JANUARY 31 - Magnus Bäckstedt (Slipstream-Chipotle) promises he will be racing the northern classics despite snapping his right collarbone in a high-speed crash late in Thursday’s fifth stage at the 7th Tour of Qatar. Bäckstedt , who celebrated his 33rd birthday on Wednesday, hit the deck hard after a QuickStep rider swept into his front wheel with 500m to go. Despite the setback, Bäckstedt vows to lead the Slipstream-Chipotle team into Paris-Roubaix and other spring classics. “A broken collarbone isn’t going to stop me from racing Roubaix,” Bäckstedt told VeloNews. “I rode the 2005 Roubaix with a fractured wrist. As long as the legs are working, it doesn’t matter what happens to the rest...

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JANUARY 27 - If women’s cyclocross racing has just one rule, it has to be “never, never, never count out Hanka.” Germany’s Hanka Kupfernagel racked up an impressive win at the world cyclocross championships on Sunday after a season of insisting that her training was focused entirely on qualifying for the road and time-trial events at this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing. After a somewhat dicey start, Kupfernagel powered away on a solo ride to win her fourth rainbow jersey in a discipline that has offered a women’s world title only since 2000, the year the German powerhouse won her first. By the end Kupfernagel had managed a solid win over another Beijing-bound rider, the Netherland’s Marianne ...

JANUARY 26 - Rock Racing rider Kayle Leogrande is the anonymous rider filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, charging that it planned to test his B urine sample after his A sample tested negative for performance-enhancing drugs, several sources told VeloNews Friday. Sources with intimate knowledge of the case confirmed that Leogrande is the unnamed cyclist suing USADA, and verified that sworn affidavits have been filed with the agency as it tries to build a case against the 30-year-old rider. The Associated Press reported Thursday that an anonymous professional cyclist had filed a lawsuit agains...

JANUARY 22 - Dear Lennard,
I'm interested in buying the Deda Zero 100 stem you recently reviewed. However I noticed that the clamp size is listed as 31.7mm. The bar I wanted to use is the FSA K-Wing Carbon which has a clamp size listed as 31.8mm. Will the 0.1mm difference in size make this combination incompatible?
Steve Dear Steve,
No, that is a common question, and the size is the same. The listed number variation is just due to a difference in rounding among companies. That size is an English spec -- 1.25 inches = 31.75mm. Some companies round it up, and some round it down. Furthermore, if you’ve measured as many handlebars as I have, you’d also know that the due to tole...

JANUARY 12 - Happy New Year! 2008 is here and it’s time to capitalize upon your 2007 training files and training log entries. For those of you who didn’t keep a training log in 2007, this is your chance to get started. Reviewing your 2007 training and racing data can be a huge advantage to those riders who kept track of their power meter files throughout the year. The biggest benefit of collecting power meter data is not analyzing individual files, but tracking and reviewing the trends over time. Rest days are even important to track since fitness can’t be gained without the proper amount of rest. Analyzing fitness trends, and seeing precisely what it took to reach peak performance, can be eve...

JANUARY 17 - I just crawled out of bed after two days of racing and for some funny reason I’m sore. Back, legs, triceps, ego. They all tingle with a slightly bruised sensation. Now, unless you consider repeated swigs of beer followed by swallowing fat-laden hors d’oeuvres a unique type of interval training, I haven’t done much to keep myself in race shape since U.S. cyclocross nationals, and let me tell you, I could feel the burn. Although I suffered like an American cross racer in Belgium (hey, wait a sec’) it felt great to have my tubies rolling on foreign soil. Greg, Kurt and I are staying in a five-bedroom house in a small town called Blauberg. A former Festina rider and British national...