Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Rambling observations of a bike nerd...

Today my mind is just a mess with all kinds of bike-dork thoughts. Sorry.

Spent some time talking to my buddy at Ritchey. Kendall Young is quite likely my doppelganger or the minutely older brother that my mother has never mentioned. He's another one of us who spent a long time in the industry and then got out and had a "real" job, only to find it didn't fulfill his passion.

Then it was geek-out time today. Remember Chris Huber? He was one of the fastest sprinters in the country for years. Rode for several teams, but had a lot of success with the Coors Light team. He was also the world record holder for the fastest rider in an HPV bike for many years. Chris later went on to start building custom frames under his own name. I first started talking to Chris when I was working at NiteRider as the Customer Service Manager. He would frequently get lights for his customers as part of his build service on bikes. I got to meet him at Interbike one year and was trying to contain my hero-worship, since he was a racing hero of mine. As it turns out, one of my best friends is a good friend of Chris' and goes to Hawaii now and again to help Chris with his bike shop there during the Ironman race. Now Chris is buying bikes from us and I get to talk to him semi-regularly. One cool dude.

SO many rumors circulating now about Trek- LeMond- Merckx. If you haven't heard the rumor, it goes like this; Trek is dropping LeMond and trying to purchase the Eddy Merckx brand instead. Makes some sense I suppose. Merckx is THE legend of legends, no matter how many Tours Lance wins. Not knocking on either Trek or LeMond, since I have friends in both companies and a huge amount of respect for Greg (I rode with him and thought I would die out of joy), but it does appear that the LeMond bikes have not been doing as well and Trek needs to have a new battle plan for when that guy from Texas finally does retire. Frankly, I just can't see Eddy doing it. I always envisioned Axel taking over the company when Eddy retires, carrying on the brand for another generation. Makes for some juicy gossip anyway.

Tomatoes; fruit or vegetable?

Tim

1 comment: