Chopper Guard Harden The Fuck Up Award: Svein Tuft – hard as fuck

-- In 2003, he showed up for the Prime Alliance pro team’s training camp near Los Angeles. He had ridden there from Canada. “He had this really long beard, and he smelled very bad,” said Jonathan Vaughters, then in his last year of professional racing.

While his European peers experimented with women’s underwear and side-parts, Canadian cyclist Svein Tuft, who this year rides the Tour de France with the Garmin-Slipstream squad, rode vast tracts of Canadian wilderness on a $40 bike hooked to a homemade trailer groaning under the weight of a sack of potatoes and Tuft’s 80-pound dog, Bear.

By all means clap Team Cancer Man, but here’s a rider we can really holler for, eh.

Now, go make yourself a nice cup of harden the fuck up and read the full story here.

Chopper Guard cyclist of the year

-- France’s Jeannie Longo (50), the female version of Belgian legend Eddy 'cannibal' Merckx, only tougher

Still racing aged 50, Jeannie Longo is considered by some as the world’s greatest ever cyclist. She has more than 1,000 career victories, the most of any cyclist in history, including 54 medals in national, world and Olympic competition. This year at the Beijing Olympics, her seventh consecutive Games (joining a select group of female athletes, including the Jamaican Merlene Ottey, to have participated in seven Olympic Games) Longo finished, by her standards, a possibly disappointing 4th in the time trial.

Winner of the road racing gold in Atlanta 1996, she won her first Olympic medal (silver) at Barcelona in 1992. In road cycling she has won nine world championship gold medals, three silver and two bronze. Her Olympic haul isn’t bad either – one gold, two silvers and a bronze. And then there’s track cycling: four world championship golds, three silvers and three bronze. In 1993 she had a once only crack at mountain biking and took home a silver medal.

The greatest ever cyclist, or singular domination indicting the quality of women's cycling? Whatever. Celebrate longo-gevity and harden the fuck up.