[CR]history rewritten on Versus TV

(Example: Racing:Wayne Stetina)

Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:00:30 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Tom Dalton" <tom_s_dalton@yahoo.com>
To: Classic Rendezvous <classicrendezvous@bikelist.org>, Jan Heine <heine93@earthlink.net>
Subject: [CR]history rewritten on Versus TV

During last night's TdF coverage on versus, there was a tiny morsel of vintage bike content. In a brief segment about equipment innovations there were a couple of shots of what appeared to be an old Molteni team bike, with SR equipment. It was pretty thrashed and used to represent that arcahic old friction shifting with it's 1st gen SR rear der and knobbly shifters. To their credit, Versus identified derailleur gears as the most significant technological chane to hit the Tour during it's history (pharmaceuticals aside, I suppose). Seems like a good choice to me anyway. Then I had to shudder just a bit, when Bob Roll attributed the invention of the derailleur to Tullio Campagnolo. Now, as far as I'm concened, Tullio invented the light bulb, the Diesel engine, and the integrated circuit, but I'm pretty sure he did not invent the derailleur. In fact, I'm pretty sure that he did not even invent the parallelogram body that Campagnolo first used on the GS. It's my understanding that there is some Juy guy who can take credit for some major invention related to derailleurs, though having not yet read "the book," my knowledge is very spotty.

Can someone with more credibility that me (that's a pretty open set of folks) please shoot Bobke an email at Versus TV and set him straight? Jan, you're the first person to come to my mind on this one.

Tom Dalton Bethlehem, PA USA

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