"I'm sick and tired of you old guys from Boulder coming up here and acting like you own the road."

That's how a roadside argument started on a county road south of Loveland, Colorado, between a motorist and a group of three cyclists last July. Before it ended, the motorist had poked at a bicyclist with a baseball ...   more »

“Unfortunately it takes something bad like this to happen to learn that you can’t be doing this. It was just a very tragic accident, that’s the bottom-line.”

Madison County (NY) Undersheriff John Ball talking about the conditions Thursday evening when a bicyclist was struck from behind and killed by a motorist. Reported by Utica Observer-Dispatch, Jan. 14, 2011.

The bicyclist, Harold Closson, 50, was riding his bicycle down the road at about 5:40 p.m. Thursday when he was struck by a 22-year-old driving a truck ...   more »

"He knew his name was cleared before he left. He wanted to be baptized again, and I thank God he got to do that. He wanted to ride a bicycle and he got to do that. He had been locked up for 32 years."

Jerry Dixon talking about his wrongly convicted brother to Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Miss.; "Cleared Mississippi man's freedom cut short."

Bobby Ray Dixon, 53, died this past Sunday of lung and brain cancer, not long after he had been cleared of the rape and murder of a Hattiesburg woman back in 1979. The Innocence Project New Orleans filed a motion to have DNA evidence in the case tested ...   more »

"Lance lost this Tour for bad luck. Physically, there’s no reason to believe that he couldn’t have been competitive in this Tour. He came to this Tour in good shape with real ambitions to win. We knew it wouldn’t be easy for him to win this Tour, but we came here with that as a goal. Even today we saw Contador not as strong as he was last year. Today we simply didn’t have the luck.”

-- Johan Bruyneel, team manager for Radio Shack, talking about Lance Armstrong's crashes at the 2010 Tour de France in an interview with Andrew Hood at VeloNews .....   more »

"A lot of people ask me why I went east to west because the winds are predominantly west to east, and part of the reason was I that I like the idea of heading home. It's just kind of a goal that you aspire to get to, so that means a lot to me from a psychological standpoint, especially at times when you're feeling a little low."

--Cross-county bicycle traveler Mike Dillon, quoted at MercuryNews.com, June 14, 2010.

You might remember that I wrote a short piece in March about Dillon, the former general counsel for Sun Microsystems ...   more »

“The most expensive bike I have cost me $3 because I had to buy some pieces for it. Everything else is just garbage that was given to me. I am brazen enough that if I am riding around and see some bikes with grass growing through them, I’ll knock on your door and ask if you want me to drag them off.”

-- Freelance bike builder Mack Carter of Iowa Park, Texas. TimesRecordNews, June 6, 2010: "Building a better bicycle; Iowa Park man turns garbage, spare parts into innovative rides."

Carter told the TimesRecordNews that he started building bike about 7 years ago when he was looking for a bike to buy and determined they were all too expensive. Since then, he's built 50 to 75 bicycles. ....   more »

"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live."

-- Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle" 1917

This is one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes and most apt for this blog. I mention it now because today marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Samuel Clemens.

I've been reading the entertaining biography "Mark Twain: A Life" by Ron Powers. He tells about Clemens learning to ride a high-wheeled bicycle as he waited for his book "Huckleberry Finn" to be published in 1884.

In letters, Powers found that Clemens' riding instructor wrote that his pupil had discovered more ways to fall off a bicycle than the man who invented it. Clemens himself claimed that he had invented all the bicycle profanity that had since come into common use.

The famous quote about bicycling comes ...   more »

"They were more shocked than I was, trying to cover up their bits and pieces with their hands."

-- New Zealand policewoman describing the reactions of two naked men on bicycles she stopped in a coastal resort town one night.

She issued a stern warning for not wearing helmets and sent them home. She chose to ignore their public nudity, which can carry a charge of offensive behavior in New Zealand.

BBC News, "NZ policewoman allows naked cycling -- with helmet"

Podium Cafe lists a couple of dozen quotes uttered by current and former pro cyclists during the past year and asks for our favorite.

The list has a few Lance Armstrong tweets about Alberto Contador being a "pistolero" and  having "lots to learn." Jens Voigt and Bradley Wiggins also are well represented.

My favorite, though, comes from Bernard Hinault, the 5-time winner of the Tour de France who commented on the earpiece radios now worn by cyclists to communicate with the team manager:

"I am against them. It is just a 'Game Boy' that has a gigolo attached at the end telling the racer when to take a piss." .....   more »

"Every part of the trail is fascinating."

-- A quote from Caitlin Truesdale, a ninth-grader at Pingree High School in Peabody, Massachusetts, who won the Bikeway Naming Essay Contest.

She chose to name the 4.6-mile trail the Peabody Independence Gateway. The bikeway has been in the works for 19 years. It cost $192,000 to design and $3 million to build.

The story in The Salem News doesn't explain why she chose the name ...   more »

"I survived six months in Afghanistan and a year in Iraq, many parachute jumps out of airplanes and other adventures and never broken a bone, and it takes a hit-and-run driver to send me to the hospital with a broken bone."

Pat Rimron telling a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, TV station about his Friday bike ride that ended when he was struck by a hit & run driver. An Army Reservist, Rimron returned to his job as a teacher at Forsyth Country Day School seven months ago after two tours in the Middle East .....   more »