David Millar is riding the Newport Nocturne! Here's the press release, even though we've just summed it up in seven words. This should pad the website out nicely.

Another Tour Star for Newport Nocturne!

Yet another top rider has decided to ride next Saturday's Shropshire Star Newport Nocturne. David Millar of the Saunier Duval team is interupting his continental programme in order to ride the famous Shropshire event.

This means that all four British riders from this years Tour de France will be taking part in the floodlit event. Promoter Nick Jeggo said "It's been a fantastic year for British cycling with the Tour de France starting in London and more Brits than for many years taking part in it. Cycling in the UK is going from strength to strength so it's fantastic for bike fans that we have the top British pros coming to Newport."

Millar will take part in the "Battle for Beijing" a one lap time trial against the other Tour riders, plus Simon Holt, Newport's local cycling star and Rob Hayles an Olympic medallist and World Champion who is sponsored by local firm, Parker International. It is also likely that Millar, together with the other continentals, will line up for the main Pro/Elite circuit race.

Britain's only floodlit cycle race, the Shropshire Star Newport Nocturne takes place at 6.45pm on Saturday 1st September see www.bikerace.co.uk for details.

Nocturne Beer Prize is Worth the Weight!

Apart from a big cash prize, the winner of the Shropshire Star Newport Nocturne gets a very unusual award - his own weight in beer!

The idea first came about in 2001, when promoter Nick Jeggo, saw an article about a continental race where the winner was given his weight in the local cheese. The thing is, who needs that much cheese? Surely liquid refreshment would be more appealing!

Local company Classic Furniture agreed to contruct some giant scales and the Landlord of the Pheasant Pub in Newport, Paul Quinn, stepped in to provide the beer. Since then, it has become something of a tradition and the race has become well known for this unusual extra incentive for the riders. Of course, honed cyclists don't weigh that much so there is usually a young lady to help the winner gain a few pints more.

Britain's only floodlit cycle race, the Shropshire Star Newport Nocturne takes place at 6.45pm on Saturday 1st September see www.bikerace

Millar will be the only rider whose shiny white legs will be visible even if the floodlights break.

Wherein we copy and paste a link someone has sent us to another awful pink website written in crazy moon language. There's some bikes right at the very bottom -- just after the photographs of schoolgirls making v signs with their fingers and a lot of horrible cars -- so we can probably get away with putting it up here.

In the past, we'd actually thought that maybe it'd be cool if there were people "pimping up" bikes, so our culture would have its own bikelove equivalent of those serial masturbators who're obsessed with adding bits of shit fibreglass to their pointlessly loud cars. But we were wrong.


Dead wrong.

Using the kiss of death we normally reserve for picking winners of grand tours, yesterday we managed to plug Keirin Fest just hours before it was cancelled. So pretend you never read the top half of yesterday's update and we'll pretend we never wrote it.

A nice, easy Wednesday update. We should make a habit of this. See you all tomorrow!

It must've been a whole week since we plugged something on this site. Here's a thing we've been e-mailed that's probably quite good. In fact we'd hazard a guess at it being the best keirin event in London on that day, at that time.


There's going to be Japanese food, apparently. See you there, unless we get any better offers.

Another plug, this time for something the whole world can enjoy
Cycling.tv's daily news show! It's very concise, and about a million times more preferable than messing around with the awful spelling and hideous design of that Cyclingnews website when all we want to know is what's been going on. The audio also sometimes goes a bit out of synch, but it wouldn't be Cycling.tv without an endearing comedy element accompanying the otherwise high-quality product. Plus now you get to look at the lovely Rebecca Charlton whenever you like. Even in the middle of the night when you're lonely and there's nobody else in the house...

Normally we just use up the eight hours we spend in work every day clicking "refresh" on all the cycling websites so we don't miss anything. Now that somebody has condensed the process into just a minute long daily activity we're going to have to find a new way of wasting time, which is a bit daunting really. Maybe we'll speak to some girls or something.

We'd call him injury prone, but it appears to have happened to about half the peloton this season. What with the conspiracy theories about WADA, UCI, ASO and Major League Baseball attempting to undermine cycling, it's probably only a matter of time before the NCDL are implicated in unleashing wild dogs to ensure that [YOUR FAVOURITE ANGLOPHONE RIDER] doesn't win.

Anyway, there's no hilarious YouTube video of it because it happened when he was out training in Spain (which, let's face it, could be an euphamism for doing anything anywhere in these post-Rasmussen days), so let's relive the two good ones from the Tour de France. The second one made our dog-obsessed housemate shriek in horror.





Two lovely dogs, hurt.

There was a pub near the top of the big climb. 10/10. Best race ever.

A.C. is definitely not Alberto Contador, according to... well, Alberto Contador. But it's not like he'd have anything to lose by admitting it -- other than being stripped of his livelihood and Tour win, that is -- so we'll take his word for it. Who could A.C. really be?!

• Alfred Chicken - A videogames character from 1993. Videogames are notorious for cheating, but even when the lead character shares a nickname with Michael Rasmussen, it seems unlikely that Eufemiano Fuentes would be the man to go to if you were stuck on level 3.


• Actinium - A radioactive, glow in the dark element that has the symbol Ac and the atomic number 89. Ties in well to the rumours that Dr Fuentes once introduced "A.C." to a man called Alexander Litvinenko.


• Air Canada - A Canadian airline. Needs lots of juice, but doesn't normally take it in the form of human blood.


• Alpha Centauri - The star system nearest to our own solar system. Fuentes's reach was supposed to be larger than expected, but we expect he hasn't quite mastered intersellar flight. Yet.


• Alex Cox - A warty Scouse film-maker. Doesn't look particularly athletic, so probably stays well away from those boring drugs that only enhance performance.


• Associazione Calcio - The Italian Football Association. Ding ding ding, we have a winner!

Axel Merckx has decided to celebrate his 35th birthday by retiring from cycling. Incidentally, that's exactly how we celebrated our 13th birthday too.

We were going to commemorate the event by uploading a huge version of that photograph we took of the side of his head, but then we discovered this site.


As well as commemorating Axel Merckx's long career, this update should just about make up for all those times we forgot about Mother's Day. Every mum loves knitting.

And so the National Championships came to Wales, the only place in Britain not three feet underwater, presumably owing to the fact that it's the only place in Britain that's actually practiced in receiving quite so much rain.

Wales is a small, proud, violent nation, and so we were more than a little worried when we heard that Geraint Thomas wasn't going to be starting. But it was all very well organised, and everybody was having a good time. Perhaps everybody was reserving their fury so that they could really give a good kicking to the vandals who'd damaged some plant pots the night before. That's the jist of what we heard on the streets.

Phil Liggett and David Duffield approached us, but we managed to make some excuses and escape. So much for secret identities and all of that. Even Hugh Porter gave us a sly mention after he'd referred to the event as the 1977 National Championships. Thanks Hugh, we'll be doubly nice to you next time our paths cross.

Sadly, we were there on work duty, so didn't get to take any photographs or get up to mischief. We did get an ice lolly though, to stave off the time before the riders got to the final finishing circuit. Some Scottish guy won in the end, all slippery with the foul looking white cream he'd plastered all over his body.

6/10 - Could've done with a helicopter, really.

All it takes is large quantities of HGH.


Looking at his finely sculpted body of Michael Rasmussen in the image above, it is quite obvious that this is the figure of a man packed full of growth hormones.

Before he discovered HGH, he presumably looked a lot like that evil bit of skin from Dr Who.