Cycling

LONDON -- Jennie Reed got her silver medal in the women's team pursuit Saturday. What she did not get was a chance to stand on the podium. Each team in this particular cycling event has four members, but uses only three at a time. Because the U.S. women were underdogs to the likes of Great Britain, Australia and Canada, they needed to keep fresh legs on the track. So after Reed teamed with Sarah Hammer and Dotsie Bausch to edge Australia in the first round, coaches replaced her with another American -- Lauren Tamayo -- for the gold-medal race.

LONDON -- Cyclist Kristin Armstrong, who will turn 39 in 10 days, looked formidable Wednesday afternoon, successfully defending her Olympic gold in the individual time trial event. She had come out of retirement to compete in the 2012 Games, but her participation seemed in question after she suffered a broken collarbone in late May. Armstrong crashed on a turn during a race in her hometown of Boise, Idaho, and managed to get up to finish the stage. Here, she owned the podium with an impressive performance, recording a time of 37 minutes, 34.82 seconds, winning by 15.47 seconds.

SURREY, England -- Cyclist Bradley Wiggins is having quite a summer, and his British compatriots got to share in his joy on Wednesday. Wiggins, the Tour de France winner, won the men's Olympic time trial by covering the 44-kilometer course that began and ended at Hampton Court Palace in an impressive 50 minutes, 39.54 seconds. It was the fourth gold and seventh Olympic medal overall for Wiggins, making him the most decorated Olympian in British history. Crowds lined the course and roars broke out at the finish line as Wiggins earned the second gold medal of the day for British athletes.

— Over John Armah's shoulder, about a quarter-mile away, was Buckingham Palace. Just around the corner was the prime minister's residence. The stage was perfectly set for the apparently inevitable moment Saturday when reigning world champion cyclist Mark Cavendish would win Britain's first gold medal of the 2012 Olympics. Maybe the screen star previously known as Elizabeth II, who did a James Bond video skit for the opening ceremony, would nip over for another rendition of "God Save the Queen" at the medal presentation.

Los Angeles TimesFilm Critic Once upon a time, Richard Wagner dreamed a mighty dream. The composer envisioned a series of four operas so ambitious they dealt with nothing less than the creation and destruction of the world. And he dreamed of doing things - like having singers swimming underwater and riding through the clouds on winged horses - that were frankly impossible to stage. That did not, however, stop people from trying, both then and now. "Wagner's Dream,"an engaging new documentary directed by Susan Froemke, details the most recent attempt to put on a new version of the 19th century Ring cycle, considered, one insider says, "the peak of the mountain" for any opera company.

Gold Chris Cleave Simon & Schuster: 336 pp., $27 There are undoubtedly fans of Chris Cleave who will pick up his new novel, "Gold," and enjoy it as much as they did his blockbuster bestseller, "Little Bee. " There is the possibility, however, that some will find it as much of a slow-moving soap opera as I did. Which is too bad, really, for a book about two Olympic cyclists. The two women, Zoe and Kathy, are friends and rivals (heavy on the rivals). Their lives are knit together onward from the age of 19, when they first face off competitively and are taken on by the same coach, Tom. The two women have markedly different personalities.

Elegant and economical - with plot, action and character precisely balanced and pared down to iconic essentials - the legendary westerns directed by Budd Boetticher, produced by Harry Joe Brown and starring Randolph Scott are as good as their reputation. Which is saying a lot. If you love westerns, or wonder why others do, these five films speak loud and clear. Known collectively as the Ranown cycle (a mash-up of Randolph and Brown's names), these films are the heart, and the soul, of the splendid UCLA Film & Television Archive series "Ride Lonesome: The Films of Budd Boetticher," which opens Friday at the Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood.

Two doctors and a team trainer with Lance Armstrong's cycling teams during his run of seven consecutive Tour de France titles received lifetime sports bans Tuesday from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for doping violations. Dr. Luis Garcia del Moral of Spain, Dr. Michele Ferrari of Italy and trainer Jose "Pepe" Marti of Spain all were found to have participated in what USADA describes as a "sophisticated, far-reaching doping conspiracy" with the U.S. Postal Service team. The three were not available for comment.

Last in a series of occasional stories on L.A.-area athletes hoping to make it to the Olympics. Linda Dawson will be sitting inside a velodrome in London early next month, waving a small American flag and trying to figure out track cycling, a sport she doesn't completely understand. It seems like the least she can do for the woman who saved her life. Dotsie Bausch will be introduced to the crowd as a world-record holder and medal contender in the woman's team pursuit, but Dawson, a 52-year-old attorney from Paris, Ky., knows that description doesn't begin to tell the story of the Irvine cyclist.

Hundreds of people stripped naked in a Munich, Germany, public square over the weekend for the latest installation by Spencer Tunick, the American photographer who specializes in assembling large numbers of naked bodies for his conceptual projects. Saturday's event was a tribute to Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle of operas, which are being performed by the Bavarian State Opera. A reported 1,700 people took off their clothes for the project, with about half of the participants painted in gold and the remainder painted in red.  The volunteers arranged themselves in various configurations -- including a pair of concentric red-and-gold rings -- that were intended to be Tunick's visual interpretations of scenes from the "Ring.