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Interbike 2008. Running the media center. Climbing that big hill up from Lake Mead. Shaking hands. Getting in a fight with a guy three times our size in Harrah’s. What an era that was.
We recently brought up the Las Vegas parties with a celebrity who probably doesn’t want to be named on here. He said, solemnly, “That was back in my drinking days.” A good excuse. But it wasn’t back in our drinking days. No idea what our fucking problem was back then, honestly.
As always, the language used in archival content reflects the culture and time period in which it was created.
Derailed, Baby!
September 2008
Stickers and films! They’re a much more worthwhile pursuit than searching the internet for pornstars who look a bit like Victoria Pendleton when you squint. So we’re likely to do more of both in the future. And probably more of the last thing too.
We’re also launching a new website! Gasp! You can be so involved with that one that it’s you who ends up getting humiliated by David Harmon at events rather than us. We’ve put some details somewhere in this month’s issue.
Nothing else to report. It’s winter, so all the proper cyclists are on their turbos eyeing up bottles of red wine.
Cross Not Angry
Because we couldn’t think of a better title for this bit 🙁
This is one of those things where we say we’re doing “photojournalism” so we can get paid for walking around with a camera and a beer, not paying attention to what’s actually going on. We used to do this a lot. Here’s SuperCross ’08. It’s like proper Belgian cyclo-cross, but takes place in the middle of a dry desert and features none of the stars.
That’s it, because resizing more than seven photographs is more work than it’s worth.
REASONS WHY LANCE IS BACK
TO RAISE CANCER AWARENESS, because nobody has actually on the planet heard of cancer and seeing a millionaire ride a bike will finally hammer the subject home.
WINNING ONE OF THE 99% OF RACES ON THE PRO CALENDAR THAT HE’S NEVER BOTHERED TO TOUCH. Nah, not really. He’ll continue to just go for the 1% that pays well.
TO MEET MORE BLONDE CELEBRITIES WHO LOOK LIKE HIS MOTHER, since he needs to get back on the A-list as soon as possible before he’s reduced to dating Dolly Parton. Or his mother.
BBC’S AMAZING JOURNALISM STRIKES AGAIN
Breaking the news of a serious road incident. The cyclist died shortly afterwards:
Alternative headline: “Selfish lycra lout gets blood on road, taxpayers foot the cleaning bill”
TEN ANNOYING THINGS DRIVERS DO
NUMBER EIGHT
Moan about how bikes shouldn’t be on the road and should always use bike paths, then have no problem with parking in lanes or swerving into them without indicating when a car turning right ahead would otherwise mean them slowing down.
Apparently what is and isn’t road depends on which definition benefits the driver the most at that particular point in time.
EMAIL OF THE MONTH
From: Olia
To: DerailedUK
Subject: Hi
Hey 🙂
I’m single female live in Ukraine. I need lover. My name is Olia and I’m 29 years old.
Find out my image at my page.
I need you! 😉
COMMENTATORS VERSUS
“SVEN NYS”
Sven Nys. Rhymes with… err… “chees”. Doesn’t it?
Even we’re not so sure now. Sven Nice? It doesn’t sound like the kind of name an indomitably hard bastard like Nys would have, but then the Flemish for “nice” is probably a long word packed with the letters k, u, and o.
So who knows? Not the people who’re paid to know, that’s for sure.
WORST OF THE WEB: BEST SPORT SPEAKERS
What is wrong with this website?
Is it the hopelessly out of date photographs?
Or the fact that twelve of the twenty riders have been done for doping at some point?
Maybe it’s that they’re naively expecting Miguel Indurain to actually speak?
No! Here’s the bad thing! They’re selling personal corporate speeches from a man who’s been dead for four and a half years, and using a bizarre biography that doesn’t even make a dick of sense to do so. 🙁
Nopac Talent, you’re this month’s WORST OF THE WEB.
ABSOLUTELY NOT THE EMAIL OF THE MONTH
This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.
IMPOSTERS OF THE MONTH
We’re used to people bypassing forming their own opinions so that they can just regurgitate our stuff regurgitated on boring internet forums. And some others treat us as though we’re an authentic source of news or something. Even certain magazines have been known to take our stuff and rewrite it so that it’s actually funny.
What we’re not used to is bands muscling in on our business. BUT THEY ARE. Bands! Well, band.
They’re on “MySpace”, which we thought was just a Rupert Murdoch contrivance for making money from teenage girls. But it turns out he’s also making money from stealing the intellectual property rights of bands too!
Have a listen to their quite surprisingly not bad music. They’re not really competing with us for anything other than Google hits — which we’ve just inadvertently helped them with by providing that link — so it’s cool to like them.
Maybe they’ll record us a theme song?
IMPENDING DOOM TEAM PHOTO OF THE MONTH
“Shit, I just had this terrible dream where I did something to make the entire cycling community hate me and spend their spare time humiliating me online.”
TEN ANNOYING THINGS DRIVERS DO
NUMBER SEVEN: DEMONSTRATE WHY CYCLING IS BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
We don’t mean the kind of driver who’ll bang on about why producing chrome and innertubes is damaging to the environment, so all cyclists should get off the road and stop being so smug. Those people are as annoying as the twats who love to condescend vegetarians just because one of them eats meat and the other doesn’t, but we’re not bothered about them.
No! We mean the people who really open our eyes to all that bad stuff we’re doing the environment. You see, riding a bike means that every single car has to accellerate hard as it passes you to prove how fast it’d be going if you hadn’t been in the way.
And because you’ll overtake them 50 metres down the road, they’ll do it again when they manage to catch you a few hundred metres later. You’re really destroying the environment, you selfish fucking cyclists.
All of which might’ve been mildly amusing if a driver hadn’t seriously made that exact point on BBC’s Have Your Say recently. Sigh.
AMAZING BIKE OF THE MONTH
It’s a really long tandem.
It seats ten people, which is a lot more friends than we usually require for our training schedule of “ride out alone, ride back alone, sit at home on the internet in the dark”.
SCRIPT EXTRACT
JAN ULLRICH BIOPIC
INT. A SUPERMARKET IN GERMANY
It is mid-October and JAN ULLRICH has been secretly planning a comeback to finally beat rival LANCE ARMSTRONG.
ULLRICH
Oh! Cereal comes in boxes now?
Enter WALTER GODEFOOT, Ullrich’s boss and drug dealer… keeper awayer. Ullrich fumbles with something and presses his hand tight against his chest.
GODEFROOT
Ah Jan! Checking out the muesli, I see. Did you know that cereal comes in boxes these days?
ULLRICH
(Awkwardly) Yes… err… sir, I just noticed that same thing.
GODEFROOT
How is the training going? Getting the miles in?
ULLRICH
(Still awkwardly) I am more dedicated that ever before, again. This time I won’t mess it up, again. I promise!
As a crowd gathers to watch their local hero buy cereal, a jumbo pack of sausages falls out from underneath Ullrich’s t-shirt.
GODEFROOT
(Laughing) Oh Jan!
Fade to black, roll credits.
DERAILED FLASHBACK
To celebrate the umpteenth closing of Operacion Puerto, we’re bringing you a flashback to something we wrote about the exact same subject 14 months ago, in an all-too-likely soon to be regular “we can’t be arsed” feature.
Other people that “AC” could be (13 August 2007)
A.C. is definitely not Alberto Contador, according to… well, Alberto Contador. But it’s not like he’d have anything to lose by admitting it — other than being stripped of his livelihood and Tour win, that is — so we’ll take his word for it. Who could A.C. really be?!
- Alfred Chicken – A videogames character from 1993. Videogames are notorious for cheating, but even when the lead character shares a nickname with Michael Rasmussen, it seems unlikely that Eufemiano Fuentes would be the man to go to if you were stuck on level 3.
- Actinium – A radioactive, glow in the dark element that has the symbol Ac and the atomic number 89. Ties in well to the rumours that Dr Fuentes once introduced “A.C.” to a man called Alexander Litvinenko.
- Air Canada – A Canadian airline. Needs lots of juice, but doesn’t normally take it in the form of human blood.
- Alpha Centauri – The star system nearest to our own solar system. Fuentes’s reach was supposed to be larger than expected, but we expect he hasn’t quite mastered intersellar flight. Yet.
- Alex Cox – A warty Scouse film-maker. Doesn’t look particularly athletic, so probably stays well away from those boring drugs that only enhance performance.
- Associazione Calcio – The Italian Football Association. Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
DERAILEDUK IS HIRING
Well, sort of. Keep submitting things to us here and we’ll keep publishing them, but we’ve also got a potential new project in pre-production.
If you can appreciate that doping is a complex issue born of various social and cultural issues, rather than just “bad”… If you can articulate opinions that haven’t been spoonfed to you by the media… If you can write in an academic or entertaining way about drugs and corruption in cycling and, to a lesser extent, other sports… If you’re privy to inside information that wouldn’t get published anywhere else…
If…, then get in touch. We’re up for one-off articles when you can be arsed, or, preferably, a commitment to an article of 400 words or more around once a month.
You might get sued for libel. But fuck it, it’s worth the risk.
STICKERS IN THE WILD
We make them, you stick them. The perfect deal! Here’s some from the past month and a half.
 Very close to people who’d shoot you for less. |  Our own airhorn was better because it had a full list of nautical codes on the side. Unexpectedly sounding the horn and asking people if they understood — to find out if they were seafarers, obviously — was only made funnier by the fact that it coincided with the exact point in time that we stopped getting sent press passes. |
 On someone’s back, during a sticker war with the boys from Rock N Roll Bikes. |  On a wallet. |
 On an Interbike pass. We’re allowed to use our own photos here, okay? |  On a very messy looking computer. |
 On a bike. Whoa. |  Resisting being told what to do. |
 On a Tour of Britain hospitality pass. |  On a different bike. |
 In a Virgin trains magazine. |  At the Tour of Britain in Liverpool. |
We’ve still got loads more stickers left, so if you want some to make your bike look ugly or to use as makeshift sellotape when you finally decide to stick notes about your various internet girlfriends on your office wall as a last ditch attempt at keeping track of which one thinks she has aspergers and which one thinks her IQ is 179, then just get in touch. And hey, if you want a refill, email us too.
Special thanks to Zoom Gordo for conducting guerrilla sticker combat dangerously close to men with guns, and then sending us loads of photos of it. We’ve already linked his blog up there, but here’s another link because it’s better and more interesting than this website and also he probably deserves a couple of stalkers.
NEXT MONTH: SOMETHING ABOUT PLAYING TEAM FORTRESS 2 ON XBOX LIVE, SINCE THAT’S WHAT WE DO INSTEAD OF THINKING ABOUT CYCLING THESE DAYS
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