Quotes from Jamie Smith

Obviously, the best way to remount a chain is to buy an entirely new, fully assembled bike in your favorite color. This is a foolproof method, but time-consuming and expensive.

I don't train to be in a gunfight; I'd much rather be in a shooting—there's a difference. A gunfight means he's shooting back at me. In a shooting, I'm doing all the work.

There are no second-place finishers—you don't take silver, you simply lose gold. Second place is nothing but the best loser—nobody lost better than the guy in second place. But on the battlefield that guy usually winds up dead.

At one end of the national spectrum is white, shining peace—that city-on-a-hill concept. At the other end is black, raging, savage war at the foot of that hill. The space between is the gray zone where the haze of diplomacy and combat meet and bleed into one another. That's where the CIA works.

But when you boil it down, we are all the same on this planet and death is hereditary. We should treat each other better and love our neighbor. In fact, Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment issued by God and He said to love God with everything you've got—your heart, your soul, and your mind.

I would argue that in the scientific rush forward, much of the nuance of bike racing has been lost. The subtleties of pack riding, bike handling, and butt kicking have been usurped by wattage, functional threshold power, and kilojoules.