Cyclists

General Motors Co. is killing an advertisement aimed at college students after receiving complaints that it makes fun of people who use bicycles for transportation. That ad has a headline stating, "reality sucks" and depicts a nerdy-looking guy wearing a helmet and riding a bicycle being passed by a cute young woman in the passenger seat of a car. It then goes on to say, "Stop pedaling … start driving" and provides information about discount pricing for GM products such as the new 2012 Chevrolet Sonic subcompact sedan and the giant GMC Sierra 1500 truck.

Placing surreal moment atop surreal moment - on Sunday at Staples, they were piling up like pancakes - the sun starts to vanish about 5:30 p.m. at L.A. Live. What they call an annular solar eclipse has begun, a cockeyed celestial event that looks as if it were penciled out by Picasso. First thought: They've assigned me to cover the Apocalypse. Second thought: Wow, the 110 is really gonna be a mess. Sunday was just another Sunday here in the City of Playoffs, except that you had this cosmic convergence of a major bike race, a hockey playoff game, a basketball playoff game and a playoff eclipse, all within hours of each other at L.A. Live, the softest spot in our city's stuccoed soul.

Cycling on the streets of Los Angeles has never been for the faint of heart. The roads are crowded. Drivers are distracted. Potholes can be perilous. So can car doors, suddenly swung open. Even the mayor is not immune. Two years ago, when a taxi pulled out in front of him on Venice Boulevard, he flew off his bike and broke his elbow. It's no wonder some cyclists seek out whatever help they can get — be it designated bike lanes, bike paths or even bike blessings. On Tuesday, as part of Bike Week L.A., dozens of cyclists rode to Good Samaritan Hospital for the ninth annual Blessing of the Bicycles.

Cycling on the streets of Los Angeles has never been for the faint of heart. The roads are crowded. Drivers are distracted. Potholes can be perilous. So can car doors, suddenly swung open. Even the mayor is not immune. Two years ago, when a taxi pulled out in front of him on Venice Boulevard, he flew off his bike and broke his elbow. It's no wonder some cyclists seek out whatever help they can get — be it designated bike lanes, bike paths or even bike blessings. On Tuesday, as part of Bike Week L.A., dozens of cyclists rode to Good Samaritan Hospital for the ninth annual Blessing of the Bicycles.

A doctor charged with assault for allegedly slamming on his car brakes in front of two cyclists in Brentwood testified Wednesday that he never intended to hurt anyone but stopped his vehicle to photograph riders who were cycling dangerously. Christopher Thompson, a veteran emergency room physician, said a group of cyclists flipped him off and yelled profanities when he overtook them last year as they rode three abreast down Mandeville Canyon Road, a narrow residential street that is popular with bike riders.

It started as a tweet from one of the world's greatest cyclists: "Hey LA -- get out of your cars and get on your bikes. Time to ride. 7:30 tomorrow am. Griffith Park, LA Zoo parking lot. See you there." The Twitter message from Lance Armstrong alerting L.A. to the pickup bike ride struck a chord with hard-core and amateur cyclists alike. Richard Ponce, 19, of Silver Lake was one of those who responded, calling friends to join. "I've been following Lance Armstrong, and he's always been a hero to me," Ponce said Thursday, perched atop his yellow bicycle in the zoo's parking lot. "He comes to L.A., brings everybody together."

The latest bicycle lane in Los Angeles has an interesting twist: It's bright green. The color is aimed at reducing collisions and to help cyclists feel safer on their north-south commute on Spring Street through bustling downtown, where two-wheeled travel is on the rise. At 1.5 miles long — from Cesar Chavez Avenue to 9th Street — the lane is the first in downtown and the first full-color lane in the city. "The really exciting thing with this bike lane is it goes right past City Hall.

A doctor convicted of assaulting two cyclists in Brentwood by driving in front of them and slamming on his brakes was sentenced today to five years in prison, ending a case a judge described as a wake-up call about tensions between cyclists and motorists on Los Angeles' streets. Wearing dark blue jail scrubs, Christopher Thompson wept after offering a tearful apology to the injured riders. He also urged a peaceful resolution to conflicts between cyclists and residents of the upscale residential street where the crash took place.

Like many avid cyclists, Rick Wurtz has his share of horror stories from the road. His closest call came as he pedaled along an open highway in Montana and a big rig rushed by within inches of his handlebars, passing so close that the truck's wake blew him off the road. There is little more terrifying to a cyclist than sitting astride 20 pounds of carbon fiber and aluminum when a motorist encased in 2 tons of steel makes a sudden right turn or bumps the riders. Yet for Wurtz and other cyclists, few episodes have reinforced the dangers as powerfully as last year's crash in which a Brentwood doctor is accused of slamming on the brakes of his car in front of two bike riders, injuring both.

A cyclist testified Friday that he was run off the road by a physician seven months before the doctor allegedly injured two other cyclists on the same Brentwood street when he slammed on the brakes of his car in front of them. Patrick Early, an advertising consultant, said he was riding up Mandeville Canyon Road when a speeding red Infiniti honked aggressively and passed inches from his bicycle, forcing him into a gutter. Early identified Dr. Christopher Thompson in court as the driver and accused him of shouting a profanity and telling him to get off the road.

Chris Horner had perhaps his most successful year as a cyclist in 2011. He won the Amgen Tour of California, finished second in the Vuelta al Pais Vasco, a celebrated one-day race, and finished fourth at the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya. Yet what most cycling fans remember about Horner's 2011 racing is something Horner doesn't. During the seventh stage of the Tour de France last July, Horner crashed. He suffered a concussion, broken nose and broken ribs. But despite being woozy and dazed, Horner got back on his bike and finished, though he had no idea where he was or even quite what he was doing.

Sarah Hammer has a beautiful smile. That smile was hidden at the Beijing Olympics, behind one of the masks Hammer and three of her track cycling teammates wore as they got off their arrival flight, the athletes having taken advice that it was best to filter the city's polluted air. The four cyclists eventually were put in an apologetic news conference, where they told the world they were sorry for doing what they thought had been best for...

As cars whizzed by and trucks honked, two dozen members of the East Side Riders from Watts slowly pedaled their cruisers up Central Avenue early Sunday. Their destination was seven miles away: CicLAvia, a rare opportunity to enjoy 10 miles of car-free streets in downtown Los Angeles and beyond and to soak up the spirit of what turned out to be a citywide block party. "Watts in the house!" boomed a disc jockey as the group pulled into the African American Firefighter Museum and joined an estimated 100,000 people who biked, walked or skated block after block without having to dodge a car or bus. "Right now they're going to get a chance to ride the streets without cars interfering with their leisurely bike ride," John Jones said of his fellow Riders members.

Cyclist Anthony Zahn of Riverside, winner of a bronze medal in the individual time trial road event at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics, is accustomed to racing the clock. But he's also engaged in a bigger and unwinnable race, a battle he's facing with humor and courage. Zahn, 37, has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a hereditary disorder that affects the nerves in the arms and legs and leads to loss of sensation and atrophied muscles. It has no cure and Zahn said Friday there are correlations between high-intensity activity — such as cycling — and an acceleration of the disease.

Alberto Contador, for a brief time Lance Armstrong's cycling teammate, had his 2010 Tour de France title taken away and a two-year ban for doping enforced Monday by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. CAS' ruling upheld decisions by the International Cycling Union and the World Anti-Doping Agency, which had fought to uphold penalties against Contador after a Spanish cycling tribunal exonerated him last year. The 29-year-old Spaniard failed a doping test that had been conducted during the last rest day of the 2010 Tour de France.

Eighth in a series of occasional stories. As soon as Dotsie Bausch opens the door to the main building at the Irvine Animal Care Center, Mandy and Brandy, a pair of excitable miniature pinschers, begin leaping excitedly against the vertical steel bars at the front of their cage. "They are so wildly energetic," Bausch says of the adorable - and soon-to-be adopted - brown and black siblings. "These two really need a lot of exercise to drain them so they can be calm when people come to look at them.

L.A. City Councilman Bill Rosendahl says he was inspired to introduce a groundbreaking anti-harassment ordinance for bicyclists after attending a meeting at a local bike shop, where he met a young man whose face had been mangled when he was struck by a hit-and-run driver. "It's about time cyclists had rights; about time they had laws to protect them," Rosendahl says in a YouTube video made to promote his plan. Cyclists already have traffic laws to protect them, but Rosendahl's ordinance, which was approved Wednesday by the City Council, gives them a new way to strike back at drivers who physically assault or threaten to assault them, force them off the road, throw objects at them or otherwise cause injury simply because of their status as cyclists.

There are people who sprint with the bulls in Spain, and people who plunge into icy oceans on New Year's Day. Then there are the several dozen men and women who gathered in Echo Park on Sunday morning at the bottom of a beastly hill and looked up. Before them stretched Fargo Street, one of the city's steepest roads. The challenge: to climb it. On a bicycle. Without stopping. Some tried and failed. Falls were so common that no one blinked when a woman tipped over halfway up the hill and tumbled violently into a bush on the side of the street.

The city put an emerald road outside my office. Well, it's more of a radioactive green, to be honest. But there it was, greeting me last week upon my arrival at the Times building downtown: a six-foot wide strip of paint running inside the traffic lanes on Spring Street. It's the city's newest bike lane, an inspiration that comes to Los Angeles via the Netherlands, where the people love getting around their cities under their own power so much, they're constantly giving bicycles more of the road.

The latest bicycle lane in Los Angeles has an interesting twist: It's bright green. The color is aimed at reducing collisions and to help cyclists feel safer on their north-south commute on Spring Street through bustling downtown, where two-wheeled travel is on the rise. At 1.5 miles long — from Cesar Chavez Avenue to 9th Street — the lane is the first in downtown and the first full-color lane in the city. "The really exciting thing with this bike lane is it goes right past City Hall.