Personal Growth / Body /  

Bicycling


Whether you charge down trails on a fat-tired mountain bike, ride a greyhound-lean road racer, or tool around town in environmentally correct comfort, there's at least one Web site for you.

The Best


Leading the pack today is VeloNet. This site is a work-in-progress that's been run since early 1994 by a bicycle enthusiast named Patrick Goebel. VeloNet's offerings are broad, ranging from basic safety tips to professional racing information. Its simple home page gives little indication of the real gold within the phone books and mailing lists, where you can learn about virtually any bicycling group in the world. This is a great way to meet riders when you travel to new places or get in touch with bicycle clubs in your home town. Each listing includes a contact name, phone number, and link to the organization's home page if it has one. VeloNet's Reading Room has neatly categorized links to every kind of cycling page out there, including advocacy, unicycling, training, health and fitness, tandems, safety, racing, ride calendars, and mountain biking. VeloNet is the best place to start any cycling tour.

Another good site for general bicycling information is WWW Bicycle Lane , which consists largely of an extensive set of links to other sites. One of the attractions here is a small yet well-selected group of cycling pictures. Overall, Bicycle Lane is well-organized, but its screens are busier than VeloNet's and its links aren't as logically grouped. While VeloNet groups its links on the basis of specific interests, such as mountain biking or road racing, many of the categories here are more vague, such as "Cool Links."

Thoroughness is the outstanding quality of Steve C.'s Bicycling Home Page. Steve Ciccarelli's headline says it all: "Touring, Tandeming, Ultra-riding. In fact this site is everything about bicycling EXCEPT Racing and Mountain Biking, although I do have all manner of cycling-related links." He has, in fact, over 350 of them, a nearly inexhaustible trove of biking information.

The Rest

If bicycle racing quickens your pulse, the best site for you is VeloNews. Catering to the road and mountain bike racing scenes, VeloNews provides race results, articles about the latest gadgetry, and training tips for Miguel Indurain wanna-bes. Although bicycle racers as a group tend to prefer function over form, this attractive site lets you navigate through it by clicking on in-line images. This site doesn't try to be a general resource for cyclists; it only has a handful of links to other Internet locations. VeloNews is the place to be during the Tour de France, which is, by far, bicycle racing's biggest event. While much of Europe becomes obsessed with the three-week Tour, which begins in early July, coverage in North America is scarce by comparison. And VeloNews doesn't skimp here: Besides daily updates, its tour page includes features, photos, and daily maps of the route.

To follow the European professional racing scene, go to World Media's Meta-List Of Bicycle Racing Links...And More. It includes links to race-related sites, some of which provide information not found in VeloNews. It also has a solid list of links to general-interest bicycling resources in the United States. This year, World Media provided hourly updates during the Tour de France, but access was very slow on race days due to heavy usage.

If your preference is mountain bike racing, RaceWeb is the best choice. It features thorough coverage of mountain bike race results from around the world and an excellent list of links to related sites.

The Bicycle Commuting Page provides useful tips for those who want to save gas and ride their bikes to work.

Chunk 666 offers up its own humorous brand of biking philosophy. It's a self-described "bicycle gang and temperance league" of people who have made their bicycles look like motorcycles. This page includes photos and instructions for making your own bicycle a chopper.

Tandem bicycle enthusiasts, especially those who brag they have a higher seat-to-wheel ratio than other types of bicyclists, should look at Tandem Magazine. This page could stand a bit more substance, but it's useful.

The Women's Mountain Biking and Tea Society (WOMBATS) proves that testosterone isn't the only thing that fuels rock-hoppers.

It's all in your head. Make sure it stays that way by visiting the Snell Memorial Foundation and the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute.

Commercial bike sites are popping up like dandelions on a summer lawn. Check out some of the highest-tech gear at Cyber Cyclery.

by David Haskin

ZD Internet Life Home PageTable of Contents


Copyright (c) 1995 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company is prohibited. Internet Life and the Internet Life logo are trademarks of Ziff-Davis Publishing Company.

web-doyenne@zdnet.com


Internet Life Vol.1 No.1 Winter 1995