The Podium Cafe Rings the Last-Lap Bell

“Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and Sky…” – Mark Cavendish, probably

Just shy of our 19th birthday, the Podium Cafe will cease publication. I had recently let SBNation know about my own decision to stop as editor, as I am not keeping up with my duties of late, and we don’t have a successor waiting in the wings. What will happen is that the site will still be here, available to read, but commenting and posting will be closed.

With one exception: I will make sure there is a post up announcing the FDS Directeur Sportif for 2025. We will operate the World’s Best Fantasy Cycling Game for next season. After that… we will see. Keep the FSA DS Website bookmarked.

Some of you may be saddened by the news, and part of me feels the same, but another part, not at all. The Podium Cafe far exceeded whatever vision I had for it starting out, and its impact on my life will be permanent. I didn’t plan it to go on forever, and to the extent that it’s largely driven by me and Jens these days, I think I speak for both of us in saying that we are OK with turning over the reins to a new wave of media. Also the forever thing… I have seen a lot of aging music acts lately (I know), and I am happy that some them can’t seem to let go. Like Paul Simon (aw!), Jackson Browne (OK!), Simple Minds (damn lads!) and the Hoodoo Gurus (HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!). But plenty of others I couldn’t pull the trigger (sorry Joanie Mitchell) and others I kinda regret (really sorry, Declan M). It’s OK to be done creating, or at least asking people to pay for your work. There you go; turn the page.

I will spend this month celebrating the Cafe with a somewhat-still-undetermined set of posts whose aim is to help us go out in style. I invite you to contribute throughout, via comments or even fanposts, which will be liberally promoted to the front page. Actually, no, I implore you! And you know when I implore… it’s business time.

Photo by Pierre Lahalle/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

A Brief History of the Podium Cafe

The Cafe went live January 30, 2006, but like most mammalian births, its existence goes back a bit before its public emergence. Picture, if you will, the year 2000, a time when Lance Armstrong was restoring, if not completely revolutionizing, Americans’ relationship to Cycling (again, I know). Picture, also, the state of electronic communication, where email was ascendant but the internet was not exactly interactive, more like a place for early adopters to project stuff at you. Access to races in America was limited to the Tour de France, and maybe a replay of Paris-Roubaix, plus you could buy VHS tapes of races if you didn’t mind waiting six months. Thankfully that was quickly changing, and by 2003 you could stream the radio call of mid-week Tour stages live, and hunt around for more stuff. Whatever, you get the point.

This spawned endless email chains between me, my brother — Mr Van P around here — and Drew, which became extensive enough that I started to worry about my employment status. Before our IT guys could complain to my boss about all the cycling emails they were hosting, I managed to create a Blogger (!) site called the Digital Peloton, where we could post a few sentences about a subject and comment away, on someone else’s server.*

[* I am just describing how I thought things worked, not how they actually worked.]

Within a little bit, we started to attract other commenters. I began writing more substantive posts, though I don’t recall how anyone found them, but some did, and we found ourselves opening our daily chats to a handful of people from who knows where. One that sticks in my now quite leaky memory was a person who went by Mags, a young rider who was about to sign with a world tour team, who liked practicing his English with us and filled us in on things like the sport’s rampant exercise-induced asthma. We later determined by process of elimination that he was Edvald Boasson Hagen, but couldn’t get confirmation because his team prohibited him from blogging. More likely it was a guy named Eddie, a retired carpenter from Wisconsin. Those were heady days.

Anyway, I was following DailyKos, an early phenomenon in political blogging, where people could use their innovative tools (reader posts! nested comments!) to interact. Suddenly people in the audience were being given a voice. Pretty neat… until one day the founder Markos Moulitsas started commenting about the Vuelta a España and the fate of Postal guy Roberto Heras. I was dumbstruck, and reached out to Markos directly. He read my work and offered to bring me into his new project, SBNation, a network of sports blogs which would bring way more of a platform, along with all those amazing tools (fanposts! nested comments! Legal access to photos!!).

Photo by FRANCK FIFE/AFP via Getty Images

And the rest is history, except for one wrinkle: this groundbreaking company was started by Markos and his friend Tyler Bleszinski — Blez to you guys — and over time both founders would develop and share a love of cycling, both the spectator sport and the activity, making this the most cycling-friendly all-sports company in the history of God’s Green Earth. We got a lot of love and support from SBNation over the years.

That’s our origin story. I will get more into content and other events that were notable for our community through the years. For now, I’d love it if you could recount your own Podium Cafe origins — how you found us, and why. On the latter question, we benefited a great deal from being an English-language site, apart from the odd attempts to imitate or make fun of Dutch. And that one post about sumo wrestling. And my quixotic attempts to teach myself Italian. We even had an entire post in French once, written by Romain Bardet’s sister! But yeah, we were mostly doing the English language thing, and in 2006 there was very little on the internet in English about the sport, and even fewer ways for us monliguists to connect with each other. Timing can be everything, as they say.