Races this weekend weren’t boring.
A fine palate cleanser for sure.
Damn I love that Leuven course.
You’ll like this then.
The course feels really organic in a way that a lot of courses don’t. They didn’t do lots of crazy things to turn a boring park into a great cross course. Some of the most challenging features are the ditches on the side of the road. And the super rutted out embankment was used so well. Top quality course design.
My favorite course has always been Ronse. Big, wide open track. The course designers aren’t telling the riders how to get around the course. They put the tape 50’ wide and riders have to figure out the best way to get from one turn to the next.
Onboard footage is really revealing. From that angle the jump over the second road ditch that some of the gents were doing looks scary as hell. So many little nooks and crannies of the course I didn’t see in the broadcast. I guess that’s something you could say for the world’s course this year–I think it was pretty much all out there for the cameras to show.
Ronse is pretty great too. (I much prefer watching the racing when Compton can actually breathe). Not only are the choices wide open, on those rolling hills the lines change during the day and there’s room to invent new options.
I didn’t realize that was one of the races that KFC had an asthma attack. I almost posted one of the muddy Ronse races (2013 I think) Those are just insane.
Yeah, she wheezed out around lap 2. Had a cold of some kind so it was almost inevitable. Not perfectly comfortable with fanboi-ing on Compton but she just happens to be the best cyclist the US has ever produced, and she can be really dominant on my favorite kinds of terrain (see US nats this year).
See US nats for the 14 years before that too.
She’s a year older than me and can still kick ass.
This is heartbreaking.
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Yeah. That’s really sad to read.
Frank posted this online.
Something her brother said really stuck. The idea that we assume that people who are incredible athletes while also being wonderful students and artists and doctors are really “strong”. That they’re somehow an ideal form that we should all strive to be. But we don’t recognize that it’s still exhausting and stressful for them the same as it would be for anyone else. They just keep going when other people would stop. Which might not be a good thing for them.
Most of that was my words, not his.
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Her family spoke more to the Washington Post
Two crashes, one in which she broke her arm in October and another in which she sustained a concussion in December, seemed to take away the control, the multitasking, that Catlin had always prized. In January, she attempted suicide for the first time and was clearly a different person to her family. “She was not the Kelly that we knew,” her father said. “She spoke like a robot. We could get her to talk, but we wondered, ‘what has happened to our Kelly?’
" . . . Everything was open to her, but somehow her thinking was changed and she couldn’t see beyond, I guess, her depression. After her concussion, she started embracing nihilism. Life was meaningless. There was no purpose. This was a person with depression. For her, she could no longer concentrate on her studies or train as hard. She couldn’t fulfill what she felt were her obligations to herself, she couldn’t live up to her own standards. She couldn’t realize that what she needed to do was get away and rest, heal. We were all searching for the magic words, that life was worth living.”
This was also great
Depression is an existential threat in a way few other things are. Depression can kill you long before your heart stops beating. You shrink from the world because it doesn’t feed you. You begin to see yourself as a burden, a blight on the world itself.
That Catlin was an Olympic medalist makes her death all the more stupefying to many. She’d achieved so much, people will think. She’d done something rare, something special, the sort of thing that is supposed to accelerate a career, mark you for future success. And the reasons why this didn’t immunize her from depression are diverse. If you’ve been trained to believe you’re a champion, that nothing short of winning matters, a silver medal isn’t an achievement, it’s a loss. If you think that you can’t possibly live up to that moment again, it’s easy to look upon your future and see 60 anticlimactic years ahead. If you look upon an achievement and think you didn’t fully deserve it, that you didn’t pull your weight or that there was something accidental, or ingenuine in your effort, that medal might not feel like it’s yours.
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Depression is also bog-standard with a serious head-injury. I don’t know how bad her “concussions” were, I hate that minimising word. In a highly functioning allrounder it might be even harder to deal with. We’ve been living with a TBI in our family for the last 35 years and there have been several seriously intentioned attempts at ending it all. Most people have no clue what goes on inside a brain injured persons head. They look completely normal on the outside.
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Oh! That explains a lot of why everything ground to a stop in Chateau Chaos over the last couple of years (until I went back on antidepressants.) That’s, um, something to know.
The only marginally fun side of a frontal lobe syndrome TMI is the disinhibition . Great for picking up people in bars and also for selling real estate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe_disorder
I wonder if pinkbike is reading tarck.
Ze plot thickens, but either way I think it’s a good thing that Richie isn’t racing Rotura.
Personally, even if we all live in a world where “innocent until proven guilty” is our standard I can’t help but feel that any athlete that has tested positive for doping in any sport should be “temp-banned” until final verdict is ruled. For the sports sake and to rid the sport of dopers, those with intent and those who made mistakes.
FWIW, it varies based on substance. If you get caught on actual steroids, EPO, etc - you will get temporarily banned until a judgement is made. The reason they are not temp banned is due to the substances they tested positive for, which don’t carry the same weight. Both those substances carry like a 6-12 mo ban on their own- but possibly more due to the combo, i dunno. It also depends on whether they can prove intention.
For more serious infractions, intentional cheating = 4 year ban, while “accidental” (i.e. no TUE) = 2 year ban.
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Also there is often a lag between A and B tests. In 2007 at the masters track worlds in Bankstown one guy got 2 podiums while he was awaiting his B sample result, at least that was my understanding at the time.
Just listening to the podcast on cyclingtips.com on how the nordic skiers were beating the biological passports. They put their blood bag in, before the race, and out again, after the race… They must feel like pin cushions. Not particularly high-tech. The best solutions never are.