Contador 2010

[progressor]

I personally appreciate his efforts. Why blast the guy when he is making a positive (IMO) contribution to the forum? If you don't appreciate what he's bringing to the table just ignore him. Why spoil it for the rest of us?

I'm not blasting him

 

[Angliru]

I'm not blasting him

If I replied to a post of yours saying that you needed to "get a life" and called you a "fanboy" I doubt you would take it any better than he did.
We all in this forum need to try to be a bit more civil with one another. It does get pretty nasty in here when it really isn't necessary, provoked or warranted. As an example of a forum that is entertaining, informative and pretty civil, check out podiumcafe.com. I've personally stepped back and looked at some of my previous posts and some of the exchanges in here
and it gets pretty heated and using your word: "nasty". I'm trying to do better.

 

[richwagmn]

I am by no means a Lance fanboy but I can categorically state that if it had not been for Lance´s Legacy of winning the tef 7 times I would not be into cycling. The first year i watch the tdf was the year after he left but it was aroused by interest in TDF after randomly reading his book that was given to me by a friend. Now I live the tdf irrespective of who rides or wins. I think it has gone both ways

Absolutely nothing wrong with this. I'm probably quite a bit older and if not for Greg LeMond I doubt I would have ever cared about cycling. Soon I was subscribing to VeloNews back when it was a newspaper format and have been following cycling (and riding myself of course) since then.

LA helped more people in the US take notice of pro cycling. We get TV coverage now that simply didn't exist in LeMond's day (Wide World of Sports 2 hour show once a week mostly covering sightseeing in France).

I don't like LA but you can't deny his positive effect on cycling in the US.

 

[alberto.legstrong]

If I replied to a post of yours saying that you needed to "get a life" and called you a "fanboy" I doubt you would take it any better than he did.
We all in this forum need to try to be a bit more civil with one another. It does get pretty nasty in here when it really isn't necessary, provoked or warranted. As an example of a forum that is entertaining, informative and pretty civil, check out podiumcafe.com. I've personally stepped back and looked at some of my previous posts and some of the exchanges in here
and it gets pretty heated and using your word: "nasty". I'm trying to do better.

Ya'know, I don't think we should be above looking back at posts of ours that we regret and deleting them, and if someone unfortunately responded to my post, I have also sent a pm to them apologizing and asking for a deletion.

Of course, if 10 people have jumped all over it by the time I want to delete, I guess my last resort is to apologize to the thread and try and think it through a little further before submitting.

Perhaps the lesson, especially for those of you who post 10 times a day or have that kind of free time, is to use more time thinking about what you want to say and maybe posting a little less.

 

[*G*K*S*]

I personally appreciate his efforts. Why blast the guy when he is making a positive (IMO) contribution to the forum? If you don't appreciate what he's bringing to the table just ignore him. Why spoil it for the rest of us?

Same here. Keep up the good work swordsman.

 

[rides like a girl]

Same here. Keep up the good work swordsman.

Work keeps me too busy this time of year to dig up the stories swordsman finds. I too appreciate his efforts to gather and post info on AC. I have enjoyed many of his videos and other stories...

 

[reyan12]

Dude I'm not being nasty but you do need to get a life - this fanboy stuff is just unhealthy. You don't really have any idea what these people are really like so why get all obsessed?

if you cant contribute anything good here please refrain from talking.its your ideas that seem nasty and unhealthy to me.if youre not a Contador fan and you can not appreciate the effforts of his fans then you can start a fanpage of your favourite rider.you should not be in this thread in the first place.

thesworsdman is a very resourceful person.i appreciate his efforts.hats off to him!

 

[Oldman]

Same here. Keep up the good work swordsman.

For someone that's not a fan in general it's great to get media that doesn't involve a Texan.

 

[progressor]

If I replied to a post of yours saying that you needed to "get a life" and called you a "fanboy" I doubt you would take it any better than he did.
We all in this forum need to try to be a bit more civil with one another. It does get pretty nasty in here when it really isn't necessary, provoked or warranted. As an example of a forum that is entertaining, informative and pretty civil, check out podiumcafe.com. I've personally stepped back and looked at some of my previous posts and some of the exchanges in here
and it gets pretty heated and using your word: "nasty". I'm trying to do better.

Fair enough. The guy just seems to get to emotionally involved,and I honestly think that's unhealthy. But yes you have a point - it's too easy respond in the ultra aggressive tones - and terms -that dominate this forum.

Sorry swordsman, badly worded, I wasn't trying to attack you with those posts but angliru has a point.

 

[python]

progressor, could you please take your message to lance armstrong thread. plenty of opportunity to meet REAL fans and anti-fans THERE. bpc and sprocket are eagerly awaiting your input, support and critique.

your contributions here unlike theswrdsman's are not constructive and are not appreciated. thank you in advance.

 

[progressor]

progressor, could you please take your message to lance armstrong thread. plenty of opportunity to meet REAL fans and anti-fans THERE. bpc and sprocket are eagerly awaiting your input, support and critique.

your contributions here unlike theswrdsman's are not constructive and are not appreciated. thank you in advance.

Why did you post that after my apology? Pathetic

 

[python]

Why did you post that after my apology? Pathetic

pathetic is your continued presence in this thread. you have plenty of passionate fans to be chastising who share your beliefs. and now please disappear.

 

[progressor]

pathetic is your continued presence in this thread. you have plenty of passionate fans to be chastising who share your beliefs. and now please disappear.

What beliefs of mine are you referring to?

 

[python]

back to berto...

i find it interesting that he did not mind to make public his efforts re his tt bike and other improvements. i wonder what other innovation/position changes he (and marti, his personal trainer) have come up with. i always suspected that one of the main reasons berto is such a good tter is due his flexibility and small size of his thy bones. this allows to experiment with various CdAs whilst measuring his power output.

 

[progressor]

back to berto...

I find it interesting that he did not mind to make public his efforts re his tt bike and other improvements. I wonder what other innovation/position changes he (and marti, his personal trainer) have come up with. I always suspected that one of the main reasons berto is such a good tter is due his flexibility and small size of his thy bones. This allows to experiment with various cdas whilst measuring his power output.

:d .

 

[python]

back to berto...

i find it interesting that he did not mind to make public his efforts re his tt bike and other improvements. i wonder what other innovation/position changes he (and marti, his personal trainer) have come up with. i always suspected that one of the main reasons berto is such a good tter is due his flexibility and small size of his thy bones. this allows to experiment with various CdAs whilst measuring his power output.

thread about contador

 

[progressor]

thread about contador

Perfect and Clean

 

[python]

susan or other mods around could you please help with having a troll evacuated from this thread ?

he is trying to hijack another thread by diverting all discussions to his persona.

Thank you.

 

[python]

please continue discussions about contador.

 

[Publicus]

back to berto...

i find it interesting that he did not mind to make public his efforts re his tt bike and other improvements. i wonder what other innovation/position changes he (and marti, his personal trainer) have come up with. i always suspected that one of the main reasons berto is such a good tter is due his flexibility and small size of his thy bones. this allows to experiment with various CdAs whilst measuring his power output.

I think it is also because he can handle the pain/suffering better than most. I recall (but don't have a link) reading that he was put through some stress test to determine threshold and they were shocked at home much (and for how long) he could suffer on the bike. He was a young pro at the time (maybe Liberty Seguros).

 

[Publicus]

susan or other mods around could you please help with having a troll evacuated from this thread ?

he is trying to hijack another thread by diverting all discussions to his persona.

Thank you.

I wouldn't let progressor get to you. He is just one of many posters here who do not (generally) contribute to the substantive discussion on any particular thread. Given his relative infrequent posting, I would just ignore him (either actively or passively).

 

[theswordsman]

Contador has been focused on training and stayed out of the news, but I don't want to disappoint the haters (or his fans), so I'll post. AlbertoContadorNotebook just posted a video of an interview where Contador was presented with his dog, Tour. It was December 22, 2008. He had won the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta that year. And this is his reaction to a dog that I guess was a Christmas present.

http://www.albertocontadornotebook.info/index.html

 

[Polish]

I think it is also because he can handle the pain/suffering better than most. I recall (but don't have a link) reading that he was put through some stress test to determine threshold and they were shocked at home much (and for how long) he could suffer on the bike. He was a young pro at the time (maybe Liberty Seguros).

Yes, Alberto can handle Pain better than most.....

And he just finished his TdF Reconn....
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/contador-completes-tour-de-france-reconnaissance

Has Alberto been spotted weighing his food or sleeping in a tent yet?

 

[theswordsman]

Has Alberto been spotted weighing his food or sleeping in a tent yet?

I don't think the weighing of food is necessary, because he only seems to get maybe 2 kilos above race weight.

I was searching for something earlier and found an old El Pais article that talks a lot about Contador's past. When he was eighteen, he was already eating right and getting to bed by ten.

He poses for the photographer in his brand new house in Pinto. Parked outside is his red BMW, and in the living room, there's a huge plasma TV. Around it lay cardboard boxes - Alberto and his partner, Macarena, have not even had time to properly move in yet. Contador warns the photographer: "My other profile is better. You can't see the titanium plates." The cyclist points to a spot on his forehead above his right eye and under a curved scar, which traverses his hairline almost from ear to ear. "I've got one here and another one here," he says. "They're from the operation."

The operation took place in May 2004. He was descending on his way to Infiesto during the Asturias Tour when his whole body started shaking with convulsions that threw him off his bike. "I was ahead and was meant to keep on pushing, while Alberto was meant to be taking it easy behind me," says his friend Jesús Hernández, who has cycled alongside Contador since their teenage years and spent a couple of years with him at Liberty Seguros. "I didn't find out until the stage was over. But later on, at night, I saw what had happened on TV. It was terrible."

Contador recounts the story with a certain analytical distance. He doesn't remember much about that day. "No, the scar doesn't tell me anything when I comb my hair in the mornings," he says. "I have no special memory of the moment. But when I saw the images, I realized that the first people who looked after me made a mistake. They made me lie on my back; I could have swallowed my tongue and choked. They should have placed me on my side. That's what you're meant to do in these cases."

It is almost harder for his family than for him to recall that day: the three hours they spent waiting at Madrid's Ramón y Cajal hospital for him to come out of surgery. Manolo Saiz unable to sleep, slouched on a chair, his parents, Francisco and Francisca, who migrated to Madrid from Extremadrua in the 1970s, and their children, Fran, Alicia and Raúl, waiting for the neurosurgeons to finish their job.

"From my point of view, and this is something I never dared tell him, I felt sorry for him because it could have been the end of his cycling career - and after all the sacrifices he had made to get where he was," says Fran. "That's why I wanted everything to go well, because I never feared for his life. I just wanted him to be normal, and for him to be able to go out with his friends again, and be sure he didn't suffer. The problem is that the area of the brain on which they had to operate was very close to the area linked to the feelings and the senses, such as taste and smell. We were afraid that when he woke up he would just start laughing over nothing or crying because he couldn't control it."

When he woke up and opened his eyes, Fran helped his parents to his bedside. Alberto looked at them and said: "It's all over, now it's time to get better."

"While he thought his normal life was at risk, he forgot about his bike," says Jesús Hernández, "but later he picked it up with more energy than before. Six months later he was already pounding us during a race in Australia." In January 2005 he was competing again, and three days later he won the first victory of his professional career.


Javier Fernández, who signed the teenage Contador up for the neighborhood team of Embajadores, recalls what the young Alberto was like then. "He was about 15 the first time I saw him, with that iron bike, which was completely outdated. He had a natural talent and strength, and broke away from the pack in a race that included Madrid's best young cyclists," he says. "It was obvious he had no technique, but also that he wanted to be a cyclist. Alberto had nothing. His parents couldn't even go with him to the races because they had to stay with his younger brother [Raúl, who has suffered from brain damage since he was a child], always in his wheelchair."

"The lack of means helped me value the little I had," says Contador. "It made me stronger. Whenever I saved up, I spent it all on new equipment."

When he was racing in the lower categories, he already behaved like a professional. He trained daily, went to bed at 10pm, barely went out with his friends and watched what he ate and how much he slept. He scooped few overall victories, but a lot of mountain stages. When he was 18, Alberto Contador made up his mind. He dropped out of high-school without having finished 12th grade and signed up for Basque team Iberdrola-Loinaz, the youth team run by Manolo Saiz, who nourished his main team, Liberty, with the young talents who came from the Loinaz. "There was no turning back," says Contador. "I would go all out." That meant spending long periods of time in the Basque Country. "We rented out a flat in Azpeitia, and between the two of us we managed quite well," says Hernández, who joined Iberdrola-Loinaz at the same time. "We cleaned the house and made dinner. I had my suitcase, and everything very tidy and in its right place. And there he was, in complete chaos. He was chaotic in everything, apart from when he was on his bike, which he looked after better than anybody else." It was then that they started calling him Pantani, referring to the Italian king of the mountains. Soon everybody in the cycling world had heard about Contador.

"He was just a kid among all those men. And there was something special about how he pedaled," recalls Johan Bruyneel, who first cycled alongside Contador on the ascent to the Neila lagoons, in the 2003 Tour of Burgos. Four years later the kid was winning the Tour de France. "The best news that's come from the cycling world this year has been Contador's Tour victory and his sheer class," says Caisse D'Epargne's boss, José Miguel Echávarri, who first saw him cycling up the Lezaun, in Navarre. "Everybody spoke to me about him, but I couldn't sign him up. I had to respect Manolo Saiz, because I knew he was his team's future." The sporting director of the team that brought Perico and Indurain to victory had a chance to sign up Contador last summer. "But life is all about choices," says Echávarri, who at the time had lunch with the boy from Pinto in Aranda de Duero, Burgos. "On his head I could see the scar of his surgery, but you could also see burnt onto his body the words 'Tour de France.' But our first choice had been [Alejandro] Valverde."

A few days after the Aranda lunch, during his last race with Liberty, Contador suffered an epileptic fit. The internal scar left by his surgery means a part of his brain is hypersensitive, and as a result, he is prone to having epileptic fits. Contador takes medication daily to prevent those fits, and pays regular visits to the neurologist. That is another handicap for him, a hurdle in his career he doesn't like to talk about. "It doesn't make sense to talk about that," he says. "All I can say is that Alberto is obsessed about not doing anything strange with his health," says Pedro Celaya, the doctor at his current team, Discovery. "He still remembers hospital well."

"So when that German doctor [Dr Werner Franke, who in early August kept him out of the Hamburg Classic, accusing him of being linked to a doping ring] comes out and says I'm taking corticosteroids and steroids and all sorts of stuff, I get really angry," says Contador, a victim of the curse of the yellow jersey, which automatically casts a shadow of doubt over all those who have won it. "Just look at my career, what I was like as a teenager, when I was an amateur, how hard I've worked, and how it's all the result of a logical course of events. I hear things and I feel like laughing - or crying. Somewhere I've read that an expert says that it is physiologically impossible to climb as fast as I do. I'd invite him to climb up with me to see. It's horrible. They've even said that when I had surgery they did something to my brain and turned me into a superman."

Now his friends - people such as Jesús Hernández, who sent Contador a text message every day of the Tour to tell him it gave him goose bumps to see him doing so well - just hope that the Tour, all this popularity and the millions he is earning won't change him. What there is no doubt about is that the life of people around him has changed. His father preferred to stay home with his son Raúl the day that Pinto took to the streets to greet the town's new hero when he arrived from Paris. "Now I can't even go for bread or take out the trash without somebody coming up to me and asking me about him," says his brother Fran. Journalists bombard his friends and his first coaches with phone calls. But they all hope Alberto won't change. They want him to remain that boy from Pinto whose parents gave him the freedom to cycle what might not have been the best bikes, but still allowed him to reach the summit from the bottom of the mountain. They want him to remain the boy who used to step out onto the balcony of his family apartment in downtown Pinto whistling. Dozens of pigeons would answer his call, and despite his neighbors' complaints, he kept on whistling, spending his pocket money on bird food.

"I don't think anything will change him," says one of his friends. "I think he'll always remember his childhood friends. And that he'll remain as stubborn as always: a fighter, just himself."

http://cyclingfansanonymous.blogspot.com/2008/08/who-is-real-contador.html

 

[Polish]

I don't think the weighing of food is necessary, because he only seems to get maybe 2 kilos above race weight.

I was searching for something earlier and found an old El Pais article that talks a lot about Contador's past. When he was eighteen, he was already eating right and getting to bed by ten.



http://cyclingfansanonymous.blogspot.com/2008/08/who-is-real-contador.html

Oh Crap, I thought you had me on ignore.

Now I feel embarrassed.
DON"T LOOK IN THE CLINIC.