Perhaps it's ironic that this year's ToC finally gave the veteran Mr. Horner his day in the sun... when so much of the race seemed to celebrate the younger end of the peloton. Peter Sagan, Ben Swift, Ben King, Tejay Van Garderen, Matt Goss; all under 25, certainly took their turns at the front. Ben King in particular was approachable and friendly with fans before every stage, I think he's got star potential and the crowds were enthusiastic everywhere he went.
Cycling becomes a strange spectator sport when most of the crowd have ridden their bikes up a mountain. Yesterday's stage from Claremont to Mt. Baldy simultaneously demonstrated our devotion and short attention span re the great sport. On the good side, I was amazed at the effort everyone made on those super steep ramps to ride to the top. About a mile below the summit with a view of a two stretches of road I spent three hours bantering with the ascending peloton of fans. In spite of their suffering, everyone was quick with a smile (I'll have a big gallery of shots up on Zenfolio in a couple of days... you may be there); I loved that.
I didn't love the fact that the same crowd started down the mountain on bikes before the race had finished. Hundreds started the descent while there were still 40 riders coming up the mountain. Not only did this make for a very dangerous situation, but the fans missed half of the opportunity to watch the PROs. Had they been a little more patient they would have seen their favorite riders speeding down the mountain, instead of getting in their way.
Watching the pros descend, knee against top tube, is just a thrilling as watching them come up. I saw them all come down and predictably, stage winner Levi Leipheimer was last. Nobody else was paying any attention. I find that strange.
Yesterday's moto feast had a cost... a two hour drive back to Seaside to pick up the car left me too tired to head towards Solvang last night. Instead I grabbed a hotel room in Seaside and drove the three and a half hours to Solvang this morning, arriving just 20 minutes before the TT start.
I had no time to check the course or to figure out how to get away from the busiest streets in town where clean backgrounds were in short supply, and where one photographer appeared just as the final five riders were coming through my position, using pocket wizards on the same channel as my flash (hence he fired my flash with his camera). Ordinarily I'd have told him to "jog" back to his original position down the street where he'd been working with no effect on my gear, but rather than have that conversation I just picked up my rig and walked away. I should have stayed, it was just getting dialed and the last few riders was no time to move.
It's funny to contrast the two days. Yesterday I was on the inside and couldn't have been closer to the race. Today I was on the outside, quite literally I never stepped foot inside the barriers. Weird. Normally I enjoy shooting TTs because you can really work on a particular shot given multiple, evenly spaced subjects rocketing by. Not today. All that driving had me a little punchy.
As soon as Horner crossed the line I made for the car and headed towards Claremont. Four hours later, through slinky-like LA traffic I made it to a hotel, my first decent dinner of a fast-food week and the shortest editing session of the Tour so far.
Wish I could say I'll be on a moto tomorrow for what will be the definitive highlight of this year's race, but it's not in the cards. Next year I'm coming credential loaded for bear; you heard it hear first. Instead it's a shuttle to Baldy's crown straight from the start. With some sleep I'll make the best of it. Two stages to go.
You're in the peleton and feel the race ebb and surge. The big BMW powers through a series of S turns at 65mph on our way back to the front after a static roadside shot of the peloton. We do this all day for 135 miles and it's brilliant. My driver John is a 35-year veteran motorcycle policeman from Adelaide Australia. This is his first moto assigment in a major race; mine too and we have a blast.
There's no pressure and as a result we get a pile of good images. I say "we" because this is a total team effort between photographer and driver. The chaos of the peloton demands the full attention of all four eyes in this partnership as gaps appear and disappear in an instant in this sometimes bloody ballet of riders, team cars, and motorbikes.
Early on John pushes the bike and my nerve down the from Laguna Seca to highway 68. He tells me "no worries, we still had a good 15 mph more there... easy". I'm glad I'm wearing the Rev'it jacket and pants recommended by Luca, and the convertible Nolan helmet flips up and down conveniently when we're pushing on ahead for the grand vista shot. It's not easy to get the camera to cooperate at times but as the morning goes on the working routine gets better, I make a few gear adjustments and things start to click.
The big story on the day is all the work that Radioshack and Liquigas are doing. The two Kings; Ben and Ted are at or near the front virtually all day and when the hammer goes down and the peloton is giving it full gas, you can't believe what it's like to slide alongside the big train.
Torn kits and bloody faces are visible reminders of the day's damage; a couple of riders are transported away after one of those random straight road accidents that probably result from a touch of wheels. A squirrel also become a victim racing across the road through the peloton and gets caught by a wheel. Rider stays up, squirrel goes down for good. A groan goes up from the peloton for the poor little guy.
Eventually we cruise into Pasa Robles where the town and the school kids are out in force. I shoot the obligatory finish pics as baby-face Peter Sagan stamps his authority on the sprint to reward his team's solid work all day. Juli has driven down from San Jose to pick me up and drive me back to Seaside where my car has been left. That's where I am now after sleeping the sleep of the dead.
Here are a few images. For some this tiny reproduction can't do them justice. Big prints are called for. Quick shower and shave before long drive to Solvang TT.
Stage 5 tomorrow and I'm on my first moto of the Tour, 135 miles of coverage.
The peloton and Team Sky in particular seemed in a really good mood today. Plenty of smiles and laughter before, during and after the race. It's too late to write anything more. With some help from one of the moto drivers I picked up some new gear at the BMW dealership in Modesto. More to follow.
Not quite sure how I'm resisting the gravitational pull of the hotel bed behind me, but here goes with a few words and images from today's stage of the ATOC. Again full marks to the organizers for a good call in Tahoe, but I can't help feeling the riders blew a real opportunity yesterday to demonstrate they are ready to assume a leadership role in their own sport. With their input a good decision was made in the interest of rider safety, but what about Tahoe? Instead of disappearing immediately into the hotel and team buses I wish they'd grabbed warmer gear (it was needed) and spent an hour signing autographs, taking pictures with fans, showing off their bikes and maybe popping a wheelie or two.
It was cold, but Tahoe deserved a little more warmth from the peloton. Again I'll cite the NASCAR example. If they had to call off an event you can bet drivers would be signing autographs and t-shirts, doing donuts in the parking lot... and generally connecting with their fans.
And to the question of whether the ATOC should go back to Tahoe and risk the unpredictability of the Sierras next year; my answer is a resounding yes. This is what many of us asked for; a chance to take our race into our Mountains (capital M). We got unlucky this year, but other than the good folks of Tahoe no one really suffered. I say tee it up again, we're due for some better luck in the weather department. And if it keeps raining we have one more argument for the jackasses who still question climate change.
Two locations today. A short punchy climb just beyond the Nevada City start. The peloton went by en masse in 20 seconds or less. The finish circuit in Sacramento was a little better but my best stuff today were faces.
With still photographers relegated to a position well back from the line for TV's sake, I gambled on a position in the Rabobank VIP area courtesy of a Tour for Kika friend. I was half the distance to the line in a perfect spot for Mr. Swift's triumph but I didn't count on the bloody cell phones. Virtually every person stuck an arm out with a cell phone, playing havoc with AF, and forcing me to pick up the riders too late to get the key shot. Had it kept raining hard for that last circuit it would have worked. The cell phones ran for cover when the sprinkles got heavier.
Notes: Andrew Messick, Jim Birrell and Bob Roll all looked good today in Classic softshell's courtesy of Rapha. HTC had a full complement of their New Team Issue Venge bikes; Saxo had a couple of McLaren Venges in the mix (still my favorite).
How Cold Was It Out There
When bears come out of the woods to warm their paws by the fire you know it's bloody cold. Actually, the corkscrew ramp about seven miles into today's planned route alternated between gusts of heavy, wet snow and isolated pockets of sun. We had quite the party going until the news of the stage cancellation came over the radio shortly after what would have been the delayed 1:15 PM start. I think everyone had been having such a good time (beverages were involved) that they took it in stride. No one second guessed the decision and most started to pack up their paraphernalia and head back to town.
Later, as numerous tweets from riders on the way to Squaw Valley confirmed, it turned out the organizers made precisely the right call. Further up the West side of the lake the road was much worse and it would have been dangerous to attempt the stage. I'm back in South Tahoe for a second night, hoping I can make the drive to wherever tomorrow's stage starts. By Monday evening we'll be down in Sacramento one way or another.
One More
This landscape is for Douglas - you'd like shooting up here
A few "weather" images from the pre-dawn streets of Tahoe. The wind is whipping the snow about and there's enough lying on the ground that I think they'll have to call the stage. They still have a couple of hours for things to change but right now it's blowing pretty good. The snow doesn't seem to have any effect on the drunks leaving the casinos - they were out in force this morning.
Everyone is waiting to see what mother nature has in store for stage 1. I expect many of us will sleep fitfully, peering out our windows to gauge what’s happening as the storm is expected to arrive sometime after midnight. The sun set through a fast moving broken sky tonight, and the air smelled like snow was coming.
Earlier the afternoon mood at race HQ in the Montbleu hotel lobby was light and upbeat as the familiar cast of characters said their hellos and swapped stories between texts, tweets and calls. Amazing how distracted we all are now.
There was a Go-Pro-related huddle of managers, riders and media talking about some on-bike video complement to the coverage. If that comes off and the UCI doesn’t burst into flames it should be a big win for the fans, though as much as I like the output of the little cameras I think in their current form they detract from the clean lines of the racing bike.
They could remedy that with an aero version that attached to the underside of a road stem. VeloDramatic Patent Pending.
Chatted with my friend Glen Fant, owner of the Specialized store in Santa Rosa, super strong rider and good friend of Levi. Glen is reprising his role as Levi’s mechanic for this lap around California... last year he had the same responsibility at the Tour. Glen had some great stories from France, most of which I can’t relate but he’s obviously recovered from the Pyrennean descent that saw three team cars side-by-side on a single-lane road having an animated “discussion” His car was in the middle ;-)
As usual it took a while to sort out the media logistics at the press center (photo vest, parking passes etc). As it stands I’m definitely not on a moto for either of the first two stages... but there’s hope things will open up later in the race. In the meantime there’s nothing to do but check the routes, drive a little recon and figure out where something might happen.
That’s only half the battle of course, because you can park yourself almost anywhere during a stage race but the more dramatic and isolated the stage the less likely you'll get multiple cracks at the peloton. If I get one shot per stage that I like this week I’ll be happy, high stakes and long odds.
On the eve of this year’s race, I’m happy to say I’m in a better frame of mind than last year when the incident with the deer left me pretty shaken. That’s it for this dispatch, I’m off to look out the window, then bed. I’ve got tire chains, but I doubt any of the team cars or buses do.
I doubt there's a more loaded word in the modern lexicon. We kid ourselves that the next bit of technology will put us ahead in the game but in truth we're all just hamsters madly spinning our wheels as file sizes, bandwidth and obsolescence conspire to put the brakes on productivity. If you're a photographer you experience the friction every time you pull a card out a camera and prepare to spend as much or more time processing as you did shooting.
My last desktop machine lasted 27 months, the one before that 36 months. Faced with an ever-decreasing lifespan, it's a good thing I take a perverse enjoyment in the chase.
I'm completely agnostic when it comes to my operating system. I cut my design teeth on the Mac, took a right-click onto Windows and now seem to have settled on a hybrid arsenal of both. I carry a MacBook Pro and the new iPad2 on the road, but my last few desktops have been PCs Admittedly I gave some thought to a Macintosh workstation this time around, but ultimately opted to build a Windows 7 desktop. No cards or letters please, I've happily made my contribution to Apple for this quarter.
Below the desk the new box is a stealthy matte black Corsair 800D, clean lines and wonderfully engineered inside for wire management and cooling. Fueled by gaming there's been a quantum leap in presentation, and every component from CPU coolers and fans to video cards and RAM are now designed to be seen but not heard. There's a large acrylic window in the Corsair case for our cats to view all this trick componentry: Asus Maximus Extreme IV motherboard; i7 3.4 GHz 2600K CPU (overclocked to 4.2 GHz); H60 CPU cooler; 16GB of Corsair Vengeance Ram; a 1200AX PSU; OCZ Vertex 3 SSD (boot drive); a pair of OCZ 2 SSDs (lightroom catalog and cache); a 2TB WD HDD for raw images and a 1TB WD HDD for final client export files. I'll fore-go the photographs, since BikeSnobNYC who's always poking about the VeloDramatic archives, will only use it as material on a slow day.
Between assignments it took several days to assemble the hardware trying always to think two steps ahead before committing to the next move. There was a minor delay when temperatures indicated the CPU cooler needed to be reseated and a standoff broke in the process. Thankfully Corsair is virtually round the corner in Fremont, so a quick drive over to their office and a parking lot hand off replaced the unusual fastener. It also took a while to get full SATAsfaction... as the various SSDs and HDDs were temperamental about the motherboard ports and order they were added to the system. After a good deal of reading I organized the system to avoid unnecessary writes to the boot SSD, moving temp files, logs, email data and the page file elsewhere. I freely admit that without Google none of this would have been possible; can anyone remember what life was like before that search engine provided all the answers about silly stuff like "trim, environmental variables and %appdata%"
And this was the easy part. The true difficulty comes in reinstalling all the applications, applying patches, transferring presets, plugins and finding invariably that your two-year-old Adobe CS4 Master Collection has compatibility issues with Windows 7. As I type this I'm sitting on hold@adobe listening to the same 30-second Muzak clip looping endlessly. Total time on hold with them this afternoon approaching 3.5 hrs. What's worse is I know they won't be able to solve the problem because I've already confirmed the answer doesn't exist on Google. Ultimately there's only one way to make things right and it's going to involve my credit card.
So the question is was it worth it? Absolutely... Lightroom is lightening quick, the new NEC screen is calibrated and sharp. So now I can get back to shooting and spend a little less time in front of the computer.
Adobe Postscript (no pun intended). Today has been an absolute case study in negative customer support. All of us have heard the familiar words "this call may be recorded..." Well all I can say is I hope today's three calls were recorded, but I'm quite sure no CS manager at Adobe would sit and listen to 3.5 hours of Muzak. Adobe saved the best for last, the final call tonight was the clincher. After two aborted 90-minute holds for level 2 support I once again called the main support number, waited 35 minutes till a script-reading rep took the call and told me she 1) had no way of knowing how long I might wait for someone to answer at level II when she transferred me 2) had no way of requesting level II to call me when a technician was finally available 3) Assured me that once transferred if I waited indeterminately someone would eventually answer the phone. She transferred me... the phone clicked and the voice said "Adobe Technical support business hours are ya-da-ya-da-ya-da, call back during regular business hours. I rest my case, which by the way is #182320640
It's worth mentioning that there still are some companies that have great support. While Adobe seems intent on dropping the ball, I had a great experience with Other World Computing (OWC) as the source for the 30" NEC PA301W that's now my main working monitor. It ships with NEC's Spectaview II software and hardware (based on the X-Rite Eye-One 2) which makes short work of calibration. Lloyd Chamber's informative Mac Performance Guide highly recommended the NEC and OWC; both recommendations are well founded... thanks Lloyd. Shipping was fast and very reasonable for this heavyweight screen.
This in response to McQuaid's logic as explained in a Velonews piece by John Wilcockson
If Pat McQuad would write his statements down, take 30 minutes to proof read them and then censor himself, he might be better off. If we go along with his pyramid metaphor even a cursory knowledge of world archeology would confirm that there are plenty of flat-top pyramid structures all around the world. In the business and administration of world cycling there's nothing inherently wrong with the UCI controlling a structure that only goes so far. Professional athletics has changed... and the patriarchal/feudal system espoused by the UCI no longer is in sync with the professional dynamic. Attempting to lay a guilt trip on the riders and teams who might entertain another vision for the sport is merely McQuaid protecting his own increasingly marginalized piece of turf.
A pro league might be the new start the sport needs, if and only if, the teams are prepared to address their own deficiencies when it comes to marketing and sponsor ROI. Cervelo was on the right track when they created their Test team vision. A team who's bottom line was broader than the top step of the podium. Manufacturers supply millions of dollars worth of product to teams and then go begging for access. Riding is only 50% of a professional cyclist's job description, the other 50% is serving the needs of sponsors. Watch a NASCAR post-race interview to see how it's supposed to be done.
All parties have a long way to go expand the sport's audience, revenue and rider benefits. I'm not convinced that taking the point of the pyramid away from the UCI is any riskier than the status quo
