Bicycles(s)! Bicycles(s)!

Finished up my photos from the 2011 Philly bike race. Check them out over here. Or don't. Free country.

I ride around town on my road-racing bicycle

Because I like to get things done in a timely fashion, I've finished posting my photos from this year's TD Bank Philadelphia International Cycling Championship over here.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right

I checked out the Philadelphia International Championship bike race for the first time this year with some friends and family, and I just finished posting my photos over here. Everything was shot on Lemon Hill, aside from a few down on Kelly Drive.

These bikes go to 11

I was watching TV yesterday and saw a McDonald's ad in which a kid riding a BMX bike had a small, hand-held radio attached to his bike. And I thought, "That's dumb, no one would be listening to a radio tied to their bike." Well ...



Doesn't mean they're doing tailwhips on those things, though. Via.

Fin

The Tour de France ended Sunday, but if you didn't catch it, or just wanted to look at some cool pics, check out the slideshow I made. I loaded up shots every night after watching that day's stage, and thus maybe had too many shots that told the story of that day, instead of just looking cool, but most are still pretty cool.

There were some big moments (Barloworld rider going over the cliff, Cunigo faceplanting into a concrete barrier, dude smashing into a tree at full speed, some notable breakaway efforts) that mysteriously got no play in the Yahoo Sports gallery, so I took what I could get. Aside from a couple only, I stuck to shots from Getty Images, because the AP stuff was always small and very flat colorwise.

Also, there seemed to be a lot less random shots of competitors this year — so the guys and teams that weren't in the running didn't get a lot of playing time. When they did show guys for no reason, as with the Stage 20 time trial, I probably included them just to represent their team and uniforms a little bit.

Doing this thing meant I had to watch every single stage, and I was usually up late loading them up, so next year might not see such a comprehensive effort. Or I might feel like it again after a year. We'll see.

Sprinter Toureno

Three sprint stage wins so far in the Tour. This guy pretty much rips.

UPDATE: Make that four. Completely boxed in with 200 meters to go in Stage 13 Friday, somehow broke through and blew past everyone. Nobody's even close this year.

Le slideshow

The crazy last week of the 2007 Tour de France, and great photos from the photogs covering it, inspired me to do a slideshow last year.

This year I started from Day 1, and I'm trying to tell the story of each day's stage while mixing in some cool randoms. So check it out. I'm grabbing all the photos from the Yahoo Sports cycling gallery.

With some of the heavyweights out of this year's race, it's been wide open so far. Good to see the American squads — Team Columbia (High Road) and Garmin-Chipotle (Slipstream) — doing well.

Did these colors run?

No, it's supposed to look like that.


I saw this flag a number of times during Tour de France coverage the past couple years, and always thought it was a black and white American flag, which made me question the significance of such a flag.

Turns out it wasn't an American flag, but the flag of Brittany. You know Brittany — right across the channel from England, Hundred Years War, etc.

The Tour's first three days are in the Brittany region of France this year, thus an abundance of flag sightings. Designed in the 1920s, it was based on the U.S. and Greek flags, as both countries were seen as the beacons of freedom at that point, according to Wikipedia anyway.