Lion Attack

This shouldn't take long.

This morning on Good Morning America there was a story about a Lion attacking his trainer at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Here's a youtube clip of the video:



1st, that dude is not being attacked. If he was being attacked, this video doesn't end with him hobbling away. It ends in two ways, 1) carted off on a stretcher. 2) a few weeks later he's being passed through the Lion's poop. It looks like there's a 400lb animal who wants to rough house a little bit. I also feel like if he's really being attacked the other trainer doesn't come over and coax the Lion off, he gets the hell out of dodge.

I'm not a crazy PETA person and I really have no problem with these kinds of exhibits, but when a wild animal acts like a wild animal I don't think there should be some insane overreaction with investigations and even the remote possibility that the animal be put down as a result. That Lion did not seek out to live it's life at the MGM Grand and because of that, if the Lion occasionally acts like a Lion who would prefer to live in it's natural habitat, I don't blame it. If you chose to be a lion trainer this is an inherent risk that you take and I find it telling that you never hear the trainers coming out and saying the animal did anything wrong.

For all of my waxing I think Gilbert Arenas on his blog a few years ago during shark week summed up my point the best (of course I am paraphrasing), "Nobody gets attacked by a shark. The shark lives in the water, you don't. You're the one trespassing. If you're at home watching tv and a shark comes into your house and bites you while you're on the couch, that's an attack." There's been on update on how Gilbert feels about sharks carrying unloaded weapons.

Good Move by Trek

Sticking with the theme from yesterday of bike companies supplying bikes to top level riders, Andy Schleck just announced via twitter that he and Frank will be riding Trek's next year. I'm not sure what the rest of their team will be riding, but this is obviously a great move for Trek.

No other bike company in the world, except maybe Cervelo, but on a much smaller scale, has seen their business explode like Trek has, simply because a fan favorite rode their bikes to victory. Trek could either predict the future or got extremely lucky when they landed the Postal Service contract and Lance Armstrong crazed fans around the world all rushed out to ride bikes with the same decal on them.

I would imagine, but I'm obviously just guessing, that Trek's market share declined a bit during Lance's first retirement and would start to fade even more now that his second retirement is much less of a ride off into the sunset sort of fashion. This would leave Trek trying to figure out what team they can provide bikes to that would most likely lead to another craze from fans to ride the same bike as their hero. Sure RadioShack seems to be sticking around for another year, but I also assume that Trek won't be too sad to put some distance between themselves and Johan the wizard of eBay (unconfirmed and not his actual eBay user name).

If I were Trek the obvious and logical answer is the new team without a name from Luxembourg which happens to have every American's new favorite grand tour hope if only because they hate the Spanish guy that was mean and beat their previous hero, Andy Schleck. I don't know what kind of hold Trek has on the Luxembourg bike market, or if there is a Luxembourg bike market, but they certainly like their place in America and since Americans like to look like their heros, I'm sure that Trek hopes that this Contador-is-the-devil and Andy-is-the-savior made up rivalry plays itself out for years. Which, thanks to VeloNews, it probably will and America will sit on the edge of their desk chairs waiting to learn the latest reason to hate Contador and Specialized but love Andy and Trek.

I'm just hoping that Trek's new commercials can compete with the Specialized commercial from this past TdF where Andy Schleck claimed to knock out a bear. While this claim is totally unreasonable since he's the only person on the planet with skinnier arms than me, it makes for riveting advertising. I could barely contain my need to own a Specialized bike as soon as he said that, because I once saw a bear while riding my bike and I'm pretty sure if I'd been on a Specialized I'd have been much less scared and would have simply got off and fought it. If you missed it, the commercial is below. Now, let's all wait and see what Trek comes out with, probably something involving rain and fireflies.

Garmin-Cervelo Merger

I'm just going to come right out and say it, I'm anti the Garmin-Cervlo merger. I read an interesting piece a few weeks ago, which I'm too lazy to find and post a link for you, describing just how bad of a decision it was for Cervelo to start their own team and how much more successful they were as the bike supplier for Riss Cycling Inc. (CSC and then Saxo Bank). What most bike companies need to remember, and what most pro level teams always know, is one high end carbon frame is just as good as another. Pro teams need bikes but they don't need your bike. Obviously most consumers forget this fact which is obvious by fat dudes riding $5,000+ carbon frames because their man crush won a big race on it. But I'm sure if you could get Fabian Cancellara off the record to tell you what the best bike he's ever ridden is, he'd have a tough time narrowing it down. As they say in the industry, they're all laterally stiff while vertically compliant.

This little test team that Cervelo put together was mostly a bust. To me it seemed like they could never quite decide if they were going to be a classics team, where they had reasonable success, if you could success as a lot of podium finishes but never the top step, and pretty dismal grand tours, thanks in a large to Carlos Sastre, who apparently thinks just showing up is good enough to meet contract obligations. When you're the bike company and you decide to step out on your own you better win some races, else, what's the point of funding it from both sides? For the most part, Cervelo failed to do that, which is why they are now closing up shop and moving back into a role that makes more sense for them in the market place, bike supplier, not team management.

So, while I think Cervelo is doing a smart thing by cutting losses, I don't think the Garmin merger is the right fit. It seems to me that all the high level Cervelo riders who are now going to be donning argyle lycra have their rival already on the team's roster. I read the piece where Vaughters basically says that Hushovd and Farrar will be complimentary to one another, but I don't buy it. Is Hushovd now going to give up his attempt to win points jersey's to lead out Farrar? Doubtful. So who is Garmin going to hang their hat on? They seem to have made a huge investment in branding Tyler Farrar as the future of that team, but for the most part he's come up sort of short in grand tour sprints. Sure he's got a few, but not enough wins to wonder why they went looking for another sprinter. But Hushovd? Anybody who watched the Tour de France this year could see that his best sprint days are behind him. Pure top end speed just isn't coming out of the legs of the God of Thunder anymore and if you want to beat pure sprinters and win points jerseys, you better do better than a consistent 10th place bunch finish and getting in the early break for scraps on the road. That strategy worked for Hushovd in 2009 but he was faster then and Cav got a goose egg on one stage. In 2010 Hushovd used the same strategy and ended up 3rd in that competition. It just seems that by adding all of Cervelo's top level riders you create a delima over who you're bringing to the biggest races of year and who's working for who. I don't see either of these guys, at least honestly, behind the scenes, taking a step back and saying the other guy deserves to be the leader. When Garmin brought Julian Dean and then Robbie Hunter over to lead out Farrar it was pretty obvious that these guys, while once top level tour sprinters were now past their prime and were happy to take on a mentor role to guide the young talent. I don't see Hushovd taking that same approach.

And, this doesn't even bring up the problem of Haussler. Where the hell does he fit into the equation? 2010 was basically a bust for him, which was just royally capped by being left off the Australian World's team despite giving up his German citizenship to ride for Australia in Australia. He's been injured all year so who knows what 2011 will hold. Maybe Haussler was a one hit wonder and this question will answer itself. But if he comes back strong in 2011, that's going to also cause some scheduling issues.

I don't know where I think these guys should have gone. Maybe as an American I think that Cervelo's biggest market is America so sponsoring a Milram or FDJeux wouldn't make much sense and the other American teams are already locked into bike deals. I also realize it's easy for me to sit at my computer and say these guys won't work together and this and that but I am not the guy writing the pay checks. Vaughters seems like a really smart guy from both a business and racing stance. While I disagree with this merger, they must see value, so we'll see what happens. I do think this clearly points to the fact that Garmin will no longer even pretend to think Christian Van deVelde (sp?) can win a major grand tour. They now have the roster of a classics team who will go to grand tours to support sprinters and stage hunters. I actually think this strategy is a really smart move for them as a team, but that does not alleviate the concerns that I mentioned before. When you've got this many talented people who are all trying to win the same races, somebody's not going to be happy. Maybe this new Garmin-Cervelo team will be the modern version of Mapei. I hear Cancellara might be leaving Saxo Bank. Maybe he wants to ride an R3 again...