BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news

Spanish bike builder Orbea has said it is upset about the BikeBiz.com story about the ETA bomb that exploded Saturday night outside the BH bike factory in the Basque region of Spain. BikeBiz.com apologises for the upset caused.

The German Bicycle Purchasing Association - ZEG - has signed up to IFMA Koln in a five year deal.

Airforce One now has a permanent space reserved for President Bush's Trek MTB. Dubya is now on the third day of his three day Chinese state visit. He arrived in Beijing on Saturday evening and on Sunday spent time on the Laoshan Mountain Bike Course, the MTB venue for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. He rode with six of China's Olympic cycle hopefuls and presented them with cycle socks emblazoned with the presidential seal.

The industry-funded Bike It scheme is lauded in a three-page feature in the magazine of the Times Educational Supplement, the weekly must-read for teachers. "Do you want your pupils to arrive in school fresh, fired-up and fit as fleas? Then get them on their bikes," states TES.

Bike makers may be gushing about carbon nanotubes but experts at the recent International Congress of Nanotechnology in San Francisco said few toxicology tests have been carried out on nanotech products. The Nanoethics Group, a US research organisation, said nanomaterials may be amazingly strong but they are not biodegradable and there could be many other unforeseen future problems with nanotech products.