Monday’s Mailbag: Happy grandma; Happy riders; Skeptical reader

The Mailbag is a regular feature on VeloNews.com. If you have a comment, an opinion or observation regarding anything you have seen in cycling, in VeloNews magazine or on VeloNews.com, write to WebLetters@InsideInc.com. Please include your full name and home town. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Please tell Casey that his favorite picture of 2004 is also my favoriteand will always be for the remainder of my life.

Best regards to all of you at VeloNews for 2005,

Olivia’s grandma
Bernadette Julich

The other ride
Dear VeloNews,
I read with interest the article about the New Year’s Day Ride in Portland,Oregon.  FYI there is another New Year’s Day Ride that has been goingon for many years in Orange County, California.  I believe it startedback in the eighties by a now-defunct cycling club, “Velo Playa Larga”.

Many of the original members can still be found on the road today ridingwith other clubs.  The ride starts in Long Beach and goes down thecoast to Dana Point where it turns inland and loops through south OrangeCounty to return to Long Beach.  Some years have attracted up to 1000riders, this year it was probably in the neighborhood of 300-400 riders. The ride is not sanctioned, supported or organized by anyone; it just happensevery year without fail and has become quite a tradition for local cyclists.

Many choose not ride the entire 100 miles but will join in for a segmentto help usher in the New Year.  Fortunately the traffic on New Year’sDay is fairly light because the ride dominates the southbound lanes ofPacific Coast Highway through the coastal communities.  If any ofyou out there are visiting SoCal on New Year’s Day be sure to bring yourbike, it’s a ride to remember.

Charles O. Jones
Orange County, California

Photographic evidence
Dear Sirs,
Here is a picture from this morning’s classic impromptu New Years DayRide 2005 as it cruises down Pacific Coast Highway at about 30 mph. The ride starts in Long Beach, along the coast, then winds inland throughOrange County, California and then back to Long Beach. Each of thelast 20 years, a new mile marker is set, one for each year. The ride startedwith 85, in 1985 and this year it was up to 105 miles for the serious folk,culminating with a massive sprint finish.

This ride will sometimes draw 400-500 local and visiting cyclists, anddrives local law enforcement nuts…basically the police department justlets us all go through each town safely and non-stop!

Sincerely,
Cameron Phillips
Newport Beach, California

Not-so-positive positives
Editor,
I don’t have any particular reason to “believe Tyler,” but I do worryabout the rush to presume that the transfusion test used by WADA actuallyproves him guilty. Dick Pound and others assert that the test has beenscientifically validated, but there is still not one single scientificmeasurement of the test’s specificity or its false positive rate (see”VeloNewsInterview: WADA’s Dick Pound“).

The files of the InnocenceProject are filled with cases of innocent people convicted of crimesbecause forensic scientists exaggerated the certainty of their tests andunderestimated the frequency of false positive results.

Last spring, the FBI arrested Brandon Mayfield on the claim that severaldifferent expert examiners had found 100-percent positive fingerprint matchesbetween Mayfield and a fingerprint left by one of the Madrid train bombers.Only after Spanish police showed that the print actually came from a knownAlgerian terrorist did the FBI admit that a 100-percent positive matchis notalways correct.

We should wonder whether Tyler’s three positive blood tests suffer fromsimilar problems to the FBI’s multiple positive fingerprint matches.

One symptom of junk science is the failure to provide complete and openrecords of experiments to the scientific community for review and criticism.The FBI’s refusal to allow outside experts to examine its fingerprint matchingprocedures and WADA’s refusal to reveal the details of its test for homologoustransfusions cast serious doubt on both institutions’ commitment to goodscience.

Based on what we know, I think it more likely that Tyler is guilty thaninnocent, but it is imperative to judge him on the basis of real science,not junk science. We need to get dopers out of the peloton, but Tyler Hamiltonseems to be confronting something more suited to the 16th century Spanishinquisition than the 21st century Vuelta a Espana.

Jonathan Gilligan
Nashville, Tennessee

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