My 61 cm Tarmac comes in at 16.4 with PD-6620 pedals and King cages. Bars are light (but 44s) and the stem and seat are not super light….

Weigh it again

Regarding pedals – I could buy Dura Ace pedals and save some grams, but at that point the $$/gm ratio isn’t worth it.

I use Michelin Pro3 tires and Michelin tubes.

The frustrating thing here is that most people can choose a heavier saddle and pedals and still come in lighter than me.

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Is your bike still for sale? I’m 60.5″ with proportional legs and torso. I’ve been looking for a very small bike as my xs Cervelo R3 (48cm) is too big. Please contact me as soon as possible as I’m trying to get something nailed down in the next two days. Thank you so much!!

Short girls rule!

Shannon

“Instead of racing The Shiv for the first time, Contador instead will compete on a 2009 Transition TT frame that was modified to meet UCI requirements. Mechanics literally sawed off 2cm of two reinforcements off the bike to fall within the 8cm rule. The pieces could be trimmed off the Transition frame because they were not an integral part of the frame material. It would be impossible to cut them off the Shiv, however, without damaging the integrity of the carbon-fiber frame”

Yes, the UCI could have and should have responded to the request for approval in a more timely manner, and then there is the salient point of the rule itself. However, Specialized was told last year that a similar design was not acceptable. The loophole specialized was trying for was the ’structural integrity’ caveat. Generally speaking, aerodynamic design elements are considered legal if they are critical to the structural integrity of the frame, as is clearly the case with the Shiv. On the Transition, the portion was purely for aerodynamics. Still, the ruling about the 8 cm section is pretty clear as well.

This is where specialized and the teams are culpable. Instead of holding off development on the design pending approval from the UCI, they went ahead with development, handed the frames over to the teams to train on. The equipment directors and the DSs on the teams need to be more diligent about whether or not new products have been approved. They shouldn’t be spending time and energy on setting up and training with equipment that has not been approved. I understand the marketing aspect of having a new frame design every year, but specialized should have held off and given the teams last years frames if the UCI had not responded yet.

That said, I think the UCI should be held more accountable to bike manufacturers. I think a rule something like a) new equipment designs must be submitted to the uci six months prior to being used in competition and b) if the uci has not made a decision within six months of the application, the design shall be considered legal for competition’.

Of course that would need alot more tweaking, but you get the general idea. It wouldn’t be hard to set it up so that the UCI could _not_ come in at the last minute and force a change, while at the same time not impeding the development of the new product to any great extent. I suppose an argument could be made that forcing manufacturers to present designs 6 months ahead of time would dampen the time-to-marketing concept, but I don’t really see that as a big deal in this case. One of my current job aspects is regulatory agency approvals. there have been a few times where we have developed a product that has made it pretty much through the production pilot run, only to find out the agency claims it doesn’t meet some esoteric specification, that we interpreted it did when we read the spec. We build that lead time into our development cycle, and there’s no reason a bike manufacturer can’t do the same.

I mentioned several times, salaries aren’t what they used to be, however you might be surprised that a certain USA domestic rider was offered 30k to ride for a domestic team and it wasn’t our only domestic team with a UCI license either. So you might be surprised about who is getting what. Salaries are taboo, and hard to collect info on. However, correct, salaries today worldwide probably go more like this. Top UCI, and I am only talking about a very few are probably getting anywhere from 30 to 50k. Most are probably getting 5-15K. I did say 7k, but oh well, close enough. There are certainly some riders getting more but not very many. I did mention if you read what I wrote that many are only getting a few thousand dollars both UCI and domestic. I wish I knew more and could show all the salaries in a graph without naming names and that could really spell it out for us. A lot of roadies went to MB in the old days in hopes of getting their hands on that cash like Pia Sunsteadt, but the dreams have seemed to switch to cross. Times are tough and salaries will improve once the economy picks up, that could take years. We might re-live the period of 2000-2007 again, like 2012-2018, who knows, wait and see. I learned a bit more from reading all the posts, and if there is one thing it boils down to for me, IMO, its this. Women will have to build it themselves from the ground up. There is just not enough men that really care enough, and have the power to do it. WOMEN MUST LEAD THE WAY! If you didn’t know, there is a huge crowd of men out there who could care less, and hope the women fail. They are a very selfish and greedy lot, but there are so many men who don’t care about anything except their side of the sport. A huge problem of epic unfairness across the board.

ps-on the health insurance, that’s not something I know much about. I had heard they were covered usually by the teams, but maybe that’s not true anymore in these very lean times.

Nicole Cooke won the Olympic gold medal in road racing and then got the gold in the UCI world championships a month later. Not a single company sponsored her or her team. Her most recent team (Skyter) also folded. What does that tell you about what sponsors think of the importance of a gold medal in cycling? Instead, Sky – a UK Broadcasting network – dumped 20 million Euros into a men’s team. Sky also declined to sponsor Nicole Cooke despite a personal plea from her.

So all this Olympic nonsense is ruining the sport and comes across as very selfish of the women. Besides, the Olympics is just a one day race and has little bearing on who the best cyclist in the world given the limit of the number of cyclists allowed to attend the Games. Qualifying for the Olympics has monopolized the women’s side of the sport and is ruining the way they prioritize their races. The men don’t rely on an Olympic model and neither should the women.

Besides, the TV coverage of cycling in the Olympics is not like other sports. Women cyclists think it is, but it’s not. If you were to go to your local shopping mall and ask 100 people who Kristin Armstrong is, 99 will tell you she is Lance’s wife. So Lance’s wife is more popular than a female cyclist who wins a gold medal (by a factor of 99 to 1).

Here’s a list of gold medalists in cycling:

Connie Carpenter
Mark Gorski
Alexi Grewal
Pascal Richard
Sarah Carrigan
Kathryn Watt

And here’s a list of cyclists who never won a gold medal in the Olympics:

Lance Armstrong
Greg LeMond
Mario Cipollini
Bernard Hinault

——

Out of these two lists, which group do you think are better known around the world as both athletes and cyclists? Which group are the millionaires who sponsors seek?

So your Olympic dream is not what you think it is, nor will it give you the recognition you think it will even if in the unlikely case you were to win a gold medal.

You sound like Sarah Hammer. Now that the UCI eliminated the individual pursuit in the Olympics, what is she going to do?

You shouldn’t be basing your career on the Olympics. It’s fools gold. It’s not a good sponsorship model for the future of women’s cycling. Cycling isn’t gymnastics or figure skating and women shouldn’t be trying to turn it into either.

The richest woman in cycling is Sue Haywood and not Kristin Armstrong.