Monthly Archives: December 2014

Cyclists made S#%* for Salary

This entry was posted in Racing on by .

The title to this post is very accurate.  We, cyclists, make shit for salary.  Compared to nearly any other professional sport, cycling is on the low end of the pay scale.

There is really not fairness in sports in general.  There is a huge disparity in what different athletes get paid for what they do.  American sports, ie,. baseball, basketball, and football, plus football (soccer) in Europe, make much more money than all other sports.

There is a guy in baseball, Giancarlo Stanton, that just signed a contract for $325 million dollars.  Yeah, that isn’t for one year, it is for 13, but the number is staggering.  But, you don’t have to go the top to get to a staggering number.  The average baseball player makes over $3,000,000 a year.  That is average.

I remember talking to Thomas Frischknecht at the MTB World Championships in France, about 15 years ago.  He was here in the US on day one when mountain biking started getting traction.  He was so amazed how much more money was in the sport and how well we were all doing.  He was sponsored by Ritchey, Oakley, maybe even Google too(I’ve been corrected, it was Yahoo Sports).  He was making good money compared to other cyclist, road too.

I told Thomas that if you added up the salaries of all the 200 guys on the start  line, it wouldn’t equal the salary of one, just one major league baseball player.  And it has only gotten worse.

But, then compare our sport to nordic skiing.  There are a few skiers that make a living, but not many.  A couple Olympic’s ago, I could have sponsored, personally, myself, a woman that was skiing in the Olympics, for $5000.  She would have skied around with my name on her.  That is about the same as what I got paid for sunglasses when I was riding MTB bikes.  Crazy.

The baseball player, Stanton, that is making $325,000,000.  His contract is most likely bigger than the total budgets for all professional cycling for a year.  That is all cycling teams- Sky, BMC, Astana, Garmin-Sharp, etc.  That isn’t just the salaries of all the professional cyclists.   It is the salaries for the riders, the support, all the plane tickets, team buses, cars, everything.

I think this is a big reason that the professional teams started Velon, a joint venture to drive the development of the sport.  Personally, I don’t think they are going to have too much success.  I think that cycling attracts a lot of quirky characters and that it is going to be very hard to get all these guys thinking global and not selfishly.  I hope they are successful though.  Cycling is a very difficult sport and the riders deserve to make a decent wage.

The UCI does have a miminum salary.  I think it is 27.500 EUR for a Pro Conti Team and
30.000 EUR for a Pro Tour Team.

But those minimums don’t apply to most of the riders here in the US.  Most the domestic pros, here in the US, are not making anywhere near mimimun wage.  The majority of guys aren’t getting paid $1000 a month. Some just a couple hundred a month, or nothing at all.  Some profession.

Cycling has historically been a blue collar sport.  It pretty much still is.  There are a few guys, very few, that can save enough, during their careers that they can retire with enough money to really retire.   The rest of the riders are doing it for the love of the sport.  That says a lot.

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Finishing Other People’s Jobs is Thankless

This entry was posted in Just Life on by .

Why is it that it is so unrewarding finishing someone else’s job?  I’m not sure that I’ve ever done a project, that was a continuation of project that someone started and baled, and ever been very satisfied.

I think it is because that no one really does anything exactly the same and that there are many ways to get to the end result of a project.  The problem is that when someone starts something in a specific way, you need to be thinking like them to get to the same end result that they envisioned.  And you might not have that vision in you.

I got thinking about this because I started, or more accurately, got involved in tiling a shower in Lawrence, that someone else had done the shower pan and cement board.  They wanted a no sill shower, a smooth transition.  They make a flush drain, a trough that would have been perfect, but the guy before me thought he could build a smooth little berm between the shower and the bathroom floor.  He did that, but he didn’t get any grade on the shower pan. And he didn’t know that the drain could be adjusted up and down, so it was mounted about 3/4″ too high.

So, yesterday, I chiseled out all the surrounding concrete, and lowered the shower drain, then tried to tile the floor so the water flows towards the drain.  I’m not sure how it is going to work.  I think there might be a couple low spots, which would be a total failure, or at least not good.

What I really needed to do was to knock out the whole thing and just start over.  Get the right drain and do it right.  That might still be what is going to happen.

I’ve run into this so many times.  Guys that have started working on their cars, or bikes and then get frustrated and quit.  A bike usually isn’t so difficult.  There isn’t much on a bike that I don’t know about.  But, someone cross-threads their bottom bracket or something and then calls and asks if I can “help” him install a new bottom bracket, when he already knows that he has jacked it up.

It’s much worse with cars.  I hate showing up to help someone fix their car and there are a ton of nuts and bolts laying around.  I pretty much need to remove them to know where they go back.

Michael Fatka had a sign like below at his shop, Michael’s Cyclery in Ames, Iowa.  I didn’t appreciate it as much back then as I do now.  The last number isn’t a big enough jump.

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I put in the other floor next to the shower, so felt some connection to the project.  The other floor has electric heat and is nice.  You can't tell how little slope the shower floor has here.  Maybe 1/8" per foot if I'm lucky.

I put in the other floor next to the shower, so felt some connection to the project. The other floor has electric heat and is nice. You can’t tell how little slope the shower floor has here. Maybe 1/8″ per foot if I’m lucky.

I should of just put one of these in and got rid of the curb.

I should have just put one of these in and got rid of the curb.