A special Tweet Tweet welcome to three new followers of Twisted Spoke: former Tour de France King of the Mountains Berhnard Kohl, head editor and writer at L’Equipe Pierre Callewaert and Velonews senior scribe Neal Rogers.
Regular readers know we have a soft spot of Bernard Kohl, busted for doping and now running a high end bike shop in Vienna. We were impressed with the quality of his post-suspension soul searching, his honesty and philosophical attitude.
In the 12 step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, the 4th step is to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” This is something that guys like Danilo Di Luca and Riccardo Ricco have never done but Kohl went deep inside himself and came out with some core truths. (In fact, when Di Luca does an inventory all he finds is the keys to his Ferrari, his lawyers cell number and a can of hair spray.)
Of his new life as a bike shop owner, Kohl had this to say: “I think I have taken the right path. Not always in the right direction, though, as I also made mistakes. But I ended up steering my boat the right way with the idea of the bike shop.”
Our favorite Kohl quote is such a zen gem that it always makes us smile in a Buckeroo Banzi kinda way: “Life plays its little games that are destined to be.” We give a warm Northern California man-hug to Bernard and welcome him to Twisted Spoke.
We met Pierre Callewaert at the Tour of California. We were both watching and waiting in line to interview Dave Zabriskie, It was day one in my new career as cycling journalist and I was thrashing in the deep water a bit, not knowing the interview protocol and feeling nervous. Pierre on the other hand is a seasoned pro and looked bemused by the whole thing and maybe a little bored. (I never did get that Zabriskie interview, either. Z-man often looks so deeply pained to be around journalists that I couldn’t bring myself to burden him.)
I ran into Pierre a few days later in the media scrum outside the Radio Shack bus after Floyd Landis dropped his Nagasaki-strength Dope Bomb on Lance Armstrong. We exchanged a few quick pleasantries. We’d hope to spot Pierre at this year’s Tour de France but that never happened. But welcome Pierre, soyez le bienvenu” or something French like that.
FInally, we were happy to see the name Neal Rogers on our Twitter list. If you read Velonews everyday like I do then you are more than familiar with Neal. We checked his bio and surprise, surprise, he spent several years in our fair city of San Francisco before moving to Boulder (our almost alma mater) where he is one of the top guns for Velonews.
We’re thrilled when real, live, professional journalists follow our typo-riddled and mind addled blog. We figure eventually there will be some rub-off and our work will improve. Welcome Neal, drop me a line anytime and can you spare a junior editor to help me clean up the typos?
I still read Twisted Spoke and appreciate it every day with my coffee, typos and all! Take out another mortgage on the house and keep up the good work!!
Thanks Ron. Regular readers like you keep me going. Matt