Time to hang up the wheels?

 Time to hang up the wheels?

No, not us! We'll just ride e-bikes. Perhaps this guy? As our friend at BikeRaceInfo, "Chairman Bill" McGann likes to say, "There's so far no cure for the common birthday", yet the former top pro in the linked story constantly blames his equipment for his huge decline as a competitive bike racer.

He does it here, here and here, just to point out a few times. And currently the blame goes to an error made setting up the new bikes provided by his team...3 years ago?

Michele Favaloro dials-in a new bike for a CycleItalia client.

Really? Zio Lorenzo was a bike-fitter back-in-the-day, using the original New England Cycling Academy's "FitKit" method, taught to him by the bike shop owner he worked for. We charged for the service and each job was signed-off by the owner (the guy with the diploma) so Zio has some experience in this area.

He made this video to help CycleItalia clients get accurate measurements from their bikes to help him to set up bikes for them from our rental fleet. I guess this former Tour winner should have watched it too?

How could you screw this up? Setting saddle-to-handlebar distance is the second thing Zio does after setting the seat height! This pro says the distance from his handlebar to saddle was off by 3 centimeters, causing back pain. Duh. Zio understands the guy was broken-up badly in his crash before going to this team but he was unable to feel a 3 cm difference and nobody ever bothered to compare the measurements from his old team bike...for 3 years? What measurements did they use to select the frame size, stem length, etc, when he went to this new team? Aren't these people supposed to be pros?

So much for all the maniacal attention-to-detail and "marginal gains" claptrap used to explain his and his former team's success. If he's really this clueless one has to wonder if his success was due to something else maybe? This was a guy who couldn't seem to get out of his own way until he joined that infamous British team, already at 25 years of age.

Lots of race wins and doping allegations followed. He's as recovered from his horrific crash as he's ever going to be, so perhaps it's time at nearly 40 years of age to realize "Chairman Bill" is right and call it a career?