Lets find these morons and get his stuff back!

Dear Cycling Community: FASTER was burglarized this evening. In your observations, if you see or hear of any questionable attempts to sell Cervelo S5, Guru CR701 or CR901, or any Carerra Bicycles via eBay, Craigslist, or other means, please report it to FASTER immediately. Thank you for your support.

This is nuts … luckily he is alive and walked away from it. 

http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nbcnews.com/51719714#51719714

UC: Tell me your Ages?

This is a story about a guy who finished last. Which is technically true. You can look up the results of the race, and you’ll see his name, right there, lonely at the bottom. Taylor Phinney. USA. Finishing time of six hours, twenty-two minutes, fifty-four seconds. One hundred-and-ninth place. Last.

But this story is better than that.

First, about Taylor Phinney. Remember that name. You might already know it. Bike racer from Boulder, Colo., 22 years old. The son of two cycling legends, Davis Phinney and Connie Carpenter. A big dude on the bike, at 6 feet 5 inches, 180 pounds, Taylor Phinney is one of the most promising young cyclists in the world. He’s already been to the Olympics twice. Won a stage of the prestigious Giro d’Italia last year. He is expected to have many great days in the sport.

Monday didn’t begin like one of those days. Phinney was competing in Italy’s Tirreno-Adriatico stage race, and this penultimate stage was a doozy. Up and down, down and up, 209 kilometers of punishment, including a 27% climb so comically steep that some riders got off their bikes and pushed them uphill. Many riders quit. Later the race organizer would admit that the stage was too difficult, even for elite pros.

Phinney didn’t expect to win this stage. He just wanted to hang around, because the next day brought a time trial against the clock, and Phinney had a chance for a good result in that event. But the day soon unraveled. His legs weren’t feeling great, and then his bike busted its chain. He had to get a replacement and chase his way back to the pack.

“I just was dangling,” Phinney said on the phone, from his home in Tuscany. “We kept going over these really difficult climbs. I’d get back to the group and I would get dropped. I’d get back again, then get dropped.”

But Phinney wanted to fight now. He had to complete the race under the time limit to do the time trial Tuesday. “If I wanted to finish the race, I was going to have to do it by myself,” he said.

So that’s what he did. As the rest of the group abandoned the race, Phinney put his head down and pedaled. He was suddenly alone. The weather was miserable. It began to rain. And Phinney kept thinking of one thing.

“I would just think of my dad,” he said.

Davis Phinney has lived with Parkinson’s disease for more than half of Taylor Phinney’s life. One of the great American racers of all time, a Tour de France stage winner and Olympian, Davis’s day is often met by frustrating physical challenges. Tasks that were once simple take so much longer. Ordinary life requires patience.

That’s what kept his son pedaling in the cold Italian rain.

“I knew that if my dad could be in my shoes for one day—if all he had to do was struggle on a bike for six hours, but be healthy and fully functional—he would be me on that day in a heartbeat,” Taylor Phinney said. “Every time I wanted to quit, every time I wanted to cry, I just thought about that.”

He had so many miles to ride. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said. “The race has gone by, and people aren’t really expecting one rider slogging along by himself.” Fans on the side of the road offered to push him up hills. But Phinney remembered a story his Dad had told him about one of his old Tour de France teams, making a pact to decline pushes.

Taylor would do the same. No pushes.

“He never lost his motivation,” said Fabio Baldato, an assistant director for Phinney’s team, BMC Racing, who was driving a car behind Phinney the entire route. “It was unbelievable.”

“He wanted so badly to finish the race,” said Phinney’s teammate, Thor Hushovd, a former world champion.

Hours later, Phinney crossed the line, exhausted. He finished almost 15 minutes after the second-to-last rider, thirty-seven minutes behind the winner. He didn’t make the time cut for the day, which meant he couldn’t compete in Tuesday’s time trial. It was a bummer, but Phinney was too zonked to be devastated. During his post-race massage, he cried like crazy. On Twitter, Phinney wrote about riding for his Dad and called it “probably the most trying day I’ve had on a bike.” When Phinney’s saga was reported on the website VeloNews, cycling fans went crazy. These have been bleak times for the sport, ripped apart by doping scandals. Phinney’s solo effort—and his emotions post-race—had stirred something soulful. “Emotion is powerful and undeniably human,” Phinney’s mother, Connie Carpenter, said in an email from Italy.

Back home in Colorado, Davis Phinney was marveling at the whole story. You can still find Davis on his bike, usually on the fancy carbon-fiber city commuter he got from his son. Cycling remains a sanctuary—”easier than walking, in a sense,” he said. But the daily routine remains full of hassles. Davis Phinney keeps a sense of humor about it, jokingly referring to himself as “Turtleboy.” He began a foundation to give people living with Parkinson’s tools for living well—for achieving little victories.

Davis Phinney said he didn’t learn about Taylor’s ride until after it was over. Friends told him how inspired they were by his son. When he heard that Taylor had been thinking about him the whole time, he was floored.

“I have almost no words for how amazing it makes me feel,” Davis Phinney said. He wrote in an email to his son:

You make me so happy and beyond proud—and that is better than any medicine and can defeat any disease.

The results are wrong. This is not a story about a guy who finished last. Taylor Phinney won that race.

It is a nightmare scenario, one which too many cyclists in the United States face: you’re pedaling along, minding your own business when an angry driver pulls alongside and starts screaming obscenities. It usually ends with the driver speeding away, but for the Jamis-Hagnes Berman team today’s incident ended up with riders on the ground and police being called in to find the hit-and-run driver.

Speaking to Cyclingnews, Ben Jacques-Maynes described the incident, which happened on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona, where the team is holding its training camp.

“We had just made it out of town onto some quieter roads and were getting ready to start our workout,” Jacques-Maynes said. “We were riding two by two, which is legal in Arizona, and were actually all on the right side of the white line, on the shoulder of the road, when a car drove up beside us and the driver started screaming obscenities at us.”

According to Jacques-Maynes, the driver swerved into the two riders who were on the front of the 15-man paceline, causing a crash. Tyler Wren was the rider most injured but appeared to escape without any broken bones.

It was a frightening incident for Jacques-Maynes, whose twin brother Andy was the victim of a hit-and-run in California earlier this year, resulting in a broken collarbone which, combined with his lack of a pro contract for 2013, ended his cycling career.

The Jamis-Hagens Berman team was fortunate to have its follow car behind it, with directeur Sebastian Alexandre at the wheel. He was able to chase after the angry driver, allowing the team’s photographer John Segesta to employ his zoom lens to get pictures of the license plate. Police are currently looking for the driver.

It is a rare incident for a city which is known as one of the most bike-friendly communities in the country, but one not uncommon in the United States, where drivers do not understand that cyclists have the right to occupy the lane of traffic.

Video Tribute:

www.teamoneracing.com/Bobby.mov

Funeral:

VA National Cemetary 23029 N.Cave Creek Rd. Phoenix 85024 is set for Thursday Feb 14th at 2:30pm with a celebration of Bob’s life gathering to follow and will be held at Airpark Bikes 8388 E. Hartford Dr. Suite 100 (probably 3:30 ish)

Memorial Ride:

Memorial ride on Saturday Feb. 23rd at 7:30 a.m. – we will be climbing the hills around camelback mountain that Cowboy loved to do. Climbing Sage, La Cholla, 56th street, and up to the Castle (east and south side of Camelback mountain – very short streets but over 20% grades). Check the undergroundcrit.com calendar next week for the starting points.

For those of you that don’t know him, Bob was tough as nails! Bob was a 50+ racer here in AZ and has won more races over the years than anyone I know and 90% of the time it was by himself off the front. State Champion and Copper cup champion year after year and winner of the Tour of Phoenix with his brother Jim on a tandem. If you raced recently, he was one of your medical personnel at the “Not So Underground Crit” since he was a Fireman for Honeywell. He just raced the 12 hours of Papago, raced Avondale (pro 1-2), raced and rode the UC, and just this past Saturday was on Bike Ranch A ride dropping you!

One story many of you probably don’t know is that Bob and Jim were riding with their buddy Dick a few years back here in Phoenix when Dick had a heart attack on the bike. Bob and Jim brought Dick back to life and to this day, Dick always rides with Bob, Jim, or both. Jim and Dick were riding with Bob earlier that day.

My buddy Raymond and I once raced in Yuma with Bob a few years back. We were in an elevator with Bob when a guy and gal got on. The girl was wearing some sort of sexy cowgirl outfit but since we were at a hotel and there was no cowgirl event going on in Yuma, Raymond and I knew this girl was no cowgirl! Bob glanced at them and said one of the funniest things I have ever heard: “Hey, you guys here for the Rodeo?” Bob was dead serious – and there was no rodeo in town. Anyway, I’m not sure if Raymond or I said it, but from then on we would call him “Cowboy”.

On a personal note, at every race or UC, Bob would come up every time I had my little girl there and kneel down and grab her little hand and say hello to her. Tough as nails but a gentle giant as well.

Tough loss for us all. He will be missed.

I know not all of you know him but for those that do, I think it would be cool to email Jim (his brother) if you have a memorable story about Cowboy. Jim said it was ok to give out his email and Jim recently said “I encourage you to remember him not in sadness but with a big smile like he always had especially when he was going all out!” and believe me, if you rode with him, you were going all out!

Jim = jimpongratz@aol.com

P.S. – Any funeral arrangements or memorial ride activity will be posted on the UC site when I am notified of such.

** Cowboy is the guy pictured on the right side

** Also recently learned he was a cowboy at one time. He worked on a horse ranch in Colorado in his earlier years!

dedication page for him:

http://www.thefridayride.com/2013/02/04/bob-pongratz-dedication-feb-2013/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bob-pongratz-dedication-feb-2013

http://mikehitesphotography.smugmug.com/Events/2013-Underground-Crit/27648107_cm4qzD#!i=2328707520&k=GW5thcr

Here is a link for some videos by Rick Rowen who has done almost all the photos on this website. (some more videos on the right side of the page if you click over there after the first video plays):

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rightbrainphotography/8401403076/

rightbrainphotography.com – click the facebook link on his website and scroll down on his Facebook page to see some photo’s as well.   I’ll post some photo’s to on the site soon.

Thanks for all who raced or came out to show their support.   If you know of a link where there are more pictures, email undergroundcrit@yahoo.com.

UC Race 1/19/13

Slideshow

View 6 photos

Eatmore Cheesecake …

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