A bicyclist who blocked traffic in a Jack-in-the-Box drive-through on the 10000 block of Silverdale Way on Thursday was arrested on suspicion of trespassing.

The 24-year-old East Bremerton man told a Kitsap County Sheriff’s deputy that he was unable to drive and had ridden his mountain bike into the drive-through to order some chicken strips.

The deputy, responding to a call from an employee, found the bicyclist by the window speaking into a hand-held video camera. When the deputy questioned him, the suspect said, apparently speaking into the camera, “The police are here.”

The employee told the deputy that the man had ridden up around 3 p.m. and placed an order. The lobby of the restaurant had closed at 2 p.m. for Thanksgiving, and a sign was posted in the window to that effect.

The employee said her manager had told her not to serve people on bicycles, because of the safety hazard. She explained the policy to the bicyclist, but he refused to leave and told her, “Go ahead and call the police. I’m making a stand.”

The deputy explained to the bicyclist that his behavior constituted trespassing, but he refused to move on.

After the bicyclist had been placed under arrest, he told the deputy he felt he had “a right to chicken strips.”

The bicyclist was booked into to Kitsap County jail, but was later released on personal recognizance.

The folk at Fark are, in general, not sympathetic to the cyclist.

What say you? Are Jack-In-The-Box and other drive-through fast food joints playing Soup Nazi to cyclists?

It’s September 19, and you know what that means… it’s Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Pirates aren’t known for being cyclists. It’s harrrrrrrrrrrrd to pedal with a peg leg and a hook on me hand. Me parrot keeps pooping on my handlebarrrrrrrrrrrs. Can’t find a three-cornered cycling helmet. Me long coat is horrrrrrrrrrrrible for reducing wind resistance. What brand of bike does a pirate ride… why CANNONdale, of course! What’s best about winning the yellow jersey? It reminds me of golden treasure.

If you see this woman driving behind you while you’re riding your bike… flee.

Naked Woman Arrested after Bicyclist Hit on San Pablo

JACKSONVILLE, FL — The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is investigating a bizarre crash on the Southside involving a woman driving a car full of children and a bicyclist.

The incident happened on San Pablo Road, just north of Beach Boulevard Sunday night.

Witnesses in the car told police the unidentified female driver [see photo] deliberately ran into a woman riding a bike on the side of the road.

Witnesses say the woman jumped out of her Honda and hopped in the back seat of a car whose driver had stopped to help the injured bicyclist.

The driver managed to get the woman out of his car, but she ran to another car, yanked the driver out, got behind the wheel and smashed into her Honda.

One of the driver’s at the scene told First Coast News reporter Kyle Meenan, “Three young children got out and they were running around screaming and everything!”

Fortunately, a 14 year old Boy Scout riding in the Honda helped to get all the kids out of the car before the woman rammed it.

Witnesses said the woman had been babysitting the Boy Scout and another child, and the two other children in the car belonged to her.

Witnesses say the woman then drove a car into a fence, got out, and ran in circles while taking off her clothes.

It took several officers to subdue her, according to witnesses.

The suspect has been identified as 34 year old Holly Kay Highfield. Officers arrested her and took her to Shands Jacksonville for an evaluation.

She is facing charges of aggravated battery/use of a deadly weapon, carjacking, DUI, and DUI/causes damage to property.

The woman on the bicycle has been identified as 55 year old Cathy Guiry of Jacksonville. She is recovering at the Mayo Clinic.

I wonder what kind of merit badge the Boy Scout earned.

After months of speculation about how Olympic athletes would react to the air quality problems here, some answers arrived at the airport Tuesday when four track cyclists on the United States Olympic team stepped off their flight wearing masks over their mouths and noses.

They were the first athletes to be seen wearing masks or doing anything proactive to combat the effects of pollution.

The masks they wore were specially designed by and issued to them by the United States Olympic Committee. The U.S.O.C.’s lead exercise physiologist, Randy Wilber, had advised U.S. Olympians to wear the masks on the plane and as soon as they stepped foot in Beijing.

Two of the cyclists wore the masks on the plane. The other two put on the masks when they arrived at the airport.

Read the rest at the NY Times here. Can anyone identify the masked US Cyclist in the photo from the NY Times?

Maybe this is a chance for Floyd Landis to stage a masked comeback?

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We’re also working hard to resolve the occasional downtime due to the fierce demand on our website during the Tour de France. Solution for the moment is to wait 3 minutes and try again.

Last item… some of you may have noted the duplicate content in the news excerpt sections. We’ve notified Bicycle.net’s Department of Redundancy Department and they’re working on it. (OK, we’re trying to get our non-TdF feature content to appear on the left and TdF-only content to appear in the middle, but our programming peloton is bonking now and haven’t gotten that working.)

When it comes to bicycle safety, visibility is key. If you want to be safe, you should be lit up like a Christmas tree, with a fluorescent, mile high afro like Sushi K. So I’m a tad skeptical of this DIY Turn Signal Biking Jacket. It’s a nice idea in theory, but surely you can accomplish the same thing by just sticking your arm out in the direction you’re turning. Worse, while you could theoretically substitute a lighter jacket, those blinking signals are only really going to show up against a dark background, so this jacket would sacrifice substantial visibility just to less obviously do something that all good city bikers should already be doing in the first place. A bad idea made more palatable by being totally awesome anyway. I do love the little arc reactor in the middle, though.

Turn Signal Jacket [Leah Buechly]

I have no idea who Sushi K is (if you do, please let me know in a comment. I agree that it’s only good at night. I disagree that using arm signals is optimal, especially at night in pot hole country when you want to keep your hands on the handlebars. Maybe a back-of-helmet version where a tap on the right side gets the right blinker blinking, tap on left for left blinker and tap on front brim turns off the signal?

The LEDs should also be obnoxiously bright.

Athletes who want to cheat by injecting themselves with a performance-enhancing drug that boosts their blood cell count can do so with little risk of getting caught, a new study indicates, possibly exposing another flaw in what is regarded as the world’s toughest anti-doping program.

A urine test that is supposed to detect the drug, and that will be used in the Tour de France next month and in the Olympics in August, is likely to miss it, the study says. The substance, recombinant human erythropoietin, known as EPO, stimulates bone marrow to speed up production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. And with more blood cells, endurance athletes like cyclists and distance runners can perform better.

EPO is banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, an international group that promotes and coordinates efforts to stop doping in sports and whose program is followed by the International Olympic Committee. The agency defends its EPO test and questioned the latest study.

Although athletes have said EPO is in widespread use, few have tested positive. Most of the athletes who have been linked to doping in recent years have been caught not through drug testing, but rather through criminal investigations. In the August 2006 issue of the journal Blood, the American lab accredited to conduct EPO testing reported only 9 positive tests out of 2,600 urine samples.

[Note by bicycle.net editors: this does not seem to be in August. See following 3 articles:

• False-positive detection of recombinant human erythropoietin in urine following strenuous physical exercise
  Blood, Jun 2006; 107: 4711 - 4713.
• No doubt about the validity of the urine test for detection of recombinant human erythropoietin
  Blood, Sep 2006; 108: 1778 - 1780.
• False-positive Epo test concerns unfounded
  Blood, Sep 2006; 108: 1778.

The new study may help explain why: the test simply failed.

The study, to be published Thursday in the online edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology, was conducted last summer and fall by a renowned lab in Denmark, the Copenhagen Muscle Research Center. The investigators gave eight young men EPO and collected urine samples on multiple occasions before, during and after the men were doping. The men's urine samples were then sent to two labs accredited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, and EPO tests were requested.

The first lab found some samples positive and a few others suspicious. (A suspicious result does not bring sanctions for doping.) The lab also declared a sample positive, although the man had stopped taking the drug and it should have been gone from his urine. His previous urine sample, obtained when he was taking EPO, was negative in this lab's test.

The second lab never deemed any urine sample positive for EPO and found only a few to be suspicious. The two labs did not agree on which samples were suspicious.

The anti-doping agency's rules say that if an athlete's urine shows traces of EPO, it must be tested again by a different accredited lab. The athlete is declared guilty of doping only if the second lab also detects EPO. By that rule, none of the subjects would have been charged with using EPO, even though their red blood cell counts rose and their performance on an endurance test improved.

"The paper certainly is an eye-opener," said Don Catlin, the chief executive of Anti-Doping Research, a nonprofit group in Los Angeles. "It's quite remarkable."

But Olivier Rabin, scientific director of the World Anti-Doping Agency, said his group had tested its labs, sending samples of urine from people who were taking EPO and from people who were not. In general, he said, the labs agreed. But Rabin added that when the agency sends samples to its labs, they are not sent anonymously -- the lab knows the samples are from WADA.

The agency does not share data from the tests on its labs, so it was not possible to determine how the organization's research compared with the latest study.

"I have never seen such a drastic situation as the one reported in this article," said Rabin, who questioned whether it reflected the true state of EPO testing.

The findings in the latest study should be no surprise, said Charles Yesalis, a professor of sports science at Pennsylvania State University. For decades, he said, anti-doping authorities have claimed they have tests that work and for decades athletes have been taking drugs without getting caught.

The anti-doping authorities, he said, "remind me of little boys whistling in the graveyard."

Still, the study's lead author, Carsten Lundby, a physiologist at the Copenhagen Muscle Research Center, said he had mixed feelings about publishing the paper. His concern was that if he laid out the test's weakness, he was telling athletes that they can probably take EPO without getting caught.

"It's a nasty problem," said Dr. Joris Delanghe, a professor of clinical chemistry at the University of Ghent in Belgium. He and Dr. Michael Joyner of the Mayo Clinic wrote an editorial accompanying the paper.

The finding is especially provocative, Joyner noted, because only last month, another study, by researchers in Sweden, called into question another urine test for a performance-enhancing substance, testosterone. The investigators showed that a substantial number of men and, in particular, Asian men, have a gene deletion that allows them to take testosterone and reap all the drug's benefits but escape detection. The testosterone test, too, will be used at the Olympics and the Tour de France.

The EPO study involved eight young men, university students in Copenhagen, who agreed to be injected with EPO over a four-week period and have their blood cell counts and athletic performance monitored before, during and after they took the drug. The EPO regimen was similar to those used by athletes who were trying to cheat. The men had EPO injections every other day for two weeks to get the process going and then had one injection per week to maintain their increased blood cell production.

The researchers were primarily interested in learning whether the young men's athletic performance improved -- it did, and markedly so. At maximum effort, the men's performances improved by 9 to 16 percent. But at a slightly lower level of exertion, performance improved by 50 percent, Lundby said. Athletes taking EPO can go 50 percent longer at that somewhat lower level of effort, which can make a major difference in an endurance event like the Tour de France or a marathon, Lundby said.

The investigators asked whether the sole reason for the improvement was increased numbers of red blood cells, and it was. But they also realized they had an opportunity to investigate the validity of the EPO test. So, without telling the anti-doping labs what they were doing, the investigators sent the men's urine samples for EPO testing.

One of the two labs, which the researchers refer to as Lab B in their paper, never declared any sample positive, even when the men were taking high doses of EPO every other day. Lab A was inconsistent. It found EPO during the high dose phase. But in the maintenance phase, it found EPO in only 6 of the 16 samples.

It is not terribly surprising that the labs disagreed, researchers said. The EPO test, like urine tests for other hormones, including growth hormone, is extremely difficult. The lab must look for tiny chemical differences between the EPO a person makes naturally and EPO that is injected as a drug.

"It's super-difficult," Lundby said. "The difference between the EPO you have in your body and the recombinant EPO is not very great."

The drug, which is used to treat patients with kidney disease, cancer and other illnesses, is made by animal cells, typically Chinese hamster ovary cells [see illustration at top]. Researchers said there were new forms of EPO and new ways of getting its effects without injecting recombinant EPO, making it even harder to detect doping.

“The list of these substances is growing,” Lundby said. “From a patient’s point of view, it’s great, but from an anti-doping view, it’s bad. The list of substances you must test for will grow and grow.”

And the possibility of a 50 percent improvement in performance has to be tempting, Lundby said. “So what do you do? You take it.”

“It doesn’t sound good for anyone who wants a drug-free sport,” he added.

Dr. Alan Grant: Try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period. You get your first look at this “six foot turkey” as you enter a clearing. He moves like a bird, lightly, bobbing his head. And you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex, he’ll lose you if you don’t move. But no, not Velociraptor. You stare at him, and he just stares right back. And that’s when the attack comes… he uses coordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today. And he slashes at you with this… a six-inch retractable claw, like a razor, on the the middle toe. He doesn’t bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say… no no. He slashes at you here… or here… or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines. The point is… you are alive when they start to eat you. So you know… try to show a little respect.
– Jurassic Park

Indeed, show a little respect.

I am Velociraptor and I approved this message. Right after eviscerating the trolls who’d hurt bicycle.net.

I’m looking forward to getting back to my usual diet of cycling humor.