Monday 19 March 2012

Get on your bikes and hand me an Apple . . . .

After 3 hours on the bike on Saturday I spent the afternoon enthralled by the Milano San Remo race. Check out this race profile from Strava. There are 4 major climbs. That final one is known as the Poggio.  




Here's something even more interesting. It's the Strava stats of US rider Taylor Phinney from the BMC team.



Its hard to believe that you can spend 7 hours in the saddle at an average speed of 40 kph. Taylor finished 37minutes behind the winner, but thats nothing to be ashamed of. 

The finish was unbelievable. I loved the way Cancellara stuck with his plan to break the sprinters on the last climb. It was too bad for him that he picked up two in-form passengers in Gerrans and Nibali. After the race I couldn't understand the comments from people saying how they felt that it should have been Cancellara's race. If you watched the race you would have seen that it was Nibali and Gerrens who broke first on the Poggio and Cancellara who tagged on before deciding that he had no chance in a bunch sprint with men like Goss in the next group, thus making it imperative to make a clean break. The three of them then played tag just as track riders do, but remember this is all happening at 30+kph up hill and 80kph on the decent where Cancellara is an absolute god. The theatre of Cancellara asking Gerrens and Nibali to pass him was like a spider asking flies to go through his web. I loved it. It was a fantastic finish and even better if you caught it on Italian TV where the commentators went crazy. 

I really avoided most of the business press over the weekend, except for the latest speculation on Apple (AAPL). I mused on what the end of the cash pile might mean on this blog a while ago. Has Apple run out of ideas? Is this an exit strategy for employees who didn't get stock options back at the time that Steve Jobs returned to the company? Who knows what Tim Cook and the Board are thinking. I'm not sure where all the actual cash is given that so much gets booked through the Irish arm of the company. I guess the biggest risk for Apple is that its sitting in various un-creditworthy banks or maybe its been in US government bonds?

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