g Home Make it five: Armstrong coasts into Paris

[Kramerman]

are all cyclists naturally hairless? My uncle is, he cant grow a decent beard to save his life...
anyway, i hardly ever see any bikers with hair on their legs. I know some of them have to wax (or shave), they all cant be hairless, unless that is just a whole lot more common in men then i grew up to believe. And if they do, why? I dont even understand why swimmers shave... does it make you *that* much more aerodynamic?

[asleepathewheel]

For other pictures of the race check out msnbc.com. here is an....interesting shot from the race. I would post it itself if I knew how. pic

[Imran Siddiqui]

are all cyclists naturally hairless?

Well even if they weren't, I'd assume they'd shave just to cut down on wind resistance.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

Isn't it absolutely true anyway ?

But this was like taking candy from a baby .

How's Law School coming along?

[Zopperoni]

No, unlike swimmers who do shave to cut down on resistance, cyclists don't shave their legs for that reason.

The reason cyclists shave their legs is:
1) that it is more comfortable on the massage table with shaved legs than with hairy legs; and
2) that hair contains more bacteria and dirt and stuff, so with shaved legs there is less chance of a wound becoming infected.

[Adam Smith]

A bit long, but a good read, especially the part about the chemo.

Riding for His Life After Escaping Death
By Sally Jenkins
Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page E01
I've never won the Tour de France. I've never even ridden in it. But sometimes, I write books in the voices of other people, and the person I'm best known for parroting is a breakneck, runaway boy from Texas named Lance Armstrong. This is commonly called "ghostwriting," and it's regarded as a bastardized genre, not quite autobiography, nor biography, either. Basically, it's trick-writing for hire, and, personally, I think it's an extremely peculiar thing to do for a living, this peering from behind someone else's voice and persona. The reason I do it is, it pays well. But I would hang around Lance Armstrong for free.
One of two things happens when you write a book with someone: You either wind up hating each other, or you get to be good friends. I arrived in Austin five years ago to begin working with Lance on the day his son, Luke, was born, and that's just the foot we got off on. So you can't say anything bad about him to me, I won't hear it. Every morning for the entire month of July I make a fool of myself by standing in front of the television, watching him ride in the Tour de France, and screaming, "Come on, Bike Boy!"
The rest of the world knows him as a grim-faced cereal-box superhero, or a Subaru commercial. I know him as a silly, grinning idiot who is constantly testing the ability of the world to kill him. It's remarkable to me that his arms and legs are still intact, given that he's constantly in danger of leaving his skin on a road somewhere. The thing you have to understand about the fight he's in to win his fifth Tour de France is, he likes it this way. "Armstrong," said race announcer Phil Liggett, "loves a good scrap."
He also likes motorcycles, and hurling himself from rope swings into fast moving currents. Lately, he likes to drive out to a place in the Texas hill country called Dead Man's Hole, and jump off a 50-foot limestone cliff into a cold pool of mineral water. It's his way of proving he's really alive. "You're doing it with me," he said one day. "Oh no, I'm not," I said.
"Skirt," he said.
Somehow, through crashes and heat waves and viruses, Lance continues to lead this freakish, calamitous Tour de France. He's ahead of Jan Ullrich by just 15 seconds in the Pyrenees. The other day, faced with the prospect of wrecking on a downhill descent, at 50 miles an hour on tires a half-inch thick, he swerved his bike into an empty cornfield, hopped a ditch with his bike on his shoulder, and resumed the race. His threshold for pain and fear is simply different than yours and mine. If you want to know what cancer did to him, there's your answer. He has fewer barriers than the rest of us -- and a lingering determination to kick the disease back as hard as it kicked him.
Every time he tries to win another Tour, he figures, he didn't just beat cancer.
He beat the [expletive] out of it. Pardon the expression.
Once, a close friend of his lectured him about taking stupid chances.
"Well, look," he replied. "Ain't nobody killing me."
He's a severe man who was taught by cancer that personal comfort is not the only thing worth achieving. When he competes, his lips thin and disappear, folded tight, in what his wife, Kik, calls his "medical demeanor." He keeps his hair intentionally short, as an emblem of his severity. Pictures of him as a young cyclist show a head of rich coppery hair that he used to be vain about, spending hours in the mirror with a hairdryer. But after chemo, his vanity was stripped away, along with his fears. "I don't ever want to worry about something as stupid as my hair again," he told me. "I'll wear it this way for the rest of my life."
One afternoon, on an airline from somewhere to somewhere to somewhere, we leaned back in our seats, and turned off the tape recorder, and we talked, only this time we talked like the friends we were becoming, and I found myself asking questions because I was curious, for myself.
"Do you think you know more than most people, because of what happened to you?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, uncomfortably, after a moment. "But I can't go around saying that."
"Are you afraid of dying?" I asked.
"It's always in the back of my mind," he said. "You think, 'I had it once.' "
Outside, off the wing of the plane, the sun was setting.
"Do you care what you die of?"
After another uncomfortable pause, he said, "I don't want to die of cancer."
"Why?"
"Because it's a slow death," he said. "And a slow death isn't for me."
After a while, he said, "You know when I need to die? When I'm done living. When I can't run, can't walk, can't eat, can't make love. When I'm a crotchety old bastard, mad at the world. Then I can die."
We talked about how the cancer had marked him -- literally. "What's that?" I asked, pointing to a brown patch on his arm. "Chemo burns," he said. He pulled up his pants leg and showed me another one on his leg. The drugs were so toxic, had so thoroughly scoured his veins that they literally burned through his skin, leaving faint discoloration. Another effect of the treatment was something called "Chemo brain," a fogginess and subtle memory loss that plagued him during the illness, with the result that there are whole stretches of days lost to him. Still another side effect was bone pain; he would ache so deep inside his bones that no painkiller could get at it.
He peeled back his shirt and showed me a slash on his chest where the catheter was implanted; it looked like he'd been stabbed. "The biggest scars are on my scalp, from the brain surgery," he reported, rubbing his head.
"Can I feel them?" I asked.
He dipped his head, and placed my hand in his hair. There were two deep, semicircular indentations, as if a brand had been pressed into his head.
Sometimes, when he was able to between chemo cycles, he'd go into his garage and turn on loud music, and climb on a stationary bike and pedal furiously until he was covered with sweat. He rode to prove he wasn't dying. Once, his friend Scott MacEachern was visiting him and heard loud music blasting from the garage. Scott walked in and found bald, sickly Lance on the stationary bike, standing up and hammering at the pedals, as if he was sprinting up a mountainside. "I knew then that if he lived, he was going to do something spectacular," Scott says.
When he was sick with cancer, he thought constantly about riding. He daydreamed of moving through the countryside on a bike, of the wind against his face, exploring all the different pavements of Europe, the bone-jarring and cobblestone-studded coastal roads along the north Atlantic, the winding black-gray ribbons along the sheared-off cliffs of the Alps, and the parched and jagged approaches to the Pyrenees. He yearned for the bloom of well-being riding gave him.
So I suspect that even in the midst of these hard days on the bike, in a potentially losing race as this Tour could be, Lance feels relief and pleasure that he's able to ride at all. Even now, sometimes, he worries about getting sick again. "I know too much about the disease," he says. "I'll never turn my back on it."
In cycling there's no padding, or protection, no outer skin of metal to protect a rider from the elements and dangers. There is only a flimsy jersey.
The rider is utterly exposed -- and this is the thing Lance loves about his sport more than all else. The cyclist experiences great emotions, sublime views, the swooping exhilaration of a mountain descent, but also a penalty on the body like no other sport, a physical toll in exchange for the beauty of the trip, a constant chipping away at his person, to remind him that he's human. The chipping away defeats most other riders. But to Lance, it's weirdly affirming. At least he can feel it. So don't count him out of this race.
The Tour de France is unlike any other race in the world, because in the end, no matter how advanced the machinery of the bike, there is no mechanical advantage that gets you up the hills, slopes that even cars have a hard time ascending. The body trumps the technology. This is really why Lance rides: to prove that in a scientific and highly mechanized era, his body is the real marvel.
There's an old saying that he loves. It was passed on to him from a friend and fellow cancer survivor named Sally Reed, who is a volunteer at his cancer foundation. "My house is burned down," the saying goes, "but I can see the sky."
Here's the thing about Lance. What will happen if he loses the Tour de France?
He'll live.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[Kramerman]

Originally posted by Zopperoni
No, unlike swimmers who do shave to cut down on resistance, cyclists don't shave their legs for that reason.

The reason cyclists shave their legs is:
1) that it is more comfortable on the massage table with shaved legs than with hairy legs; and
2) that hair contains more bacteria and dirt and stuff, so with shaved legs there is less chance of a wound becoming infected.

is that a serious answer? really, i cant tell if it is or not.

[pchang]

serious

That was a serious answer. However, the reason I have been taught is slightly different. Wounds from crashes are a bit more difficult to clean and bandage properly if you have a lot of hair on your legs. I am unfortunate enough to know this from personal experience.

[Zopperoni]

Originally posted by Kramerman
is that a serious answer? really, i cant tell if it is or not.

That was a very serious answer, and pchang added to the second reason.

Personally, I shave my legs for cycling primarily because it makes it easier for me to put on and take off my cycling pants. It also feels less warm without the hair.

[Dry]

Originally posted by Zopperoni
Furthermore, Merckx is also winner of five Giro d'Italias and one Vuelta d'Espana IIRC.

Exact.
In 74 he won all 3: World Championship + Tour + Giro.

World champion: (64), 67, 71, 74
Tour: 69, 70, 71, 72, 74
Giro: 68, 70, 72, 73, 74
Vuelta: 73

He was first in the main classifications (jerseys had to be worn by seconds):
69: yellow (general), green (points) and dots (mountain).
70: yellow and dots
71: yellow and green
72: yellow and green

Between 69 and 75 he won +/- 250 races/stages, one every 8 days.
His nickname was "The cannibal".

[TCO]

USA!

[alva]

No, unlike swimmers who do shave to cut down on resistance, cyclists don't shave their legs for that reason.

The reason cyclists shave their legs is:
1) that it is more comfortable on the massage table with shaved legs than with hairy legs; and
2) that hair contains more bacteria and dirt and stuff, so with shaved legs there is less chance of a wound becoming infected.

Close, or maybe add to that; when their is alot of sweat, hair makes it easier to get infected (which is obviously a little annoying when it happens somewhere in and around the pants area.

[alva]

It's quits amazing looking at that pic how much weight he has lost.

Strange how something so awfull can change your life for the better...