Weiss, long ago an anonymous blogger, visited Boulder to promote his latest title, “The Enlightened Cyclist.”
It was bound to happen–the Bike Snob, aka Eben Weiss, appeared in Boulder yesterday, Sunday, April 1. He visited the so-anti-snob-they-are-practically-snobbish chaps at Vecchio‘s, then took a 45-minute spin through town before reading at the Boulder Book Store. Reading isn’t exactly a fair estimation of his schtick. Rather, he presented a bizarre and tortured PowerPoint presentation imploring attendees to coalesce into a cycling religion based upon the worship of a lobster.
Apart from Andy Hampsten, Tour of Italy and Alpe d’Huez champion, most people seemed to laugh off the call to action as a stunt. Hampsten, on the other hand, remarked, “Behind pork, I fucking love lobster.”
Weiss didn’t actually read a single phrase from his book, his second. He did take the time to answer questions, some of the most probing being “how many bikes do you own?” and “where’s your favorite place to ride?”. Surprisingly, neither of these imbecilic queries elicited scorn or rebuke from Weiss–a disappointment to some, this writer included.
I took the opportunity to press Weiss on a far more substantive issue: is Cadel Evans the largest douche on the planet? I didn’t ask in so many words, but I related how I’d vowed never to watch the Tour again if Evans won (which he did in 2011, oh horror of horrors). With a streak of pragmatism and gentility I never assumed he possessed, he simply suggested I watch the Tour nonetheless and embrace the dishonesty and hypocrisy of it.
“It’s so easy,” he said. “to be a hypocrite. Why not?”
And that, folks, was a bombshell inside my tiny, fragile, eggshell mind. I realized right then and there, Weiss, “The Snob,” is nothing short of a two-wheeled prophet. A bipedal, bicycling philosophizer…and damn if I wasn’t psyched for yet another Tour de France, complete with Bob Roll’s gap-toothed hickery, the constant underachievement of the French (Tommy Voeckler being the heroic exception), and dozens of manorexic illiterates in Lycra.
I’m reborn!
All in all, it was a fun gathering. Thanks to the Vecchio’s boys for hosting, Eben for a funnyass talk…and for entertaining my begging for him to write a few hundred words for my book, Holy Spokes, due out this fall…unless I somehow blow it between now and then. Always a possibility, friends. Always.
Pedal down to the Boulder Bookstore and grab a copy of either of the Snob’s books and get on his blog…he’s one of the few cycling writers well worth reading these days. And he’s a pretty nice guy, too. Unless he rips on me for bugging him about my book–then he’s a dick.
