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Guests: Shannon Galpin; Dov Tate
The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating daily – famine, illness, and now a world that seems to be looking away, is making evacuating women – especially women athletes – cyclists – more dangerous and fraught with more complications.
It all begs the question – one that has been asked over and over – what is keeping the cycling community from helping to evacuate, resettle, and protect Afghan cyclists? The ones who are out, or about to be evacuated, are not the entire story – and in fact their stories are ongoing anyway.
If we can perhaps agree that the way the situation in Afghanistan was handled badly in the beginning, it has only become more difficult without the attention and financial support that was there at the start and has since gone away.
This is not a “pretty holiday story” – it is one that I believe should be told and that whatever we can each do – whether it is to donate money or offer help in whatever form works – NOW is the time to do it.
You can find out more about the situation as it continues to unfold and make a donation at fundly.com/support-Afghan-cyclists. Shannon posts updates fairly often. The other organization she mentioned is iProbono – a human rights organization at i-probono.com.
Instead of the usual gift giving product reviews we’ve done for many years, I thought we’d change it up with an idea that has meaning for so many of us – climate change.
Dov Tate is the founder of Parcours – a wheel company in the U.K. As a 
triathlete he thought wheelsets were too expensive. As an engineer at Oxford, he conducted a groundbreaking study into bicycle wheel aerodynamics with Dr Steve Faulkner at the sports engineering department of Nottingham Trent University. The resulting study produced what is now Parcours – his wheel manufacturing company that offers a variety of models.
Now, Parcours is partnering with Ecologi, a program that offers a variety of options to fight climate change – in particular, Parcours has given each of its wheelsets a “watts saving” number and that, in turn, is the number of trees that will be planted with every pair of wheels sold. ! Watts For Trees!