[The Telegraph] A mysterious cyclist has been stalking the Home Counties over the last week, putting in staggering performances which have knocked professional cyclists off the top spots on Strava leagues of the most popular climbs surrounding London.

“J P”, as he calls himself online, first targeted Box Hill, which featured on the Olympic road cycling route last year. On one of the three laps he logged on Saturday he knocked Madison-Genesis rider Ian Bibby from the King of the Mountain spot. The ride was later flagged as “suspicious” by users and Bibby returned to the top of the table.

Undeterred, the next day J P headed east to try his luck at Toys Hill and Ide Hill. He took the King of the Mountain on both. Cycling Weekly reports that further rides were logged on Monday and Tuesday around Swindon, but at the time of writing these had been deleted.

One Strava user suggested that the mystery rider is Tyler Hamilton, the doping-tarnished former colleague of Lance Armstrong. Bizarrely, the avatar linked to the account is an image of Armstrong himself, smiling in a yellow jersey. And Armstrong has been known to use “J P” to check into hotels discreetly in the past. It stands for Juan Pelota, which is the name of the café in the bike shop he owns in Austin. But surely Lance couldn’t ride around in the UK inconspicuously?

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If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times: if everyone would just behave like Lance Armstrong, the world would be a better place. Most athletes, after they’ve been disgraced, sit around and feel sorry for themselves. They get fat. They get arrested. They become the antithesis of everything they were before. So with everything that’s happened to him you’d pretty much expect Lance to strap on a helmetcam and sit around blocking traffic like every other bicyclist.

But not Lance. Fuck no. Lance Armstrong is a man BUILT to antagonize. He doesn’t know any other way. It’s just the way he’s wired. And since all the hypocrites in the bicyclist community already hate his fucking guts, he’s just gonna go out there and make them miserable. Just tackle their toughest courses and absolutely obliterate their best times. You’re gonna ostracize for me using the same exact drugs that every other bicyclist was using? No big deal, I’m just gonna start destroying every record on your hardest courses so completely that you won’t even believe it’s real. That’s how fucking good Lance is.

And on a side note how much of a slap in the face is this to these pricks? Must suck to know that they guy who you spent years attacking and making into a complete outcast is still so much better than you that you literally can’t believe it. I mean how would you like to be the guy who reported these times as spam? Just some amateur pedal jockey who thinks it’s humanly impossible to post times that good. Meanwhile Lance is sitting at the top of the hill not even breaking a sweat. Sucks to suck, bicyclists.

(image source)