The 2013 Festivus For The Cyclists

Festivus is a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 as a way to commemorate the holiday season without participating in its pressures and commercialism. It is usually celebrated with the practices of the "Airing of Grievances", the labeling of easily explainable events as "Festivus Miracles", and concludes with "Feats of Strength". If you are a person of a certain age, you of course remember it was featured on an episode of Seinfeld.

You can read more about the whole celebration of non-celebration here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festivus

On BicyclingBlogger, I'd like to take this opportunity to recap the 2013 cycling season in my own Festivus fashion...

Airing of Grievances

Oh man, doping yet again!

Froome crushes the competition at the 2013 Tour de France, beating Quintana by 4:20 mm:ss. And our dear sport is still not in a place where Froome can merely take his spot on the top of the podium and be patted on the back and given a big hand shake for a job very well done. No, the press must still pester him about how it must have been doping. Are we still not in a position to accept that the anti-doping controls work?

Perhaps not... as Danilo di Luca was kicked out of the Giro in its last week for an out-of-competition EPO result from before the Giro even departed on its first day! How was he even allowed to start?

And even our home-country hero now has a taint from the skeleton hanging in his closet - outed by that walking/riding pasty skeleton himself, Michael Rasmussen. Never liked that twit, and was a little - just a little - skeptical with his book revelation of Ryder Hesjedal's "introduction to doping." At least Ryder didn't deny, deny, deny as many others have in the past, and admitted his use of long ago. I was always a bit worried about this, because Ryder did ride/domestique for Discovery in its Armstrong doping hay-days. But I thought it would be Armstrong that might finger Ryder - his bullying being so pervasive/perverse - not Rasmu-sh!#ten.

Let us all just hope that the doping controls of the 2012 Giro were solid enough to allow Ryder's victory to stand the test of time.

Festivus Miracles

A Festivus Miracle is an easily explainable event. Check out these Miracles:

• Intervals are hard, and make me tired! It's a Festivus Miracle!
• When I didn't ride for three weeks because I was holiday-ing in Europe, I lost 20W+ from my Threshold Power! It's a Festivus Miracle!

Feats of Strength

It was one of my stronger seasons lately. I had a solid 5th place GC showing in the Bike-On-Broadway Stage Race in Saskatoon back in May. And then in June, I had my best ever showing in the Banff BikeFest, placing an 49th of 81 starters. In the past, I never got an official GC result because I had always DNF'ed in the Road Race stage.

But Festivus isn't finished until my result has been wrestled to the ground. And I don't need to go far for that...

Again this year, like last year, my good friend Peter Toth pins me to the ground with his result at the 2013 UCI World Masters Track Championships with his Bronze medal performance in the Team Pursuit event. Well done Peter!

And now I can officially put the 2013 Festivus For The Cyclists to rest!