Attending a Game at Maracana

So you're going to be in Brazil, and you want to watch a game at Maracanã. Good for you. You may be frightened stiff by all the talk about Rio's dangers. Well, I did it and I'm alive to tell. It was mildly terrifying before I did it, exhilarating while I was there, and sufficiently staid afterwards that I went back a second time, with the same experience.

If, after reading this, you're still nervous, and attending a game is the most important thing to you, go with a tour. Your hotel definitely has one. Or you could hook up with Sergio, a wonderful guide. I didn't use him myself, and I've never met him; we've only traded email. But he was helpful even though I wasn't a customer, and demonstrated a genuine affection for the game. I got the clear sense that with him, I wouldn't be getting an overly packaged experience. And his rates were lower than the hotel's.

But I hate tours, and wanted to do this not surrounded by a group of other terrified tourists. So what follows is some approximation to step-by-step instructions on how you can do this for yourself.

Two more things to note.

Maracanã isn't the only stadium in Rio. Engenhão is another major (new) stadium with a full slate of games. But it's a bit farther from the subway, and I wasn't as sure about its neighborhood. Nevertheless, I imagine it makes for an equally exciting venue. (And you can get bragging points: “Oh, these days everyone goes to Maracanã, but I...”. You could make it out to be the K2 of Rio stadiums at your pub back home.)

More importantly, I attended two mid-season club games with only one team from Rio. So everything was easy. None of this applies for games whose results matter more, when a famous rivalry (such as Fla-Flu) is involved, when the national team plays, etc.

Okay, let's begin.

---

You can find a schedule to games on the CBF site. As of this writing, click on “Série A” at the top, and try the links on the left. “Escalas” should give you a schedule, but it may only show the current week. This link gave me a full season schedule, but sometimes the Web page just produces an error. This kind of difficulty may be good preparation. [Note: Sergio's site, linked above, usually contains the game schedule.]

Warning: I made various game plans based on this schedule. I sent email to two Brazilian friends to confirm I'd read everything right, and I had. A week before the games I checked the schedule again, and every game had changed in some way (time, date, ...). So give yourself a little flexibility, and check again closer to the date.

The stadium's name is not Maracaña—it's not in Spanish. It's pronounced “mah-RAH-ka-na”. You may hear the metro announcer pronounce it as “mah-RAH-ka-nu”.

Learn a few key words: today (hoje: ho-ZHAY), tomorrow (amanhã: ah-ma-NYA), yellow (amarela: ama-RAY-la), green (verde: vehr-DJEH), white (branco: br-AHN-cu). Practice the pronounciation a bit: though the written words are very similar to Spanish, they aren't spoken quite the same way. If you're taking my suggestion on tickets, and all this language stuff terrifies you, you could write a note containing the date, names of teams, “arquibancada verde/amarela”, and a number (of tickets), and slide it in the ticket window. This has the advantage that you will almost certainly have no problem at all, and the disadvantage that you will have failed as a traveler. [If you are repelled nevertheless, it may be because you're trying to buy tickets for a future game—even the next day's—and they aren't on sale on the current day.]

Research the team colors. The Wikipedia pages for all the teams I saw gave their home- and away-colors. You would do well to avoid wearing any team colors at all. (Admittedly, the second time I accidentally wore a shirt in partial team colors—one of Fluminense's tricolor—and nobody seemed to notice or care. Still, standard precautions apply.) And from reading those pages, you may also learn a chant or two.

You can usually buy your ticket the evening of the game—various sources recommend getting there two hours ahead. I found it easier to go earlier in the day, to keep my afternoons flexible. The ticket office seems to be open at reasonable hours. (You can also buy the tickets directly from the team's box offices—I located the one for Flamengo on Rua Raul Machado, two blocks west of the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas (that's right, it's not in the Flamengo section of town)—but going to buy the ticket is a good dress-rehearsal for getting to the match.)

To get your ticket, take the metro to the Maracanã station. You can't miss the stadium; you really, absolutely cannot. (The only way you could miss it is if visibility were under a hundred yards—if it is, what are you doing at a football game?) When you emerge from the station, take the (can't miss) ramp to the left. This will put you at one of the stadium's main gates. Facing the gate, proceed left along the stadium wall. You'll soon get to the ticket window. There seems to always be a handful of people milling about (including touts, who left well enough alone when I spoke in Portuguese but hassled people who spoke English). Also look for the word Arquibancada above the little teller windows. This is the word for the upper floor of the stadium, and where you want to sit.

Buy your tickets. I asked for Arquibancada Verde, the green stand; one time I was given a ticket for it, another time for the amarela (yellow) section. They're essentially indistinguishable. Those tickets were BRL 30. For more, you can sit in the white or blue sections, where you sit side-on to the field. On the back of your ticket you'll see all the relevant details (stand, date, time, teams) printed, so make sure these are what you wanted.

In terms of time, using the metro, it never took me longer than about an hour to get to or from the stadium, and that's from Cantagalo, currently the end-station of the other line (in western Copacabana). I expect 1h15m is a very safe estimate. I once got there in just about 45 minutes.

There is no real in-stadium pre-game tradition, nor the equivalent of batting-practice. So there's not much to do if you get there early, other than revel in the fact that you're there. Which is something in itself, so you might as well. Be aware that the locals seem to mill about outside the stadium until just before the game, so your “empty” section may end up packed. It may even be that you ended up in the heart of a team's cheering section, with drums behind you and flares going off overhead. This is not a hypothetical.

Why do people mill about outside? In part to meet their friends, etc., but I think mainly because you can't buy alcohol inside the stadium. The only beer is alcohol-free (if you order a beer and are told something that sounds like a disclaimer, that's what they're telling you). So you'll see lots of vendors selling alcohol outside, including on the ramp between the metro and the stadium. Get your fill if you must while you can. I chose to not dull my senses. (And given the dismal quality of Brazilian beer, the non-alcoholic stuff in the stadium was no great loss.)

You may have noticed that your ticket has some slightly bewildering code indicating your actual seat. For the games I went to, they weren't bothering with assigned seating. It meant I was free to roam around the stadium, and indeed I periodically moved between stands to get different views of the stadium, the game, and the cheering sections. If they are checking seating assignments, then I expect you will simply be pointed in the right direction.

You will be searched before you go in—a quick and friendly pat-down. (As you walk up the ramp in the stadium, you'll see guys lifting their shirts. They're showing the police their belts, though you may think this is just beach machismo gone awry.) I believe I saw backpacks get in; they didn't blink at (and certainly didn't inspect) my umbrella. I expect a bottle of water is also fine (they aren't obsessed with stadium concessions like they are in the US), but do leave the heavy artillery at home.

You won't actually find much at the stadium concessions. There's no real food to speak of. I saw some vendors selling what looked like boxed, pre-made hot-dogs; there were various kinds of snacks; and that's about it. On the other hand, it's not very expensive. (Beer was BRL 4, chips and such about BRL 3, a little bag of nuts is BRL 1. So you don't need to carry much cash.) One warning: the nuts (amendoim) contain monosodium glutamate (MSG).

One other tip. If you don't already have one, buy your return metro ticket before the game. (When people get off the metro they're all focused on finding friends, etc., so there are no queues at all to buy tickets.) This will save you a lot of waiting later.

My first game began at 8:30, so I got back to Cantagalo sometime around 11:30pm. It would be false to say that walking the 5-6 blocks back to my hotel (a block off the beach) felt like “the safest thing in the world”, but it did feel very safe. Even the streets immediately around the station, which are a bit dark, are peopled. They're all working-class folk, many of them enjoying what is presumably a post-work drink at the little local bars and snack counters, away from the tourist places. But because they're locals, not tourists, they do know their colors, and may be a bit tired or tipsy. So this is one place where wearing team colors may just cause a bit of trouble.

If you want a team jersey, the official ones cost a pretty penny. You can find cheap ones, but these aren't quality prints, and are presumably not legal. Anyway, if that's what rocks your boat, you can even find them outside the stadium. I approached a vendor and was quoted BRL 30. I laughed, and he immediately dropped it to BRL 20. I tried to talk him into BRL 16 and he wouldn't take it. Okay, that gave me a lower-bound.

Later, I walked around in the street-market in Copacabana and asked some of the guys selling Brazil team shirts for local team shirts. I noticed that asking them somewhat loudly made them immediately say no (so these are illegal!). But if you linger at a store for a few moments a store-keeper will eventually approach you; mention the team you want to him in a low and conspiratorial voice. He'll take you to the back of the store-tent and pull the jersey out of a big, black trash bag full of illicit team jerseys. He too will start with BRL 30-32, so just say “I can get this at the stadium itself for ...!” He'll fold right away. And you're probably still paying way too much for a cheap rip-off. I did.

How to Enliven the NFL

I was watching the end of a routine game between the San Diego Chargers and the Minnesota Vikings today. Football (the American kind) has a unique notion of “running out the clock”: i.e., wasting time to end the game. This prompted that seer of baseball, Earl Weaver, to reputedly say, “You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all.”

Anyway, I was watching this game and thinking how generic it was: take away the colors and names, and it could be any two teams playing anywhere. What a waste of local color and character. So it occurred to me: why not allow teams to acquire attributes based on their names?

Imagine if the Vikings had real horns (not painted-on ones) on their helmets, and if the Chargers carried battery-packs that let enabled them to administer moderate shocks. (This would give a whole new meaning to the term “defensive battery”. Aside: the first few hits on Google for “football defensive battery” all refer to assault-and-battery charges on football players.) Various teams (Bills, Ravens, Bengals, Jaguars, Lions, Bears, Falcons, Cardinals, ...) could also outfit with horns, fangs, beaks, and the like. Give the Cowboys lassos, the Redskins tomahawks. The Patriots would be equipped with muskets and blunderbusses: lethal, you might think, but not when you consider the reload time. The Texans presumably arm with concealed weapons and lethal injections. Only the Dolphins, it would appear, are disadvantaged by this scheme.

Out of Africa

About a year and half ago, a good friend (name hidden to protect the guilty) bought me an extremely generous gift: a pair of MBT running shoes, which cost the grand sum of about 150 GBP, a sum I'm entirely unworthy of.

What kind of shoe costs that much? One that comes with its own DVD, of course. MBT stands for Masai Barefoot Technology, and you can immediately see it all come together, the confluence of technology (Technology), its opposite (Barefoot), and its appropriately politically correct second-cousin twice-removed (Masai). MBT shoes are characterized by a curved sole—think the shape of the Nike swoosh— that make the very notion of standing stil a bit of a balancing act. The theory is immediately obvious: the sole's shape mirrors the manner in which you're supposed to place, roll and lift your feet while running, so the shoes will improve your running motion and quite likely result in less stress on the knees. And so forth: there are details about the lace fasteners, and so on, but these are all second-order attributes.

I haven't, I'm afraid, had a chance to test any of these theories. Because my friend bought me the shoes from some sort of exercise center-cum-spa in London, to which I haven't been able to return, I was entirely at the mercy of the extraordinarily unqualified fitting, ahem, sales agent, who failed to account for either the width of my feet (wider than normal) or the thickness of socks. Result: the shoes don't fit me, and I've only used them about six times, usually with painful consequences.

Before leaving for Banff in May, I decided to go for a quick run in the morning. For reasons not worth elaborating, I decided to do the run in the MBTs, and without socks. (The latter is less daft than it sounds once you accept the initial premise, seeing as that's the only way I can fit my feet into the shoes.)

I was doing quite well for the first several minutes until I began to feel a slight itch in the rear of my right foot. After a while it got rather irritating, as if a small, sharp stone had gotten wedged. Squriming my foot didn't seem to move the stone at all so, at the end of a mile, I stopped to investigate. A goodly surface, about the size of an American quarter, had lost its epidermis and was raw, pink, bleeding flesh.

There was only one natural course of action. I took off the shoes, in the best puss-in-boots fashion put one on each hand, and proceeded to run the mile back home...barefoot. Oh, the irony.

For anyone tempted to smack down several Dead Presidents for MBTs, don't let this tale dissuade you. I'm sure they have wonderful reasons for making the backs of the heels chafe. They certainly can't be blamed for selling their wares prominently through incompetent outlets. The DVD alone may be worth the price. But I must warn you about one more unexpected side-effect of wearing MBTs.

Two winters ago we visited my wife's family in Williamsburg, Virginia. Kathi, her sister Jodi, and I went for a run through the historical area, and ended up in the cheese shop(pe?). As we traversed the store I heard a rather delighted squeal from behind, in stereo. I turned to find a mother-daughter pair, looking for all the world like they listed a spa as their home address, staring in delight at my legs. My ego deflated slightly when I realized they were actually staring at the bottom of my legs. We made eye-contact and they proceeded, mother taking the lead, “Ohmygawd! Where did you get those from?” After several rounds of exchange in which they revealed the celebrity status of MBT trainers at their spa, one of the distaff pair finally let it drop: “We've nevah seen those on a man before!”

Caveat emptor.

I Know I Knew a Knee

In late 2005 I started to take up running. After two winters on a bike trainer in the basement, I was jealous of people who could actually do outdoor things in the winter—in shorts! Running is relatively convenient compared with cycling, especially where I live, so when spring arrived my feet stayed firmly planted on the ground, instead of clipping into pedals. And thus, what began as a winter substitute turned into cross-training and then slowly morphed into something I nearly admitted to liking. (The admission comes hard in part because having been asthmatic into my teens, running is truly harsh on me.) The day before we left for Edinburgh in November 2006, I ran my first sub-7-minute mile.

By spring 2007, the entire length of my left leg felt about twice as old as the rest of me. I had some persistent pain in that foot; then along the thigh; and finally the knee got so bad I couldn't sit with my knee bent for more than fifteen minutes. In restaurants, I had to find a table where I could stretch out my leg, as if fractured and in a cast. I was very close to going in to a doctor, and had begun steeling myself for the inevitable knee surgery.

As an experiment, starting in the beginning of May, I decided to give up running cold turkey and focus solely on cycling. At first all those old pains persisted, and manifested themselves on the bike. But then, about 500 miles later, I noticed that they were...completely gone. My left leg feels as good as my right, both feel excellent, and I write this message having just spent four continuous hours almost motionless on a plane, knees bent, without the slightest trace of pain.

It's well-known that running is usually harder on the knees than cycling (though a badly-configured bicycle can be just as bad or worse). I'm also lazy about warming-up and the like; clearly, people run marathons on end without anything like the problems my feeble efforts engendered. But it still amazes me that cycling can not only be so much less bodily stress, but that it can have helped effectively cure my knee. Maybe I can sink the cost of that surgery into a new bike instead!

Slow-Motion Sports

American football is my canonical example of a slow-motion sport. By that I'm not referring to the long pauses between action (what George Will famously likened to committee meetings), and obviously not to the actual plays, in which numerous people with the speed of top sprinters charge in several different directions all at once. Rather, I'm referring to the fact that what you see is not what you necessarily get: before you can cheer for a touchdown, you have to check whether a flag was thrown on the 40-yard line because someone whom you've never heard of who had nothing to do with the play grabbed the jersey of someone else you've never heard of who also would have had nothing to do with the play—save for the jersey-grabbing, which has now nullified the play itself.

Every sport has or is acquiring slow-motion elements. Cricket and tennis now have action-replays that can make or nullify a decision. But these are invoked rarely, and when they are, the result is usually dramatic (in cricket, especially, the uses are sparing and important enough that the official replays are tenser than the play itself). And outside a small set of events there are no fouls or replays, letting stand what you saw as what happened.

Mind, I don't mean “slow-motion” as a pejorative. There is a certain kind of fan for whom that very indecision is part of the charm of the sport, and it leads to a kind of dramatic tension of its own. So be it. That isn't my point here.

What I did want to point out is that we've rapidly acquired a new slow-motion sport: cycling. It used to be that nothing matched the primal immediacy of a mountain stage: a small handful of the most talented riders struggling up an HC climb, attacking and dropping, standing and delivering. The pain was real because the context was real: you didn't need to refrain from delivering a glancing blow because you weren't sure of what flags were flying elsewhere on the field of play. You didn't need a photo finish: the difference in finishing times was in the order of minutes. For an aficionado, there are few more dramatic things in all of human activity.

That's still what happens on TV, but the outcomes have become entirely detached from the action. Who's dirty, who's clean? Who's going to have irregular blood or inhuman testosterone? From Hamilton to Landis to Basso to Petacchi to Vinokourov, what frustrates me most is not watching and wondering “Are they clean?” but rather wondering, “Should I be applauding?”. After all, tomorrow may say today didn't happen, or even next year may say this year didn't happen.

To me, then, the real tragedy is that what has gone out is not trust: that was never there. What has been lost, instead, is the immediacy, the directness, the decisiveness. Cycling has become a slow-motion sport—an ironic statement about an activity in which men and women climb impossibly steep pitches at improbably high speeds—where decisions are made and then unmade over what is, relative to the action itself, geological time. That, to me, is the truly incalculable loss. By the time we watched the finish of Stage 15 on a one-day delay, we'd already heard about Vino's (supposedly) failed dope test, so watching the play was surreal, and about half the comments by the commentators sounded cruelly ironic.

Meanwhile, though, I'll still be getting goose-pimples watching Alberto Con(ta)dor fly out of his saddle like—indeed, even better than—a certain Texan, and hope he won't go the way of all the other climbing prodigies of the past few years, from Iban Mayo to Alejandro Valverde to, perhaps the most dramatic of them all, Damiano Cunego, who rode like Marco Pantani on the way to his Giro win and has subsequently never demonstrated that same form (hmm...).

Climb to the Vista Point for the Clouds

The Charles River Wheelmen (CRW) organized an excellent ride today called Climb to the Clouds. The name is a bit of an exaggeration: the highest point in the climb is Mt. Wachusett, a ski station in central Massachusetts. But it is a ski station; the hill gains about 1100 feet over four miles, though this hides a few ridiculous pitches. That, combined with the warning that the course was very hilly and definitely not for beginners, made it undeniably tempting.

I have a confession: I wasn't sure I wanted to do Wachusett. Not the ascent, which I definitely wanted, but the descent, which—like many others in New England—is riddled with narrow roads, tight curves, frost heaves, and cracked pavement. Combined with how much my bike has been rattling lately (and rattled especially vigorously the last time I came down that way), I wasn't looking forward to doing it in a bunch.

So when I set out my gear last night, I laid out my very flash Nalini bike shorts, a bright red. My reasoning was simple: I felt morally obliged to negotiate Wachusett on account of (a) being in a ride called Climb to the Clouds, and (b) knowing I'd spend the rest of the day sacked out watching the first real mountainous stage of the Tour de France. And I knew that once I'd worn the Nalini, I'd really have no choice in the matter. Once you talk the talk, that is, wear the wear, you've got to walk the walk, that is, ride the ride.

It proved to be an exceptional ride. It was hilly as promised, and with the odd mile of awful pavement, mostly on very good roads. By taking it early on a Sunday morning I was able to avoid most of the traffic. There were two or three very fast descents, one long and screaming (the Wachusett payback). Some of the climbs were long hills that demanded that you settle into a steady tempo, others were short, widing roads whose length you couldn't estimate; there were a few genuine quad-busters.

Aside: someone in the Massachusetts Department of Transportation has a perverse sense of humor. At one point on Wachusett, coming out of a false flat, the road turns to the left and pitches upward sharply; it rises up and touches you in the nose, as Phil Liggett might say. And just there this humorist has seen fit to inscribe the instruction, SLOW.

But perhaps the best part of it was the CRW organization. They were superbly organized, firm but friendly, manned perfectly good feeding stations, and had arrowed with exceptional attention. Even someone who demonstrates nearly functional illiteracy when it comes to following arrows (e.g., me) managed the ride without a wrong turn. That is something they can brag about.

Feeling Blue

Since my Bike Friday is in for repairs, I've begun to overhaul and put some miles on my old Specialized. Two years in the basement on the trainer—and not much maintenance before that—have left it in a fairly bad state. But over an hour of washing (with Kathi's help), and a few more (lighter) rounds of that since, have made it ship-shape. While I immediately notice my dislike of the sub-105 Shimano parts, and miss my 50T chainring (I'm back to mashing a bit in my 53T), overall I've been putting on some miles quite comfortably.

One problem with reviving a bike that's been in a basement too long, though, is that you don't know what really works and what doesn't. Last Friday, after a 25 mile ride, I was making the last turn before home when I went down comprehensively. I suffered very little external injury, so initially I was more confused than anything else. (A construction worker nearby asked whether I was okay and, when I replied in the affirmative, he responded, “That was spectacular!” It was immediately clear that he's never seen a real bike crash.) While taking inventory, I noticed that my front tire was...half-flat. So I'd had a very, very slow leak that had gotten progressively flatter as I bumped around town, and on that final hard right turn the tire just buckled.

It turns out that I'm actually quite bruised in various places inside. My friend Laurie Heller recalled that she'd had a similar experience: some of her worst injuries were from her slowest crashes. Due to various internally bruised parts, I can now primarily only ride in the drops. At the very least, I feel quite silly plodding along to school in the morning in that position.

One casualty of my fall was my bar-tape, which was anyway beginning to unravel. Four years ago the bike began with a Specialized Phat Wrap, which is surprisingly comfortable. Two years ago (after another fall) I switched to yellow Cinelli cork: less padded, but a lovely feel. Today I got a Deda Elementi blue wrap. This officially proves that my biking color is blue: blue glasses frame, blue shoes, blue gloves, and now blue wrap. I've realized the reason is because I don't like green, there's too much macho red on the roads already, and yellow is pretentious (or can appear that way).

The Deda tape is a thing of beauty:

(The actual tape is darker than the photo suggests.) Those little dents are just the edges of the logo, which is under wraps. The attention to detail is fantastic: the sticky strip is just broad enough, the color is sublime, it feels like it isn't there, and the package includes both tape for the end and a little supplement to wrap around the back of the hoods.

Once I was done wrapping, I proceeded to install the end plugs. I was about to just shove one in when I noticed it has the Deda ‘D’ logo on it. I stopped, rotated the plug a quarter turn to orient it properly, and only then pushed. That's what beautiful design inspires you to do.

A New Fixation

Wherein our correspondent chronicles his very first experience with a fixed-gear bicycle, for the benefit of others who may follow this enlightening route.

There are no new puns left to make about fixies. None.

So I was riding around the criterium course at last weekend's Cox Cycling Classic in Providence, wondering why I wasn't racing, when a nitwit decided to pull over from the middle of the road all the way to the kerb—right in front of me, without looking over his shoulder—to greet his friends. Naturally I went down, hard. Because of the way the universe works, not only did he not crash, he didn't even notice what he'd done. It was left to his friends to come over to help. No road-rash, but it did remind me of why I don't race.

Friends are admittedly important—perhaps the most important thing in the world. But more important even than my front derailleur? Not only is it busted, but so (I shudder to even think about the cost this will involve) possibly is the front derailleur hanger, which in turn is part of the rear assembly of the bike: everything's just more complicated on a Bike Friday.

Anyway, since I'm feeling in particularly good riding form right now, I was fairly upset after dropping off the bike at my LBS, the Hub. As I was leaving the store, though, I realized I was...surrounded by bikes! So I asked Jesse whether he'd rent me one. Knowing I've been eyeing fixies for a while, he loaned me a brand new KBS. It was so pristine I was afraid to take it (how many falls does it take to learn to ride a fixie?), but with a twinkle in his eye he said, “Consider it a test ride”. Dangerous words.

Getting started was a bit terrifying, and my first day I doubt I exceeded 6-8mph. I was getting passed with abandon by people wearing cotton t-shirts riding flat-bar hybrids with zany pedalling styles—nothing against any of that, bless their souls, but it did make me, in lycra and gear, feel rather ridiculous. The second day I was well over 10mph. And I've learned a bit about the fixie experience.

My main concern was about needing to stay conscious of always pedaling (this is a fixed-gear, not just a single-speed). It turns out I needn't have worried. The momentum of the rear wheel is such that there is no real danger of stopping cold because you forgot to pedal. I went into turns and other configurations where I normally wouldn't be pedaling, and the momentum gave my leg the little kick it needed to remember to stay in motion; indeed, it would have taken effort to not stay moving.

The truly hard thing, I've learned, is stopping. There's a funny motion to it. Say your left foot is at 12 o'clock. You need to use your right foot to initiate braking. So as your right foot moves up to 12 o'clock, you keep adding resistance. So far so good.

Suppose, however, you don't come to a stop. Now your right foot goes over the top...at which point gravity pulls it down, and you have to make a conscious effort to (disregarding all your hard-earned, pedal-in-circles muscle-memory) push down on your left foot...but only until it peaks at 12 o'clock, and so on. As a result of not stopping by the time the countervailing foot had reached 12 o'clock, I would end up going through another pedal circulation, and another, and another.

I realized that I just needed to push down harder, but then I began to feel a rather strange sensation. Never having experienced it before I began to ease off, which of course led me back to the almost-but-never-quite-stopping cycle. A few minutes later I finally figured it out. That sensation was a muscle that I had never exercised, indeed even experienced, before, being called into duty. Marveling at the human body and letting the muscle do its job did the trick: I am now stopping (from low velocities of about 10-12mph) very nearly on command. (Though just as I came to believe this a squirrel ran half-way across my lane and planted itself there, losing me a few hundred heart-beats that I will never recover.)

So, yes, I'm hooked. It's an absolutely wonderful experience, and I can see it doing wonders for my cycling. A single-speed would simply not be the same; after all, I grew up riding nothing but (very few bicycles in India had gears; those that did were deemed “racing” models—usually synonymous with drop-bars—and my folks weren't about to get me one of those). I've parked the KHS for now because it doesn't have a front brake, and my interest is in improving my pedal-stroke, not in acquiring additional bones. Also, it's an ultra-cool, retro-design, all-black hipster model, and I am definitely not worthy of it. I'd proclaim that a fixie is definitely in my future, except I'm afraid the cost of one may be sunk into Bike Friday repairs this summer, pushing the fixie into the more distant future.

An Overflowing Cup

The World Cup is on.

No, not that World Cup; it really was over last year. Rather, the Cricket World Cup, which is even more interminable than usual. But who's complaining? A few billion people in India and Pakistan, for instance, two cricket-crazy countries that were both eliminated in the first round; but not this happily non-partisan viewer.

To most people, world cups are temporary quadrennial punctuations in their schedules. To me, it's a Plimsoll line that plumbs my immersion in modern technology. As cups go, then, this one counts for two notches. But more on that in a bit.

The World Cup is beind held in the West Indies. Don't feel too badly if you've never heard of the West Indies; don't rush to your atlas, either. You're used to hearing of them as the Caribbean, except they also encompass South American countries such as Guyana, and exclude countries such as Cuba (now if only Fidel Castro had been a bowler rather than a pitcher...). Home of a thrilling, exuberant style often called “calypso cricket”, the region has gone to great lengths to host the tournament.

It's sad, then, that the impact of those two early exits—particularly India's—is writ so large. I single out India not for partisan reasons but because of an inescapable fact: it has by far the largest population of the circket-playing nations, combining a wealthy expat community in the US with an increasingly enriched population at home. Indeed when I was at the cricket stadium in Bengalooru in December 2006, I saw posters for world cup cruises that cost several thousand US dollars. But the half-empty stands are not the fault of India's team alone; they're equally due to a stupidly greedy ticket sales strategy that was irking the West Indians even before the tournament began. It's a pity, because this mismanagement means the cup may not return to this hemisphere for a while.

Another group that is undoubtedly hurting is the advertisers. Actually, I've been surprised by how few different companies have advertised all tournament long. A quick look at the categories of advertisers makes clear precisely who the target demographic is: insurance (inconclusive), money transfers to South Asia (hmmm...), and matrimonials (bingo: desi grad students).

What fans there are are, nevertheless, having a grand time. The stands teem with everything from tigers (Bangladesh) to kangaroos and crocodiles (guess). Even the half-amateur Irish, who have made it to the second round, are being supported surprisingly well. I haven't seen too many Rastafarians, but two days ago the camera focused in on a West Indian gent sporting a large, black knit cap featuring a beautiful green marijuana leaf. One presumes he was feeling pretty peaceful.

Despite huge changes over the past two decades, there are many ways in which cricket still lags behind better commercialized sports. Some of these ways are refreshing: cricketers from the lesser countries still give honest interviews, rather than substituting answers with long strings of disclaimers that are carefully designed to give offense to no-one. On the other hand, one of my colleagues, John Jannotti, observed that nothing gets transmitted during the lunch break, when that time could be used well for some entertaining tourism ads by the islands. This is not strictly accurate: while for part of the time there's merely a slide saying when play will resume, the rest of the time is taken up by some fairly remarkable—or remarkably awful—desi rap. The latter only reinforces John's point.

One of the ways in which cricket has stolen a march over other major commercial sports, such as American football, basketball and baseball, is in the smart use of technology. For a supposedly stuffy and traditionalist game, there seem to be few qualms about the use of televisions and replays. Furthermore, there is no adversarial scenario whereby coaches must “challenge” umpires: instead, umpires can freely consult television replays from multiple angles to render a verdict. This means the game has lost a touch of its spontaneity, but the far higher quality of decisions is a clear advantage, while the very small number of such replay consultations means it's rarely disruptive to the flow of the game (and indeed, every such replay is the source of great tension and excitement). This, combined with other technologies such as motion tracking of balls, means that in a mere fifteen years, cricket has been almost unrecognizably transformed (for the better, though two hundred tweed-jacketed MCC members will undoubtedly disagree over sips of their port).

The game's rules have also changed and, while some of these changes are designed to simply make matches more of a slug-fest, these rules have adapted to incorporate significant strategic elements. The most interesting of these is the terribly-named “power play”. It used to be that tight fielding restrictions (over where players could stand relative to the inner circle) applied for the first fifteen overs of a fifty-over game. Now these restrictions apply for a total of twenty overs; the first ten of these must be the first ten of the inning, but the remaining five can be taken any time the fielding captain chooses, in five-over blocks (with the caveat that they will be automatically enforced by the umpire if necessary). (The name is awful because “the fielding captain has chosen to take a power play” sounds like he just engaged in a positive action, whereas in reality he has undertaken an action that will hurt his team.) Names apart, though, they add a significant new element of strategy to games. Some teams have chosen to not strategize at all, taking all power-plays in a row (i.e., for the first twenty overs). Others have spread them out to good effect. In contrast, at least once (in a recent South Africa game), I saw a captain make a complete hash of it, leaving the last power-play until the end of the inning and giving the opposition a bushel of runs in the process. So it really does impact matches.

Finally, on to my own technological history.

Back in 1999, I heard that Fox Sports World was going to show one- and two-hour highlights of every day's play. This was what made us cross the line and get cable TV for the first time. (Before we got around to disconnecting it OLN began to show the Tour de France...and the rest is history.)

In 2003 we didn't get cricket on the TV, but decided against buying satellite connectivity. Of course, we could get the scores in close to real time over the Internet. For the finals, in which Australia played India, I was unfortunately out of the country; in particular, I was on my way from Frankfurt to rural Germany for a Dagstuhl workshop. What to do for the scores while on a slow, rural train in a country that's never even heard of the sport?

Fortunately, Kathi knew enough about cricket to be able to parse a score-line. And we'd just gotten ourselves T-Mobile phone services. T-Mobile lets you send email to an account that turns the message into a text-message. So every few minutes, Kathi copied the relevant parts of the scorecard off a screen and emailed it to my phone, and I kept up with the scores all the way to Dagstuhl. It was exciting, heady stuff. (The technology, that is. The match was an unmitigated disaster for any Indian.)

Now, in 2007, with the slightest prodding from my father, I've subscribed to Willow TV. Their service has been surprisingly good, even if they are excessively vigilant (if understandably so) about having multiple sessions for a single user account. Thanks to the Internet, we can route around the ignorance of American television entirely. (There hasn't been a single reference even to the tournament as a whole in any of the American media I follow, other than an op ed piece by Shashi Tharoor in the New York Times...bemoaning the lack of coverage.)

But that's not all. Last weekend my parents visited, with their boat-anchor of a laptop. The laptop, you see, has an s-video output. So my father brought that along with a cable; we plugged it into the TV and proceeded to spend all weekend as the most perfect couch potatoes you've met. It's the first time I've seen something to the "Windows Media Center" advertising: the OS is smart enough to take the signal inside Windows Media Player and send it to the s-video, ignoring everything else on screen, so you can even hide the player on the computer's display and proceed to use it to work (as my mother did, ignoring the two of us for the most part) without affecting the TV viewers. The signal has been sufficiently good that, save for a few artifacts and the very occasional blip (about twice over two days), I entirely forgot that we were watching programming over the Internet rather than normal-definition TV.

Well, that was rather nice, and after my parents left I was feeling pretty depressed about my own laptop. Then Kathi realized that we have an ancient (~2000) IBM ThinkPad in the basement, the machine Kathi bought when she started her job, which we keep around for emergencies when someone has to send a machine in for repairs. She knew it had a bunch of connectors on it, so she went to check. Wouldn't you know, one of them is an s-video.

It's actually a 7-pin s-video, not 4-pin. Calling various of our fine technology stores (Radio Shack, CompUSA, etc.) yielded neither connectors nor wisdom (indeed, none of the former and even less of the latter). Then we noticed that the four pins appear to be in the same position on both the 4- and 7-pin sockets; and I found some pinout diagrams on the Web that provided just the reassurance I was hoping for. So we plugged a 4-pin jack into the 7-pin socket, twiddled with some configuration, upgraded some of the ancient software on the ThinkPad and, hurrah, I have cricket on the TV again.

Life is great.

Coda

Life wasn't so great for Bob Woolmer, the coach of Pakistan, who died shortly after the country's team failed to qualify for the second round. Many in the cricketing world must have immediately wondered whether his death was natural or was caused by the gambling interests that are so strong in the game. When, a few days later, the coroner ruled his death was a murder, I'm sorry to say the news was more saddening than shocking. As a child I enjoyed reading about Woolmer's exploits for Kent and England, and he was a positive force on the game. So there is a dark underbelly to all the money sloshing around cricket, and Woolmer's death reveals just how dark it is.

Hill Repeats in Flanders Fields

I wrote this in late March, 2006, shortly after our trip to Flanders earlier that month. A few people were kind enough to pretend they enjoyed it, so here it is, rescued from the oblivion of my mailbox.

... in which our correspondent discusses climbing a wall, visiting a museum, and chatting with the locals.

I.

I did hill-repeats a week ago Zaterdag.

I was based in Ghent, in eastern Flanders, and my destination was an obscure town due south named Geraardsbergen. Geraardsbergen is big enough to warrant a train to it from Ghent, but only just. Its four-track station was peopled by: a ticket-seller, three bored teenagers, and a confused-looking middle-aged person who wordlessly stared at us the whole time. The cafe, uninhabited by people or goods, represented the triumph of economics over hope.

I wasn't supposed to be at the station at all. I'd based myself in Ghent so I could ride to Geraardsbergen, but a nasty bronchitis meant I had little energy to spare, especially for the numerous wrong turns I was sure to make on rural roads. The train was a fair compromise when the alternative was going nowhere at all.

The previous day, while we stumbled jet-lagged around Ghent, it rained and rained. At night I went to the receptionist to ask whether she had a weather forecast for the next day. She smiled and arced her hand toward the outside. “You mean it's Flanders in the spring?” She smiled again in eloquent silence. Fair enough; had it been warm or dry, I'd have felt robbed of some fundamental part of the experience.

Moreover, I was prepared. I'd asked a Flemish friend, Kim Mens, how to pack for this. It will be cold, he said, and I should expect lots of rain. I was more concerned about snow, which could ice and turn roads—especially upwardly-inclined cobbled ones—nasty. But that at least, he said, was one thing I shouldn't need to worry about in Flanders.

We woke on Saturday to thick snowfall.

Any town with “berg” in its name is sure to be interesting, and the town's French name offers confirmation: Grammont. But Geraardsbergen goes one better: its hill is called the Muur, an altogether better name that means “wall” (think “mural”). The Muur, one of the final climbs of the Ronde Van Vlaanderen (Tour of Flanders), is often the decisive point in the race with mud, cobbles, pitch (up to 20%) and screaming crowds packed into a tiny space. The town has signs with the word “Muur” and a cycle icon. The burghers know why we're here.

Ignoring the people and the workings of the invisible hand, I wheeled out of Geraardsbergen station. I'd printed the Ronde's maps, but the route seemed to slash across town like a flailing snake—a ploy, I felt sure, to maximize the town's chances of seeing the race. But some of those could be one-ways, and nobody was holding traffic for me. So I'd mapped another little street that avoided all the meandering and instead got down (up) to business.

I was soon in the market square, an atmospherically dark gothic town hall watching over a parking lot. A few obligatory wrong turns (and descents) later, I found my chosen street. I saw that it rose absurdly (think Jencks St in Providence, but 2-3 times as long, and cobbled), but hey, that's what I'd come for. So I set off in the haze, squirming over the terrain...only to be greeted by a barrier.

A barrier? Kim Mens's father had confirmed that repairs on the Muur were long done; but here it was, and it forced me to dismount. Well, you don't easily clip back in on an incline like that; you don't easily, and I don't at all.

What to do now? I couldn't possibly *walk* up the Muur, but up ahead I saw my savior. I'd read about the Hard Men of Flanders, and there was one obstacle they were not known to master: stairs. This could not be The Way. Reassured, I pushed up (which, on slick cobbles, meant I frequently caught my slide by locking my cleats into the edge of stone), descended, and finally got to a different cobbled road that was barrier-less and stair-free. I was on the Muur.

After all these hijinx it was a relief to find it at all, so the repeat climbs, which I'd earlier used to justify the trip, became essential for reconstructing the experience.

The Muur is in two parts. The lower streets have small, very rectangular, cobbles laid out with the long side perpendicular to motion. Here you are in the midst of of town, the streets are wide, and these cobbles look fresh. Then you take a 120 turn—which, surprise, is precisely the route marked on the Ronde map—and everything changes. The road narrows so much a large SUV or truck would have trouble squeezing through, and probably couldn't turn the sharp corners. And the cobbles are more square, like the one in the Paris-Roubaix trophy. They are gapped, chipped, and sometimes missing. There is little sidewalk to speak of, an interesting way to host hundreds of drunk, screaming fans.

The lower part is on a sensible incline, so the natural instinct is to accelerate. The resulting ride is is straight out of a cement mixer, but this seemed the most pleasant way to tackle the unworldly vibrations; indeed, all week long I found myself accelerating over cobbles (and rather enjoying it). On the square cobbles, the trick is finding a line. In the steepest stretches you can't sit for need of power, but can't stand for lack of stability (due to moss on the cobbles that makes your wheels slip); I nearly fell three times.

The rest of the week I rode around in cobbled Brugge and out of town. Even in the middle of a working day we were passed by ones, twos and groups of bikers on road machines, all dressed in the proper European fashion of team or club kit head-to-toe and beyond. The area around Brugge is filled with paths along canals bordered by perfectly aligned poplars; the roads are straight as arrows, offering no protection from the wind. My speed differential attributable just to wind was 4-5mph.

II.

This past Saturday I visited Oudenaarde, also in south-eastern Flanders; once the home of Flemish tapestry, now host to the Ronde Van Vlaanderen museum. They museum bills the Ronde as one of the two great “cobbled” classics. Flanders had a fit of asphalt surfacing in the sixties, which greatly altered the route of the Ronde; the race has been part of a restoration and revival of cobbles, especially on the hills—though the museum offers no perspective from the locals who have to negotiate these hills daily.

The museum's organizational conceit is that you pick from a menu of twelve past winners. You then hear about “your” rider at various exhibits along the way. I suggested that Museeuw and Merckx must be especially popular. Without disagreeing, the ticket person noted seriously that Schotte was quite popular too—an indication of the museum's demographics (Schotte reigned just after WW II; a legendary Hard Man, he was nicknamed the Last of the Flandriens). Then he broke out into a broad grin and confessed, “But Eddy is number one.” (I felt obliged to tilt the statistics, and figured Godefroot would be good for a quote or two—which he was.)

One of the museum's main attractions is a trainer set up before a projection TV so you can ride against Peter Van Petegem. (I can't wait for this to become cheap enough to put in a basement.) The outcome is precisely what you'd expect, though nobody all day (including me) spent more than about thirty seconds on it—keeping up with them is a pretty sweaty activity. Besides, what trainer can compare to the real terrain?

Amidst all this fun I skipped the museum cafe. I discovered just as was leaving to run to make my train that Ludo Dierckxsens was visiting for the day, and holding forth in the cafe on Milan-San Remo. The museum has a steady round of visiting “speakers” such as him, especially in the spring season. It vastly exceeded my expectations and I'd heartily recommend it to anyone who's read this far.

III.

The Bike Friday is, of course, a wonderful conversation piece. At the top of the Muur we meet a late-middle-aged couple. After the usual stumble through 3-4 languages we settle on English. Do we know what the Tour of Flanders is? That's why we're here. Wonderful! A great race! And there's a pause as they remain standing there with us.

I fill the gap. Are you from the town? This is their opening. Oh no, they're from Antwerp. They're scouting out the climbs on the race route. By foot? We have bikes back in town, he tells us. And then very precisely, a bit sternly, he adds: “First we do it by foot. Then by cycle.” She smiles sweetly.

So have they looked at other hills? Yes, they're working backwards. They have been to the Bosberg, then, I ask, waving in its general direction? Slowly, and with pride, he replies: “We have spent the night on the Bosberg. (pause) We are with...” I recognize the trailing voice of the vocabularly gap, but my suggestions—friends, family, etc.—aren't helping. A moment, and he straightens up and repeats slowly: “We are with camper.” This is a habit? No, this is their first time, he says with pure joy (she smiles very sweetly). They will be amongst the masses; you can tell he will yell loud Flemish invective at the riders while she smiles at the proceedings and lets out a little whoop as her favorite rider comes by.

I play to the crowd. They're Flemish, so there's an easy guess: I toss out that they surely have great hopes for Tom Boonen. Tom Boonen!, he echoes, as she smiles sweetly. (I'm still pronouncing it like the English language commentators, not quite getting the intonations right, but we're past that.) He tells me Boonen has excelled in Paris-Nice but, looking ominously around, and dropping his mouth into a frown, he confides that Tom's climbing is not so good.

We ramble about TV coverage and other things. Looking to wind up and depart this miserably chilly hilltop battered by gusting winds—he has called the view from here “beautiful”, an indication that regional pride has entirely trumped aesthetic sense—I decide to play the trump card: Tom will be riding in the world champion colors, yes? His breath catches. So maybe, I offer, we will see Boonen win the Ronde wearing the rainbow stripes. She grins very broadly, but he is too choked up with emotion; his heart-rate seems like mine was when I crested; if he could breathe, I reckon, he would break out into the Belgian national anthem(s?). On that note we wave these fine people goodbye. She wishes us well but he does not seem to notice, his mouth puckered with pride and his eyes distant.

It is not our only encounter.

As the holder of an Indian passport, I have developed a host of techniques to disarm immigration officials who express too much interest (it's rarely of the positive kind) in me. Lately I have been waved through immigration, but at Brussels airport I notice the staff are in a questioning mood. Kathi's passport warrants none, but me he asks where we are going. To Brugge eventually, but tonight to Gent.

He relaxes. “So you are in the Flemish part of Belgium!”, he says, not disapprovingly. But he's still talking, so I want to distract him. Yes, I say, and I add, “We go also to Geraardsbergen.”

“Geraardsbergen!” he echoes, correcting my pronounciation but smiling. “You go for the <something that sounds like it would translate to mutton pies>?”

It is my turn to correct. I stiffen, straighten. As my hand makes a sweeping upward motion, palm down, subscribing an angle about 65 degrees greater than reality, I say, “We go for the Muur”. You can hear the capital `M'.

“The Muur!”, he roars. “Amateur cyclists!” (I bristle slightly at the entirely accurate but unnecessary adjective.) The trainee sitting beside him has said nothing, given away no emotion as she has looked at me; but now she breaks out into a partisan smile. He, meanwhile, is grinning a mile wide as he thumps a stamp into my passport with a passion you would not have thought possible of a government official.

Suspending the passport between us, he pauses. “When you go to Geraardsbergen, you must try the <something that sounds like it would translate to mutton pies>. It is the local speciality.” He returns the passports so he can make a small round shape with his thumbs and forefingers, and looks down at it a little wistfully, as if hoping that by the powers vested in him by the Kingdom of Belgium, he could make a mutton pie manifest itself in the ring of his hand. (She does not appear too impressed by this gustatory passion.) When the round refuses to fill, he looks back, smiles broadly (but, I feel, just a little more sadly this time), and wishes us a excellent trip.

It is in the nature of contemporary journalism to make the most of episodic data, to extrapolate wildly from a single incident. The journalist wants, most of all, to be seen as the spotter of a trend before anyone else. Your humble correspondent is not above such frailty. Thus I am forced to report that when a citizen's first reaction to hearing “Geraardsbergen” is to think mutton pies—pies that, my instinct tells me, will not be on the WeightWatchers approved list—over the Muur, the state of cycling is in jeopardy. Tim Moore has pointed out that Eddy Merckx looks like he stayed on his racing diet long after he stopped racing; and we have citizens worried that Tom Boonen's climbing is not so good. I have toured the breadth of Flanders this week, folks, and I have assembled the evidence to report that it will be a while before we see another Lucien Van Impe. You read it here first.

Coda

On reading this report, Kim Mens pointed out that the officer was referring to mattetaarten—made, he said, of “butter, milk, sugar and almond”. So I now regret having missed out on them.

Oh, and Tom Boonen won the Tour of Flanders in his rainbow jersey.