Would a celebrity endorsed bike be your first pick?

A few years ago I met a bloke from Halfords who was involved in the marketing of their bike range. We were chatting away and got on to the subject of their offer. He asked me what my view was of Halfords and what they should do to improve their lot. They'd clearly seen the growth in Bike sales happening but were lumbered with the association of being a car accessories store which sold bikes on the side. At the time I think I muttered something about 'improve the product cos people think it's shit'.
It's interesting to look back at that time and see what they did do: got celeb endorsement to drive sales.
And so was born the Boardman bike range.
Now I'm sure Halfords and Chris Boardman would stress that Chris had a huge hand in the design and development of these bikes and he probably had some to the extent of saying 'I'm not putting my name to any old rubbish'.
It's clearly worked for them both: the bikes are very nice indeed and they sell like hot cakes. 

More recently, Evans Cycles has taken the same approach and reeled in Chris Hoy to back up their range. Looking a bit further back, Greg's Trek-made Lemond range came a cropper when he slagged off Lance and there are of course the Merckx bikes which have been doing the rounds for a good few years.
So, do the moves by Halfords and Evans signal a significant change in the approach of big retail?
Well, yeah, but as the two other examples show it's nothing new. 
There's something about celeb endorsement which just fails to excite me. I guess the idea is that, if Chris Boardman is willing to put his name to something then it must be OK for me to buy and ride.
And, for me, that's at the heart of everything that's wrong with the approach. If you are unwilling to spend a bit of time looking around two or three bike shops, asking a few questions or using the web for research, then you're probably not really that interested in bikes and cycling. So, in my view, the celeb approach puts off as many as it attracts. But I'm probably wrong, it probably puts off far fewer.
There probably is a bit of snobbery on my part here and I would undoubtedly ride any of the bikes mentioned above, they just wouldn't be my first pick.

Le tour 2013

Le trailer cinematique pour le tour de France 2013

Click Greg's face

Fin

Hill climb blues

Greg LeMond once said about cycling that "It never gets easier; you just go faster." For me that quote encapsulates much of what cycling is about for everyone from Tour de France winners to the semi-serious club rider.
You do not have to be a cyclist to understand that cycling for more than say, 30-40 miles, is about endurance, effort and, occasionally, pain.
As you strain every sinew to grind your way to the top of a steep incline, you can be forgiven for thinking that you never want to see your bike again.  Wishing you could be spirited away to the top of the climb or placed in some nearby tea shop in the company of a steaming brew and a cherry scone.

Granny ring ahead

Of course, this doesn't happen as you select your lowest gear and try to maintain forward momentum.
But gradually, you get stronger and fitter.  Hills which you used to suffer on now roll beneath you and go unnoticed.  It's still hard, you still have to apply pressure to your pedals to get there, but you are going and, more importantly, going faster.
Soon you begin to understand that everyone else you are riding with is in the same boat: everyone is suffering on the climbs it's just that some suffer at a higher pace.
That everyone suffers provides excellent encouragement to the club rider: not in any schadenfreude way but knowing you are not alone can be a welcome tonic.
There's a good article on riding hills on this blog if you're interested. 

Can Lance rebuild his battered reputation?

Oh dear, dear me.  Lance.  What can you say? Having read some of the USADA's evidence against Lance, it's impossible not to come to the conclusion that he did it.  They've pretty much got him bang to rights.  
Of all the testimony, it's George Hincape's which is most damning.
While Lance and his team of lawyers have tried to swat away allegations from those they considered untrustworthy, having your chief lieutenant point the finger too, demolishes any shred of doubt there may have been.
Rather than analyse the quotes and testimony from the Reasoned Decision of the USADA - principally because other people have already done it and done it better than I would elsewhere - I'm going to explore what it could mean for Lance now.
Lance's moves thus far have been true to form: abrasive, dismissive and acerbic.  But now he's played those cards and its all blown up in his face, what options does he have to salvage a reputation which has fallen further than Jimmy Saville's - admittedly from a higher starting point.
Let's just imagine that I'm advising Lance on his reputation, what would I advise he do now?
Well, presuming he is as guilty as the evidence suggests, my advice would be to simply come clean.

Top half of Team Battenburg 

Lance's story remains a fascinating one and he can actually use the doping to his advantage by building the next stage of his life around it. As well as being driven to win, Lance could well point out pressures from sponsors like Nike and Trek and the requirement of the UCI to have a global figure for the sport which would build on the foundations set by Greg Lemond and sell the sport to the biggest market in the world.
These pressures, Lance could say, led him into a spiral of doping which had to be maintained to prevent the whole façade from crumbling. With each race, each transfusion and each denial, he was painting himself into a corner from which there was no escape but only denial.
An 'I did it and I'm sorry' followed with a pledge to continue raising money for his cancer charity, would be the first step toward his public rehabilitation.
The next steps from the UCI and Lance himself will be fascinating to watch. Whether he digs his heels in or comes clean, Lance will remain a divisive figure in the sport and while his record is still recognised by the UCI, he continues to cast a long shadow over it.

Retro cycling jerseys

What would the Tour de France be without the Malliot Jaune?  And the Giro without the Maglia Rosa? These are among the most recognisable jerseys in sport.  In the case of the tour's yellow, it's right up there with Brazil's famous football strip and the intimidating All Blacks kit: instantly recognisable around the world.
The design of the current crop of pro-team kit is quite interesting to read.  The obvious purpose of the design is to afford the sponsor as clear a platform as possible to build their profile.
It's odd that from my seat in the UK that exotic sounding teams are in fact just sponsorship platforms for the most mundane corporate activities.  I don't know what I was expecting but to find out that FDJ is the French equivalent of the National Lottery and that PMU, sponsors of the Tour's Malliot Vert is a bookies where French blokes go to have a flutter on the nags, kind of destroys the magic.
The nicest kit in the Peleton of le Tour this year was, in my view, Saxo / Tinkoff Bank, closely followed by Europecar's green.
However, it was defiantly Team Sky shirt which fulfilled its sponsorship objective most successfully.
It's retro styling is clean and neat and judging by the amount of people you see out wearing it, the sales of replicas have been strong for them.
I started watching the tour in the late 1980s - in the days of Channel 4 coverage and I really love some of the jerseys from that era.
Sean Kelly in the yellow of Kas, Roche in Carrera Jeans, the superb Systeme U shirt worn by, among others Lauren Fignon and Luis Hererra's Cafe de Columbia.  My favourite however, was the La Vie Claire top worn by Hinault and LeMond.
The Molteni shirt made famous by Merckx is a classic too which still looks fantastic.
Designs of almost everything go through a period of being naff before acquiring a retro cool and I think this is where some of the 1990s cycling shirts are now.

So whereas you can buy a new reproduction of the Merckx Moltenti and La Vie Claire from the superb Prendas Ciclismo, you can't get US Postal, T Mobile or Mercatone Uno.  But their time will probably come.