Team Type 1 - Managing Dissent

Pappillon welcomes comments from our readership, and encourages their participation in discussions on topics of interest. Our comments policy is straightforward, with only three basic tenets, and there is no up-front moderation on posts originating within the last 10 days. If you want to comment on a post that's older than 10 days, you should still do so - it will just be delayed momentarily while its relevancy is reviewed.

This policy serves us well, and only on very rare occasions have we had to delete comments, usually because some anonymous poster is trying to impersonate someone else. Unfortunately, last week we had to delete a comment that was defamatory to Mike Creed, one of the nicest guys still racing in the pro peloton - despite his having lived with my former roommate, Igor Pugaci!

Unfortunately we didn't catch the comment quickly enough - it followed the post which revealed some level of internal dissent at Team Type 1. The spineless and cowardly anonymous commentator snarkily claimed that Mike Creed was behind the Twitter account, "Otis Crakenberry (Otisdecrack)," who is the source of the very unflattering material on Team Type 1. This person is not Mike Creed.

Leaving aside the fact that "Otis Crakenberry" is on-record stating that they are not Mike Creed, it should be apparent after even a cursory examination that there are such fundamental differences in style, vocabulary, cadence and tone between "Crakenberry" and Creed (whose Twitter account is simply "Michael_Creed") that no right-thinking individual could mistake the two.

Furthermore, it's not in Mike Creed's character to hide behind anonymity and throw stones at his employer. I've known Creed for more than a decade, and he's always been the kind of guy you'd want as a teammate: someone who knows what's "going on" and has the presence of mind to organize a group of riders on the road, unite them around a common purpose, and - if things aren't going well - publicly defend his teammates and himself. If he had a problem with you, he'd come to you directly to try to resolve it. He wouldn't set-up shop on the Internet and start a bitter campaign of anonymous carping. And anyone who thinks he would doesn't really know him half as well as they imagine.

It's actually quite difficult to believe that anyone within the Team Type 1 management could be fooled into thinking one of their most experienced, valuable riders would orchestrate an anonymous attempt to embarrass them via Twitter. But just for the record, the final reason why I'm convinced that Otis Crakenberry cannot be Mike Creed, is that I received a DM on Twitter from Crakenberry at the same time I was on the phone with Mike Creed, who himself was driving a car at the time - not sitting at Starbucks in front of a laptop banging away in anger on Twitter...