US Olympic BMX Team

 The Following appeared in yesterday's New York Times:

Remember, St. Cloud's own, Alise Post is on this team, and has a pretty good shot at getting on the podium!

July 19, 2012

BMX Racers Roll With Latest Methods

By GREG BISHOP

CHULA VISTA, Calif. — When Mike King raced BMX bicycles, the sport’s elite knew nothing of dynamic warm-ups, or core cooling, or thermal regulation. They did not mix sports drinks for maximum hydration and electrolyte balance.

They were BMX riders, and they resided at the intersection of counterculture and extreme sports, and the very idea of science as a means to improvement seemed downright uncool. This was before bicycle motocross became an Olympic discipline, before King became an Olympic coach, before his sport and its outdated training methods underwent a scientific revolution after its debut at the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing.

At a recent practice, King looked less like an employee of USA Cycling and more like the BMX pioneer he was in what now seems like another life. He wore a mesh hat cocked sideways and low-hanging shorts, his face covered in stubble, eyes hidden behind sunglasses.

King paused and considered how to answer a question about his team’s so-called magic pants and their powers of recovery.

“Magic pants?” King said as he grimaced slightly. “I really can’t discuss them.”

That Belichickian response showed how much BMX has evolved since the Beijing Games, transformed from rebellious adolescent into, King said, “something more grown-up.” As he spoke, the team’s video coordinator, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, recorded practice runs from a nearby roof, beaming the images and data to the iPads of coaches on the course.

One of those coaches, James Herrera, started in BMX in 1977. As he gravitated toward coaching, he focused on less developed training methods, returned to school and obtained master’s degrees in psychology and exercise physiology. Such methods sounded, at first, like a foreign language to his charges.

When King raced, advancements in strategy came mostly from watching competitors or reading textbooks. The basics: climb on small bike, pedal furiously, turn left, repeat. The riders traveled together, ate together and sometimes bunked together, a mix of French and British and Australian, with as much camaraderie as competition.

Some of the more serious athletes transitioned into other cycling disciplines. The British track cyclist Chris Hoy, winner of three gold medals in Beijing, started in BMX.

So did his teammate Jamie Staff, a gold medalist for Britain who became a track cycling coach for the United States. He used to watch Christophe Leveque, the Flying Frenchman, who dominated BMX throughout the 1990s with support from French sports federations. Staff and others were devoted, riding for six to eight hours daily. But that training, Staff said, was “misguided” and “uneducated.”

When the sport made the Olympic stage, other nations followed the Leveque model. BMX training became more like track cycling training, which had become more like road cycling training, with a process similar to the one used by Tour de France teams.

“It’s getting really scientific, which is not really BMX,” Staff said. “I know they’re trying to keep BMX cool and hip and trendy. At the same time, they’re changing the mentality. At this point, you buy into it. Or you don’t bother.”

When the 2008 Olympics rolled around, King concentrated on keeping his athletes relaxed. He knew the pressure and the magnitude would be higher than ever.

It felt, he said, like a culmination: BMX, at the highest level of sport, on prime-time international television; BMXers in the opening ceremony, clad in red, white and blue. This meant more money, more exposure, more legitimacy as a sport.

One future Olympian watched the event on television. His name is Connor Fields. He is a favorite for this summer’s London Games.

“The impact couldn’t have been bigger,” he said. “The Olympics justified and solidified everything we do.”

The minute the races in Beijing ended, another race began, and the United States program was caught flat-footed. The American men and women had seized half the Olympic BMX medals because they possessed the deepest talent pool, because the sport was created and incubated in Southern California.

That would no longer be enough, not after Australia, France and other countries put their considerable resources — more private financing and sports institutes — behind BMX in late 2008. The United States, Herrera said, fell “maybe a year behind.”

At the same time, King and company shifted their junior development strategy. They went for youth, replacing veterans with prospects, save for Mike Day, the elder statesman and a silver medalist in Beijing.

The United States retained the largest talent pool but needed to take a more scientific approach to training. Herrera was mindful of the pattern in another cycling discipline. Mountain biking, he said, was also created in the United States, yet an American last won an Olympic medal in that sport in 1996, its first year in the Games.

The American BMX program underwent a training overhaul. Herrera came onboard. Simple dietary changes were instituted: no dessert or sugary energy drinks; more fruits and vegetables and nutritional supplements. Jerseys were designed to be tighter and more wind-resistant.

Coaches studied different exercises in the gym and measured their effects on the bike. They added power meters, as had been done in the other cycling disciplines. Based on the data they accrued, they adjusted the volume of on-course training and its frequency, determined whether riders needed more practice on uphill or downhill sections, and selected gear.

They hired a videographer who used the computer program Dartfish to show riders the best lines to take on a given turn. Videos of individual riders could be placed side by side on a screen, as if they were racing, to compare which one took the most direct route.

In most elite BMX races, Herrera said, the winner finishes less than a second and a half ahead of the competitor who finishes 64th. Often, the gap is less than one second.

“In my era, we’d probably roll our eyes,” King said. “But at this level, with the money we spend, 1 percent of improvement based on sports technology could be one thousandth of a second, which could be the difference between a gold and silver medal.”

Before the 2008 Games, the United States built a replica of the Beijing course at the Olympic Training Center here. Each year, it hosted an official race. Day won the first one in 35.9 seconds. Fields won the most recent one in 33.6, a difference, he said, of 10 to 20 meters.

Those gains, which Herrera described as massive and astronomical, came in large part because Fields, 19, emerged during BMX’s scientific revolution. His coach, Sean Dwight, said BMX, with athletes on tiny bikes traveling down steep ramps in three seconds at 40 miles an hour with seven other competitors to contend with, was more explosive than the 100 meters in track and as explosive as weight lifting.

Dwight focuses most on Fields’s biomechanics, believing that an ideal position on the bike produces maximum power. He knows almost immediately whether Fields’s head is tilted two inches the wrong way, or his shoulders are too far back.

While Fields helped push BMX into this new territory, the courses grew longer, the jumps higher, the turns more dangerous. If this made BMX more viewer-friendly, it also worried coaches.

The replica London course sits near the replica Beijing course, and it appears at least twice the size and twice as difficult. The first jump, Herrera said, is the length of three to three and a half cars. King said BMX had “reached its threshold,” just as he said four years ago. Asked if the progression meant somebody could ultimately die, he said, “I hope not.”

Regardless, the scientific revolution will continue. King said riders were once ridiculed for acknowledging that they took ice baths. He laughed and called the progress mind-boggling, adding, “You know, it’s still a bike race.”

He won plenty of those without science, but the United States had no gold medals in Beijing. If to win a gold meant that BMX had to lose some of its counterculture cool, well, consider King a convert, magic pants and all.

12 People on a Bike with Beer

Let's have a really big science project - a Beer Bike! Here is another article from the NY Times:

A Hybrid That Runs on Foot Power and Beer

By SALLY MCGRANE

AMSTERDAM — Eight British bankers in orange jumpsuits, their ID patches embroidered with the names of Tolkien characters, were in town for a bachelor weekend (Frodo was getting married). They had just finished a two-hour city tour on a beer bike. “Arwen fell off!” said a very cheerful Pippin. “He almost killed himself!”

“We had girls running after us!” Gandalf said.

“Well,” Pippin pointed out, “they wanted a lift.”

“Still,” said Aragorn, the best man, “we talked to women. It was great.”

A kind of pub on wheels, propelled by pedaling, the beer bike — which in Europe is usually but not always steered by an employee of the tour company rather than by one of the partygoers — is thought to have been invented in the Netherlands in the late 1990s.

But in recent years, the contraption, variously promoted as a social lubricant; an original, environmentally correct way to see a city; and a healthier, calorie-burning alternative to sitting in a bar, has expanded its appeal beyond the Dutch border to several European countries and the United States.

“We are just human beings,” said Ard Karsten, who started building beer bikes and running tours in the Dutch capital in 2005. “We like enjoyment.”

Mr. Karsten installed a new keg of beer on his bright blue, 20-foot-long, 1,500-odd-pound machine, which can hit speeds of five miles per hour and accommodate 12 riders on regular bicycle seats around a wooden bar, where beer is on tap. A bench in the back provides more seating.

The next group, a bachelor party from Paris, settled in, and Mr. Karsten took the helm. “Everybody needs to pedal,” he barked, as the bike began to move forward, merging into street traffic. “Don’t give beer to locals. Don’t slow down. Don’t scream and shout.” He looked around as the Parisians lighted cigarettes. “And stop smoking! It’s bad for your health.”

“Tourists like to see Amsterdam in a new way,” Mr. Karsten explained.

But the beer bike is increasingly international. “We receive requests from countries I’ve never even heard of,” said Zwier van Laar, the Dutchman who claims to have invented the first beer bike in 1997 as a way to help a pub owner advertise his establishment in a local parade.

Udo Klemt, a German lawyer, saw his first beer bike while on a trip to the Netherlands. “I fell in love immediately,” he said, and imported one of Mr. van Laar’s machines to Cologne in 2005.

Two years later, Mr. Klemt founded the BierBike company, which offers tours on Dutch-made beer bikes in some 30 cities in Germany and Budapest. “All I know is that it is really fun to ride one of these,” he said. “I have plans for the whole world.”

In much the same way, James Watts, an American who used to work in the software industry, saw one of the bikes while on vacation in Cologne two years ago. “I said, ‘I’m going to bring one of those back to Oregon.’ ”

At home, Mr. Watts built the first Cycle Pub, then teamed up with Mr. Karsten to import Dutch beer bike technology. So far, they have made vehicles for Reno, Nev.; Boise, Idaho; Portland; Madison, Wis.; Tucson; Denver; and Santa Monica and Redondo Beach in California. Mr. van Laar said he had sold 11 beer bikes in the United States. At least one American company, Caztek, based in St. Paul, started building them last year.

Exactly why beer bikes carry such appeal is still something of a mystery. There is the beer, of course, which for some is reason enough. For many, it is the combination of partying and pedaling, which accomplishes a special kind of bonding.

“It kind of inspires a sense of silliness,” said Luke Roberson, based in London, who built his first Pedibus, a beer-bike-type vehicle that sometimes also serves champagne, in 2008. Once, he said, a group of actors in a London tomb-themed haunted house spotted the passing bike. In full ghoul costume, they gave chase and boarded. Another time, the police pulled a tour over, asked for a card and booked one the next day.

Bart Sallets, who started running beer bike tours in Belgium in 2007, said that while “of course, getting drunk together is a very nice way to bond,” things can occasionally get out of hand. Like the time a middle-aged, kilt-wearing Belgian almost set his bike on fire during his bachelor party. When the police arrested the groom-to-be, everyone else ran away, leaving the tour guide stranded with the bike, which is too heavy for one person to move.

Beer bikes are not welcome everywhere. Munich banned them in August, and after a court ruling in November, beer bikes now need a special permit to operate in Düsseldorf. Michael Zimmermann, head of Düsseldorf’s public regulatory agency, said that the bikes blocked the old city’s narrow streets, causing traffic jams, and that the loud, off-key singing was annoying.

Operators insist that clear rules are the solution to rowdy behavior. For example, “if someone can’t walk, he can’t get on the bike,” Mr. Karsten said.

Or, as Ulrich Hoffmann, managing director of BierBike in Berlin, said, “You can take off your shirt, but you can’t bare your bottom.”

Even in their native land, the bikes are not universally popular. “I wouldn’t be caught dead on one,” said Machteld Ligtvoet, spokeswoman for the Amsterdam tourism board. “It’s not something that we promote.”

The bachelor party from Paris, however, was having a good time, if somewhat sheepishly. “If my wife saw me right now, she would leave me immediately, I look so stupid,” said Julien Paumelle, a filmmaker.

Despite complaints about the lack of ashtrays and a humiliating defeat in a race against a bachelor party from Madrid on another beer bike, the French deemed the outing a success.

“Beer or sport?” mused the brother of the groom-to-be. “It doesn’t need to be a choice.”

Haven't written for some time ... it's been busy - sort of, all right, I'm lazy. Anyhow, the following article appeared in today's NY Times. It's a tad on the optimistic side, but it does illustrate what can be done when there is the will to actually act.

There is a noticeable change in the atmosphere in St. Cloud related to the acceptance of bikes on the street. Cars seem to me to be a bit more accommodating and respectful - that needs to go both ways BTW. Things are moving though, and the article inspires ideas related what we may be able to do here.
Keep the faith and get out and ride!

For all you Talking Head fans:

This Is How We Ride

By DAVID BYRNE

THIS summer the city’s Department of Transportation inaugurates a new bike-share program. People who live and work in New York will be able to travel quickly and cheaply between many neighborhoods. This is major. It will make New Yorkers rethink their city and rewrite the mental maps we use to decide what is convenient, what is possible. Parks, restaurants and friends who once seemed beyond plausible commuting distance on public transportation will seem a lot closer. The possibilities aren’t limitless, but the change will be pretty impressive.

I’ve used a bike to get around New York for decades. There’s an exhilaration you get from self-propelled transportation — skateboarding, in-line skating and walking as well as biking; New York has good public transportation, but you just don’t get the kind of rush I’m talking about on a bus or subway train. I got hooked on biking because it’s a pleasure, not because biking lowers my carbon footprint, improves my health or brings me into contact with different parts of the city and new adventures. But it does all these things, too — and sometimes makes us a little self-satisfied for it; still, the reward is emotional gratification, which trumps reason, as it often does.

More than 200 cities around the world have bike-share programs. We’re not the first, but ours will be one of the largest systems. The program will start with 420 stations spread through the lower half of Manhattan, Long Island City and much of western Brooklyn; eventually more than 10,000 bikes will be available. It will cost just under $10 for a day’s rental. The charge includes unlimited rides during a 24-hour period, as long as each ride is under 30 minutes. So, for example, I could ride from Chelsea to the Lower East Side, from there to food shopping, later to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and after that, home. This system is not geared for leisurely rides up to the George Washington Bridge or to Coney Island. This is for getting around.

I’ve used bike-sharing programs in London, Ottawa, Washington, Toronto, Barcelona, Milan and Paris. In London, where they introduced a public bike program two years ago, I could enjoy a night out without having to worry about catching the last tube home or finding a no longer readily available black cab. In Paris, the Vélib program has more than 20,000 bikes and extends all the way to the city’s borders. Significantly, the banlieues, the low-income housing projects that surround that city, aren’t included, so the system reinforces a kind of economic discrimination, but maybe more coverage is coming.

New York’s program will have some advantages over the Paris and London programs. New York’s high-rise housing projects are scattered throughout the city, so neither they nor their inhabitants will be excluded from the covered bike-share program area. The ugly tendency to segregate by race and class will be, in a small way, mitigated here. By bikes!

PROTECTED bike lanes in Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Vancouver signal increasing acceptance of bikes as a modern transportation alternative and increasing interest in bike safety. Some of these cities even have stoplights for cyclists, most of whom actually stop. European bikers take traffic rules seriously: passers-by yelled at me once when I stood in a bike lane, as New Yorkers often do, and chatted with a friend.

I just completed a Latin American tour, not a music tour, but a series of discussions about bikes and transport; there it seems every city has its own bike-share program, many with peculiar local traits. Bogotá, Colombia, for example, has ciclovías, when the main streets are closed to all traffic except cyclists on weekends. Though Gabriel García Márquez reportedly had to lobby his community for approval for a bike path that was to go through his neighborhood in Bogotá, today those citizens are completely sold on biking as a way of getting around; Bogotá bike use has increased by a factor of five. Significantly, the increased biking has affected the city’s economy, as Bogotá recently extended a network of bicycle paths through lower-income neighborhoods around the city’s periphery, making it easier and more affordable for those who don’t live in affluent areas to get to work. Bike paths = jobs.

New York’s system will be a lot like the one in London, which I used last summer. Before setting off, I downloaded a map and app that showed me where to find the bike station closest to my hotel, near Soho Square and to my destinations, an art gallery in Mayfair and later a restaurant in Notting Hill. I made one payment — a pound (about $1.50 — cheap!) — and I was good all day; there are no additional charges as long as each bike trip is under 30 minutes. (It’s easy to keep bike trips within that time limit because there are loads of stations where you can drop the bike off, and you can get a new bike after having a coffee.)

So, I don’t have to worry about leaving my bike somewhere if it rains or if I decide to cab home? Nope. I don’t have to worry about parking my bike outside for hours? Nope. I don’t have to think about whether my friend has a bike if we’re going somewhere together? Nope. Everyone has a bike now.

In Paris, Montreal and Washington — other cities with systems that work the same basic way — I could use bikes to get to work or meetings, run errands and get pretty much wherever I wanted to go. Often, I arrived at destinations more quickly than friends who took cabs or the subway.

At home, it’s gotten easier and safer to ride in the last few years. The city has added 280 miles of bike lanes and paths since 2007; if you stick to the paths, biking is less scary here than in London and Paris. I wouldn’t advise a novice to ride down Canal Street or (God forbid!) on Flatbush Avenue, because there are lots of lanes of different kinds of traffic there and no protected area for bikers.

How do I use a bike on a typical day? The other afternoon, I took a break from writing and biked south to Chelsea to get groceries. I rode down the protected bike lane on Ninth Avenue; it’s definitely a lot more relaxing to ride in these than it is to negotiate naked New York streets, though you do have to watch out for salmon-cyclists who ride against the flow of traffic.

I try to stop at red lights and often feel lame when other cyclists zoom by. But if this system is ever going to be safe enough for kids, stopping for lights and following traffic rules is something we all have to do. I was ticketed twice here in New York for running a red light; I got the second ticket while riding downtown to argue the first one!

After getting my groceries I tossed the bag in my basket (yes, very geeky, I know) and rode home up 10th Avenue. If I had wanted a safer, quieter ride, I could have gone over to the Hudson River bike path, which I use to commute to work in SoHo. The ride along the water is gorgeous and relaxing. Compare the feel of pedaling along the riverside to the clenched-jaw, stressed-out feel people have when they drive to work, get stuck in traffic, pay a fortune for parking or circle around looking for impossible-to-find street parking. Just saying.

I realized that bike travel had practical value a long time ago, when I was a kid, in Baltimore. I lived in Arbutus, which is on the outskirts, near the city line. There was public transportation, a bus line, but it was designed mostly to get people into the central city. It was useful for an occasional urban gawking adventure, but it was useless if I wanted to visit my friends. So I rode a bike to get to the nearby neighborhoods where they lived and where my high school was.

The house in Arbutus was flattened in 1970 and became a parking lot. My parents moved to a suburb farther outside the city, and I went to college. My parents were part of the phenomenon known as white flight, which involved lots of mostly white people leaving cities for suburbs and houses with yards, a garage and a driveway where they could park the cars they needed to get around. (Anyone who has seen “The Wire” knows how this removal of the urban tax base affected public services, especially the school systems that were available for the primarily black and minority urban population left behind.)

When I finished college, I wanted to live in the city, where the excitement was. Like a lot of other young people, I arrived in the city with no money and lived in glorious squalor; we spent most of our full, busy lives in bookshops, bars, tiny apartments and cheap ethnic restaurants. It was exciting and productive, but it wasn’t easy, and eventually we wanted life to be less of a constant struggle. We saw that people in other urban centers, especially in Europe, were finding ways to live with their cities rather than in spite of them. How could we do that?

Questions like this aren’t uncommon and spring from a sense that one’s life might be rewarding in ways that don’t have to do with material success, status or making money. Quality of life — cliché though it has become — eventually became a big consideration for a lot of people, not just artists and immigrants, but also businesspeople, designers, office workers and code writers, who came to the city and wanted to stay. They want to raise children here and live a vibrant, exciting life as they grow old.

I just turned 60 and have no plans to retire to the suburbs. I love it here. For me, and lots of other people, the answer to the question “What would improve the quality of our urban life?” involves simple things like ... um ... bicycles, which make getting around — and being in — the city easier, more pleasant and more affordable. New York is one of many cities that are creating all kinds of new green spaces, riverside parks and bike programs, all of which are symptomatic of our desire to make our cities into our homes.

Look around you. Bikes are everywhere: in glamorous ads and fashionable neighborhoods, parked outside art galleries, clubs, office buildings. More and more city workers arrive for work on bikes. The future is visible in the increasing number of bikes you see all over the urban landscape. This simple form of transportation is about to make our city more livable, more human and better connected; New Yorkers are going to love the bike-share program; culturally and physically, our city is perfectly suited for it.

David Byrne is an artist and musician.