Here’s a quick bit of footage from today’s Urban Freeride event in Newcastle upon Tyne. I’ll cut together a longer piece for Monday. The YouTube vid is lo-res, sign up and subscribe to get the hi-res version for video iPods and Apple TVs .
The Nissan Quashqai microsite will have some great footage online soon. The company is paying big bucks for an outdoor broadcast company to video what Nissan is billing as “first international Pan-European Urban Freeride Competition with the largest prize fund to date.”
However, there’s some bad news. US rider was taken to hospital today after falling from a ladder bridge. He injured his back, and fellow star riders Darren Berrecloth and Cam McCaul went with Aaron to hospital. The 28-year old compressed his spine and chipped his L1 vertebrae.
Berrecloth told Quickrelease.tv: “Newcastle General hospital has one of the best spine surgeons in the country so Aaron lucked out in that respect.”
UPDATE (Weds, 9th May):Statement from Cannondale:
After a freak accident during the first stop of the QashQui event in Newcastle, England. Aaron was riding a ladder bridge, when his rear tire slipped off and he fell 8 feet down landing on his tailbone. The impact caused a compression of his L1 vertebrae. After several X-Rays doctors to not foresee ANY permanent damage and expect Aaron to make a complete recovery within 6 months.
We spoke to Aaron this morning from his hospital bed where he had high spirits while resting comfortably. When asked about the crash Aaron stated it was a total freak accident. “I was riding a wide bridge and my rear wheel just slipped off. Luckily the way I landed there will be no long term effects and doctors are expecting a 100% recovery.”
Aaron went on to praise all of his sponsors for their continued support at a very difficult time. “I have the best sponsors in the world, their support gives me peace of mind and encouragement to continue to do what I love so much.
Everyone at Cannondale wishes Aaron a speedy and healthy recovery!
There’s are lots of great little bike movies about Amsterdam, Copenhagen and other cycle-mad cities. They’re inspiring, something to aim that, something to show to politicians to demonstrate a bicycle-friendly city is a civilised, modern, cool city.
Some of these movies are on YouTube, simply search on some obvious keywords to find them.
But here’s a 15-minute video from 2004 that hasn’t been on YouTube, until now. It’s from the Netherlands-based Interface for Cycling Expertise. I-CE for short. The video is available as a stonking-great, 156meg download from the I-CE website but it’s in Quicktime format. Not every computer has Quicktime installed but most can play YouTube’s Flash movies.
I was given permission to place the movie on YouTube. As well as roving around the Netherlands and Denmark, the movie includes footage from Bogota, Columbia. Got a video iPod and/or Apple TV? Subscribe to the to get this movie on your hi-def plasma TV.
The movies was scripted by Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogota, who used the Dutch and Read the rest of this entry »
‘Floydfairnessfund1′ created a YouTube account on 30th March. Michael Henson, the PR man for Landis, is featured in the vid - along with lots of riding shots of our hero, of course - and as Henson is the executive director of the Floyd Fairness Fund he must be ‘Floydfairnessfund1′. But why the ‘1′? There’s no YouTube user called ‘Floydfairnessfund’?
The video is professionally produced, although it goes black before the end. Anyway, who cares, it’s another example of the Landis camp using the internet to advance their message. Go, Floyd, go!
There’s more info on BikeBiz.com and, of course, on .
John Burke, president of Trek USA, has created a PowerPoint presentation about why bike companies should increase their financial support of bicycle advocates and political lobbying groups.
He first aired the talk at the National Bike Summit in Washington DC two weeks ago. On Sunday it was also given to Taiwan’s A-Team of industry leaders and in a conference room at the the Taipei trade show.
Here’s my 23-minute video of Burke’s 40-minute talk. I created the slide graphics in Mac’s Keynote as John Burke’s slides didn’t come out very well on the video (I was using a small stills camera, not my normal video camera).
ORIGINAL POWERPOINT PRESENTATION (NO AUDIO):
Jonathan Maus of the Bike Portland blog was present at the first airing of the talk and he headlined his coverage ‘Is John Burke the Al Gore of the bike trade?’ This was a reference to Al Gore’s slide show about climate change, ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ The slide show, seen all over the world, was made into a movie, winning this year’s Oscar for best documentary.
Burke’s presentation also focussed on the environment but majored on what Burke knows best: the bike trade. His presentation was aimed at encouraging bike companies to spend more money on cycle advocacy.
He called the bicycle “the perfect product at the perfect time.” And bike companies would sell more of them if there were more places for folks to ride them.
“The number one way to grow the business and to have an impact on society, health, environment and congestion is to create a bicycle-friendly world,” said Burke.
He revealed that for every $100 of sales, bike companies typically spend $3.90 on marketing, $1.60 on R&D but just 10 cents on advocacy.
“That doesn’t make sense. As an industry we need to look at how we spend money. Why do we spend the amount of money on marketing and product and little on advocacy?”
He wants to “spur a debate in the industry” about “where we’re spending our money.”
Read the rest of "Spend more on advocacy, urges Trek boss"...
Simon Spotlight Entertainment, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, is to publish the Floyd Landis autobiography at the end of June. The book will therefore hit the shops after the USADA tribunal starting May 14th - which will decide Floyd’s fate – and before the 2007 Tour de France kicks off in London.
Whatever the tribunal decides, Positively False will become a bestseller. Quickrelease.tv can safely predict Floyd’s book will far outsell Inside Dope: How Drugs Are the Biggest Threat to Sports, Why You Should Care, and What Can Be Done About Them. This is a polemic by WADA boss Dick Pound. Despite his love of getting his strong, and often controversial, views into the mass media, Dick Pound trails Floyd Landis in the Google rankings. See this Google Fight.
Floyd leads with 1.8m results with Dick trailing at 1.3m despite having a first name that can bring in lots of extra results, albeit from sites you may not want your mother to see.
The Quickrelease.tv video stats bear out this heavy defeat for Dick Pound. This YouTube video on Dick Pound’s views on hacking and admin errors has had just 160 views:
However, this video featuring Phil Liggett’s views about the likely innocence of Floyd has had 11, 457 views:
Read the rest of this entry »
Read the rest of "BOOK WARS: Floyd Landis vs Dick Pound"...
One Got Fat is an infamous 1963 public information safety film from what might be supposed were the drug-crazed minds of the writers and directors at Interlude Films of the US.
Watch it and weep. It’s wrong on a multitude of levels. Today, that is. Perhaps it was normal for the 1960s? Making kids cycle along the street in monkey masks? Normal for 1963?
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972)
BICYCLE DRUGS TRIVIA
Author and playwright Aldus Huxley popularised the ingestion of LSD in the late 1950s. The drug was first made in 1938, the psychedelic properties not being discovered until 1943.
Why is this short history of LSD on a bike site?
April 19th 1943 is known as Bicycle Day, because a certain Dr. Hofmann took the drug and then rode, you guessed it, a bicycle.
Dr Hofman wrote:
“I asked my laboratory assistant, who was informed of the self-experiment, to escort me home. We went by bicycle, no automobile being available because of wartime restrictions on their use. On the way home, my condition began to assume threatening forms. Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless, my assistant later told me we had travelled very rapidly.”
Five bike repair and maintenance videos have been posted to YouTube. There are many more to come.
They will be also be available as higher-resolution video podcasts for subscribing to and downloading to your video iPod. The links will be placed here soon.
FIXING A PUNCTURE:
BIKE VALVES:
WASHING AND LUBING YOUR BIKE:
OPERATING QUICK RELEASES:
BASIC TRAIL TOOL KIT:
The videos are also available on the YouTube group.
With today’s release of there’s now an easy way to get video podcasts on to your high-definition television screen.
Previewed as iTV by Apple’s Steve Jobs last year, Apple Inc. (now without the ‘Computer’) has plumped for Apple TV as a name. ITV, of course, is a UK broadcast company network and might have taken umbrage at use of its name.
Quickrelease.tv will soon upload to iTunes all of the video podcasts found on CYCLING: News & Views, the old DotMac account, now sadly broken. Not that Mac stuff ever breaks
Before this uploading you can watch the lo-res vids on YouTube .
