not going to go negative here”

Lemond incredulously uttered something like a “huh” at the closure. I’ll give him his due, it took guts to ask the question. His face flushed, eyes turned down, he could do nothing but sit as Lance recognized the next question. It was not a follow up.

Update: A little later in the morning I discovered that Lance and his manager had been informed that Greg planned to attend and wanted to ask a question. It's a positive sign that Lance didn't attempt to duck the confrontation and politely recognized Greg Lemond. It's quite clear that the two winners of cycling's most pretigious race can't reach an understanding, and even if we'd sat there for weeks they couldn't have agreed. Ironically, Taylor Phinney who represents a bright future for American cycling sat watching the spectacle.