“Italian Giusto Cerutti has a broken wheel after a fall. According to the rules he is not alowed to accept help. Tour de France 1928. Location unknown.”

From the National Archive of The Hague on Flickr.l

Tweed rides may be all the rage, but in this Easter season I think the Brazilians have the right idea. If you’re in Sao Paulo, swing by the hat ride!

The rider with the best hat wins a pizza! Poster art by Dimas Forchetti, originally posted by Cabelo.

This is a truly horrific story from Brazil, made all the more terrible by the fact that is is so well documented and you can watch it unfold close-up, and by the fact that I have not been able to find any English-language coverage of it at all. Given the footage below, which shows a close-up of the accident attempted murder as it occurs, it is extremely fortunate that no cyclists or bystanders were killed.

The video below is very very hard to watch- it shows a peaceful, pleasant-looking dusk ride, with a hundred or more cyclists of all kinds (fewer than half of whom are wearing helmets) riding through a medium sized street in Porto Alegre. Young and old riding together on a warm evening: a friendly looking woman on a trike with her dog on the back, a guy in Red Bull kit, people on cruisers, some hipsters. It looks like a really fun, friendly evening ride.

And then, at 1:00 into the video, a black car literally mows through the cyclists from behind, carrying several cyclists on the hood and windshield, and the rest of the video is of shocked cyclists, twisted bikes, the injured being comforted on the pavement, and finally ambulances, and twisted bikes being carried away. Click below to play the video.

Added: Here is a better video that edits together footage from multiple cameras to provide a more complete narrative, with English subtitles, including witness testimony and outrage at the end.

The Porto Alegre Critical Mass blog has links to more videos and reflections on the incident.

The local news site Zero Hour says police have identified the driver and are waiting for him to turn himself in voluntarily (apparently as of yesterday he is not at his home address). It also have video of the accident from a different perspective, shot from high above out an apartment window. The same video appears in this TV news report.

In the words of our friend Cabelo, who alerted me to this story, “Much light and energy to all who lived through this horrible experience.”

You’ve doubtless been skipping the World Series to follow along as the Tour du Faso has wound through Burkino Faso, West Africa, confronting riders with 110-degree temperatures, rutted roads, dust, and an opportunity for Africans to compete with Europeans on home soil and under a modicum of media attention. This year’s competition features teams from France, Belgium, Holland, Ivory Coast, Togo, Ghana, Mali, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and of course the Mighty Squirrels of Benin. Today, according to Cycling News, “Home rider Abdoul Aziz Nikiema won another stage for Bukino Faso on the final day of the race to the capital Ouagadougou as Julien Schick of Team Reine Blanche managed to defend the leader’s yellow jersey and secure overall victory.”

Cycling News has the full race summary, stage by stage, with photos from our friend Christopher Herby. He also contributed a couple of Cycling News blog posts while traveling with the Benin team. While he has many great things to say about the Benin riders, and their coach, the short version of their tour experience is:

There’s a classic book by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe called Things Fall Apart. That would also be a pretty good title for the adventures of the Beninese cycling team at the Tour du Faso. While things fall apart metaphorically in Achebe’s book, things are literally falling apart here in the Squirrel camp. Things like shifters, bottom brackets, wheels, and quite excitingly, steerer tubes. All this makes it quite difficult to compete against a peloton equipped with modern bikes and fancy carbon wheels.

I know I speak for so many of us when I send hearty congratulations to the team for their efforts in this race. Here’s another of Christopher’s sentiments, which I share.

Like Benin, Burkina Faso celebrated its 50th independence anniversary this year, and the Tour plays an important role in showcasing Burkina’s development. I was excited to see a strong contingent of media coverage at the opening ceremony for the big men’s speeches and the team presentation. As I watched the Benin team walk on to the stage, I couldn’t help but get a little sappy: it’s such an incredible opportunity for these boys to travel to a foreign country and compete against top athletes. Alphonse hadn’t ridden on paved roads until six months ago, and now he’s about to start a UCI 2.2 stage race. Pretty cool.

And I absolutely love this image, among many great images Christopher took during the race.

I’ve written a couple of times before about the national cycling team in Benin, West Africa. This week the team is heading off to the Tour du Faso, a 10-day, 1300 KM stage race held annually in Burkina Faso in October (the race seems to have zero web coverage in 2010. I challenge you to find a single link!). Christopher Herby sent us some photos as they prepare:

Coach Fernand Gandaho talks to the team in their dorm. The athletes slept on straw mats during the 10-day training camp.

Hello BikeJuju Friends,
I’m a bike dork like any other, but I’ve spent the last two years of my life working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin.  Much to my surprise, I discovered an obscure yet energetic group of cyclists here in one of Africa’s poorest countries.  As a former racer myself, I’ve gotten involved with the national team, and I’ve been sharing stories about the team on CyclingNews.com.  I’m getting ready to join the team next week at Africa’s biggest cycling event: the Tour du Faso.  I invite you all to follow along and cheer for the team.  Though most of them have never used a computer or traveled beyond Benin, I’ve assured them they are the most popular team in the Tour! Cheers from Benin! — Christoph Herby

The team crosses a bridge on Benin's coastal highway, one of the country's smoothest roads.

We wish the team team bon courage as they grind towards what is surely Africa’s best-named capital city, Ouagadougou.

Claire and I spent a good part of the day helping to load bikes with the Village Bike Project, who were packing a shipping container for their program in Ghana. If you don’t know about VBP, you should stop by their website to learn more.

I’ve posted about Village Bike Project before. They’ll ship this container to Ghana, where a portion of the bikes will be sold off to pay shipping costs, leaving them with a sustainable organizational model, and a large number of bikes for use in their Ghana programs.

There was an extra special moment today when a birthday cake arrived for Village Bicycle Project founder David Peckham. Happy birthday, Dave!

Packing the container is hard sweaty work, with a great group of people, for a great cause, and it’s fun even when there’s not cake! First, the bikes are pulled out of various storage containers and laid out in rows by wheel size.

Volunteers prep each bike by removing the pedals, twisting the handlebars sideways, and dropping the seat. This minimizes the space the bike will take in the container.

Meanwhile the container-packers jam as many bikes into the container as possible, filling any extra spaces with wheels, tires, and bags of parts as they slowly work their way forward. Throughout the day the packers call out for what they need: “More tires!” “More 20-inch bikes!” And the volunteers outside adjust the flow into the container accordingly.

When the container arrives in Ghana, the process will be reversed, as illustrated by these photos from Jason Finch.

And soon after that, in the most important step of all, the bicycles find new lives in service of new riders! (Also Jason Finch photos)

My pals at Village Bicycle Project are loading a container of donated bikes for Ghana on Saturday and just sent me word that they may be short on volunteers. Come join us! I’ll be there with my wife and daughter, it’s tons of fun. Or just help get the word out. Many hands make light work! Thanks. Details below.

Village Bicycle Project says:

My first Burning Man is over, I’m no longer a “virgin,” the Man has burned, and suddenly after five magical days in Black Rock City with 50,000 other burners, I find myself back in the “default world” sitting at my desk trying to make sense of it all. I say that as if something like Burning Man can be untangled and made sense of, but part of the joy of the event is that it makes no sense and every kind of sense at the same time. It’s a manifold place, full of exuberant contradictions and surprises and discoveries and congruent incongruities at every turn. (And now the whole enormous city is just plain gone for another year!)

I took my new tallbike to Burning Man (more on the tallbike soon), and my camera. And I expected to do a little riding and a lot of photographing, wandering around to document the many wonderful varieties of bicycles and pedal-driven vehicles on the playa (as well as the art, and the people, and the scene).

This is Ellen from Vancouver on her wonderfully whimsical pencil bike. I rode around with her twice.

I had seen photos of this camel tallbike from Burning Man 2009 and loved seeing it gallop past in person.

But Burning Man really is about participating, not observing. That’s not just a trite saying, it’s a deep part of the community’s DNA. And so although I did go out and take photographs a few times, it really was much more gratifying to just ride around, participate, interact, and leave the camera at home instead of sticking it in peoples’ faces. Despite the many Burning Man photos on the internet, cameras are surprisingly few and far between in Black Rock City.

And much more than I ever expected, I found the playa a deeply satisfying place to ride just for the sheer joy of riding. There were huge open spaces, there were great art installations spaced widely apart at perfect biking distances, the air was constantly filled with beats to keep me energized, and there were other riders everywhere, dressed outlandishly, or skimpily, or not at all, and pedaling magnificent machines.

Truly everyone had a bike. Cars are forbidden–it is a pedestrian and cycling city–and the distances between neighborhoods, or art pieces, or theme camps, are measured in miles. The place is enormous.

Center Camp has bike racks all the way around, jammed with bikes night and day.

Granted the conditions were sometimes less than optimal. Black Rock City is located three miles out into a dry lake bed, and we had occasional 40 mile-per-hour winds, so by the end of the week my bike was caked in dust, my bottom bracket was creaking, and every bike in our camp was starting to need various kinds of tender lovin’. I had at least two rides through full-on dust whiteouts, rides made possible (and even fun!) only by clear goggles and a good dust mask.

One memorable dust storm ride took place at midnight, racing across the open playa following a camp-mate who was dressed as a rocketeer and waving a blue lightsaber, as he disappeared and reappeared ahead on his trike in the darkness and swirling dust, heading for a circus tent dance club called Ashram Galactica, which was showing Lawrence of Arabia on a huge outdoor video screen by the dusty dance floor. You just can’t make stuff like that up!

I began my summer in Belize, with three days on car-free Caye Caulker, where bikes are the best way to get around the hot, sandy streets. And I ended my summer the same way, in car-free Black Rock City, where thousands of bikes roam the playa, decorated and lit and gathering dust as they convey their fantastically clad riders to the next adventure. It was truly an amazing and transformative time. Burning Man, it turns out, is a cycling event as much as it is anything else. I hope to ride with you there next year!

A few more photos are on Flickr.

A special shout out to my uber-groovy camp-mates from It’s Your Burnday camp, and thanks to Isaac for the bikes-in-dust photos.

Previous Bikejuju posts: about Burning Man 2009 bikes, and anticipating Burning Man 2010.

I was very tempted to go to Maker Faire Africa this year, but the business I had in Nairobi fell through, and I opted to spend this weekend preparing for Burning Man instead. (Tough choice!) They’ve just posted a “meet the makers” short video. Looks chilly in Nairobi this week!

Maker Faire is a great event and I am pleased the momentum has carried through from the first Maker Faire Africa, held in Ghana last year (and mentioned on Bikejuju here).

As you can see, though, despite the vibrancy of the grassroots bicycle and bicycle design sectors in Africa, they are under-represented at Maker Faire Africa, especially when you compare it to the US Maker Faires, where there is always lots of bikey fun. From a distance it seems there are even fewer bicycle projects in Nairobi than last year in Accra. I have a little dream that we could use the Maker Faire Africa gathering in 2011 or 2012 as a place to bring together the African grassroots bicycle sector. What do you think?

The Burning Man festival comes every Labor Day, and the last three years I’ve seen friends getting excited, and going, and raving about it, and I’ve wished I was there. I’ve lived vicariously by looking at pictures, and posted some here. But this year, finally, I am taking the plunge, indulging my 40-year-old self, and joining other friends marking the same four decade milestone in a camp we’re calling It’s Your Burnday. Departure is a week away, a box truck with our camp’s major structures has already arrived on the Playa, and my room has turned into a pre-departure staging area piled high with a crazy psychedelic jumble of outlandish attire and desert camping survival supplies.

Black Rock City has bikes in its DNA. It has a serious bike culture. It is a temporary city of 45,000 people, designed from the outset for bicycles and pedestrians, with almost no cars allowed (except for “mutant vehicle” art cars). The sheer size of the place make bikes the best option for getting around. And what bikes they are! The person-powered vehicles of Burning Man range from disposable (hundreds of bikes get left behind at the end of the event each year), to truly fantastical.

Bone Bike image by Ron

Canopy trike image by Sterling Ely.

Will you be at Burning Man? Let’s ride! It’s Your Burnday camp location will be at 3:45 and C, shoot me an email, or leave a comment, or just look me up when you get there!

A couple of urban cyclists in Black Rock City stop for a friendly chat. Photo by Ionan.