Playing around with SLIDE for another project. I threw this together with a set from flickr pretty quickly… The photos in this slideshow are taken in San Francisco and the bay area between 2003 and 2005 during the San Francisco Grand Prix professional bike race.

10 days ago – Playing in the Purcell Mountains, BC
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6 days ago – Working in Ottawa
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2 days ago – Bike team directing in Richmond Virginia
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If you were there you had fun, if you weren’t here are some links to help you imagine what the night was like:

• Party recap on Pedal Magazine - by Tim Lefebrve
• Recap post on Cyclingteam.info – has a geat video of a drunken Eon D’Ornelles paying $4500.00 for a Jersey offered during the evenings auction to raise funds for the Echelon Project
• Photos of Gord Fraser’s career - on this site

what’s 7thgroove’s connection? Kevin Field, the principal of 7tghroove, is a friend and former team mate of Gord Fraser. Dave Cathcart, the marketing director of the Saris Cycling Group is a friend of both Gord’s and Kevin’s and he’s a major personal sponsor of Floyd Landis. Dave, got the yellow jersey donated and signed by Floyd Landis. Floyd Landis is a friend and former team mate of Gord Fraser. David got the jersey to Kevin in California the weekend before the party. 7thgroove builds Floyd’s website. Now can you follow that?

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“These are dark days for efforts to stop cheating in sports, but they represent an opportunity to change the game

(Floyd Landis) winner of the fabled Tour de France, seems to have taken a morning-after pill; Justin Gatlin, the world’s co-fastest man, tested positive for the same drug, testosterone. They should admit wrongdoing and become part of the solution.

If Floyd Landis and Justin Gatlin were not household words before the last couple of weeks, they may be about to go down on the dark side of the sport history books.

Mr. Landis, winner of the fabled Tour de France, following a Cinderella comeback late in the race, erasing a disastrous day-before, now seems to have taken a morning-after pill to recover from the previous failure and will likely be stripped of the crown that is the dream of all cyclists — the Yellow Jersey in the showcase event of cycling. And Mr. Gatlin, the world’s co-fastest man, has tested positive for the same drug, testosterone, the daddy of all the power drugs and the uncle of most of the modern anabolic variants.

Aside from the ignominious Tim Montgomery, turned in by a complicit teammate, these are the biggest names outside of professional baseball to have been caught for drug use since our own Ben Johnson after his world record, gold-medal-winning performance, in the 1988 Olympics, which did more to put Canada on the Olympic map than any gold medal in hockey.

What the (expletive deleted) is going on?

Let us resign ourselves to hearing the customary flow of denials of any drug use, notwithstanding the scientific results of the tests, performed by expert, World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited laboratories — or, if we revert to Major League Baseball (MLB) terminology (they have better lawyers) any “knowing” use of drugs.

We will have to wait for the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) to organize an appeal process, since both are American athletes, before any formal sanction can be pronounced. Who knows, USADA may subscribe to a suggestion that both athletes, in separate sports, were ambushed by a roving squad of Nazi frogmen and injected against their will with the prohibited substances. But, if USADA does not bite, Mr. Landis faces a two-year suspension and Mr. Gatlin (because of an earlier violation) a lifetime suspension.

What, we may well ask, does all this mean? Are there no sport heroes, past or present, to be trusted to be what they seem?

First, we, like everyone else, must face the fact that there is a drug problem in sport today, one that has been allowed to build up over a number of decades, ever since veterinarians made it clear to athletes that, so long as they did not mind chronic acne and shrunken testicles, testosterone could help them bulk up, be stronger and recover faster. This problem is not restricted to cycling and track and field, but they will serve as convenient examples.

Take cycling in 2006. If 2006 were to be measured in the Chinese cycle, it would be the Year of the Excrement. Among the active riders in the immediate post-Armstrong era, those who finished second, third and fourth in the 2005 Tour de France were busted in a Spanish doping investigation and prevented from competing in the 2006 Tour. This year’s winner has tested positive. These are not the losers at the back of the peloton, nor the journeymen riders in the middle of the pack. They are the best. Mr. Landis was the winner this year. It would be the equivalent of disqualifying an entire Olympic final.

Next, despite the vociferous protestations, it is all too clear that cycling authorities have been unable, some suggest unwilling, to cope with the problem. Indeed, not unlike MLB, there has been an institutional denial of the existence of a problem. Six weeks before the devastating revelations of the Spanish investigation, International Cycling Union (UCI) officials were assuring me that there had been a cultural change in cycling, that whatever may have been going on in the past, there was no longer a doping problem in the sport, to the extent that the UCI was actually considering a possible reduction in the number of tests it would perform. The Spanish investigation established that there was an organized scheme to cheat, involving riders, teams, doctors and even UCI officials and the expenditure of major amounts of money to the organizers of the scheme. This was accompanied by a code of silence among all those involved.

If the problem is to be solved, there must first be an acknowledgment that the problem exists. As in alcoholism, or other addictions, if one refuses to acknowledge the existence of a problem, no cure is possible. The next step is to reach out for help. Whatever has been done to date has been sadly lacking in effectiveness.

The answer lies in the formula established by the World Anti-Doping Agency, a partnership of the sport movement and governments in all five continents. We are faced with organized and sophisticated cheating, so we should be willing to use every weapon in our combined arsenals. Doping offences can be established without the need for a positive analytical result. Sport authorities know who the athletes are, where they are, more or less what they are doing to dope, who the coaches are and so forth, but they have no power to seize evidence, to compel people to provide evidence and to enforce trafficking rules. Possession and use of most doping substances without medical prescriptions are already illegal (as in Canada), so the combination of the sport and public authorities provides a means to get at the full range of the evidence needed to stop doping.

For cycling, this could be the first day of the rest of its life. If I were Floyd Landis’s lawyer (which I am not), I would say that, if you love your sport and want to get back into it as soon as possible, tell it like it is — like it really is. Give everyone who has been subverted into the conduct that has exposed you the chance to clean it up, or take the risk that, in the Year of the Excrement, your sport may be flushed into the toilet.

Go after the enablers. You will never, ever, have more credibility than you do today. They are the ones who wrecked you and your sport. The athletes are not acting alone and may well be the compliant victims of a system that coerces them. Mr. Landis, exposed as he is now, could become the saviour of his sport. Continued denial will only consign him to a life of ridicule and obscurity.

As for Mr. Gatlin, I would give him the same free advice. Accept the consequences of your actions and use the experience to make your sport — and, in the process, yourself — a better man.

Sport should be fun. It should be clean. It should be something of which its participants should be proud. It should be something of which the community should be proud. It should be something you would want your kids to do — without having to be chemical stockpilers and liars.“

Richard W. Pound is a Montreal lawyer, a member of the International Olympic Committee and president of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Dick Pound is a bit of a blowhard and embarrassment to Canada. Hmm, that was harsh, but it’s reasonable to expect the head of an organization that is essentially like the supreme court of sports, should maintain a air of objectivity… Here’s our favourite anti-Dick article from the Washington Post

From: © The Ottawa Citizen 2006, Wednesday, August 09, 2006
By: Richard W. Pound, Citizen Special

citation link

Sunday in White Rock, BC, just south of Vancouver…

We helped the Jet Fuel pro cycling leverage open and free tools to enable 9 riders and 5 staff to contribute stories and photos to their website. The result, after 18 months the site has has grown from 7 to almost 300 pages of content, has realized a 400% growth in site visitor traffic and has rocketed into the top five in its google search position.

In April of 2004 we …