[tsearcher]

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The obvious follow up is "was the "movie" (or event) good for your activity?

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Lance Armstrong was good and bad for me personally. When I first started cycling seriously, mountain bikes weren't around yet. There were a decent amount of bike shops in the Chicago area and they all catered to road bikes.

But once the mountain bike fad hit, everyone needed one. Never mind that there are no mountains in Chicago, but there are lots of roads. Any way, once that happened all the shops catered almost exclusively to mountain biking. It became hard to get parts and service for road bikes. This was before the WWW. Fortunately, mountain bikers generally weren't real hard core, so the good routes and paths were still pretty wide open and cycling was still a lot of fun in and around the city.

Once Lance Armstrong became famous, road bikes were back in vogue. This was good since now it was easy to get parts again and there was a nice selection of new bikes to choose from.

The bad, is that the roads and paths became full of Lance wannabes. The congestion is bad enough. But a lot of these folks have no common sense or bike etiquitte. They don't signal. They don't maintain a straight path. They do maintenance in the middle of the path. Just really spoiled riding for us old timers.