Thursday, June 10, 2010

Welcome

A lot has been going on this season, not all of it positive. Nonetheless, I decided it's time to put some thoughts down in writing and to give my perspective on some things - cycling and otherwise.

I figured I could either stick my head in the sand because our chosen charity, LIVESTRONG is tied in so closely with Trek, who I believe has handled our team and the Madone issue terribly, or push forward. Personally, I put a huge amount of time and resources into the team and our LIVESTRONG focus and I'm not quitting because of Trek's actions - or inaction. So I'm going to *try* to turn a negative into a positive.

Please consider supporting LIVESTRONG by making a pledge through our team based on the number of Top 10 race results we acheive this year at HHCycling.com

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The 2010 Trek Madone 6.9 Steer Tube Failures
Some may be coming to this blog as a result of the VeloNews.com article written by Zack Vestal about the situation with the 2010 Trek Madone steer tube failures.

(The story has not yet posted as of Thursday June 10 at 2:30PM)


I didn't set out to be involved in a crusade against Trek - I paid for our team bikes and Trek was a sponsor of our team. I just wanted to race my bike this year, raise money for LIVESTRONG (see Featured Pages at right) and get my Cat 1 upgrade. However, my handlebars came off in a race on May 15, leading to a hard crash onto gravel caught on my helmet cam. Then a week later, ANOTHER of our bikes had the handlebars break off. I was upset and pushed Trek really hard to find out what was going on. That didn't go well. In the end, I found out another team had two bikes break in one weekend a month before my crash. On top of that, another DC area rider had his tube fail at Wilmington GP. That's 5 failures in one month on just the East Coast. I contended to Trek that if they did not communicate on this quickly, that I would seek out press coverage and regulatory intervention to try to protect the other Madone riders out there.

Still, Trek would not release any information to the 6,300 other Madone owners, choosing only to send a "dealer bulletin". This led to me asking Velo News to look into this and filing an incident report with the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

There is a FEATURED PAGES link at right that is a journal of the story behind the scenes with more photos, emails and more in-depth information.

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Haymarket Bicycles / HomeVisit Cycling Is
Raising Money For LIVESTRONG


On a more positive note, my team, Haymarket Bicycles / HomeVisit is raising money for LIVESTRONG through our race results this season.

Please go to our web site HHCycling.com and make a pledge!

We are raising money for LIVESTRONG in 2 ways:
  1. We are donating all race winnings. Through HomeVisit, I am matching all winnings dollar for dollar and donating directly to LIVESTRONG. We have won over $3,500 as of June 1!
  2. We are collecting pledges to LIVESTRONG based on the number of Top 10 race results we score this season. Our goal is 100 and we have 57 so far. A pledge of $1 per Top 10 will send $100 to LIVESTRONG.

I'm really proud of our approach to this and I hope to keep it going next year and beyond in some form. I designed a web system in concert with my talented programming staff at HomeVisit. We built a pledge system with secure store function that collects pledges for billing to credit cards. The whole site is database driven, so our pledge count, race results, top 10's and podium placements are all updated in real time. At some point, we could have a larger team, masters, women and juniors all raising money for charity through race results. The idea is to give the riders something to shoot for and keep focus and attention on fund raising all year long.

Check the FEATURED PAGES link for more on our fund raising efforts.

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Leaonardtown Criterium Tack Sabotage Caught
On Helmet Cam
The day after the Poolesville crash where my bars came off my Trek, I decided to dust myself off and race Leonardtown with stitches in my knee. It's a cool course that I hadn't done since I was a Cat 5. I ended up getting caught up in a crash caused by someone dropping tacks on the course - again on helmet cam. The story got regional and national TV coverage. The video is below and the FEATURED PAGES link has more info and TV coverage links.


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