I don’t eat much red meat.  It isn’t that I’m all that against it, it is just that I’m not that into it usually.  I was a vegetarian when I first started racing.

There was a guy in Kansas City that was really good, Bill Nickelson.  He pretty much beat up on all the guys when I was 14.  He was a vegetarian, so my brother Kris and I decided to emulate him.  We asked him exactly how he ate and he told us.  He also suggested a ton of vitamins to take.  Calcium, Magnesium Zinc, Vitamin E, Pantothenic Acid, Niacin etc.  I can’t even remember them all.

I did this for a long time, pretty much until the first time I got to go to Europe to race.  Salad bars and options were always available here in the states, so I didn’t really think much about eating before I fly to Europe.

The first race we did was the Tour of Vaucluse in Southern France.  I wrote a post sort of about it.  It was a Pro-AM race with lot of great professionals, plus the Russian and Eastern European amatuer teams.

The race fed us and I realized pretty much the first day that it was going to be nearly impossible to not eat meat.  That was nearly all they served for meals after breakfast.

So maybe the 2nd day, I decided to quit being a vegetarian and eat a steak.  I figured it was the only way to survive the trip.

So I walked over the food line and got a steak.  I really had no desire to switch up my diet, but there was no other way.

I was sitting there and started eating and it wasn’t good.  It was super chewy and hard to swallow.  I was thinking that I really hadn’t been missing out on anything all those years, but knew I needed to finish the meat to get through the stage that day.

While this was all going on, a French rider, maybe even Laurent Fignon, I’m not sure who it exactly was, came over, kind of started laughing and pointed at the steak.  He then did a couple neighs.

I didn’t know what he was doing, then thought a second and realized that he was mimicking a horse and implying that it was horse meat.  I pretty much dropped my fork and stopped chewing.  I was nearly sick.  I couldn’t believe I was eating horse.

That was it for the meat that race.  I wasn’t going to “risk” consuming horse again.  When that stage race finished, we raced the next few weeks in Italy and didn’t have that problem.

Anyway, I’m not proud of consuming horse meat. I never it attend to do it consciously again.  They still eat it over in France.  I’m not sure what that is all about.   Maybe it is one of the reasons I’m not that into red meat in general, I don’t really know.

I have no idea how people eat these guys. It doesn’t sit well with me.

There is an article over at Cyclingnews that says that CBS’s 60 Minutes is going to air a segment on mechanical doping on January 29.  That is exactly a month.  Do you think that if 60 Minutes makes a valid argument, or even better yet, exposes the use of mechanical doping for the past decade, it would change the way us Americans think about it?

I’ve usually always agreed with what 60 Minutes covers.  It all seem pertinent.  It is the Sunday evening program, after the football games, that seems to try to expose unfairness throughout society.  They call themselves a “newsmagazine”, which is appropriate, I guess.   They started in 1968, so nearly 50 years ago.  That is crazy.

60 Minutes has already done a ton of stuff on Lance and his issue.  They did an exclusive segment with Tyler Hamilton that was revealing, sort of.  This is going to different.

If 60 minutes is going to air a segment on mechanical doping in the sport of cycling, then there have to be some riders that are shitting themselves right about now.  I assume they will name a rider, or multiple riders, that have had the advantage of this.  Since they “caught” Femke Van den Driessche, the only person, as far as I know, of potential trying to use mechanical doping in cyclocross, obviously it does exist.

Greg (Lemond) has been talking about it for sometime now.  He says it exists and has been used in the peloton.  I have no reason to doubt him.

I think a 60 Minutes show on it will go way more in depth that anything the cycling media has covered on the subject.  They have rarely made mistakes in their reporting and thus, hardly ever have to retract something that isn’t true.  I assume they did their research during the covering of this subject.

So, we have a month to wait.  I did a post about the revealing of mechanical doping a couple weeks ago and in that article, the “inventor” of mechanical doping, Istvan Varjas, said that a major television show was going to cover it.  I’d alway thought it would be a European television show. Never did I think it might be 60 Minutes.  This should be interesting.