cycling « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

cycling

Finally, a normal change of pace

Today was the first day since February 23rd that I haven’t had a bunch of stuff on my calendar. I have been running five calendars since about that same time, and I checked them all, in disbelief, to make sure there was nothing doing today.

This meant that I spent a few hours grading, a few more hours working on a brand new lecture, and a little more time watching a documentary. I have, this week, been answering the last 48 questions poised in my online class. Across the semester they are tasked with reading various articles and chapters. In these six assignments they must make annotations. There’s a certain formula we employ. One element of the formula is to ask a question that the reading has inspired. I figure, since I’ve instructed them to ask I should try to answer the questions. This is a lot of fun. For one thing, you see the wide range of ways that students are thinking about the reading. For another thing, you can challenge yourself to write interesting and creative things. For still a third thing, you can try to predict questions that will come up a lot, and thus create some form answers. The downside to this, and it’s not really a downside, is that it is time intensive.

The good news is, this was the sixth and final annotation of the semester. This also means that the big project is boring down upon us. Feedback there matters a great deal, over the stage process, and that is certainly time intensive.

I have been working on a lecture today about unhealthy traditions. The challenge here is going to be in trying to sound neither obvious, nor a hallway monitor.

And tomorrow I’m screening a documentary that’s a little too long, so I have to find parts to cut out of it, for time. It’s not as easy as skipping the beginning or cutting the end. You have to make some deliberate choices, hopefully, without losing too much context.

And that is what I did on the first day when I didn’t have anything to do.

Also, I went for a bike ride. It’s still early enough in the outdoor part of the year that this feels hole-in-corner. And my lovely bride is out of town at a conference, so I was riding on my own, which felt even sneakier, somehow.

That’s how it felt, for a little over an hour. And down this road I flew.

It was tee-hee sneaky version of the feeling. The “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this” style.

If it somehow makes it feel appropriate, I didn’t go out until after hours. And I only got above 30 mph three times.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

https://www.kennysmith.org/wordpress/blog/2026/03/17/cuan-na-haisleime-and-keem-bay/”>This is Keem Bay.

adventures / cycling / Ireland / memories / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
31
Mar 26

Some days you get a lot of little in

In Rituals and Traditions we had a group work day today. At the end of the semester the groups will be delivering big presentations and I’m trying to give them some built-in time to work on their projects. They are presenting ideas to the university’s athletic department. Rituals, traditions, game day atmosphere, and so on. Today I overheard of the few ideas that are percolating. Some of them are going to shape up nicely.

In Criticism, we talked about two basketball stories that the class selected. First, we had this one, which gave us a nice modern and historical parallel.

It’s been 75 years since college basketball’s first major gambling scandal. Not all that much has changed:

Odds are, there won’t be any ads about it over the next three weeks of the NCAA Tournament, but college basketball is celebrating an anniversary this year.

It was 75 years ago that the New York district attorney announced the arrests of 32 college basketball players as part of a sweeping sting operation into point-shaving that eventually included 86 games, 17 states and $72,000 in bribes – more than $900,000 in today’s money.

[…]

Time is, in fact, a flat circle.

Three-quarters of a century later, coaches remain aggrieved that their players are equal parts coddled and entitled, and the sport is in the throes of yet another point-shaving scandal. Twenty people are alleged to have hatched a game-fixing scheme that affected 17 teams, 29 games and at least 39 players.

When these stories come up I realize I need to learn more about gambling. “Gambling: bad” only gets you so far. Also, the thing that seems obvious to me is less an issue for others. But we talked about framing and the like, which led nicely into this next story they selected.

Maryland coach Brenda Frese went viral for yelling at Oluchi Okananwa. There’s more to the story. The “more” was a delightful conversation of the function and structure of clickbait, and also curated writing.

Just yesterday we had our first outdoor ride of the season. We made it off campus in good order today and that allowed us another nice treat, an after-work ride. The days are getting longer; it’s about time.

So we pedaled by the winery, where we will soon return to eat pizza. We cruised through the pastures, where I see my horsey friends, and then turned left to go down the asphalt shoot which is some of the best roadwork around here. We went up to the park, passing empty sheep pastures, and hooked a lovely left uphill into the backside of town. We took the biggest hill around, huffing and puffing in the still-warm sun, and turned onto the road that I rode so incredibly well one time that I turned it into three Strava segments — I have never ridden it well again. Then we breezed by haunted house, down the hill, up the other side, and home.

It was a lovely, windy, 12-mile stretch of the legs.

This is Dumhach Bheag.

cycling / memories / Monday / photo / site / video — Comments Off
30
Mar 26

First outdoor bike ride of the year!

Late Saturday afternoon the light came in a southern-facing and I just happened to catch it’s delicate double-pane dance. No idea why it does this. Whenever I do see it, which isn’t every day, I find myself staring at the glass to see if there’s something there. There’s nothing there. Just an abstract ghost in the machine, a surrealist glitch in the matrix.

It reminded me that I needed to wash my car. The winter weather is behind us, surely, and I can now get the salt and sand off the body and frame. So I drove to the nearby car wash, sprung for the you-do-this-twice-a-year package and drove on in.

Drive-through car washes fascinate me. It’s a ridiculous trip down memory lane, a demonstrate of the bites and bytes that your noggin is storing for no reason. I recall, as a kid, we used to go to one car wash that was for some reason quite popular. Long lines. Hand dried fenders. Maybe that’s why. I recall once when the driver of the car ahead of us panicked. The big fan at the end of the tunnel had a large wheel that descended and rolled along your windshield, over the roof of the car and so on, as the blower did it’s job of pushing the water back inside the collection and retention system. I guess the driver didn’t know that, or had a bad experience with airplane landing gear. He jammed the brakes and we tapped his bumper. Everyone was fine. No body damage, no physical damage. Two clean cars, one weird incident, one embarrassed driver. I recall having a car where the passenger door window didn’t seal well. It was fine in the rain. Never had a problem in the rain. If I was going through the car wash I had to take a towel. I recall someone I knew who did a destroy-her-wedding-dress photo shoot, when that was a thing. She had people throwing cans of paint on the dress. Silly online trend, colorful photos. The better ones, though, were when she went to one of those manual car wash places and they sprayed down her dress to get the paint out. I saw those photos and thought, “Ahh! Finally! A reason for these types of car washes!” No one ever wants to go to those if there’s a proper drive through car wash in town. I recall washing cars in the driveway. But I don’t recall the last time I saw someone doing that. Maybe no one wants to wash their cars at home if they can pay eight bucks, drive through the soap and get their ride almost clean.

You remember a lot of things in a car wash for no reason at all, other than that you’re there with the soap and the noise and not much else.

The experience also allowed me to take a bunch of windshield photos and create a new front page for the site. Go check it out. Stick with it for 60 seconds to see them all. Go on. I’ll wait for you here.

[…]

Wasn’t that fun? Different? Memorable? Will I remember that the next time I go to the car wash? Probably late this summer? Will it be worth remembering? How many times will I change the art on the front page between now and then? Don’t worry, I’ll always keep you updated about those changes. Keep reading this space and you’ll never miss a thing. A thing on this site, anyway.

The weather is finally cooperating on several fronts, and so we had our first outdoor bike ride of the year today. We just did an easy 10 miles around the neighbor to see if the bikes were working (they are) and see how it’d feel (weird) and to see who is going to be faster this year (she is).

I didn’t ride a lot in the basement this year. It’s just been mentally difficult to go down those stairs and I’m not sure why. We have a terrific basement space. One day we’re going to finish at least part of it. Right now it’s cinder blocks and shelves and great storage and a lot of floor space for activities you don’t want to do outside or can’t put in the living room. But, still, I haven’t gone down there that much this winter.

Probably will when it gets hot, though! It is always a little cooler in the basement.

That’s Aasleagh Falls on the River Erriff.

adventures / bluesky / cycling / IACS / research / Rowan / scholarship / weekend — Comments Off
14
Mar 26

The ‘Propaganda Peloton’ paper

The rare Saturday post here coincides with the second and final day of the International Association of Communication and Sport’s summit in Dublin, Ireland. I spent almost the entire night finishing up the slides and notes for my presentation today.

I did get about two hours of sleep, and arrived at the conference just in time to see a morning session that included a presentation by one of our former professors, and also her daughter, who is a law student at Syracuse. I have photos of that young woman as a very little girl, and have now watched her give research for a few years. She’s been studying Name, Image, and Likeness in the NCAA and I’ve been trying to make the case that she could graduate from law school and carve herself a substantial niche in that brand new area. Whatever she does, she’ll be brilliant at it, just like her mother.

Later I gave my last presentation of the conference. This was actually inspired by someone else’s paper from last year. I sat in a conference room in Chicago and jotted notes last March and thinking I could do a similar, but different work. I had a topic that no one researches, one only barely discussed in the popular media.

And, then, last September, la Vuelta a España took place. There, and in the months to follow, we had an instance where sportswashing most decidedly did not work. So I talked to one of our friends and Sports CaM colleagues, Dr. Julia Richmond. I knew the story, but she knows propaganda. We batted it around, and she figured out precisely the way we should frame the work.

This version of the research was titled “Propaganda peloton: Sportswashing in professional cycling.”

If you need a citation: Smith, K.D. & Richmond, J. C. (2026, March 13-14). “Propaganda peloton: Sportswashing in professional cycling. [Conference presentation].” IACS 2026 Summit, Dublin, Ireland.

So today I gave our little example of how and when and why sportswashing didn’t actually work. (It usually does.) All it took was the specific circumstances of the sport of road cycling, like the lack of liminal space between fans and athletes, a history of protest, a route through the Basque country and one other thing …

I’m presenting this paper at #IACS26 in a few moments on behalf of @rowanuniversity.bsky.social and The Center for Sports Communication and Social Impact.

If you were here you could hear how the story turns out.

If you are here, it’s in room E206.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) March 14, 2026 at 9:43 AM

Usually, sportswashing can be successful in road cycling. There are a lot of multinational petrochemical sponsors now. There are nation-states sponsoring teams. (Indeed, I used one of those to make a point in this presentation about budget disparities.) And while it can work in those other cases it didn’t work here because of genocide. By November, the Israel Premier Tech team was being denied entry into other races, riders were breaking contracts or outright retiring, IPT stepped away as the sponsor of the team in question a year early. Their owner also parted ways with the team.

And wouldn’t you know it, in the audience for this presentation was someone who knows all about this, and another scholar who has a friend that, until last year, drove for Premier Tech. But it’s interesting, and it worked because of what Richmond did to make it happen. I hope someone in the room knows her and tells her how I was bragging on her. She couldn’t be there, because she had to attend a wedding in the Caribbean.

He said jealously, in Dublin.

That’s two years in a row I’ve presented cycling research at this conference. I’m going to develop a reputation for doing that if I keep this up.

The IACS conference ended today. I attended a bunch of great sessions, met some lovely new people and saw some friends for all too short a period of time. Some of them we’ll see at next year’s conference. Others we won’t see until the conference goes abroad once again.

My lovely bride, who is the executive director of IACS, helped put on a great conference. Their largest ever attendance, despite this dumb new war in the Middle East keeping about four percent of the participants from attending. It was also their first hybrid conference with the people from Sport and Discrimination. And everyone seemed to have a good conference. Some of the board members celebrated at Il Corvo, a little four-star Italian restaurant just across the street. Because I know people, I was invited for this little dinner. I had the carbonara, which is a good litmus test for an Italian restaurant. If it’s good, you can be comfortable ordering other things on the menu. The carbonara was good. I guess we’ll have to come back again.

Poor me.

More on Monday, when we’ll be spring breaking.

cycling / Monday / photo / Rowan / site — Comments Off
2
Mar 26

The month of lions and lambs

Happy Monday, and happy March! We have survived the brutal months. Now, the month that makes the difference. All of the snow has mostly melted. Spring, overdue, has been promised. It has not yet been received here. It will be received with great interest when it shows up. And we’re getting close. We’ve had some mild temperatures. We’ve had sunny days, like this weekend. Now we just need to put it all together … and we will … and then keep it that way, until late November or so.

I better not be writing paragraphs like that very much longer.

It was a productive weekend, all spent right here at my desk. I did the monthly cleaning of the computer, updated the monthly spreadsheets, created new subdirectories and updated some boilerplate code. I put the February page of my master assignment calendar behind me. (I have several task-specific calendars running and when the stress of things hits my move is to make another calendar. Late last month I made the master panic calendar, filled it out through May, noticed almost every moment between then and March 28th was spoken for and then set about marking things off the list. Nowhere on that calendar is there a note to make another calendar. Five is sufficiently silly.)

I settled on two new documentaries for class. One of them will be a midterm, and I finished writing that today. The other we’ll watch in class. I’ve had it on my radar for some time, wanted to watch it, want to write something about it. About 14 minutes in I knew it was going into my Criticism class, too. I’ll pretend like this was all by design, because it should fit perfectly.

Also, I finished the draft of that work packet. Presently the thing clocks in at 29 pages, with all of the appendices to go. I wrote the service and research and professional development sections last week. I detailed the teaching section, filling up the maximum seven pages. I have two years of classes, peer observation, student reviews and subtle notes about the future to get into just seven pages. It took some doing to make it fit. Happily, all of the scores from my teaching evaluations are good. The lowest score I’ve registered in the last two years was about the difficulty of a class. Message received: that class will be more demanding and challenging if I get to offer it again.

I’m taking today off from that packet. It’s time for a break from thinking about myself. Besides, I have to think about tomorrow’s classes. Tomorrow evening I’ll do a dead tree edit of the packet, and then send it to a colleague who has generously offered to make sure I’m not omitting anything. After that, final corrections, final assembly, PDF the thing, and send it in. All of which takes place by mid-March. Not the longest thing I’ve ever written. Not the most tedious thing I’ve ever written. But it is a lot of me. Call it … maybe 60 or so pages? I can’t say yet. The checklist, though, tells me I have to have TWO tables of content. That’s always a signal.

On to more important things. We need to do the weekly check=in on the kitties. Phoebe would like you to know that she is not on the table. She is on the runner. And nowhere in the contract does it say she can’t be on the table runner.

Poseidon, himself no slouch when it comes to jailhouse cat lawyering, finds the argument a bit tiresome. Though you can be comfortably certain he’ll be doing much the same thing tomorrow.

So the cats are doing great. Lots of cuddles and big purrs over the weekend. Everyone is doing great.

I did manage a few quick rides. On Saturday, I was in Switzerland! This is just to the northeast of Zurich. I rode up and out from the small rural, forested village of Mosnang and over to the equally small and wonderfully charming Kollbrun. This route was part of one stage of the Tour De Suisse in 2024 and, while I did not see that particular race, I can see why.

I only wish that the person who recorded that route had done so on a brighter day. Switzerland is stunning most everywhere you look. Beautiful lakes, mountains a plenty, gorgeous values, and a huge array of glorious architecture. You can see ancient Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau. But there’s just a little too much Modern and Post Modern architecture, some of which is bordering on Brutalist. Much better to be among the trees and the hills and the rivers and streams. Even if it’s just my basement.

Anyway, here’s that route.

And this evening I rode in Corsica. (But still my basement.)

The last four rides have felt really nice on the trainer. This is notable because everything prior to that, since November, has felt bad or worse. I was getting demoralized. Now, though, I want to see what kind of trouble I can get into riding uphill on Rouvy. I did that tonight. I found myself a little Cat-2 climb that let me climb 1,110+ feet over 3.82 miles. Saying I rode in Switzerland on Saturday, and tonight in both Corsica or Mallorca, where I powered up that hill, is nice, but I’d also like to go outside. I’m ready to not be in the basement.

If for nothing else because I’m kicking myself by how little I’ve done down there this winter.

But spring is coming in now. That’s what the top of this post told me, anyway.