Interbike 2008

Interbike and its sister whoop-it-up event Outdoor Demo open this week in Las Vegas. This could just as easily be called "Boys and Their Toys" as the crowd of mostly men swoop down on the Sands Convention Center and Bootleg Canyon to froth over the latest and greatest the bike industry has to offer. There are always a couple of things to expect every year.

• Move Interbike: Interbike has a contract with the Sands through the 2009 show. But there is growing interest in packing up the truck and hauling the carnival to Anaheim, Salt Lake City or, more possibly, Denver. Las Vegas simply does not represent the culture of modern cycling, critics contend. But looking around "The Show," as it is known, one could get the idea that boozy nights (free beer from vendors jump starts most nights) on The Strip is more in line than Micky Mouse or mountain highs.
  
  
• New Products + Vendors: One major point of the show is to reveal new products to a mass audience. A dizzying array of vendors sets up every year, so much so that it's easy to get lost. At the end of the day, it's tough to leave with little more than a glazed-over appearance.
  
  
• Education: Believe it or not, some learning does happen in Vegas. Interbike always includes plenty of seminars that are actually helpful and informative to store owners and managers and down the road customers. Store mechanics sign up for technical demonstrations and instruction while owners and managers try to figure out smoother ways to operate.
  
  
• Italian Stallion: Ciclismo Italiano (i.e. the Italian manufacturers section) will have the best dressed, most sophisticated area of the show. Dark suits, bright pink and orange neckties and sleek black cocktail dresses provide the highest standard at The Show.
  
  
• Down + Dirty: Its' the same thing every year. Day 1: Going ga-ga for new stuff. Day 2: Getting down and dirty with vendor meetings and preseason orders. This is the year's beginning and the end for most bicycle retailers.
  
  

If you just can't get enough, check out Interbike or Twitter: Interbike 2008.

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Ironman: A Classic Footrace

So, maybe it's not about the bike after all. The World Championship in Hawaii returned to its roots as a footrace on Saturday when Craig Alexander pounded out a 2:45 marathon to take home top honors। Even with light winds, those who went out strong, gaining big leads on the bike, did so at their peril. In fact, just four of the top 10 overall professional men finishers had a top 10 bike split.

The most striking of the fizzlers was Torbjorn Sindballe. He led off the bike with a segment time of 4:27:40, having averaged 25.11 mph. Yet he finished 46th, 8 minutes and 20 seconds behind women's winner Chrissie Wellington. It was a classic blow-up. Alexander, on the other hand, was 11th off the bike - more than9 minutes back from the leader. But his 6:17 per mile pace steadily took him past the big guns. It was a similar yet not as striking phenomenon for the women.

Winner Chrissie Wellington had a 7 minute lead over Belinda Granger - even after an 11 minute setback from a flat tire - when she came in from the bike. Wellington, of course, held on to her lead, winning with about 15 minutes to spare. Like Wellington, second-place finisher Yvonne Van Vlerken bucked the fast-bike-blown-run bunch. She moved up one spot on the run from her third place bike finish. Granger wasn't so lucky. She sunk on the run, finishing in 17th position. In all, six of the top 10 women finishers had a top 10 bike split.

Will this be an end to the fairings, dimpled aero helmets and slick, super-fast bikes? No. But might some folks be thinking more about their run training in a year's time? After the race on Saturday, the answer almost certainly is yes.

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Legalized Cheating?

Has equipment evolution in the name of speed gone too far? TJ Tolakson turned plenty of heads at the World Championship last week with what many believed to be a carbon fairing on the front of his aerobars. That designation would make it illegal under the rules. Yet there he was plugging along the course. At the end of the day, his bike split was less than speedy, relatively speaking of course. Joining Tolakson on front-end improvements was Faris Al Sultan with his Xentis Aero X1 aerobars. Very slick, but over the top? And it appears that swimskins have reached critical mass. Most, if not all, of the participants climbed out of the Pacific wearing these suits. So, some have started to wonder about the purity of a sport that so values equipment evolution to gain speed.

Paul Huddle, Bob Babbitt and Michellie Jones had a discussion about all of these inventions only to determine that enough was enough. Swimskins and fairings and aero water bottle holders are damaging the purity of the sport, they more or less concluded. But is it cheating when everyone has access to the products? Or is it cheating when even with all of these aids finish times are still - at best - about seven minutes off Luc Van Lierde's 1996 course record of 8:04:08? Perhaps we'll find out in the year's to come. But for now, nearly anything goes.

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Men, Women + Ironman

Women have shone brightly in the news and society of late. A lot, as it were. There is, of course, government and the meteoric rise in attention surrounding politicians in skirts and pantsuits. Retailers - especially bike shops - are trying to figure out how to better serve women. Men are stealing the girly infatuation with color by actually wearing pink in public. Jennifer Lopez got things rolling in media circles by doing the Malibu Triathlon. Though, that's not necessarily a focus on women specifically. But it does bring around the point that men and women have long performed differently in sport. (Or maybe that's a stretch for a segue). In any event, that's probably not going to change much even as science advances in the field of sports medicine, a researcher wrote in the journal of the American College of Sports Medicine.

In analyzing two decades of results from Ironman events, Romuald Lepers, of the University of Burgundy in Dijon, determined that finish times of all athletes have plateaued. Lepers found that times decreased dramatically from 1981 through the late 1980s. But from 1988 through 2007, performance increased only 1.4 percent overall. Women made stronger advances than men in the run portion of Ironman, decreasing times by 3.8 percent in the last decade. But the data also show, Lepers wrote in this month's Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise journal, that there is nothing in the information he analyzed to indicate any changes in performance between genders in the future.

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