Sticking to the Script

Most Tour de France previews, at least those that are published on nice glossy paper, are outdated by the time they hit readers’ mailboxes. That’s not an indictment of the work that goes into them, or of anything really, it’s simply a matter of long printing lead times combined with the reality of Tour rosters, politics, and court cases that continue to evolve right up until that first rider rolls out of the giant hot dog explosion. (Or is it some Birth of Venus thing? I’m torn.) Sure, there’s a good chance the dates and route maps printed in those previews will still be accurate when July rolls around, but the rest is a little more speculative.

Take the 2004 Tour, for instance, when Matt White, warming up for his prologue ride, slid out on an electrical cable cover and broke his collarbone, sending reserve rider Peter Farazijn on a police-escorted 200km road rally across Belgium to fill in. Farazijn is probably the only rider in the modern era to start the Tour with a few beers in him, and for that alone we love him, but that’s not the point. The point is that every magazine is obligated to do their preview and to speculate about rosters and the roles each rider will play, but doing so is like laying down a bet on the Superbowl after the first playoff game. You have a little information, and you have to try to pick a winner. Unfortunately, you’re just not quite sure who’s playing yet.

But the first two days of this year’s Tour? Those were a gift to those poor sots who, with some hesitation, put their pencils down back in May and gave the order to roll the presses. A 15.5k opening time trial? Fabian Cancellara (Saxo Bank) sounds like as good a bet as anyone. Second stage likely to end in a sprint? Mark Cavendish (Columbia-HTC) is pretty much the only name you should write down. Those two prognostications had all the risk of picking Armstrong as a Tour contender in the early half of this decade, but I can’t say I blame anyone for making them. They were correct, of course, and besides, there’s plenty more stages, attrition, and dramatic collapses waiting in the wings to make a mockery of late race predictions.

While the clockwork reliability of Cancellara and Cavendish certainly endears them to people like pundits, team directors, and sponsors, it doesn’t make for particularly exciting news when they win. We all expected them to win, and they did. So I don’t have much to say about that, except to say nice job and just call a bit of attention to all the hard work those guys have to do to make it look so easy come race time. I’m also going to try to avoid the trap of demanding that they notch further victories or continue to win by greater and greater margins to “keep it interesting” or “dominate.” In an era that’s conditioned to value repeat wins, I think it’s worthwhile to remember what an accomplishment each stage win is. After all, numerous bars and cafes have been opened in small European towns on the strength of a single Tour stage win, the story of which is undoubtedly recounted over the rail every year around this time.

That said, nobody will be surprised to see either man on the stage winner’s podium again later in the race.

Race Radio

• If you’re trying to make a case that Lance Armstrong’s (Astana) opening time trial performance was a good sign (and I think you could argue either way if you were so inclined), I’m not sure comparing his performance to Kim Kirchen’s (Columbia-HTC) is the best way to go about it. Some of the other points are good, but that one rings particularly hollow, as Kirchen’s status as a GC leader holds all the same weight as George Hincapie’s in 2006. It’s a small point in the context of the article – less than 10 words worth – but the fact that it’s made at all seems a bit like “protesting too much.”
  
  
• Really, after all these years and all those tears, nobody double checks David Miller’s (Garmin) time trial bike before the start? In a post time-trial chat with Versus, Miller noted that his swashbuckling slide around one of the TT course’s hairpins wasn’t a stylistic choice, but rather due to a malfunctioning front brake. The lack of front stopping power led him to honk on the rear brake to scrub speed, causing to a slide that probably put a nice flat spot in what I’m guessing was a pretty pricey tubular. To his credit, Miller recovered well and only mentioned the brake issue in passing, rather than whining about it.
  
  
• If Miller finds a good mechanic, maybe he can help an Anglophone brother out and send him Mick Rogers’ way. The Columbia-HTC Australian apparently dropped his chain twice on the opening climb on the way to a 27th place finish. Miller debuted the dropped chain schtick in a TT a few years ago, and followed it up with a disintegrating disk wheel and a broken chain on a road stage. If Rogers wants to catch up to Miller in the mechanical sweepstakes, he's really going to have to come up with his own signature move.
  
  
• TV commentators often talk about all the banging that goes on in the final kilometers of a sprint stage, but it can be hard to pick out on the live shot. Not so with yesterday’s feed of the finale, which for some reason made all the grabbing, elbowing, and head butting exceptionally clear. The overhead shot also made Cavendish’s blistering finishing kick abundantly clear for those two or three people out there who didn’t already believe in it. Once Mark Renshaw (Columbia) completed his textbook leadout and Cavendish hit the front, Cavendish just rode straight away from Tyler Farrar (Garmin), who was sitting in ideal position on Cavendish’s wheel. Usually, the guy in second wheel can at least get as far as pulling out into the wind to make a try, but not this time. That Farrar gained and held that position in a finale that could be inadequately described as a “hectic” speaks volumes of how well Farrar has come along in his abilities, but there’s not much you can do against a kick like that.
  
  
• Skil-Shimano’s Piet Rooijakkers smacked Cavendish around a bit with 2 kilometers to go, but apparently only after Cavendish gave him a little jersey yank. In the end, most people seem content to put AG2r’s Lloyd Mondory on the tail end of the “he hit me first” blame chain and move on. Sure, none of it’s particularly sporting, but isn’t it comforting to have another Dutchman out there punching people during sprints again? Somewhere up there, Michel Zanoli is smiling.
  
  
• VeloNews' Chuck P. has apparently been dinged from Lance Armstrong's Twitter feed. It's pretty early in the Tour for Charles to be adding such achivements to his already outstanding palmares. I just hope he's saving something for the final week.
  
  
• Yes, I do know who won Stage 3, and how. But since this site is still just getting rolling and can use all the traffic it can get, I see no point in angering the TiVo freaks by talking about it just yet. And I apologize for calling you freaks.

The Year of Living Dangerously, Part II

The second half of the Service Course interview with former Mercury-Viatel assistant sport director Whit Yost is presented below. You can read the first half here. Whit's observations on cycling can be found at Pavé.

SC: When the rumours about missing rider payments at Mercury-Viatel went public, were you still being paid?

WY: I was being paid at that time. I think Wordin realized, and we kind of made it clear, that if he stopped paying us the team really does just shut down. And keep in mind, my salary was such a pittance that I think he looked at it as, “I can fire Gallopin at whatever he’s making, and I can pay Whit Yost what he’s making to fill in the blanks long enough to get me through to October.” We still joke about the validity…I still have my “contract.” My last payment was October, and that was it. I didn’t received any of the final few months that I certainly thought I was entitled to.

SC: What stands out as the low point from those times?

WY: Certainly the end of that season. When Gallopin lost his job in July and it was announced that Eddy Borysewicz and myself would be responsible for picking up his duties, and Eddy B hadn’t set foot in Europe yet at that time. I was known as Gallopin’s number two man. And I think that certainly from Gallopin’s standpoint and from the perspective of a lot of his colleagues in the sport, there was this assumption that I had done something to stab Gallopin in the back so that I could have his job, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

I remember the night that Wordin called me and Stan [Barrett] and John Sessa, the head mechanic and said, “you guys need to meet at the office at 7:00. Gallopin’s coming to turn over his keys and hand over all his files, and I want all three of you to be there for it in case he tries anything funny.” I remember him coming in, and he wouldn’t even look me in the eye. I tried to talk to him, I tried to apologize, I tried to tell him that I thought this was unfair and I had nothing to do with it, and he wouldn’t even look at me. Several months later I saw him at Paris-Tours and tried to shake his hand, and he just walked right by me. That was the worst part.

SC: Have you had any contact with Gallopin since?

WY: No, none whatsoever. I hope that maybe one day down the road I’ll be somewhere and I’ll be able to talk to him about it. But I don’t know. The guy was really a father figure for me. He picked me up at the airport when I got back to Europe in October. I stayed with him and his family. I stayed in their guestroom. He drove me around. Everything I learned about being a director, Gallopin taught me. To this day, I really wish I will one day have a chance to talk to him about it, and make him see that I had nothing to do with it, and that I thought it was just as unfair as he did. But I was in a position where, if I fought it too much, I would have lost my job, too. By that point, Wordin didn’t care about who he fired, he didn’t care about breaking contracts or breaking promises. He was doing everything he could to save the program.

SC: You spoke earlier about Tonkov calling you his director from the outset, and that Van Petegem and many of the Europeans were very respectful of you. That, to me, speaks to the more ingrained professionalism of the sport in Europe. Do you think that the subsequent explosion of Mercury-Viatel affected European’s image of the professionalism of American teams?

WY: Yes, I think so. People looked at Wordin as this Californian, surfer-slash-cowboy character that no one really took seriously to begin with. In 2001, Mercury gave him enough money that he had to be taken seriously, financially. The team won a bunch of races at the beginning of the season thanks to Gallopin. That was all Gallopin and the talent of the riders.

But yeah, there wasn’t a lot of damage control, and I have no doubt that it hurt the credibility of American cycling. I’m sure that for a guy like Jonathan Vaughters there have been times where he thought to himself, “Jesus, if only this guy hadn’t made things so much harder for me, I might be even farther along than I am.”

SC: I can almost hear some readers saying that the success of U.S. Postal/Discovery should have no doubt countered that poor impression of American cycling. But those are basically European teams.

WY: Yeah, those were all European teams. If you go back, as I’m sure you know, if you look at U.S. Postal’s history in races, they didn’t become really successful until from a managerial and staffing standpoint, they cut themselves apart from their U.S. counterparts. It wasn’t until those changes were made that they really became the juggernaut that they were.

SC: The guys who were already big, experienced riders at that point – Tonkov, Van Petegem, Van Bon – do you have any insight into their perception of the situation? Did they let you in on their thinking at all as this was unfolding?

WY: I think they knew that we were doing everything we could to make the team successful. I would hope that if you were to bump into Pavel Tonkov or Peter Van Petegem and ask them what they think, I hope they would say that we were really good guys, and we worked really, really hard, and it’s unfair that they got caught up in this experience. [Wordin] got too big, too soon, when he didn’t really have time to learn the ropes. In fact, I know I said the opposite before, but maybe a guy like Jonathan Vaughters owes a debt of gratitude to John Wordin, because he gave an example of what not to do in trying to create a European professional team.

Granted, a lot of these guys have been through it before. There’s not a whole lot of regulation in professional cycling. If the UCI spent half the money they spend in regulating people’s blood values on regulating the management of the teams as businesses, we’d have a much stronger sport.

SC: The 2001 Mercury roster had a lot of riders who have since gone on to notable careers, like Baden Cooke and Floyd Landis. Was there a feeling back then of what those then-unknowns were capable of? And for all the other flaws, what does that say about Wordin’s ability to pick talent?

WY: It’s funny you say that. That was Wordin’s number one skill. Wordin knew talent. He took Floyd out of nowhere. He took Baden Cooke out of nowhere. And Floyd and Baden are two great examples. I knew, and said at some point during that season, “Baden Cooke is going to win a classic some day.” He didn’t win the major classics that I hoped he would. Part of that, I think, is that when he signed with Francaise des Jeux, FdJ wanted to market him in France. But the next year he went out and won Dwars doors Vlaanderen. And right away I said, this is it. Baden’s going to become the Baden that we all thought he was going to be.

Floyd? Everybody sort of saw the talent in Floyd if he could just keep his mouth shut and earn his knocks and sort of learn how to race in a European style. I think everybody saw that potential there, and obviously other people did too, because he went on to do what he did.

Matt Wilson was the same sort of thing. Matt never got as high as I think he could have, but he was a stagiare for us towards the end of 2001. He went on to sign with Francaise des Jeux and work for Baden and ride several Tours. So, yes, by far Wordin’s biggest strength was picking talent. Absolutely.

SC: We talked a bit about the team’s bike sponsor issues, but let’s talk a little about the equipment itself. At the start of Het Volk in 2001, some of the Mercury riders were chatting with the Aussies on Credit Agricole. When the CA guys asked how the new team bike was, the verbatim answer I heard was, “it’s shit.” What was the feeling about the equipment within the team? Mercury had to have been the last big team to ride steel frames.

WY: Yeah, we were sort of rockin’ it 1988 style for awhile there. You heard it from the horse’s mouth, and I can’t argue with that. The Lemond Zurich was a really beautiful steel frame, but it certainly wasn’t cutting edge in 2001. You could say whatever you wanted to, but a lot of that just came down to the late sponsor switch. We didn’t have time to get good bikes from the company, and even when we did, they were titanium frames that were as heavy as steel frames.

We also had a lot of issues with sizing. I’m not even positive we had full custom framesets for these guys. That’s one thing when you’re using carbon fiber monocoque, but when you’re making something out of steel or brazed titanium you should be able to make it to the riders’ preferences. And they weren’t.

So we had issues with that, we had issues with Spinergy. I remember right before Het Volk, we ordered 40 Ambrosio Nemesis rims without labels and we had some 32 hole spoked wheels build up for the classics. And I remember getting a call the day before Het Volk [from Wordin] saying, “you better make sure you guys don’t use those wheels,” and calling Gallopin to tell him what John thought.

The same thing happened with pedals. Peter Van Petegem wasn’t comfortable with the Speedplay pedals at first, which is a shame because Speedplay is a great company with great people running it. I remember before Milan-San Remo getting a call from Wordin saying to tell Van Petegem that if he doesn’t ride Speedplays he’s not doing the race. That obviously got smoothed over before the race started, but yes, there were a lot of issues with the European riders trusting the equipment they were given.

I think that a lot of them were let down. Every once in awhile I got this sense that they thought, “wait a minute, we’re riding for an American team. We should have the best stuff, because America is the country that’s always coming up with these innovations. Europe is old school and traditional, America should have all these great things.” So I think they felt let down by that.

SC: Cobbled classic choices aside, what did folks think of those Spinergy Rev-X wheels? They’ve gone on to garner quite an unfavorable reputation for, you know, exploding.

WY: I think in the more, for lack of a better term, generic races, I think the guys liked them a lot. But I remember later on in the season there’s that great photo I haven’t been able to find since of Pavel Tonkov in the Dauphine on a repainted C-40 with a set of Mavic Ksyriums with the labels peeled off. I think that kind of says it right there. These guys just weren’t that happy with it.

SC: So you’re not sitting on a basement full of Lemond Zurich frames and Spinergy wheels, then? Because the nostalgia value is only going to go up for that stuff.

WY: No, I wish I were. We didn’t have enough for our riders, let alone for the staff. If I ever found one, I’d try to jump on it just for the sake of nostalgia. I do have some old clothes and things. My favorite is a yellow jersey from the Tour of Malaysia that Jans Koerts signed for me, so I have that framed in my apartment.

SC: How did your tenure with Mercury wind down? Was there a point when you definitely knew it was the end? A goodbye of any sort?

WY: No, no. It ended not with a bang but with a whimper. We did our last couple of races. By then 9-11 had happened, so there was all that drama going on in the world. I just remember getting word that I was going to get my last paycheck at the beginning of October. I stuck around long enough to pack up my things. I think the last race I did was the Circuit Franco-Belge, a little four day stage race in Belgium and northern France. And that was really it – not a goodbye. Wordin obviously had bigger things to worry about than how his 25-year-old assistant sport director was feeling about the collapse of the team.

SC: So with you out of the picture, who was left there to terminate the leases, sell off the equipment, etcetera?

WY: That was Stan Barrett, who had since taken up residence in Paris. I think he was going to stay on in Europe just to live and maybe try to study French. Stan had been with Wordin since early on as a soigneur, so I think he felt a little bit more of a sense of obligation. And I think Stan knew that he was going to get paid as long as he was working – I think Wordin would have made sure to pay him as long as he needed to because they’d been together from the beginning. Stan is a great guy; he’s a good friend to this day, and I’m glad that Wordin took care of him until the end.

SC: Is there anyone from those days who you’re still in touch with?

WY: Yes, John Sessa, who was the head mechanic at the time, the guy who got me the job. He was just in my wedding over the weekend. He’s with Jelly Belly now.

SC: So, after everything you've described here, would you do it again?

WY: In a heartbeat. It was without a doubt one of the best years of my life. I just got married and I hope to have kids, so I hope that I’ll have other best years, but as cheesy as it sounds, I can honestly say that I got to live my dream for a year. When I was in college, my friends and I would watch those WCP videos of the classics, and the team directors would come up to the riders in the cars, and my buddies would say to me, “Whit, that would probably be a really good job for you one day.” Which was also a backhanded way of saying, “Whit, you’re really not that good of a rider.” But to actually be able to do that, and to meet those guys and to have those experiences has been fantastic.

The only regret I have, and I still say this to my wife to this day, was that I didn’t keep a journal. I wish that I’d kept a journal, because there are so many experiences, and places, and conversations, and stories that I know I’m not remembering right. I spent most of today trying to find the name of this hotel we stayed in after the Mont Ventoux stage of the Dauphine in 2001, and it’s driving me crazy that I can’t remember it

But that’s just a long way of saying, yes, absolutely hands down I’d do it again.

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Thanks to Whit for taking the time to share his experiences with the Service Course. Want to read what someone who's seen pro cycling from the inside thinks about the sport's current events? Visit Whit at Pavé.

The Year of Living Dangerously

An Interview with Whit Yost

With the financial storms battering Astana in May and June, many longtime cycling fans wondered if we were about to see another of cycling’s big teams take on water and sink rapidly to the bottom. Astana’s backers came through with the cash necessary to keep the team afloat, but had Astana sunk mid-season, it would have been, in a word, “precedented.” Le Groupement, which featured Graeme Obree, Robert Millar, and Luc Leblanc among others, went under early in 1995 when its main sponsor turned out to be a pyramid scheme. The 2001 season featured not one but two notable collapses. The vegetarian Linda McCartney squad overreached its budget and sank just after the Giro d’ Italia. And then there was Mercury-Viatel, the American domestic team that signed names like Peter Van Petegem and Pavel Tonkov, jumped to Division 1, and just as quickly found itself in choppy financial waters.

As a young assistant sports director with Mercury-Viatel during its turbulent 2001 season, Whit Yost got to get deeper inside professional cycling than most of us ever will. These days, he’s back stateside teaching English, but he continues to share his cycling insights via his excellent Pavé blog. In this two-part interview, Yost shares just a few of his experiences in the European peloton and gives us a firsthand look at what it’s like to be inside a cycling team in trouble.

SC: Let’s start with a little background. Where are you from, and how did you get your start in cycling?

WY: I’m from just outside of Philadelphia, born and raised. I rode a bike all the time when I was a little kid, but toward the end of middle school, I got a mountain bike and really just fell in love with it. By 1993, I’d started doing some races, and a friend of mine invited me to go down and do the 24 hours of Canaan.

That was the same weekend in June as the Corestates race in Philadelphia. At that point, I was still in the “roadies are geeks, they shave their legs, they wear tight clothes” mountain bike mentality, and it was something I was totally against. At the last minute, our plans to do the Canaan race fell through, and the guy who was going to take me said, “why don’t we go down to Manayunk and watch the bike race.”

That was the year that Armstrong ended up winning the million dollar Triple Crown, and we went down and rode our bikes around Philly, and I was hooked. Absolutely hooked. Just the scene, and the race itself. I basically went back that week and bought a used road bike, shaved my legs, and the rest is kind of history.

SC: Philadelphia got you hooked, but you ended up racing for awhile in Belgium before it was more common for young amateurs to do so. How did that come about?

WY: I went to Bucknell, raced at college, and my junior year I wanted to go to Belgium for the experience, for the culture, and especially for the racing. I found a study abroad program in Belgium, so I applied for that and was accepted. Basically, I spent my whole junior year living, studying, and ultimately racing in Belgium. I graduated in 1999 with really no idea of what I wanted to do other than that I wanted to be living in Europe and doing something involving cycling. I went back to the same institution [in Belgium] where I’d been studying as an undergrad, only this time as a masters student.

As I was doing that and racing, and really started to realize that I just didn’t have it to race at the elite level. I had a passion for it, but I didn’t have the talent, and I really wasn’t willing to do what probably would have been necessary to get to and sustain that elite level.

SC: So another year passed and you returned to the United States. How did your relationship with Mercury-Viatel come about?

WY: I ended up coming home in the middle of 2000. A friend of mine who was the head mechanic for Mercury at the time got me a gig as a jack-of-all-trades assistant with the team on a trip to Europe in the fall of 2000 because I spoke some French, I spoke some Flemish, and I knew the area. They gave me a plane ticket and paid me $500 a week. I flew over with the team and was just helping them out for two and a half weeks while they did some races at the end of the season.

I met up with [Mercury director] John Wordin one day and spent the day driving around with him in the team car following a race, and by the end of the day he offered me a job for the next year.

SC: What were your initial impressions of Wordin and his management style?

WY: At first, I was impressed. The gentleman that introduced me to John and got me the gig is a best friend and had been for years, so I’d heard stories about Wordin antics – this sort of non-traditional style that he had, showing up to directors’ meetings in his spandex, not making an attempt to really learn the language, being sort of brash, slightly arrogant and outspoken.

At the same time, I had to respect what he was doing. He had a great team of riders together. He had convinced Mercury to invest millions of dollars into taking the team to UCI Division 1 status [roughly equivalent to today’s ProTour level – ed.]. The riders seemed to like him, they seemed to trust him, and he definitely had passion. I used to joke that if VeloNews had a contest to give one of their readers $5 million to let them run a cycling team, he’s the kind of person it would produce.

But here I am, and I’m 24 years old being given the chance to be an assistant sport director for a European professional cycling team. I wasn’t going to be too critical of the opportunity.

SC: Speaking of your age, much was made of your youth at the time. There was even a feature in VeloNews that focused heavily on that aspect, as I recall. What was it like trying to be the boss for a group of riders that were, in many cases, older and more experienced than you were?

WY: It was certainly really hard. Ironically, I feel I had the biggest challenge convincing the American riders that I was someone to be respected. The European riders – I’ll never forget that from the first time I met Pavel Tonkov until the last time I saw him, he called me “diretorre.” He was always respectful and gracious, and he respected the title. He knew that this was the person who was in charge of this team, that this person was supposed to be the organizer and the manager, so he was going to show the respect that comes with the title. That lasted all the way through – Peter Van Petegem, Geert Van Bondt, Andre Teteriouk, all those guys, they always gave me the respect of a sport director.

With some of the Americans, they didn’t feel that I’d earned enough knocks, that I was the one who should be giving them their schedules, driving the car, etcetera. But they were still helpful. I remember the Tour of Malaysia was my first race, and I was thrown in at the last minute as THE sport director. I remember Chris Horner, Gord Fraser, Henk Vogels literally sort of teaching me on the job. You know, Horner coming back for a bottle and saying, “No, no, no – put your elbow here. Hit the accelerator just as I’m about to take it. Now I’m going to hold on…” Sort of coaching me through it as we went.

But it was certainly tough. There were moments when some of the other directors tried to intimidate me, but I just did what I thought was right, and made the decisions I thought were the best ones. It was what it was. By the end, I think I had earned the respect of a lot of my colleagues. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough at the time to give me a landing spot when Mercury began to fall apart.

SC: What was your life as a DS like when the team still looked like it had a bright future? Were you mostly in Europe, or did you do any domestic work? How did you spend your days?

WY: The only time I was stateside was for training camp in January/February. Then I flew right back. As Wordin put it, he needed people to help run his team in Europe. That’s really what I was entrusted with.

From those initial two weeks in August and September of 2000 when Wordin offered me the job, I was right back in France beginning at Paris-Tours in October. I pretty much stayed in Europe straight through the off-season to find the location for a service course, set up paperwork, sign leases, go to Italy to negotiate with the guy who was going to make our mobile home, go to central France to meet with the guy who was going to make our car racks, meet with the guy who was going to make our truck. I was working closely with Alain Gallopin, who was the head sport director in Europe, and another American named Stan Barrett. The three of us were responsible for getting the whole operation up and running overseas.

SC: What memories stand out from that time?

WY: I got to drive all over Europe. I got to meet with all the riders personally. One of the things I had to do initially was to drive around with a guy from Speedplay. He and I drove around meeting with the riders at their homes to take measurements, talk about shoe sizes, introduce them to some of the product, so that we could make our early season equipment order in time for training camp. So I got to go out to dinner with Pavel Tonkov and his wife; I got to have beers with Peter Van Petegem and Geert Van Bondt. I was able to develop a relationship with these riders early on, which I think was one thing that led to the level of respect they gave me later in the season – I was essentially the first face that they associated with the team from a management side.

I remember going to a little town outside of Florence to meet with the president of this mobile home company. I had a flight back to Belgium at about 2pm and this man insisted that he wanted to take us to this little local restaurant and buy us lunch, and he promised he would get me to my flight on time, which he did, albeit after finishing two bottles of wine and a couple of whiskey digestivos. So I still don’t really know how I got home that day, but he certainly got me on the plane.

SC: And that’s all you really asked him to do.

WY: This is true. I didn’t say what state I had to be in!

SC: Since the collapse of Mercury-Viatel is so inextricably tied with your experience with the team, we might as well jump into it. That implosion has gone down in the history books along with cycling's other great collapses. What was the view like from the inside?

WY: Well, I go back to the metaphor of “give a VeloNews reader $5 million and tell him to run a team.” He’s going to run it like a fantasy football team. He’s going to go out and spend all that money on riders, and he’s not going to take the time to think about infrastructure and the other things a team needs to run. He’s not going to think about money to put a metal shield on the bottom of the follow car the week before Paris-Roubaix; he’s not going to think about the number of oil changes the cars need; he’s not going to think about extra tolls for trucks on European highways; he’s not going to understand the ins-and-outs of the French legal system and creating a corporation, and how much money you lose by not having a corporation on French soil. I think John just had a great vision. He just wasn’t aware of all the things he would have to do to make that vision a reality.

We received some pretty reliable information in January that we weren’t going to get invited to the Tour de France. And then in April, I’ll never forget it, I was at the Grand Prix Denain in northern France and I got a phone call from Stan, who said that we just got our credit card bill from February, and that that bill was the entire budget for the entire year for credit card bills.

SC: The whole budget for general day-to-day expenses was spent by March?

WY: Just general day-to-day expenses. We were just bleeding money from the outset. Then it became apparent, and this is just what I gleaned from conversations, a lot of what the budget was based on were bonuses that we were to receive once we were invited to the Tour. And it was based on handshake agreements and promises that had been made if were were invited to the Tour de France. But once it came out that we weren’t going to be invited, these sponsors said, “Sorry, you’re not going to the Tour, that money’s not going to be there.”

SC: Was any of that bonus money to go to rider’s salaries? Or were the salaries taken care of by guaranteed funds, and the bonus funds were to go towards expenses incurred later in the year.

WY: I’m not sure. I believe the bank guarantee was intact, and ultimately the riders got that bank guarantee. This money would have just gone to, well, everything. It would have gone towards riders’ salaries, to getting to races, to getting extra equipment. It would have gone to the general budget of the team.

SC: So things were already starting to go south in early spring. As I remember, the financial issues became more public knowledge when Viatel went bankrupt and pulled out, and then there started to be bike sponsorship problems as well.

WY: Yes, and keep in mind there were bike sponsorship problems from the outset. Originally, we were just supposed to be Fuji. Wordin started out by flicking Fuji for Lemond when he realized he needed the money from Viatel just to get into the season. [Telecom firm Viatel had signed on with Greg Lemond in an effort to create a European-based team. Subsequent agreements combined the efforts of Lemond and Wordin to create the Mercury-Viatel squad, aboard Lemond bikes. – ed.] So Fuji got flicked for Lemond, and then when Viatel pulled out, we went back to Fuji on our hands and knees, and they graciously helped us out.

By then, I think the damage had been done. Wordin’s credibility was waning. We hadn’t been invited to the Tour. Lemond had pulled out. Everybody knew that Viatel as a company had gone bankrupt, but they still looked at Viatel and Lemond leaving as a bad sign. Laurent Chotard tested positive, which didn’t help. And by now the riders were talking. The riders weren’t happy. There were rumours the riders weren’t getting paid. You’d see things like Pavel Tonkov showing up to races on a Colnago C-40 that had been painted to look like a Lemond. Excuse the term, but it just kind of turned into a shit show.

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The second half of the Service Course interview with Whit Yost will be posted tomorrow. In the meantime, pay him a visit at Pavé.

Believe in Hype

In his article covering the U.S. national soccer team’s unlikely win over the superpower Spanish side in the Confederation Cup, the New York Times’ George Vecsey addressed the details of that match, but also used it as a jumping-off point to discuss the state of U.S. soccer. In recounting the team’s journey to the win, Vecsey noted that the U.S. coach “was under attack in blogs in recent weeks. (Yapping about the coach is a great step forward for the United States.)”

Vecsey was talking about soccer in the U.S., of course, not cycling, but his seemingly innocuous little parenthetical hits at a much larger point that U.S. cycling fans might be advised to bear in mind. Over the past week or so, with the Tour de France looming on the horizon, there’s been an increasing amount of backlash to the saturation coverage of Astana’s internecine drama, Tom Boonen’s recreational pursuits, various court cases, and the UCI’s hamfisted approach to governance. “Enough!” the critics shout, “let’s talk about the sport, about the racing, about who‘s fast and who‘s not.” Sometimes, in my weaker and more purist moments, I find myself leaning the same way. After all, who’s not just a little tired of all dope, all the time, or, alternatively, all Armstrong all the time? But then I snap to my senses and remember that all that coverage of the various, seemingly peripheral issues of professional cycling, miscellaneous hero worship, scandals, and gratuitous pot-stirring included, is, as Vecsey put it, “a great step forward.”

Simply put, the fact that so much non-competition coverage of cycling is being produced, consumed, and discussed by the U.S. audience means that, to a certain extent, the sport has taken hold here. It means that the U.S. audience is no longer content to simply be told what happened out on the road, spoon fed who won or lost, how, and by how many seconds, all set to an insipid John Tesh soundtrack. They’ve long since learned the basics, and now, they want to know more about the personalities, about the business, and about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Why? Because it helps inform what they see when they watch the races or when they read the race coverage. And, maybe more importantly, it’s all that non-competition coverage that helps fuel, if not barroom banter, then at least post-ride coffee shop kvetching -- that “yapping about the coach” that shows that fans are involved and emotionally invested. And it’s that investment that makes professional sports appealing to sponsors, and, therefore, commercially viable.

If you look at what’s written about the two most successful “world sports” -- soccer and Formula 1 racing -- you’ll find that much of what’s reported in the vaunted pages of L’Equipe and La Gazzetta dello Sport isn’t about the nuts and bolts of what happened on the field or track; it’s about the various incidents and intrigues surrounding the sports. Was AC Milan involved in fixing matches? Will Ferrari really drop sponsorship of their legendary racing team next season? How many million pounds was that latest transfer in the English Premiership worth? Who was Ronaldo spotted cavorting on a Bali beach with? None of that stuff is really about sport, per se -- it’s not about who won or lost, or who made a great pass on the pitch or on the track. It's chatter, and a lot of times, it's trivial, or speculative, or overblown, just like some of the cycling coverage people complain about. But then again, in that respect, cycling could find worse company to be in if it's looking to sustain itself in the current economy.

Besides, there's frankly only so much you can write about the competition itself (trust me), and though some cycling fans might tell themselves otherwise, there’s only so much of “just the racing” that the public can read. Now, I’m not arguing that we really need that fifth article about Armstrong’s new girlfriend, that every time one teammate calls another an asshole needs to be reported and dissected, or that every hangnail Cadel Evans gets warrants a fresh interview. All I’m saying is, if you find yourself getting irritated by whatever you want to call this sort of reporting -- be it fluff, media hype, or muckraking -- you can also take comfort in the fact that, underneath it all, it’s a good sign for the sport, not some sort of death knell. After all, very few sports have ever died due to bad, excessive, or frivolous media coverage. They die because the fans don’t care.

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Pretty quick one today, eh? We're hoping to get out an interview in two parts over the course of this week before the Tour de France frenzy kicks in this weekend. Stay tuned.

What Might Have Been

Contador in Argyle?

On Tuesday, Bicycling’s Joe Lindsey put out a great piece that uncovers several of the contingency plans that were set to go into action had the Astana team’s Kazakh backers failed to deliver the €6 million bank guarantee the UCI saddled them with. Drawing on sources from within and close to Astana, Lindsey reveals that the team was set to continue as Livestrong-Nike had the Kazakhs failed to pony up the cash, and that Alberto Contador had been in talks with Caisse d’ Epargne. Lindsey also outlines what all this dealing means to an Astana squad that will now continue with both Contador and Armstrong attached, mainly focusing on the Lemond-Hinault showdown scenario that many have been salivating over since Armstrong announced his return.

For me, though, none of those things are the headline of this story. Rather, it’s the news of the team that Contador was allegedly most serious about joining – Garmin-Slipstream. According to Astana sources cited in Lindsey’s story, negotiations had gone far enough that the squad was shipping Felt bikes to Contador and had brought on Herbalife to chip in an extra $2 million to cover Contador and an entourage including a soigneur, a mechanic, and Astana compadres Sergio Paulinho and Benjamin Noval. So why should those little facts trump all the other juicy info in the article? Because, if accurate (Garmin sources have yet to confirm), they reveal that things are getting desperate in the Garmin camp with just a week and a half left until the Tour de France.

It can be hard to see at times, but Vaughters and company do have reason to be nursing a fairly sweaty set of palms these days. Last year, when the team was a scrappy Pro Continental squad looking to earn some respect, Dan Martin’s hard fought third place in the Med Tour, Tyler Farrar’s Zeeland GC win and sprint win over Mark Cavendish (Columbia) at Tirreno-Adriatico, and David Millar’s top-10 at the Dauphine would have been good results. But this year, with Garmin out of the underdog slot and playing in the big leagues, things are looking a little thin in the win column, and fans don’t get nearly as enthused about near-misses from breakaways and top five finishes in time trials. Additionally, the team’s “clean team” hook has worn a bit thin, and the focus has shifted more from establishing that reputation to earning results – the team has said as much. Add in Tour GC hope Christian Vande Velde’s ill-timed injury at the Giro, David Millar’s shoulder injury, and Columbia-High Road’s Giro thumping of Garmin at its own TTT specialty, and the team’s Tour campaign – the one that could save the season – was leaning towards a letdown. Set against that backdrop, it’s not hard to see why Garmin was looking for options.

But signing a three-time grand tour winner and agreeing to take on a few of his buddies as well? Loading up a more-or-less Anglophone team with a good portion of Discovery Channel’s former Spanish Armada? For a squad that’s always carefully selected riders to ensure team cohesion and proper fit, resorting to those sort of last-minute mercenary dealings is a marked departure. Indeed, the deal seems to be a departure from many of the team’s basic principles, and may indicate a bit of a crisis of faith within the organization.

Since the team’s TIAA-Cref days, team manager Jonathan Vaughters has set out to develop young talent, and though he made some battle-proven signings to help the team build momentum last year, he’s basically stayed true to that methodology. Sure, David Millar, David Zabriskie, Magnus Backstedt, Julian Dean, and Christian Vande Velde had already been around the block a few times when Vaughters picked them up, but Vaughters hasn’t been one to pursue and sign whichever superstar came up on the auction block, and those signings were hardly flashy.

Rather, slow, steady growth has been the model, and Vaughters has relied on an ability to spot young talent and on patience, nurturing riders like Martin Maaskant, Farrar, and Martin as they make names for themselves wearing his jersey. And of course, last year’s Tour revealed Vande Velde as a reasonable GC contender – an emergence that, despite Vande Velde’s long experience, still felt like the discovery of a new rider, and one that Vaughters has justifiably been given credit for.

On an organizational level as well, Garmin has made a name for itself by running counter to many of the dusty traditions and folk remedies of European cycling, instead developing its own management concepts and the various “protocols” developed by team physiologist Allen Lim. Combined with the team’s doping stance and its patient approach to rider development, Garmin had positioned itself as a new kind of cycling team for what many fans are hoping is a new era in the sport.

But the potential Contador deal, if such a deal was indeed in the works, undermines all that in one fell swoop. Simply hiring a big gun and his stable mates, tossing aside internal development, team cohesion, and slow growth in favor of results here and now, is straight from the old days. It doesn’t matter that, in the end, the deal didn’t happen – knowing that it could have tells us what we need to know. I’d also wager that those riders who thought they were vying for a spot on Garmin’s Tour de France roster have learned a thing or two as well.

Joe Lindsey was dead on about what the dead-on-arrival Contador-Garmin deal could mean to cohesion within the shored-up Astana team, but its potential affects on Garmin could be even more disastrous.

Well, Yes and No

Vacillating Answers to Today’s Cycling Questions

There are at least two sides to every story, and in cycling these days, there are always at least two answers to every question. Let’s look at four of this week’s discussion topics, and try to arrive at a simple “yes or no” based on the news of the week.

1. Is examining blood values a reliable way to catch cheaters?

Pat McQuaid and the UCI give an emphatic “yes,” based on the fact that, over the space of a week and a half, they got to nab the “list of five” for blood profile suspicions and Toni Colom (Katusha) for EPO. According to the UCI, Colom was targeted for the EPO test based on suspicious blood values, so we’re giving the UCI the benefit of the doubt and calling that a bio passport success as well. Of course, asking the UCI if blood values work is like asking a proud parent of an honor roll student if their child is really smart – they had a bit of a skewed view in the first place, and now they have the bumper sticker to prove it. Of course they’ll say yes.

In the “no” chorus we have Bernhard Kohl, whose story is, by now, over-told. But now Kohl has someone to harmonize with in newcomer Vladimir Gusev. Gusev was terminated last year by Astana for blood values that were interpreted as suspicious by well-known dope guy and Astana consultant Rasmus Damsgaard. CAS decided that maybe those values weren’t so suspicious after all, at least not suspicious enough for Astana to fire him over. In the meantime, Saxo Bank, where Bjarne Riis helped Damsgaard forge his dope-monitoring legend, has scaled back its vaunted internal testing programs citing the fact that the UCI passport program covers the same ground. So if the bio passport tests are now taking the place of some of the internal controls teams used to do, are they prone to the same problems? Only the appeals will tell, so call us in eight months or a year.

2. Does the UCI know what “targeted” means?

On June 9, the day they announced the Colom positive, the UCI seemed to have a solid grasp of what “targeted” meant. Colom’s blood values looked a little fishy, and so based on that, they gave him more tests than the average, non-suspicious rider. You know, they “targeted” him.

But that moment of clarity seems to be fading fast, as cyclingnews.com’s interview with UCI Reine de Dopage Anne Gripper reveals. Gripper comments on the list of 50 riders that the UCI has said will be extra-special tested in the run-up to the Tour de France (not to be confused with the list of five riders to be prosecuted). According to Gripper, these 50 riders aren’t being “targeted,” they’re just being subjected to additional testing based on the fact that they’re likely to do well at the Tour, either in terms of GC or stage wins. Well, that’s better – thank goodness they aren’t being targeted, you know, in the sense of being singled out for extra scrutiny based on a specific criteria or behavioral pattern. Like winning races or something.

It doesn’t really matter, of course, but I do hesitate to ask what they’ve thought “random” meant all these years.

3. Are Astana’s money problems solved?

Yes, apparently. Just a day or so after the UCI’s deadline officially passed, Bruyneel and the team’s Kazakh sponsors managed to come to some sort of agreement that should see everyone paid through the end of 2009.

But then we have to ask, who is everyone? Because if we go back to that Gusev story again, we see that Astana, presumably through Bruyneel’s Olympus management company, now owes the amply-chinned Russian his salary, plus damages, plus legal costs. I don’t know what his salary was, but Gusev was starting to really break through right before he got preemptively popped by the team, so damages could be considerable. So will Astana’s barely-dry check from Kazakhstan cover that little tab, or is Bruyneel going to be left to cough up the rubles himself? I don’t know, but if you think it’s hard to get the Kazakhs to pay guys who have ridden for them this year, you should see how hard it is to get them to pay the guys who haven’t.

4. Does Tom Boonen really like the marching powder as much as we think he does?

According to the testing agency and the Belgian justice system, yes. Boonen himself says he was blacked out during the night in question, and can’t rightly say either way whether he did cocaine or not. But now an independent review panel says no, Boonen didn’t actually ingest cocaine. Apparently, panel looked at a hair test, and while it does show the presence of cocaine, it doesn’t show enough coke present to indicate definitively that Boonen had any, only that he’s probably seen some in the last few months.

Before we get too excited, I’d note that the English version of the story says Boonen didn’t “ingest” cocaine. The initial Flemish versions I’ve seen say he didn’t “snort” cocaine. These are obviously two different meanings, as there are other ways to ingest besides snorting, and they affect how strongly the drug shows up in your system. While, say, eating cocaine is less efficient than sniffing it, it is still ingestion. This cyclingnews.com article sheds some light on the testing tolerances and whatnot, but frankly I’m just bored with the whole thing, and I steadfastly avoid dealing with anything measured in ng/mg.

ASO is apparently bored with the whole business too, since they’ve announced today that, for their purposes, Boonen snorted, otherwise ingested, or rolled around in the blow enough to exclude him from this year’s Tour de France. Now all we’re left to wonder about is whether the UCI will still try to come up with some “damaging the image of cycling” charge to hang him by. I suppose they could, as he’s still caused a hell of a PR fuss, but if you can get hanged in cycling for having been in proximity to drugs, there won’t be an empty gallows or a vacant tree branch in all of Europe pretty soon. (Update: No sanction for Boonen)

So for those of you keeping score, that’s a yes, a maybe, a no, and a “we’ll see” all on a single question that doesn’t have the slightest bit to do with racing a bicycle. Flattering times for the sport, indeed.

It's 6pm In Switzerland

The most underreported story of the last two days has been the fact that the UCI, not content that the Kazakh federation had caught up to its current payments to the Astana cycling team, has required the federation to deposit an additional 6 million euro bank guarantee. That amount would effectively cover the sponsor's committment through the end of the year, leaving the team to ride the rest of the season without the sort of turmoil and costume changes it's experienced so far this year.

So why does it matter what time it is in Switzerland? Because that guarantee is due at 6 pm on Tuesday (revised from 5 pm). In other words, now. If there's one thing they know in Switzerland, it's timekeeping, so if the money has failed to appear, the case goes to the UCI's licensing committee. That body could force a transfer of the license from the Kazakh federation to someone else, and I think we all know the "someone else" we're thinking of.

Though cyclingnews.com picked up the story yesterday evening, the news was in play in the Belgian and Dutch media much earlier in the day. In fact, Sportwereld posted this story early yesterday, then pulled it in favor of one with fewer details, and has now reposted it. In it, Johan Bruyneel reflects that he's still had no communication from the sponsors, though he seems pretty comfortable with that, promising that the team, whatever it may be called, will be at the Tour start in Monaco. He's so comfortable, in fact, it's almost as if he has a Plan B, eh?

Now here's the question: was Astana just waiting for this announcement before they decided whether to pay up or not? Had CAS cleared Vinokourov to ride ahead of the Tour de France start, there's a chance the money could have arrived, with one very, very hefty string attached.

CAS didn't award Vino his two-week reprieve, however, so he remains sidelined until a nice, safe July 24 (leaving Tour Poobah Christian Prudhomme free to breathe a giant sigh of relief). So now I suppose we'll never know if the Kazakhs might have been able to pass the hat for a cool 6 million to put Vinokourov directly back in the thick of things, or how Bruyneel would have reacted to the sort of strong arm tactics that the Kazakhs would have likely employed to ensure Vino his return. Compared to the oft-referenced, seldom named "cycling mafia," I'm betting the Kazakhs play just a little bit harder when the chips are down.

Now all that remains to be seen is if Astana will cough up the cash to watch some Spano-Germano-Americano quadruple threat play hero on its dime, especially now that management has benched Kazakhstan's best-performing local boy, Assan Bazayev. According to the Sportwereld article, chances of receiving that check are looking pretty slim, and I'm guessing that fits pretty well into a well-developed Plan B for the team.

UPDATE, June 17 a.m.: Though there's no official release available from the UCI yet, cyclingnews.com reports that Astana (the team) did not receive any payment from the Kazakh federation by yesterday's deadline. Apparently, the Kazakhs may try again today, but not if they follow the advice of their lawyers and their negotiator, former Dutch pro Rini Wagtmans, who feel that the UCI doesn't have the authority to ask for the extra guarantee. They may be right, but not having the authority has never stopped the UCI before, so it may not matter very much in the end. In the CN article, Wagtmans weaves a few theories about how the process may go down, but I'll be damned if I can make heads or tails of what he's envisioning. Bad translation, maybe? Also, Joe Lindsey takes his own look at the situation and provides some basic background here.

Coincidentally, Wagtmans' former teammate, Eddy Merckx, has a birthday today.

Clowns to the Left, Jokers to the Right

If Only the Sport Were That Organized

Who runs this goddamned sport? Nobody and everybody, apparently, and recent news has been coated in the sort of scatological crossfire you’d expect from that sort of diversified management structure.

CONI, the Italian federation, banned Spaniard Alejandro Valverde for his alleged involvement in a Spanish doping affair based on a blood sample taken in Italy during last year’s Tour de France. Habsburg blood may have seen less of Europe than Valverde’s, but in fairness to those kingmakers, Valverde’s ties to the papacy do look weak in comparison. Indeed, a high-priced indulgence is about the only thing that could save Valverde’s soul from a paperwork purgatory at this point, and that little absolution doesn’t appear to be coming any time soon. The Giro may have run it’s final TT through the pope’s front yard, but even an organization that feels pretty comfortable weighing on who can sleep with who, when, and what they should wear when they do so knows better than to weigh in on cycling’s regulatory orgy.

No, Benedict’s silent on Valverde, but maybe that’s only because he hasn’t been issued his gold-plated papal Colnago yet, because everyone else who’s ever seen or pedaled a bicycle has thrown their opinions into the pot. Remarkably, the only thing people seem more concerned about than Valverde’s alleged performance enhancing activities are Tom Boonen’s recreational ones, making the cycling press seem less like sports news and more like TMZ. The immediate result of all the hubbub is that either of both riders may not be able to start the Tour de France come July. Depending on who you ask, of course.

Christian Prudhomme, Grand Poobah of the Tour de France, recently announced a near theological shift in his organization’s policies, telling the media hordes that ASO will “obey the rules” when it comes to sanctioning the various sins of Boonen and Valverde. That following the rules instead of making up your own is now worthy of a press release says a little something about how we operate here in the bush leagues of professional sport, but so be it. Anyway, ASO has decided to agree with the UCI that, as sporting entities, they might not really have the authority to sanction a rider based on an unrelated, out-of-competition legal matter, like, say, blowing some lines in the piss-soaked men’s room of some godforsaken Antwerp disco.

Things aren't that easy, of course. According to the UCI, they might still be able to nab Boonen yet, but not on sporting grounds, and they can’t find the time to make up a new rule to try him under until after the Tour. So, for now at least, Boonen looks to be in the clear, at least until someone else argues their way into having jurisdiction in the matter, and trust me, that’s not far off. Who knows, maybe this is USAC’s time to shine – I’d suggest basing jurisdictional authority on either his participation in the Tour of California, or, for some real flair, his participation in the Univest Grand Prix as an amateur.

Anyway, if I’m reading it right, as another part of this year’s great reconciliation, ASO has also agreed that until the UCI gets the evidence from CONI and makes its own ruling on Valverde, a ban in Italy doesn’t really have much of anything to do Valverde racing in France, though it seems they’ll leave it up to Valverde as to whether he thinks his form is good enough to outrun the carabinieri on his own personal cannonball run when this year’s Tour dips into Italia. The kid has the rare combination of being quick in the hills and in a sprint, but I’m not sure even the Green Bullet will take that bet.

The UCI doesn’t seem to be too anxious to gather that Italian evidence, though, and why would they be? They can leave it to CONI to keep Valverde from the Tour, despite the fact that nobody’s ever adequately explained how CONI can keep an unsuspended rider with a non-Italian license from riding a race that is not held under the auspices of CONI. Yes, the Tour will go briefly into Italy, but CONI is a sporting body, not the border patrol, and other than that brief sojourn on Italian asphalt, CONI doesn’t have a hell of a lot to do with the Tour de France. But that’s just the sort of easy out the UCI loves, so why look too closely at the legality of it?

But all that CONI stuff really only affects Valverde, and with everyone playing relatively nice between the UCI and ASO this year, someone has do the broader eye-gouging and overreaching, and this year the French government has stepped up to the task. Chapeau. Not satisfied that Prudhomme and ASO could simply decide what was best for their event within the rules of the sport, France’s Minister of Sport, Bernard Laporte, has seen fit to wade into what was, for a brief, shining moment a waning clusterfuck rather than a waxing one.

By declaring from his own little pulpit that Boonen and Valverde “are not welcome at the 2009 Tour de France,” Laporte has managed to preach exactly the opposite sermon from the UCI and ASO, deciding that, as a part of the ruling civil authority, it should slog into the affairs of a sporting event it neither owns nor regulates, based on its distaste for a legal matter in Belgium and a sporting matter in Spain (that’s been co-opted by Italy). I’m not sure what the French government generally or the Ministry of Sport specifically kicks into the Tour pot, or what their contribution would or could be besides discount prices on gendarmes, but I’m pretty damn sure they aren’t in charge of sending invitations, which is a good thing, because picking out stationary is a hell of a delicate thing, and best not left up to government bureaucrats. Either way, France as a state is known to profit considerably from the Tour, in good years and bad, so France as a state best shut its trap and let ASO do what it does best -- run an incredibly lucrative bike race. Fortunately for Boonen, and maybe Valverde, Laporte isn’t the official welcoming committee for the 2009 Tour de France. I think that’s Bernard Hinault, and he’s doing a bang-up job so far.

Even if we discount Laporte, who I might add has a name that’s a pretty good homophone for “Puerto,” if you know what I mean, things aren’t all rosy just because ASO and the UCI have decided to play by roughly the same rulebook. Lest we think that the UCI is contorting itself into some non-recognizable, even-handed caretaker of the sport, we only need to look as far as Wednesday’s news. Upping the ante in its desperate attempt to ward off derision of its biological passport program, UCI chieftan Paddy McQuaid announces that they’re ready to release the names of riders with suspicious biological passport results. McQuaid also says that the UCI will eventually open proceedings against the riders, but that even though they’re announcing the names, the riders won’t be given the customary immediate sit-down by the boys in blue. No, they’re going to leave that “up to the teams.” How magnanimous, or unbelievably cowardly, depending on how you look at it.

What, pray tell, does that magnanimity tell us about how dependable these “suspicious” findings are? It means they have all the durability of an R-Sys wheel, because this is, after all, a sport where you can be slapped with one of those provisional suspensions based on a rumor about a particularly voluminous bowel movement you may or may not have created in the team bus bathroom back in 2005. If it can’t get you suspended in cycling, even provisionally, it simply isn’t worth worrying about. And if the world governing body is going to come out and name names, and especially if they’re going to build the suspense with preliminary press releases to increase turnout at their Swiss photo op in a few days time, they damn well better have enough to evidence to take the wheels off those riders’ bikes right then and there.

And if the paper the UCI has is that good, would they leave it up to the teams to give provisional suspensions? After all, the UCI has implicitly accused many of those teams of orchestrating these ugly little affairs themselves, so why, if those teams now know the jig is up, would they sit down the very guys who should be absolutely flying right now? Nah, I say go out all guns blazing, and make the UCI spend the next two years trying desperately to finalize a single results sheet from here to the Vuelta.

Frankly, if one of my guys turned up hot, I might keep sending him out there until someone told me in no uncertain terms not to, because I’d be sick of the UCI putting me in the middle of its little spats. Last year it put the teams and riders in the middle of its tickle fight with ASO, this year it’s inserting them into their fight with the biological passport critics. Enough is enough – if you’ve got the goods, let’s see them, if not, get back to work if you want, but quit spouting off to the press. If you’re going to position yourself as the sport’s overarching enforcement arm, do the job with good evidence and confidence, and don’t try to force the teams into doing your bidding when you’re too terrified of the fallout to do it. You can have the credit and you can have the blame, but no matter how hard you try, you have to risk getting one to get the other.

Unfortunately, the message from the UCI is as transparent as it is distasteful – be a good little team, and suspend these riders like you know we want you to. Otherwise, you’ll get so much “targeted testing” from your top riders down to your soigneurs that you won’t have enough blood or piss left to fill a vial. If what we’re looking for is real, fair, and non-politicized enforcement in cycling, I’m not sure that looks like it.

Eye for Eye

Yesterday, two arguably related stories hit the wires within hours of each other. The first involved various outlets’ extractions from Bernhard Kohl’s “tell-all” interview with L’Equipe. In that interview, the young Austrian, who won the King of the Mountains jersey at last year’s Tour de France and then promptly got popped for CERA use, put forth the idea that the UCI’s much-vaunted (by them) and much-maligned (by others) biological passport system was actually helping riders dope by giving them a constant stream of good data about their blood levels. Using that information, they were able to stay in bounds while still mucking around with their blood enough to get a good boost.

A few hours later, the UCI announced that Katusha’s Toni Colom tested positive for EPO in a test conducted on April 2, two weeks after he won the final stage of Paris-Nice. The UCI statement prominently read, “This abnormal result is the direct result of a targeted test based on information taken from his blood profile and knowledge of his competition schedule.” In other words, “We got him because of the biological passport. Take that, you bastards.”

Well, didn’t that work out nicely? Now, maybe I’ve become too cynical, but it strikes me as a bit too coincidental that the UCI finally got their Colom press release prose just the way they wanted it for release the same day the Kohl article hit the newsstands. “But aha!” you say, “the UCI release says that Colom was informed of his positive the previous day, June 8, so it couldn’t have been timed to coincide with the Kohl article.”

You raise a good point, but by June 8, the cat was already out of the bag on what Kohl had spilled to L’Equipe. Run on Saturday, June 6 on the L’Equipe web site, this story gave a hint of what was to come, and ended with the note: “La confession complète de Bernhard Kohl, à lire ce mardi, dans L'Equipe.” Or, “read the complete confession of Bernhard Kohl, Tuesday in L’Equipe.” No, the teaser doesn’t mention Kohl’s disdain for the biological passport program, but with a few days of warning, it might not have been too difficult for the UCI to find out where else the interview would be headed. As we know from past experience, the walls of many of these organizations are notoriously thin.

So what’s the big deal? The problem is that playing this sort of tit-for-tat game with riders, test results, and sanctions just undermines the credibility of the testing system. When people see that news of positive tests is being released according to an organization’s political needs, rather sporting considerations, they become suspicious, and rightfully so. The take home message becomes that the regulations and associated testing are not there to ensure as clean a sport as possible in the most expedient manner possible, but rather that the tests and their results are ammunition to be carefully stored away until someone steps out of line. Then, with the organization’s actions in question, the tests are pulled out as a defense carefully wrapped in a cloak of proactive enforcement.

Of course, like I said, I may just be too cynical, and indeed the timing of the two stories may all be a big coincidence. Still, that coincidence only highlights another lesson the UCI and its associated tangle of testers and sanctioning bodies need to learn: that the appearance of impropriety can be just as damaging as actual impropriety. If they were so suspicious of Colom, why did it take over two months to get the testing done and make the announcement? And if they were comfortable with such a lengthy timeframe despite their suspicion, which they clearly were, why not wait another day or two to make the announcement? Had they done so, they might have avoided looking like they’re engaging in a petty schoolyard game of “Is not! Is too!” with critics of the passport system. At the very least, they might not have looked as if they’re sitting on a pile of test results, waiting to throw them out like aces in a game of blackjack. As it stands, we’re just left wondering how many more of those cards they’re holding, and whose faces are on them.

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Kohl’s point raises another question about both the biological passport, and the various longitudinal tests teams are conducting internally. Kohl and others point out that supplying riders with their own data effectively provides them with a blood monitoring service, allowing them to manipulate their blood more carefully and stay within the rules. Put like that, giving them all that data sounds like a bad idea, eh?

On the other hand, most people, bike riders included, take it as a given that they have a right to access their own medical data. They do so first because, well, it’s theirs, and second because it gives them some means to identify and defend themselves against inaccuracies in the system. Finally, as we saw with the Armstrong/Caitlin testing fiasco, and with various similar testing programs put forth by teams such as Garmin, CSC, and Columbia, the public seems convinced that absolute transparency is the way to a clean sport. They want people’s blood values, damn it, online and in real time, and if a team does anything less, they must be hiding something. But of course, it’s kind of hard to give the world at large all the facts without the riders logging on for a peek, and using it however they see fit.

So which’ll it be? Transparency for all, or keep the blood data secret, thus placing blind faith in the hands of the testers? The first is certainly dangerous, if what Kohl claims is true. The second, unfortunately, is probably even worse.

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One final note: It took us awhile, but the Service Course has finally made it to 100 posts. It’s too bad it had to be one about dope, but oh well, you work with whatever material's on hand.

Prologue to a Nap

Could someone with more sway than this website tell Versus that, while we very much appreciate their coverage of cycling, and will continue to voice our undying support of mixed martial arts fighting just to get it, using that generous 2-hour Sunday slot to air 120 minutes of Dauphiné-Libéré prologue (ahem, “opening time trial”) is just wasteful? Just like the start house pictures that heavy set gentleman was taking, prologue coverage doesn’t really tell us much other than, “hey, look who showed up!” And after 120 minutes of guys riding alone for 16 minutes, the rest of the key points of the 8-stage race, some of which may actually be interesting, will then be shoved into a subsequent 2-hour show next Sunday.

While well intentioned, in showing such a copious amount of prologues and time trials, I believe Versus isn’t giving itself enough credit. With the help of the Armstrong bounce, the station has, over the past decade or so, built up an audience for their cycling wares. Even better, that audience has finally reached a point in their cycling education where their appreciation extends beyond, “Guys on bikes! On television! I can see them!”

Look, when you’re a kid, you just like ice cream, and you’ll eat as much of it as you can get your hands on. But once you’re older and know a little bit more, you start to appreciate quality and taste over volume. Similarly, with more than a couple years of cycling now under their belts, even those much-maligned Armstrong-era fans have developed tastes that are a little more nuanced, and they’re looking for coverage of the more substantive, tactical, and interesting parts of the race. That usually doesn't include time trials, and it never includes prologues. Sure, their results can occassionally have dramatic effects on the overall, but usually it's just guys riding bikes, one at a time.

I’m not one to lob criticism out there without offering constructive solutions, of course. That’s what message boards are for. In the spirit of cooperation and improved coverage, which will no doubt net Versus tens of dollars more in advertising revenue, we humbly offer the following suggested rearrangements of the 240 minutes of Dauphiné-Libéré coverage that Versus will provide via its June 7 and June 14 Sunday broadcasts:

1. A judiciously edited 30 minute recap show each day of the Dauphiné’s eight stages. Air it any time you want, we all TiVo it anyway, but again, in the spirit of cooperation, we promise not to tell your advertisers that.
   
   
2. Two 60 minute shows covering key stages, and a 2-hour block next Sunday. Everybody loves that “whole stage” coverage Versus does during the Tour de France, and it is a gluttonous summer pleasure for many. But from a practical standpoint, professional racing is all about the last hour, so you really don’t need much more than 60 minutes. So take this past Sunday's alotted 120 minutes, cut them in half, and use them to show two of this week’s key stages. (Just so we don’t get confused, this does not mean one show should be dedicated to the Stage 4 ITT.) Do one hour of coverage of Stage 5 to Mont Ventoux, and one hour of Stage 6 to Briancon. Then use the 2-hour BikeGasm broadcast on June 14 to cover Stages 7 and 8. (In the first ten minutes of each show, Phil and Paul can do a quick oral summary of what’s gone on in the intervening stages, preferably using the correct names and team affiliations along the way to minimize confusion.)
   
   
3. Five, 22 minute daily recaps Monday through Friday of this week, with a quick recap of Saturday and last stage coverage on next Sunday’s 2-hour BikeGasm broadcast. The 22 minute length does seem unwieldy, I’ll admit, but it will give longtime viewers a sense of nostalgia for the early OLN days, when broadcasts started and ended at all sorts of random times.
   
   
4. Just blow all 4 hours on the Mont Ventoux stage. Listen, being British, Phil Liggett will be obliged to spend at least an hour of the Ventoux coverage talking about Tom Simpson and his tragic and untimely death due to drug-taking. It being Versus, Phil and/or Paul will also be required to narrate a 45 minute video retrospective of the Armstrong-Pantani Ventoux finish, and, in the interest of national security, reassure American viewers that Armstrong absolutely, definitely, positively did give Pantani the stage win, and that if he really wanted to, he’d have wiped the floor with him. Add in another 20 minutes of prattling on about Eros Poli winning a stage over the Ventoux despite being an enormous beast of a man, and a few minutes of miscellaneous poetics about the Ventoux stage of this year’s Tour de France, and we’re left with a little over an hour and a half for actual coverage. That sounds about right.

In closing, while extended prologue coverage may be the Ho-Hos of professional cycling – fattening, kind of artificial tasting, and lacking almost any sort of nutritional content – they do give you a chance to have a closeup look at the riders and equipment, largely because there is no action to distract you. Here’s what we saw before we nodded off:

• Cadel Evans (Silence-Lotto) looks skinny. I couldn’t quite make out ribs through the back of his skinsuit, but I did see a few vertebrae, which should mean he’s right on track in his Tour de France preparation. The other way to gauge Evans’ form is to examine how erratic his outbursts in the press are. According to that metric, he still has some fine-tuning to do.
  
  
• Evans was showing off his usual crazy-low TT position, but what struck me were his wrists, which were significantly below his elbows. The position seemed to form a giant scoop into his chest, leading me to wonder how aerodynamically efficient it is, or what other fit, comfort, or power factors may have led to that position. That said, I’ve sniped at people for judging aerodynamics from photos in the past, so I best shut my trap now.
  
  
• Like Evans, Ivan Basso (Liquigas) looked to have a distinct downward slope from elbow to wrist, so for a second I was just wondering if "wrists-down" was just the "new level." Then I saw Basso yanking violently up on his extensions to pull them back into position, so I guess not. But I do hear that "torque wrenches" are the new “I go by feel.”
  
  
• Alberto Contador (Astana) had a new prototype time trial bike with some crazy white-on-black design on it. Trek’s big names having custom painted (usually horrifically so) bikes is nothing new, with Contador, Leipheimer, and Armstrong all getting the star treatment in recent past. But I don’t think this latest example was just a show of respect and shrewd marketing on their part. The design could be seen as decorative, but it’s also very similar to the intentionally eye-confusing designs car companies use when they put new cars on the test track – it makes it really hard to tell what the bike really looks like in any detail.
  
  
• So does Contador’s debut of the new TT bike show us that he’s achieved primacy from Trek and/or the team for testing new products? In other words, is it now Contador, rather than Armstrong, who gets “the shit that will kill them” of Coyle-book fame? It seems correct that he does, of course, given his record and his chances in July. But since Armstrong has returned to the scene, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see him return to his spot as the primary recipient of new material.
  
  
• David Miller (Garmin) was riding a regular road bike with clip-on aero bars and deep section rims instead of a disk. It was good enough to net him 10th place, but I still have to wonder what the reasoning behind the decision was. The way I see it, either Miller has had his nerves so frazzled by dropped chains, exploding disc wheels, and other time trial shenanigans that he’s sworn off TT bikes forever, or it was just a photoshoot for one of Felt’s aero road bikes. Look out for an ad shot of Miller’s ride yesterday with some variation of “Slick Enough for a ProTour Time Trial” in the Felt marketing copy.
  
  
• Speaking of Millar and Armstrong, what is it with English speakers and handlebars so wide you could drive a bus with them? I remember one shot of Tyler Hamilton with his hands on the hoods back when he was riding for CSC – it looked like he was reaching out to hug fat Aunt Patrice at the family reunion. I don’t know – Miller, Armstrong, Hamilton – maybe it’s a generational thing rather than language-based?
  
  
• Tom Boonen (Quick.Step) didn’t look high, but it’s hard to tell sometimes.
  
  
• The white world championship skinsuit is not doing Bert Grabsch (Columbia) any favors. He looks like he ate last season’s Bert Grabsch, resulting in a skinsuit that is now double stuffed with Bert Grabsch-ey goodness. That’s unfair, of course – white is not slimming, and he is a big, powerful rider – but the guy still looked huge. I think that to rake in a little extra cash, for the biological passport program or whatever new quagmire they see fit, the UCI should sign on separate sponsors just for the WC jerseys. And it should be Jet Puffed Marshmallows.

Big Tents, Small Media, and Other Things

Notes from Arlington

As I mentioned earlier, I provided some straight race coverage this past weekend for the Clarendon Cup NRC race and the Air Force Cycling Classic, a USA Cycling ProTour circuit race. Due to changing life circumstances over the past few years, I don’t travel to do race coverage nearly as much as I used to – as you may have noticed, I do most of my sniping from up here in the cheap seats these days. And while I’m not sure yet if, after this weekend, I’m burned out or reinvigorated, it’s always fun to be part of the circus again when it’s in town.

In the new issue of VeloNews, Neal Rogers has an interesting piece about how professional cycling is covered. Or maybe it’s only interesting to people who have done the job, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s a piece that many cycling journalists have probably longed to write – we’re painfully aware of how many readers like to complain about the flavor of the sausage, but lack any real comprehension of how it gets made.

In that same spirit of openness, I’ve jotted down some things below that occurred to me as I covered this weekend’s races. Not all of them are new thoughts, by far; they’re not all directly related to this weekend’s experiences; and I probably have far more than this if I really thought about it. But what the hell.

On Home Field Advantage

You’d think it would be easier to cover races that are within single digit mileage from your home, wouldn’t you? In some ways, that’s true. When the race is in your backyard, or takes place along your regular commute like this weekend’s races did for me, there’s no airports, no rental cars, no map reading, and no crappy hotels. You sleep in your own bed, and eat breakfast in the kitchen with your kids instead of at a fluorescent-lit buffet with Serge, the Ukrainian soigneur. And there’s something to be said for all that.

But there’s also something to be said for being fully committed to the task at hand, with none of the distractions that you simply can’t get away from at home, no matter how pleasant they may be. Doing race coverage for the web like this weekend, it’s not a big problem, but if I were hunting for features or sidebars or angles for print, it’s far better to be holed up in the race hotel, inside the bubble, where you can make a quick call to the front desk, be connected to someone’s room, and arrange an interview in the lobby in an hour. And the amount of off-the-record scuttlebutt you can get in a hotel bar should not be underestimated for its background value. When you drive home an hour after the finish, you miss all that.

What is Media?

Look, I’m sympathetic towards “new media.” After all, as much as I hate to admit it, you’re reading this on one of those newfangled blogs, and my last printed-in-ink byline was probably over a year ago. And I'm not the only one -- the press tent’s getting mighty crowded these last few years with the expanded roster of online outlets, and during the post-race interviews, a few more recorders are thrust between you and your subject and you feel a little bit more hot breath on the back of your neck. If that meant more widespread, diverse, and credible coverage of cycling, I’d be more than happy with a little less elbow room and a less advantageous spot on the rail. It is, literally and metaphorically, a big tent, and I think that’s great.

The problem is that, while some of these folks do good work, many of them don’t seem to be working at all, and in fact, never produce anything from the events they’ve been credentialed for. In the meantime, they’re using that credential to get in the way of the folks who are working – interrupting interviews to have their picture taken with riders and getting in the way of the working photographers at the finish line for the sake of completing their PhotoBucket galleries. As valuable to the sport as fans and amateur photographers are, that’s just not what media credentials are for.

And they keep eating all the damn donuts.

Probably the most frustrating thing, for me anyway, is the appropriation by those same people of material generated by those who WERE actually working at the event. Occasionally, it’s as inconspicuous as seeing a quote on a blog or somesuch that was in the article you wrote, and you know you were the only one who got that quote, because you were sitting in a moving team car with the rider with the windows up when you got it. That’s annoying, but the most egregious case I’ve seen was back in 2007, when someone who was very excited to have race credentials for his blog (enthusiastically posting about it prior to the race), proceeded, hours after the race, to cut and paste the entirety of my VeloNews copy to his blog. Yes, my name was still on it, but that’s still pretty far from fair use, for those who deal in such things. The kicker? He’s a professor of online journalism at a local university. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing “don’t steal material from other sites” is Week 1 material in an online journalism class, maybe Day 1, even. More bluntly and less legalistically: you were there, you had the same access I did, write your own damn story. And if you think the theft is bad for the writers, you should see what it’s like for the photographers.

Look, I don’t mean to sound like the crusty old guy here, but maybe I am, so I might as well embrace it. I’m not even suggesting that we start severely limiting access – at least not for events like last weekend’s, which generate a significant amount of local interest that’s best capitalized on by new media. All I’m asking is that, if you’re going to be there, and be all geeked out about having a credential (which is fine), then DO something with it. Write something, do some work, find an angle, produce something useful – or just stand outside the barriers like the rest of the fans and enjoy the race. There’s no shame in that. At the very least, stay out of the way and don’t steal my stuff.

Second Fiddle, Maybe Third

We saw two, good entertaining domestic bike races this weekend, probably the two biggest going on in the U.S. on those two days (note - there was a women’s World Cup in Montreal, Canada). That said, sometimes writing about races, even big domestic ones, for the bigger sites can feel like throwing words down a well. Like, say, when the events you’re covering fall on the last days of the Giro d’ Italia, where the gap between winning and losing is less than a minute, and the finale is being contested on wet cobblestones in downtown roads with aero bars.

So yes, I was not expecting, nor did I achieve, nor did I deserve, top billing on the site at any point during the weekend. For that to have happened, I think Chad Gerlach would have had to have won both the Arlington races by a minute and a half, allowing me to fully, shamelessly, and transparently work the human interest angle to the bone. That didn’t happen, but c’est la guerre. At least seeing my headlines sink rapidly down the column was not an unfamiliar sensation – the first race I covered live and in person, the 1999 Red Zinger stage race, ended on the same day Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France in Paris. Talk about getting buried.

Life in the Desert – All Heat and No Water

Last weekend’s races – a flat crit and a circuit race with a bit of a hill – presented the riders with different physical challenges. You may not know this, but the two formats present the media with different challenges as well. The criterium is primarily a test of your ability to endure blazing sunlight and scorching pavement temperatures, as well as your ability to maintain riveted attention for 100 laps. Seriously, 100 laps. The circuit race, on the other hand, is primarily a test of your bladder. Sure, you’re in the shade of a car in the caravan, and you have air conditioning and a good view of the break, which is nice, but you’ve traded in access to the criterium’s port-o-johns and the associated comforts they provide. The coping mechanism is no mystery, of course – get up in the morning, and consume the absolute minimum of liquids, in my case a very small cup of coffee to get going. Then hit the port-o-johns about three or four times at the start. Then don’t drink anything until you’re done with your post-race interviews. Even then, many times, at the end of the three or four hour cruise, that lap belt is starting to feel mighty tight. It’s really not that long to go, but I think it’s more mental than physical: it’s the fact that you can’t go that makes you have to. But that first sip of water when you’re done is oh so sweet.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Among some of the regional teams this weekend, there was apparently some confusion as to who would be riding for what team, in which races, and what race number they'd be wearing, resulting in three or four different versions of the start list (which matches numbers to names and teams), depending on how you counted. Unfortunately, none of them really shed much light on the situation. Without getting too far into it, or pointing any fingers, if teams make roster or number changes and don’t inform the organizer or officials, or if they do inform them and the organizer or officials don’t communicate those changes to the media (either with revised start lists or on the fly via radio tour), don’t expect your name to be right in the reporting. Yes, if Mark Cavendish switched numbers with George Hincapie before Milan-San Remo, or Hincapie and Tom Boonen switched teams, we could probably pick up on it and sort it out on our own, but when we’re talking regional riders making their appearance in national events, we can’t always pick out the faces. We really are trying to give you your day in the sun when it’s warranted – just help a brother out with the right information.

But Who Cares?

If any or all of that makes you think didn’t enjoy working this weekend, you’d be wrong. Most of it is just part and parcel of doing the job, and you laugh about it and move on. It was a great weekend of racing, and next weekend, when the circus rolls on up to Philadelphia for the Philadelphia International Championship, I’ll definitely miss being under the big top.

Charlie Don’t Surf

And Leipheimer Don’t Jump

Cyclists have as many words for minutely different types of strength as Eskimos do for different types of snow, but a professional rider’s specialty, and their success at it, often boils down to whether they’re very, very fast for a short time, or just very fast but for a longer time. To try to figure out which a rider is, you can phrase the question any number of ways: Is he a climber or a time trialist? Is he fast, or is he strong? Is he a sprinter or a classics rider? Is he a turbo, or a diesel? The questions vary slightly, depending on whether we’re in classics season or in the midst of the grand tours, but they’re all looking for the answer to the same equation – where, on the spectrum between what we’ll call “fast” and what we’ll call “strong,” does he fall?

(Yes, indeed, we’re oversimplifying, but for a reason. There are finer distinctions, of course, depending on terrain and roles – though both short and very, very fast, a sprinter’s violent acceleration is differently calibrated than a pure climber’s stabbing attack, for instance. But where a rider sits on the spectrum compared to rivals within his specialty can tell you a good bit about how a race will likely go down.)

Different specialties within the sport require different balances of power – those often vague waypoints on the fretless fast-strong continuum. And to keep things interesting, the balance points aren’t necessarily static – some riders are able to sacrifice the “jump” needed for a bunch sprint for the mystical “force” required for the cobbles, others can barter “explosiveness” in the hills for the “strength” needed for a flat 40k time trial. Sometimes it happens through training, sometimes it just seems to come with age, sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, but as every rider knows, you can’t have it all at once. Nobody knows that better than GC riders, who slide around the continuum more than most, trying to find that sweet spot that will bag them a grand tour title.

As with anything, there are limits – no rider who is naturally bent too far towards one end of the spectrum can hope to force himself very far towards the other side, no matter how hard he works at it. You can’t fight nature, and they can only seek their best achievable balance. For GC riders’, the specially tailored version of the fast-strong continuum is labeled, at either end, “attacking climber” and “time trial monster.” The reality is that mostly, GC riders are very good at both, often among the top riders in either specialty. But they’re always a little bit, or in some cases, a lot, farther towards one end or the other. The best reach a high white note of balance that lets them make and match the killing accelerations in the mountains and also slay their opponents against the clock. The names of those who achieve it are written in the recordbooks, but more numerous in those same books are the names of those who simply came closer to the balance than the competition on hand.

Which brings us to the point of today’s sermon: Leipheimer don’t jump. That, of course, is not news, and to his credit he’s always been remarkably open about it. The real question was, at what point would Leipheimer’s best attainable spot on the continuum – the one that lets him be very strong in the TTs and climb fast and steady, but not match any sort of acceleration – come to be seen not as a “vulnerability,” but as the absolute, immutable roadblock that would forever prevent him from achieving a grand tour win? I’d say that point was reached on Stage 16 of this year’s Giro d’ Italia, from Pergola to Monte Petrano. Earlier, I’d speculated that this stage would see those who could throw down sharp attacks do so, and then we’d see if a Leipheimer/Armstrong tandem could diesel their way back up in time to save their day. The first part happened, with Ivan Basso (Liquigas) and Carlos Sastre (Cervelo) opening the attacks. Danilo DiLuca (LPR) and pink jersey Denis Menchov (Rabobank) sprang away in pursuit, preserving their GC spots from the surprising and sudden danger presented by a very sharp Sastre. Leipheimer, well, he didn’t. As he always does, he rallied a bit and rode a great tempo up the remainder of the final climb, but so did everyone else of importance. The problem was, with those opening salvos in the initial kilometers of the climb, the minutes he needed had already gone up the road, and while his climbing tempo is fast, it isn’t that fast.

Leipheimer is obviously out of contention now for the Giro, but why say that his lack of acceleration will be the roadblock to any future grand tour success? Well, for obvious reasons, I’m guessing he won’t get much of a chance at freedom in the Tour de France. And, in the unlikely event that he chooses to ride a three grand tour season, anathema to Americans, he’d just close out the year at what may be the biggest festival of acceleration you could ask for – the Vuelta. Though he’s come closer there than elsewhere, with Alberto Contador (Astana) potentially doubling up, a healthy Ezequiel Mosquera (Xacobeo-Galicia) possibly back in action, and about a dozen other jumpy Spanish climbers hopping around like jackrabbits, it doesn’t seem like the best opportunity. Of course, those guys can’t usually time trial, so there you go again… But after the Vuelta, time just keeps marching on, if you know what I mean.

Leipheimer’s not the first victim of getting caught at that damning spot on the continuum, of course. Look at Cadel Evans (Silence-Lotto), for one. And indeed, for years of Tours de France, the point on the spectrum where both find themselves wasn’t a bad spot to be in at all. In the Armstrong era, grinding, not explosiveness, seemed to be the key to victory, or at least contention. Alex Zulle, Jan Ullrich, Joseba Beloki, Andreas Kloden? All fantastic time trialists and strong climbers, but explosive high-mountain riders were never among the true challengers, though Iban Mayo looked to be for a very short time. And in those sorts of races, Leipheimer probably would have a fair shot (critics will, rightfully, point out that he had leadership of both Rabobank and Gerolsteiner during those years and failed to produce, though I’d argue longer experience has been key to his recent successes). Now, though, the formula for Tour candidates seems to be changing, with more snappy mountain riders making bigger impressions on the overall – riders like Contador, Andy Schleck (Saxo Bank), and, obviously Sastre. With his ride in the Giro, Menchov seems to be only one of the riders from the traditional mold to approach the high white note – seemingly sitting on the perfect balance of speed in the mountains and strength against the clock. Basso also had it once, whether he will again remains to be seen.

Race Radio

1. All this coverage of the short climbing stage to Blockhaus, and not a single picture of the actual World War II German-built bunker at the top? Come on. As a former history major and the son of an architect, I was all set to combine my love of cycling with gawking at a bit of history and some early inspiration for brutalist architecture. Oh well -- I suppose the lack of photos has something to do with the top 3k or so of the climb being snowed in. The stage itself was certainly brutal for its length, with Carlos Sastre sinking again just as fast as he’d risen on Monday, Armstrong looking rough, and DiLuca making Menchov look winded for the first time in awhile. Good on Franco Pellizotti (Liquigas) for winning, and for recognizing his narrow speciality – freak stages.
   
   
2. DiLuca continues to impress with his ability to grovel for seconds wherever he can, attacking Menchov on the Blockhaus finish and grabbing himself another 13 seconds on GC. While his true chances are very slim, the way he’s riding, I’m not ready to count him out quite yet. Unrealistic? Maybe, but to put it in the typical language of non-native English speaking riders, he “likes to make a show for the fans.” I like that.
   
   
3. Will Menchov become the first rider to be both awarded and stripped of a grand tour win as the result of a doping scandal? Unfortunately, maybe. As is our (young, ever-evolving) policy here at the SC, we’ll just keep writing about the performances like they’re real, until someone with some sort of authority tells us they’re not with some degree of credibility.
   
   
4. You know you’re in the waning days of a grand tour when you start looking at the other jerseys. Kevin Seeldraeyers (Quick.Step) and Francesco Masciarelli (Acqua & Sapone-Caffe Mokambo) are locked in a battle for the young rider jersey, with the surprising Masciarelli only two minutes adrift. The Italian looks to be on the upswing, so tomorrow’s finish atop Vesuvio could be his chance. On the other hand, Belgium must be excited about the prospect of a new GC contender in Seeldraeyers, since things haven’t been working out too well for them on that front for the past 30 years or so. Like the battle for pink, it's a two-man game, with the next rider something like 15 minutes down.
   
   
5. In the mountains classification, former Giro winner Stefano Garzelli (Acqua & Sapone) looks to have things all sewn up, even if his country hates him for outsprinting DiLuca for second place on the Blockhaus stage (thus eating bonus seconds DiLuca could have used). Whatever – Garzelli wanted the points, and I’m glad to see he’s found something to do in his dotage. Beats playing bocce.
   
   
6. Speaking of Garzelli’s success, is it feeling a little old in here, or is it just me? I mean, Garzelli, Sastre, DiLuca, Menchov, Leipheimer? What’s happened to riders in their late 20s, the alleged peak of grand tour prowess? Mick Rogers (Columbia), at 7:05 back isn’t flying the flag terribly high.
   
   
7. On a non-Giro note, I’ll be providing some straight-up, button down, race coverage reportage for VeloNews for this weekend’s Air Force NRC races in Arlington, Virginia. That’s the Clarendon Cup crit (former CSC Invitational, former U.S. Postal something-or-other, and originally…the Clarendon Cup) on Saturday, and the Air Force Cycling Classic circuit race on Sunday. Say hello if you see me.

Fed Up, Knocked Down, and Dropped Out

Some Notes on the Giro

The Service Course is never really at a loss for words, but we are frequently at a loss for time. So with the (American) Memorial Day holiday weekend looming, here’s some quick fodder from the bella Italia.

1. Ah, there’s nothing like getting what you wish for, on Christmas day, Memorial Day, or any other day, really. Less than two days after the SC suggested that Giro media not grovel at the feet of Lance Armstrong’s (or anyone's) Twitter feed, it seems they’re publishing tweets no more. The Service Course -- it’s what drives the Giro press corps.
   
   
2. Danilo DiLuca (LPR) did indeed lose his pink leader's jersey in yesterday’s freakazoid time trial, which is obviously not the greatest shock to the cycling world. That said, he did well to not completely blow himself up, riding well enough to keep himself in the second spot behind TT winner and new pink jersey Denis Menchov (Rabobank). With some explosive stages in the hills yet to come, we may well see him back in pink at some point. Could it be for good? That's tougher, as he'd have to build back up enough cushion to see him through one more time trial.
   
   
3. Looking like a bit of a three-horse race now isn’t it? Levi Leipheimer (Astana) is the third horse, in case you were wondering. With the aforementioned mountain stages coming up, the question will be whether diesel Leipheimer can match the accelerations of DiLuca and Menchov (to a lesser extent) well enough to keep himself in contention come the final TT. Armstrong does seem to be riding himself into shape, and should be able to help him to a point. The question is, how much? In the days of yore, Armstrong would have been the guy to be able to match those accelerations, but even if that happens, it won’t do Leipheimer a whole lot of good if he can’t follow Armstrong back to the wheel in time. We may well see another round of sharp attack versus fast-and-steady in the coming week. Iban Mayo tested this theory thoroughly against Armstrong in the 2003 Dauphine Libere, and though Armstrong eventually won the race, Mayo did a lot of damage along the way.
   
   
4. With his win today and subsequent leadership of the Giro, will Denis Menchov finally get some buzz? Despite two Vuelta wins, you don’t hear much about Russia’s biggest GC hope for a few reasons. First, he’s just doesn’t seem to be much of a talker, trash or otherwise. He’s also not particularly flashy on a bike – a great time trialist and a good grinder in the mountains, but he doesn’t exactly shout “explosive,” though I do think he’s shown a lot more punch on the climbs in the last couple of years. Finally, one of his Vuelta wins was awarded after initial winner Roberto Heras was popped for doping. No matter how you regard victories of that nature, they certainly don’t make as big an impact as the ones where you get the kisses on the top step at the end.
   
   
5. Speaking of Russians, if Menchov wins the Giro for Rabobank, won’t Katusha just die?
   
   
6. Turns out the Giro time trial was just a little too crazy for multiple world TT champion Fabian Cancellara (Saxo Bank), who woke up Thursday morning and thought, “eh, maybe not.” As it always seems to be in these situations, it was apparently always the plan for Cancellara to go home early to get ready for the Tour de France, though the "right before a stage I really didn't want to ride" was never explicitly spelled out. It also fits into Saxo Bank’s larger team plan of doing absolutely nothing in the Giro d’ Italia.

DiLuca's Pink Slip?

There seems to be some debate as to who the “favorite” is for the Giro. You have to declare someone the favorite, of course. Otherwise, how would people on internet message boards know who to love or hate? The bookies are leaning Danilo DiLuca’s (LPR) way recently, some pundits are waiting to see what Ivan Basso (Liquigas) really has in the tank these days, most people are ignoring Denis Menchov (Rabobank) as usual, the American cycling press favors Levi Leipheimer (Astana), and the American general interest media is probably still waiting for Armstrong to make his move.

What that all means, as I see it, is that nobody really knows, and that’s largely due to tomorrow’s wildcard stage. The 60 kilometer time trial is so unlike anything we’ve seen in a grand tour since any of these guys have been racing professionally, it’s anyone’s guess who will win. And then, how decisive will the time gaps be? The Giro organizers have had a few missteps of late, but they have managed to come up with a stage that is the perfect format to keep people guessing. It’s about half again as long as the average grand tour TT these days, so that alone creates the potential for some unexpected results – who knows who the best time trialist over 60k is? Last anyone checked, it was probably Bernard Hinault, but I think he’s lost a step by now.

But it’s not even a normal, ridiculously long TT. Apparently, it’s also hilly and technical. So much so that there’s lots of talk of riders forgoing TT bikes – a sign that the course may not be suited to the talents of the die-hard TT specialists like Brad Wiggins (Garmin) and Fabian Cancellara (Saxo Bank). In fact, Cancellara’s already hedging his bets by calling the course “a bit crazy,” and following up that comment by calling it a whole lot of crazy. All that said, it’s still a TT, and some folks just don’t do well against the clock, no matter how long, short, hilly, or flat the TT may be.

Picking a winner for tomorrow’s show may be too tough a task, but the over/under bet seems to be whether DiLuca will manage to keep his pink jersey. For some reason, I hope so, even if only because I have a feeling he probably won’t. I’ve gone on record in the past saying that DiLuca should focus on the classics, but after the first week of this Giro, I’m sure glad he hasn’t. Mike Barry put it best when he called the Giro more of a “collection of stages” than the Tour de France is, and as more of a puncher than most of the GC riders, the Giro’s grab bag format has played to DiLuca’s strengths. At the Giro, there’s no three-days-in-the-mountains, roll around awhile, three-more-days-in-the-mountains for the climbers to dig their teeth into their own terrain and rhythm, and no billiard-table-flat 40k TT that the usual clockers can do blindfolded.

Instead of the Tour’s predictable roadmap of killing opportunities writ large, the Giro has provided a bunch of little opportunities – deceptive little climbs, a tricky descent, finishes that favors smaller groups – that DiLuca’s been able to take advantage of. Unlike the standard GC riders, DiLuca doesn’t seem to be thinking of whether he can gain a minute on the next mountain top finish or pull a minute and a half back in the TT. Instead, he’s picking out those little chances – like that last descent in Tuesday’s stage to Pinerolo – where he can grab a few seconds at a time. And while people weren't really looking, those seconds started to add up. That scrappiness has been made more evident by DiLuca’s necessary focus on stage wins. More than the true climbers and true time trialists, DiLuca needs the time bonuses on offer to have any hope in the overall, and at this point those bonus seconds account for a significant portion of his 1:20 advantage. All told, his constant fight for seconds, bonus and otherwise, has made for some great riding in the waning kilometers.

In his two stage wins so far, it’s hard to deny that DiLuca has looked very much like a classics rider trying to win a grand tour – something I think is pretty refreshing in a time where specialties seem to be getting so narrowly defined as to border on the ridiculous. While he’s doing as well as any true all-rounder could hope so far, keeping control of the race through whatever tomorrow brings could be a bigger challenge than he’s faced so far. But if he can make it through Cinque Terre intact, he may just get enough respite to hold on as the race settles down a bit and teams without anything to show (i.e., most everyone besides Columbia and LPR) take a bit of the heat off the GC battle.

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Some followup on Monday's kvetching about the media's use of Twitter quotes. Today, VeloNews’ Andrew Hood writes of complaints amongst the Giro press corps that Lance Armstrong (Astana) is inaccessible. Quelle surprise! Clinical question – if people can’t remember things that happened three years ago, is that short-term or long-term memory loss? I mean, it wasn’t yesterday, but it wasn’t 20 years ago, either. Anyway, the article notes that Armstrong has been giving the media the slip for several days now, but has been busy posting material to his Twitter page. Writes Hood: “That’s what Armstrong did following Tuesday’s electrifying 10th stage. He crossed the finish line and turned around to go directly to the team hotel, leaving journalists to pull reactions off the Twitter site.”

In a related note, in his Explainer column today, VeloNews’ Charles Pelkey answers a question received during their Live Update coverage, which simply asked, “Where’s Lance?” Part of Pelkey’s answer was that the coverage basically mentions the riders making the moves or otherwise doing something notable, and that “it’s safe to assume that if you don’t hear about Armstrong, Leipheimer, Di Luca, Sastre, Menchov or other top riders, they’re probably doing okay and riding with the peloton.”

Now, can’t we take this same attitude when it comes to post race quotes? As in, if riders want to stew in their juices and not talk to the media, can’t we all just assume they have nothing to say? It would beat the hell out of having to chase people all over the internet, journalistic dignity-wise at least. But, like rider protests, doping, and other messy issues, it would have to be one of those things where everyone agreed not to do it, lest one entity be able to claim an advantage over their rivals by breaking the pact. And we see how well those little agreements tend to turn out.

Race Radio

1. A few different perspectives on the whole Giro-Milan protest brouhaha are floating in. A great collection of rider quotes and insanely over the top Italian editorial writing on the subject are available on ProCycling’s Dan Friebe’s BikeRadar blog. Why, oh why, will nobody pay me to write like the Italians? It seems like so much more fun. Bicycling’s Joe Lindsey gives his take on his Boulder Report blog, while Mike Barry (Columbia) uses his diary entry to give us some insight as to how a rider mulls these things over. And while Barry makes his case, Ivan Basso (Liquigas), on the other hand, has put forth a weak-kneed recant.
   
   
2. Mark Cavendish (Columbia) must be happy to have bagged a full, competitive sprint stage today, just so everyone will stop jawing about his win in the trainwreck Milan stage. But really, can someone besides Columbia and LPR catch a break in this race? If Mick Rogers (Columbia) somehow pulls it together to get himself into pink tomorrow, other teams are going to start going home.
   
   
3. This isn’t Giro related, save that he competed in it during his time on the road with Motorola, but our hearts go out to the family of Steve Larsen, who passed away way too young today at the age of 39. Here’s to a guy who could ride a bike – any bike – damn fast.

Slow Poke

I read late yesterday evening that there was a protest at yesterday’s Giro d’Italia stage in Milan. You can imagine my surprise. I only saw a few minutes of the stage before I had to go get on with my day, but at the point I saw, the peloton was somewhere around the 6 laps of the 15k downtown circuit remaining and was spread gutter to gutter, chatting. In other words, it looked exactly like I would expect a pointless, ill-conceived, pancake flat, city center circuit race to look like if you were foolish enough to place it after the hectic opening week of a grand tour. You know, like a post-Tour exhibition crit, but with less authentic action.

It turns out the slow riding was indeed a protest, however, even if the protest did look suspiciously like “what would have happened anyway.” We’ll leave the basic, fundamental ridiculousness of this stage on the back burner, for now, and have a look at this little bit of nonviolent revolution. Specifically, the riders were protesting the safety of the Milan circuit itself; some coverage hinted that riders were also more generally protesting what they view as some questionable safety decisions by the organizers throughout the first week of the race. Was the rider’s effective neutralization of the stage, with stage times tossed out the window and just the final 10k raced in earnest, justified? I’m of a bit of a split opinion on that one, leaning towards “yes,” I suppose.

The immediate concern was Sunday’s Milan circuit, which reportedly funneled riders from two lane roads into single-lane corners, took in as many of the city’s tram tracks as possible, was strewn with parked cars, and was segregated by tape rather than barriers. Adding to the potential mayhem was the fact that the course didn’t really have anything to break the field up – in other words, they’d more than likely take in all those corners, tracks, and cars as a tightly packed group, lap after lap after lap. Of course, I wasn’t there, but it does sound like a recipe for disaster, and when you’re facing a recipe for disaster, whether you’re a pro cyclist or an accountant, I do think that you have the right to say something before swan-diving into the empty pool headfirst.

To me, the fact that there were cars parked on a closed course says it all, and in and of itself gives riders ample reason to call the organizer’s entire attitude toward rider safety into question. There is, of course, the problem of riders potentially striking the parked cars on the course. There’s also the potentially more troublesome problem of the motorist getting in, starting his car, and driving it away, only to encounter Danilo DiLuca (LPR) et. al. rounding the next corner at full tilt. Now, I’ve seen cars being towed, carried, or bounced from race courses prior to jerkwater amateur crits throughout the American southeast, a region that hardly has the same affection and appreciation for bicycle racing as northern Italy. And even though it was the early 1990s and the color pink abounded on bikes and jerseys, those races were certainly no Giro d’ Italia. But they still got the cars off the damn course. So does RCS expect people to believe that there was no way the organizer of the biggest races in Italy could have worked with the city of Milan to have those cars removed in time for the city’s showcase stage? If we can agree that that scenario seems ridiculous, the only other explanation would be that RCS didn’t try to address the problem, which reflects an alarmingly negligent attitude towards race security.

The broader complaints about hairy road courses during the first week? Whether those are protestable offenses by organizer RCS is less clear cut, since what’s safe or unsafe in those cases relies a little more on rider judgement than does the Milan problem. Just as parking my car in front of my house is really dangerous if I try to slide the car in sideways at 50 miles an hour, yes, some of the Giro descents and finishes are dangerous if you try to take them at superhuman speed. And just as most normal people can park in front of my house, most normal people (at least the ones reading this site) could ride down those descents and negotiate the stage finishes. What makes these things safe or unsafe, of course, is in how fast you try to do it, and how big a game of chicken you’re willing to play while doing so. When is the course to blame, and when is it the riders' fault for not slowing down?

So where do you draw the safety/responsibility line between the riders and the course designers? Sure, if a descent is too damaged, exposed, or technical to be taken at reasonable bike race speed, then the organizer should obviously avoid it. But when an organizer eyes an otherwise suitable descent, with new pavement and beautifully cambered hairpins, does he have to factor in the thought that some headbanger who needs a contract next year will take unreasonable risks for the chance at scoring the victory, smearing himself on the retaining wall in the process?

Unfortunately, the answer isn’t clear, and as you get farther into it, it just gets harder to determine what should be deemed “safe.” For instance, the “course design / safety / how fast can you ride it” issue is plenty visible in cyclocross, where half the trick is to see how fast you can ride whatever the organizer’s thrown at you without falling over. And in all but the most egregiously bad course design, taking the challenge at a reasonable speed for your skill level is the rider’s problem. However, you get a number of pre-ride chances to test out your theories on the ‘cross course before you go barreling into that muddy turn in competition at 30 kph; in the grand tours, riders are pretty much seeing the course for the first time as they go, and they’re going at 70 kph. Taking that into account, is any of this really safe?

Reasonable care seems to be the best riders can ask of organizers. You know, like maybe not using that 100kph blind curve leading to a sheer dropoff at kilometer 200 of a stage, or not sending the peloton barreling down the four lane autoroute into downtown, then doglegging them into some cobbled, six-foot-wide medieval back alley for the sprint. Has RCS exercised that reasonable care in planning this year’s stages? I’m sitting about 3,000 miles too far west to really know, but the people who really have to worry about it are saying that RCS hasn’t. Bike racers are a whiney bunch, of course, but as much as I'd like to disregard the complaints, you seldom hear complaints like this about safety at the Tour de France.

I will say this, though – the Italians at RCS may not be as safety-conscious as the French at ASO, but they are funnier. Giro director Angelo Zomegnan, understandably frustrated that the riders had effectively blown what should have been a big advertisement for Milan and the Giro, snapped to the AP, “This circuit was explosive, full of bursts, and required you to get your ass off the seat. But it seems like certain riders who aren’t so young anymore didn’t want to do that. Today, the riders’ legs were shorter and their tongues grew.”

Unless I’m mistaken, he just called protest figureheads DiLuca and Armstrong old, and possibly lazy. Tune in tomorrow, when unless the peloton shapes up, he may just call Damiano Cunego short and Ivan Basso’s sister fat.

Race Radio

1. Pedro Horillo (Rabobank) fell off a cliff. Seriously, fell off a cliff. Fortunately, despite some injuries that would seem more serious if not viewed in the context of falling off a cliff, he seems to have a pretty good prognosis. When he’s feeling better, he can take comfort in the fact that he’s now become the Wim Van Est for a whole new generation.
   
   
2. Mark Cavendish (Columbia) won Sunday’s stage, which you might expect in a flat, 10 kilometer race that ended in a sprint. Andrew Hood did an interview with him afterwards, during which he asked if the win meant that Cavendish had “worked out how to beat Petacchi.” To that, Cavendish retorted, “I don’t think I understand the question. He beat me once all year. I won in Milan-San Remo, I won in Tirreno. Today was just putting right what I messed up in the first stage.” The snappish answer was perfectly justified given the question, but I felt for Hood. There are some times during interviews when, just as you're asking the question, you realize you've phrased it totally wrong. Then you just have to shut up and wait as the line-drive answer comes hurtling back at your head.
   
   
3. Cavendish’s win capped what’s been an obviously remarkable week for Columbia, a week that also includes wins in the previous two stages from teammates Edvald Boassen Hagen and Kanstantsin Sivtsov. Add to those wins the team time trial victory, Cavendish’s time in pink, and Thomas Lovkvist’s time in pink and the young rider’s jersey, and you couldn’t hope for a much better first week for a team without a proven GC threat. Credit the riders, of course, but also team director Bob Stapleton, who bet heavily on youth when he took over the T-Mobile squad that morphed into Columbia. Those guys are paying off now, and earlier than a lot of people expected them to, and it's nice to see a bit of a changing of the guard.
   
   
4. Mike Barry is one guy on Columbia who isn’t young, but he is strong, and he is very nice, at least according to Cervelo’s Ted King (and a number of others, myself included). But what struck me about Barry this week was his own diary entry in VeloNews, which managed to put one difference between the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia in much more succinct language than I’ve ever been able to: “While the Tour de France is formulaic in its structure, the Giro is a mishmash of stages.” I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's true.
   
   
5. Astana’s little jersey change didn’t really tell us much after all, did it? In the end, the new design was just the current jersey with the non-paying sponsors’ logos faded back. So in essence, Astana spend lord-knows-how-much money to effectively do the same thing we did when I was 17 and one of our club sponsors didn’t pay – black out their logo with a Sharpie marker. Of course, the idea that the new design would hint at the new sponsors was just the way I and many others read the team’s comments prior to the design's release, and it proved to be an overreaching interpretation of those comments. The new kit does, as the team promised, reflect “the significant changes that are ahead for the team.” It’s just that, contrary to what we expected, the new design only told us what we already knew – that most of the consortium that makes up the Astana sponsorship ain’t paying, and people hate not getting paid.
   
   
6. We haven’t had a real note on the media in awhile, so here’s one for today: Can we quit with all the damn Twitter quotes yet? Yes, I realize that Twitter, like team press releases and such, can be a good source for information and can give you a basic read on what’s on riders’ minds. And at least most writers are openly stating where the quotes came from – which is better than those “news” articles I read every day that use the same quotes and copy I get in my inbox via press releases. (Although, with the prevalence of Twitter, I suppose you’d have to be a fool to try to pass off a tweet as the product of first-hand journalism.) So what’s wrong with using Twitter postings in articles? Nothing on occassion, but in overusing them, reporters are letting the subjects of their article control the message by only answering questions that nobody, save the Twitterer, has asked. After all, Twitter is nothing more than people interviewing themselves, and giving pretty superficial answers at that. Now, would anyone ever really grill themselves in a public forum, or would they only ask and answer questions that are the most advantageous to them, as both interviewer and interviewee?

Money Laundry

Or Laundry Money, Whichever

The 2008 Tour de France exclusion. The Armstrong comeback. The non-payment issues. The Kazaks abandoning ship. May 31 deadlines. Think Alberto Contador is starting to wish he’d signed somewhere else yet?

Anyway, the team currently known as Astana seems all set to change sponsors, promising to debut some modified “our current sponsors are going down the crapper” kit over the next several days of the Giro d’Italia. The new clothes are said to retain the current sponsors, but give a teaser as to who the new sponsors will be. Like most, I’m speculating that the new sponsor package – which is an amazing feat in itself in this economy and at this point in the season – is a heavily Armstrong-linked affair, and will have something to do with the Livestrong cancer non-profit.

Some people are crying that the Livestrong team scenario isn’t possible, because a non-profit entity can’t own a for-profit bike team. I believe they’re overcomplicating the issue. Or maybe they’re undercomplicating it. I haven’t decided yet. So with no training or experience in the relevant laws and accounting regulations, I’ll obviously wade right into the issue...

There are any number of ways I can see getting around this roadblock, or maybe I’m just proposing that the roadblock doesn’t really exist. First, ownership and sponsorship are two different things – they’re just more combined under Astana than they usually are due to the Kazak national ties. Same deal with Katusha, but these sorts of state-sponsored, pseudo-Soviet arrangements aren’t really the norm. For instance, Riis Cycling owns the team known as Saxo Bank, but Saxo Bank is the sponsor, not Riis. Likewise, a company called Tailwind Sports owned the U.S. Postal and Discovery Channel teams, not the semi-public mail service or the TV channel. Just as in those arrangements, there’s really no reasonable scenario in which Livestrong itself would actually “buy the team,” which is how a lot of people seem to be imagining this deal going down. So Livestrong wouldn't actually “own” anything.

Sponsorship, on the other hand, is really just advertising by another name, and non-profits certainly advertise all the time, though they usually call it "fundraising" instead. In fact, I’ve built a small fort in my living room out of Salvation Army mailers, lashed together with Easter Seals return address labels and roofed with Children’s Hospital glossy postcards. So, Bruyneel, Armstrong, or damn near anyone else could buy out Astana’s ProTour license, contracts, and infrastructure (the “team”), and Livestrong could sign on as a sponsor.

If Livestrong just shelled out the regular “title sponsor” rate, though, it could result in a pretty ugly balance sheet for a charity, considerably lessening the ratio of dollars per charitable contribution that go directly to the root charitable purpose. That would lower the charity’s efficiency rating, which could spell disaster for donations, especially in a bad economy. So a traditional title sponsor arrangement still doesn’t seem likely, even if it is legal.

Another option is that someone, including Armstrong and/or Bruyneel, could buy the team/license, and that entity, someone else, or a group of people (people like Thom Wiesel) could sign on as the “title sponsor,” but not in the traditional sense. We usually think of a title sponsor as a company that pays to advertise its services on the team’s stuff, but really if you have a few million dollars they’ll put damn near whatever you want on there. If the Service Course gave some team (I’m thinking something in a nice second division Belgian squad) enough money, I could decide that I want them to ride around all year with one of my kid's doodles on their backs instead of my logo. And they’d like it. So this theoretical sponsor group could decide that they just happen to want the Livestrong logo on the jerseys, maybe in addition to their own logos, and Livestrong could agree to let the team use their logo for that purpose. Sort of an in-kind donation of space, if you will. Remember those little yellow bands on the Discovery Channel jerseys? Think bigger.

A third scenario is that Livestrong serves as sort of a “collecting sponsor.” The charity would have some representation on the jersey, likely in the form of its signature black and yellow color scheme and some logo placement, but it would pay little or nothing for it. Instead, it would serve as a cause umbrella to sign up sponsors like Glaxo-SmithKline, Amgen, Merck (yes, Merck, not Merckx), or other cancer treatment-related companies, like for-profit health systems or equipment manufacturers. Essentially the same thing as Team Type 1 does for diabetes.

Finally, there’s one scenario that people don’t seem to be considering – a cycling team doesn't necessarily need to be a for-profit venture, and if the Livestrong Foundation really felt the perverse, inexplicable desire to actually own a cycling team, I suppose they could go that route. Non-profit doesn’t mean volunteer, and it doesn’t even necessarily mean charity. It just means that you somehow “serve the public benefit,” and that you don’t make a profit. For instance, National Geographic is a non-profit, but over the years they’ve certainly made plenty of cash selling magazines and Jacques Cousteau TV shows and slapping that yellow square logo on damn near anything. But at the end of the year, there’s nary an extra cent to be found - they just happen to have, from what I’ve read, extremely nice lunchrooms and generous benefit packages. Make no mistake, under a non-profit scenario, Bruyneel, Contador, Leipheimer, Horner, et al would still very much be getting paid, it’s just that at the end of the year, the company that owns the team would have to have appropriately spent or reinvested all its money. That shouldn’t be too hard with a good accountant. And call me crazy, but I think that Armstrong’s foundation probably has a good enough reputation and good enough lawyers to make the case to the feds that the team should qualify as a non-profit .

Of course, I could be wrong about all of that. Maybe the new sponsor is Lego, who knows? What I’m saying is don’t write off the Livestrong thing based on one line out of the reams of rules regarding non-profits. And never underestimate the number of gaping loopholes in the tax code.

Bridging the Gap

Little light on the content here these days, eh? Well, that’s because the Daughter of the Service Course was born two weeks ago, and anyone who’s done that drill knows that newborns can really cut into your casual cycling commentary time. She and I get along just fine, though, because newborns are a lot like cyclists – they’re asleep most of the time, and when they aren’t, they’re eating, pooping, or crying about something. Kidding aside, we’re all thankful that everybody’s healthy, and we’re getting enough sleep to stay relatively sane.

At this point, there’s no way we can catch up to all that’s transpired in cycling over the last couple of weeks. But as we all know, when your team’s missed the break entirely, nothing reassures the director that you really are trying like an ill-fated, half-assed bridge attempt. So here goes…

Rebellin Lights It Up

I left a comment on Pave site right after Fleche Wallonne, wondering if Davide Rebellin’s (Diquigiovanni) latest win there would finally get him the recognition he deserved as one of the finest classics riders of his (aging, mostly retired) generation. Well, maybe it would have, except for the fact that a few days later, Rebellin’s legacy took an unfortunate turn in the other direction with the news that he lit the doping lamp for CERA after his bronze medal performance at the 2008 Olympic road race. Like Johan Museeuw, he has to be regretting his decision not to have hung up his wheels just a little bit earlier. And like Museeuw, we may be in for another “in the last years of my career…to try to remain competitive…etc., etc.” half-confession that does nothing but call the entirety of a career into further doubt. Ah, well.

Schleck Finishes on Time, Race Finishes 20 Minutes Too Late

Andy Schleck (Saxo Bank) took a really exciting win in Liege-Bastogne-Liege, or at least he would have if the race ended shortly after he made his winning move and established his gap. But it didn’t. And as much as I love L-B-L, watching Schleck cruise alone, however speedily, up that long, wide, dead steady, dead straight climb into Ans was just excruciatingly boring. L-B-L has a lot of beautiful, dramatic climbs – the Graham Watson special in Houffalize, La Redoute – but the Cȏte de Saint-Nicholas just ain’t one of them. Coupled with Frank Schleck (Saxo Bank), to hear the press tell it, single-handedly menacing an entire herd of about 35 certified Ardennes classics threats into a total stupor, it wasn’t the best finale the race has ever seen. I mean really, nobody could attack because Frankie was there? Cunego? Valverde? Anyone? Because you really weren’t going to win with Andy up the road, anyway.

Ardennes Specialists are People, Too

Despite his recent lighting of the lamp, Rebellin won a load of big races, including his legendary sweep of the Amstel Gold Race, Fleche Wallonne, and Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 2004. Yet when people talk about classics riders, he’s rarely mentioned with contemporaries like Michele Bartoli and the like. Why? I think the reason is two-fold. First, for whatever reason, Rebellin’s never gotten any respect – years of non-selection for the Italian World Championship team show that. I don’t know the guy, but I do know that some folks’ heads and mouths can rob them of opportunities their legs should have given them, and in a time when national coach Franco Ballerini was trying to build unity, Rebellin just didn’t seem to fit into the plan. So maybe Rebellin just rubs people the wrong way, but if he does, it’s never been in as public a way as some of his compatriots, like Gilberto Simoni (Diquigiovanni) or Filippo Simeoni (Ceramiche Flaminia).

The personality part of the equation is likely to remain a mystery, to non-Italian speakers at least. Besides, the second reason Rebellin isn’t regarded as a classics legend is much more broadly applicable and more important anyway: the misplaced perception that classics = cobblestones. Some classics do, of course, have plenty of cobbles, and the stones do add a certain something to the feel of the race and the legends of the men who thrive on them. But plenty of big classics are held over smooth roads as well – races like San Remo, Liege, Fleche, Amstel, Lombardy, and Paris-Tours. Despite that, it seems that unless someone wins Roubaix or Flanders, they aren’t dubbed a great classics rider, and that’s unfortunate. Sure, grand tour guys snap up some of the Liege wins, and if you win Paris-Tours or San Remo, they’ll probably still just call you a sprinter. But there has to be a place for guys like Rebellin in the classics pantheon, doesn’t there? Maybe if there were, guys who are clearly cut from the same mold as Rebellin, like Damiano Cunego, Alejandro Valverde, and Danilo Diluca, would stop chasing slim chances at grand tour wins and focus on the asphalt classics where their talents really shine. That said, they’d be stupid to ignore the financial incentive of the grand tours vs. classics equation if they have a reasonable chance of success over three weeks, so I can’t say I blame them.

Actually, It’s Three Blows

Speaking of cobbled classics, Tom Boonen (Quick.Step) has made a habit of winning them, and unfortunately, he seems to also have made a habit of knocking back some Bolivian marching powder afterwards. The news is everywhere you’d care to look, of course, including Monday’s revelation on cyclingnews.com that this is actually Boonen’s third cocaine positive, not the second. News coverage is great and all, but the week’s best contribution to the hubbub comes from this VeloNews.com article, where Lance Armstrong comments on the situation with a fantastic double entendre:

“It’s a blow for him, a blow for Quick Step, a blow for their sponsors and Belgian cycling.”

Well played, Armstrong, well played.

Pick a Winner

Hey, wait a minute! That last article we cited also noted that the Giro d'Italia has started, and admitted that there are people besides Armstrong riding it. I’ll be damned. Other than some arguably more spectacular scenery, what does the Giro have over the Tour de France? A shitload of former winners on the start line. Stefano Garzelli (2000), Gilberto Simoni (2001, 2003), Damiano Cunego (2004), Ivan Basso (2006), and Danilo Diluca (2007) are all in the mix this year. Why does the Giro seem to always have so many former winners on the line, when the Tour sometimes struggles to have even one?

The simple answer is that the last 30 or 40 years of the Tour have been dominated by a host of multiple time winners. In fact, from 1968 to 2008, only 19 men have won a Tour de France. When a few guys account for anywhere from three to seven wins within a ten year block, there just isn’t a hell of a lot of room to stack up a host of former winners on the line. Armstrong’s tenure alone saw pretty much every other active Tour winner retire or die.

The Giro’s recent history, however, has been dominated by fierce competition among the natives, hence this year’s presence of all those still active former pink jersies with surnames ending in vowels. Not all of them have a good shot at winning by any stretch of the imagination, but they all still have enough kick to make things interesting on those notorious uphill Giro finishes.

Thinking about the presence of former winners at the Giro got me wondering – does the Tour, by virtue of its status as the “premier” Grand Tour, just lend itself to dominance by standout riders more than the Giro? The answer is, in the last 40 years, as the Tour has risen to greater prominence and specialization has increased, yes. But comparing the Giro to the Tour over their histories shows less of a disparity. In 91 editions, the Giro has had 58 winners, for an average of 1.56 wins per victor. Over 95 editions, the Tour has had 56 distinct winners, for an only slightly chunkier average of 1.69 wins per victor.

Tifosi

Like a lot of people, I like the Giro because, well, it’s not the Tour. It doesn’t have that same over-scrubbed, made for television polish added to it to appeal to the uninitiated. It still manages to maintain the image that it’s about bike racing more than the “event” or the brand. The Italian fans, the tifosi, are, of course, already a legendary part of that feel, and you’ll see it again this year when the race hits the hills. But lest you think that the insanity you see at the tops of the climbs today is new, some sort of depraved reflection of the over-the-top society we live in today, watch this clip of the 1974 climb of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo.

And turn the sound on, so you can hear the thump when the motorcycle hits people.

In Soviet Russia...

Amstel Gold Race Wins You

When the Katusha cycling team, the biggest, most visible component of the “Russian Global Cycling Project,” became a reality this season, the formula looked familiar. While the team’s stated aim is to develop young talent from the home country, the Russian squad hired a healthy dose of mercenary foreign talent to keep the sponsors’ names in the papers until that young talent was sufficiently developed to provide the results on its own. Sure, the team lured some veteran Russian riders home, giving the team a little more authenticity and providing the youngsters with some native-language support and role-models, but most people expected that the first major results would come from Robbie McEwen racking up some stage wins, or Filippo Pozzato or Gert Steegmans bagging a big cobbled classic.

That’s not an indictment of the team’s methodology. Like I said, it’s a pretty standard format these days, particularly for young teams coming from outside the traditional Western European cycling nations. Think (post-Vino and Kash) Astana with Contador, Armstrong, Leipheimer, Kloden, or Garmin-Slipstream hiring Backstedt, Millar, and Wiggins. It’s also a good business strategy – by bringing in some foreign names with dependable specialties, the teams can secure the wins their sponsors demand without unduly burdening their more developmental riders with winning expectations right out of the gate. With the direction the sport is trying to take with regard to drug use, I’d call that a positive.

So Katusha set out this season looking for early wins from McEwen and Pozzato, home country interest from perennial Tour hope Vladimir Karpets, and some quality racing miles for its slew of younger riders, like Mikhail Ignatiev and Ivan Rovny. So when veteran Russian hardman Sergei Ivanov outsprinted the younger and much more fancied Karsten Kroon (Saxo Bank) to win the Amstel Gold Race, the team got something even better than it planned – the team’s first big classics win, gift-wrapped and delivered by a native Russian.

For a project that states freely and often its insidiously Cold War-esque mission of returning mother Russia to her “proper place” in the cycling world, it doesn’t get too much better than that. Yes, at just 40-plus years old, the Amstel Gold Race is no monolithic Tour of Flanders, no storied Paris-Roubaix. But for a team with Katusha’s goals, what’s better: your imported Italian playboy winning Flanders, or your Soviet-era, life-long worker Ivanov winning a pretty solid classic? I’d argue for the latter.

Race Radio

• At 34 years old, Ivanov hasn’t been a big winner over his career, and Amstel Gold is certainly his biggest trophy to date. His other wins include the 2000 E3 Prijs, stages in the 2001 Tour de France and Tour de Suisse, and stages of smaller races. He’s also a five-time Russian national champion.
  
  
• In the Service Course’s Tour of Flanders preview, I pointed out that Ivanov was one of the only riders on the Katusha roster that stood a chance of being there for Pozzato in the finale. He did the job at Flanders, and seems to have held his form pretty well since. That said, I don’t see him being a factor at Fleche Wallonne or Liege-Bastogne-Liege, where the climbs are a bit less suited to a puncher. (Full disclosure: I’ve already seen the result for Fleche Wallonne).
  
  
• The home team can’t catch a break at their home classic, can they? It’s been eight long years now since Erik Dekker’s 2001 win, and despite the presence of a second Dutch team in Skil-Shimano, it seems like Rabobank still gets to shoulder much of the blame for the drought. This year looked promising with natives Robert Gesink (Rabobank) and Karsten Kroon (Saxo Bank) both in the winning move, but you could feel the air go out of the crowd when Gesink fell back and Kroon never even reached Ivanov’s back wheel, much less came around him.
  
  
• It seems like the Dutch riders and teams should really have an advantage here – half the challenge of the Amstel Gold is not getting lost. But their true disadvantage, at least in terms of public perception, is the lack of any other top-tier events in the Netherlands. If an Italian wins Flanders, the Belgians still have Gent-Wevelgem, the Brabantse Pijl, and all those prior home semi-classics to fall back on. For the Dutch, Amstel Gold and Veenendaal-Veenendaal are pretty much the only chances for a home classic win.
  
  
• In our ongoing Silence-Lotto watch, Philippe Gilbert managed a solid fourth place at Amstel Gold. Together with fellow Walloon Christophe Brandt, Gilbert has his homecoming this week with Fleche Wallonne and Liege. Neither race suits him particularly well, but maybe homefield advantage will do more for him than it’s done for the Dutch at the Amstel Gold.
  
  
• This has nothing to do with Amstel Gold, except that they both involve Rabobank not winning, but as a cycling site, I’m mandated to address the Theo Bos (Rabobank) Tour of Turkey incident. The Service Course’s official stance is that Bos wasn’t actually trying to put out a hit on Impey. How can we say that, when it looks so intentional? Because if you’re really aiming to take someone down, dragging them across your own front wheel at 50 kph isn’t usually the way you’d choose to do it. That said, the UCI needs to at least issue a fine or moderate suspension for the simple fact that you’re not supposed to take your hands off the bars in a sprint, and I’d say within the 1 kilometer mark is close enough to a sprint. Bos is a trackie, and a big one at that – he should have been able to do all he needed to do with his head and shoulders.

The Dope Show

With news of Tyler Hamilton ringing the doping bell for a second time all over the front pages today, it seemed like a good time to drag out the dope-related piece below. Why? Because just rehashing the Hamilton saga wouldn’t be any fun, and I’m confident that any number of sources will be able to fill that void in your informational needs. But doping is going to be the topic of the day whether I like it or not, and I'm not strong enough to swim directly against that rip current. So I'm swimming sideways, just like they tell you to. Onward...

Back in January of 2008, a fellow club member (and writer for a serious, newsy publication) was looking for sources that knew the ins-and-outs of the doping world, since she’d been assigned to cover the Major League Baseball hearings on Capitol Hill. So she put the question out to our listserv. Since we travel in some overlapping circles, and I’ve never been one to resist a snarky reply, I channeled my alter ego to warn her of the dangers of what she was asking – namely, asking cyclists for nearly any sort of input on doping matters, cycling or otherwise. If she had any doubts as to the wisdom of that course, I believe the response, pasted below, cleared it right up.

I should caution you that my alter ego is not a stickler for strict presentation of “the facts,” which should never be allowed to get in the way of making a point. Also, he’s usually a little drunk.

*******************************************************

Dear Mme. [Name Withheld]-

Welcome to the dope show.

I suggest that you get in touch with your friend and mine, Mr. [Name Withheld] lately of Boulder, Colorado. He’s been sniffing around the back end of that dog since 1999, at least, and he hasn’t let it bite him yet. The astute minds of NPR call on him each July to speak on the issue, as he has a voice for radio, with a face to match, as he’d no doubt point out, ha ha, hee hee… The MLB crowd isn’t his game, but he’s likely kept up with the issues.

But before telephoning and getting down into the dirt of the assignment, I advise you to consume a minimum of one pint cheap whiskey, open all the windows and put a needle the live version of Lou Reed’s “Heroin,” preferably at maximum volume and distortion. I stress that it must be out loud and analog, at least at the output end – none of that digital file and earbud shit your generation has an affinity for.

“I’m going to try
For the kingdom, if I can
Because it makes me feel like I’m a man
When I put a spike into my vein
Aw, honey, things aren’t quite the same…”

Ah, things aren’t quite the same. Indeed. And that's the problem. Talking to lycra-clad freaks about doping in the American big leagues is a dangerous proposition. For starters, they’re so radicalized through years of cycling’s “unfair” media browbeating that their spittle-whet rants about American major league sports are nearly nonsensical. But more than that, their tirades are virtually irrelevant, as the sewer of dope regulations running beneath cycling's roads is much deeper and has far more tributaries than the shallow ditch that runs straight past the MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL headquarters and out to their ample parking lots. For that crowd, being a federally regulated monopoly has its drags, like providing health insurance and wearing a tie for congressional hearings, but strict rules against the hot sauce ain’t among them.

But not so with cycling, my friend. We have plenty of those little sticky wicket dope rules, and we did it to ourselves. Rather, Hein Verbruggen did it to us back in 1992, when the UCI reunited its FIAC (amateur) and FICP (professional) arms and wrapped them lovingly around the busty chest of the IOC in a ploy to get at the roll of cash tucked neatly into her décolletage. That clumsy groping opened the door for professional cyclists in the Olympics, that quadrennial feel-good sham that for some reason continues to intoxicate the advertisers.

And what did we get for it? The goofiest son of a bitch to ever hold a Swiss passport, geezer Pascal Richard, wins the 1996 Atlanta road race and starts an unfortunate trend by putting his remedial art skills to work designing himself a commemorative jersey. Compare that to 1992 in Barcelona, when quiet, young, and beautiful Fabio Casartelli, clad in a sponsor-free Squadra Azurri jersey, single-handedly Hindenburged the USCF-funded Lance Armstrong publicity dirigible that was floating over the NBC coverage. Armstrong got other chances, of course, but Casartelli not so much. He died way too early and way too publicly on the Portet d’Aspet, and we’re left with a Telekom Cerberus negotiating the medals on the road in Sydney 2000, Paolo Bettini riding in gold shoes, and at least one other pro race every four years guaranteed to be as fucked up as the World Championships. But that’s not the worst of it.

In exchange for sipping complimentary Coca-Cola in some luxury trailer on a humid Atlanta streetcorner, then flying off to the next round of bid cities to check out their race courses, liquors, and prostitutes, collecting as much as he could in cash and prizes along the way, Verbruggen ceded dope regulation of professional cycling to the rules of the IOC, with all the integrity that implies, and subsequently to its WADA minions. That lot and their accredited labs have joined the national cycling federations, national Olympic committees, and some attention-starved police forces and magistrates to form some sort of babel-tongued Greek chorus, chanting for heads on plates wherever they can find them. When they can’t find the plates, they settle for the heads, and then fight amongst themselves over who gets the ear and who the tongue. The rest is all written down.

But that doesn’t have anything to do with baseball. Because the professional stick-and-ball crowd has the goddamned good sense to stick to the culture they know and the rules they make and enforce themselves, instead of handing the keys to the kingdom to some Swiss milkmaid in a labcoat just to gain entry to an event their audience doesn’t give a rat’s ass about. They’ve got a good thing going, and they’re not about to screw it up by hopping in the sack with a bunch of guys in Prada sunglasses sipping thimblefuls of coffee in Lausanne cafes.

Those guys may have a lot of Euros lining their pockets, but baseball is content with the pile of greenbacks it has, an extra large from Dunkin Donuts, and getting hauled in front of a congressional panel every now and then. Why? Because they’re smart enough to know that baseball is about the pennant, the World Series, and money, not the Olympics, just like cycling is about the Tour, the Classics, and money, not the Olympics. And that you’re far better off running your own show. The Olympics are a cold-war relic more suitable for Greco-Roman wrestlers, ice dancers, and eastern-bloc gymnasts than for sports with more than a couple of bucks in hand and other things to do with them, and you’re far better off without the IOC’s hand in your particular cookie jar. But cycling failed to recognize that. Fortunately for professional baseball, it did, and its dog-and-pony hearings will go as scheduled: superficially tough questions pitched to bit players, marble-mouthed non-answers from the low seats, the ceremonial ousting of several “bad seeds,” then business as usual. Cycling used to have that luxury, but we sold it for a soft-focus interview with Bob Costas.

So anyway, yeah, call [Name Withheld]. He’s probably wondering what you’re up to anyway.

-RFN
15/01/08

Cobbled Comparisons

What’s left to write about Tom Boonen (Quick.Step) winning cobbled classics? I don’t know, really. He has the power, the skills, and the head, and he puts them together with remarkable consistently, rendering him very hard to beat. And, as we saw on Sunday, when it comes down to the sort of blunt, teamless, rider vs. rider fistfight that Paris-Roubaix tends to be, he’s very, very hard to beat.

Boonen has long since won all three of the biggest cobbled classics – 1 Gent-Wevelgem, 2 Rondes van Vlaanderen, and 3 Paris-Roubaixs – and he’s won most of the smaller races over the pavé, too. It must be those palmares, combined with his riding style and his allegiance to the teams of Patrick Lefevere, that gives people the irresistible urge to constantly compare him to Johan Museeuw. It’s a fair comparison, of course – they’re very similar riders. But when, as of yesterday, people were still posing questions like “is Boonen the next Johan Museeuw?” I just have to shake my head. It was a valid question three years ago, but now?

Let’s have a look at how they stack up win-wise in the races that are best suited to the basic characteristics that both men share. (The selection of races shown is purely at my discretion – feel free to argue about it.)

To my eye, though the numbers break out a little differently, Boonen has already at least drawn even with the retired Museeuw, though you could probably score it either way if you tried hard enough.

There’s no denying that Boonen lacks wins in some of the races Museeuw conquered, like those “classic” victories in the Zuri-Metzgete and HEW Cyclassics that Museeuw gained while chasing the old World Cup title (which he won in 1995 and 1996). But those races are far less important now, and not worth focusing on like Museeuw did in the World Cup years. In the big cobbled classics, Museeuw is still one Tour of Flanders win up on Boonen, though he lacks a Gent-Wevelgem title. The older Lion can boast an Amstel Gold win, which doesn’t seem to be on Boonen’s wish list and may be outside his abilities with the changes to the course since Museeuw's win in 1994. Museeuw also owns one Paris-Tours, which should be well within Boonen’s skill set. Museeuw and Boonen both have one World Championship title to their credit, but Museeuw also owns two Belgian national champion’s jerseys, and you have to believe that Boonen would like at least one of those. Finally, Boonen has somehow failed to yield a Het Volk/Het Niewsblad title yet, while Museeuw collected two.

So considering the above, how can I score them equal in stature? Well, two reasons. The first is that classics riders have to find something to do all summer, and that’s usually trying to bag stage wins. In that capacity, Boonen has far, far exceeded Museeuw. On the biggest stage, the Tour, he’s won six stages to Museeuw’s two, and bagged a green jersey as well. While Museeuw’s other stage wins were mostly in smaller Spanish stage races (e.g., Ruta del Sol, Tour of Valencia), the Four Days of Dunkirk, and a couple stages of the Tour de Suisse, to be fair, many of Boonen’s have been captured in ProTour stage races, including the Vuelta a Espana, Paris-Nice, the Eneco Tour, and the Tour of Belgium. And, particularly if you exclude criteriums, Boonen's overall palmares are just much longer and of higher quality.

My second reason is simpler, and involves less fuzzy math and conjecture. Museeuw retired at the age of 38, with many of his biggest victories coming after his 30th year. Boonen, on the other hand, is 28 and very much an active rider. So, in short, Boonen has reached this level of success in a far shorter time. Will Boonen's palmares soon definitively exceed those of his mentor? Almost certainly. A Milan-San Remo, Paris-Tours, and additional cobbled classics are still available if the cards fall right. The question now is how long Boonen will continue to ride – after his amazing 2005 season, he floated the idea of stopping at 30, saying he didn’t want to linger into old age. As someone over 30, I’m trying not to take offense to that, but we’ll have to see if the ensuing four years have changed his mind. After all, the job pays well, and the kid has some expensive habits…

So why, after each of Boonen’s big cobbled victories, do people continue to reflexively ask whether he “stacks up” to the legendary Museeuw? For me, the answer is simple – weather. Boonen’s Flanders and Roubaix wins have all come in pretty fair weather, and Boonen crosses the line bathed in late afternoon sunshine, teeth and jersey glowing white, maybe a little dusty. Museeuw, on the other hand, was a rain and mud magnet – just Google for pictures of his 2002 Roubaix win, and you’ll see a textbook on how to forge your legend.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not calling Boonen a fair weather rider, and I think that when the rains do return to Flanders and Roubaix, Boonen will still be there at the kill. Like Museeuw, Boonen wins hard races against hard competition and whatever nature provides. It’s just that Boonen needs to make it look harder, and for that, he needs a little cooperation from mother nature. One or two mud-encrusted Boonen wins, and the comparisons should take care of themselves. And if not, time will do it for him – everything looks harder when us older folks are doing it.

Race Radio

• Silence-Lotto finally made it into the move that mattered, putting both Leif Hoste and Johan Vansummeren into the royal breakaway that also contained Boonen, Filippo Pozzato (Katusha), Juan Antonio Flecha (Rabobank), and Thor Hushovd (Cervelo). Man, I’ve been waiting weeks to type that. Unfortunately, they got caught out a bit when Flecha elected to auger himself into the ground, but what can you do? Next step: win something. I think the Grote Scheldeprijs this week is calling their name.
  


• Pozzato may not have brought home any trophies this week, but he’s inserted himself into the list of cobbled contenders in a way that he hadn’t before. Maybe it’s his fashion choices, his manner, or his palmares, but he’s never really shouted “nails” the way a Boonen, a Van Petegem, or even any number of Flemish kermis specialists do. And though he’ll probably continue to have a better off-bike wardrobe than his competition, nobody will take him for a harmless pretty boy in the cobbled classics from here on out. Even better, the Flemish fans gave him a hell of a hard time in the finale, giving him a coating of spit and beer and closing the road down on him, and he gracefully brushed it off in the post-race interviews.
  


• Those cobble-level TV shots they like to get at Roubaix are good at showing a peloton shape that’s pretty unique to the race: the trident, formed by one line of riders coming up the crown, and one line in each gutter.
  


• Is it just me, or did the Garmin car seem to wait for George Hincapie (Columbia) to get on the bumper after his flat and awkward tire change?
  


• Speaking of George, I like him, I really do. And I know that Versus is aimed at the American audience, many of whom are familiar with Hincapie from his support of Armstrong at the Tour de France all those years. But could Versus please dial back the Hincapie love a notch or two? Call the race, make note of the local favorite and get a quote, but don’t be the cheering section.
  


• Speaking of Versus, remember last year when Phil and Paul were crowing and clucking and harumphing at every opportunity about Astana being excluded from some ASO races based on events that transpired the year before? Not so much vocalization now that Fuji-Servetto (formerly Saunier Duval) is the team getting the door slammed on them for the same sorts of issues, eh? I mean, sure, it’s not All-American Leipheimer and Horner getting screwed this year, but Ivan Dominguez is an American now. Can’t a former Cuban get a little jingo love from the home broadcaster?
  


• It wasn’t a big attack, but 2001 Roubaix winner Servais Knaven gave it a dig, anyhow. Always a team man, Knaven led Domo’s (another Lefevere team) sweep of the podium that year, getting away while everyone kept an eye on Museeuw. Romans Vainsteins (Remember him? And his rat-tail?) was third. Knaven may not be a star, but his move was the first time I remember Milram doing anything notable, or even visible, this classics season.
  


• With his third Roubaix win, Boonen enters some pretty elite company, including late model legends like Museeuw, Eddy Merckx, Francesco Moser, and Rik Van Looy, as well as old-timey heroes Octave Lapize and Gaston Rebry. Again, with time left on the clock, equaling four win record of Roger "Mr. Paris-Roubaix" DeVlaeminck doesn't seem to far out of reach, does it?
  


• My longshot predictions from Friday proved to be just that -- longshots. Manuel Quinziato (Liquigas) was able to follow the early splits, but fell out of contention come crunch time. Still a career week for him. Kevyn Ista (Agritubel) did arrive in Roubaix eventually, but at more than 17 minutes behind, he finished hors delay. At least you still get the famous shower at the end.
  
  
• Seeing some new contenders emerge this week has me looking forward to next year. With Alessandro Ballan (Lampre) and Fabian Cancellara (Saxo Bank) hopefully back from injury and illness, Pozzato possibly supported by a strengthened second-year Katusha, Thor Hushovd and Heinrich Haussler (Cervelo) improving and back for another crack, Sylvain Chavanel (Quick.Step) making things interesting for the French again, and Boonen, Stijn Devolder, and Hoste still flying the Belgian flag, it should be a vintage year.