On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 7/1/2002
Americans in Paris--a rhapsody in red, white, and blue
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| Winner of the Dauphine Libere cycling race, U.S. cyclist Lance Armstrong, rides in the pack during the last stage Morzine-Avoriaz to Geneva, in Geneva, Switzerland, in this June 16, 2002, file photo. Armstrong's bid for a fourth straight Tour de France title is already off to a good start. He feels stronger than ever, he knows the terrain, and his main rival was sidelined with injury weeks ago. But that doesn't mean the Texan is getting complacent about cycling's toughest event, which begins July 6. "Anything can happen. I can lose form, or have an accident,'' Armstrong said. ``I'm optimistic, but there are no guarantees." (AP Photo/KEYSTONE, Laurent Gillieron, File) |
This is a great time to be an American fan of bicycle racing. Never before have there been so many US riders doing so well at the highest level of competition, in the European arena....the big leagues. As we approach the pinnacle of the cycling season--the Tour de France--the homeboys are everywhere.
Well.... Okay, no, maybe they’re not everywhere, but wherever they are, they get our attention. Americans still make up a tiny percentage of the population of professional racers in Europe. Biking in general and bike racing in particular are still very much niche activities in this country, so there aren’t thousands of young riders feeding into the junior programs and amateur racing scene that would, over time, crank out dozens or hundreds of quality pros, either for domestic races or for export to Europe. And then, living and racing in Europe is still a daunting challenge for athletes from this side of the pond. The language, the food, just the general culture shock take a toll. (All of that set against a grueling schedule of training and racing that would be exhausting under the best of circumstances.) It’s probably easier for a top-level star, who gets a certain amount of red carpet coddling, but for the rank-and-file domestique, it’s a hard and lonely grind.
So what we end up with is a fairly brutal winnowing process that sorts out the average or slightly above average racers from the really good ones. If an American is going to make it in the Euro pro peloton, he had better be good and he had better be tough. Those who survive usually have what it takes to be stars of the first rank. The result is that while we don’t see hundreds of American pros working in secondary roles on second tier teams, we do see an increasingly large handful of really good riders in leading roles on a wide variety of top teams.
Just a few years ago, almost the only Americans we saw in the big European races were concentrated on one US team, first sponsored by 7-11, then Motorola, and now USPS. (Greg Lemond is the most notable exception to this, but then, he has always been exceptional in this and many other ways.) That usually meant that all the riders on the team had to work for one team leader, so very few individuals were actually given the opportunity of winning and becoming stars in their own right. Now we see the US riders dispersed throughout the Euro teams. Many of the current crop of elite riders did come to Europe as worker bees on the US Postal team, but one by one, they have found opportunities to rise to leadership roles elsewhere, so that we now have a situation where several American riders have legimate expectations of winning big races. We’re faced with the happy problem of having to not simply root, root, root for the home team, but of having to choose our favorites from among a growing cast of potential winners. An embarrassment of riches.
Any role call of Americans in Paris has to start with Lance Armstrong, at present a colossus bestriding his world. He has won the last three Tours in dominating fashion, and he has just completed a powerful run-up to this year’s Tour by winning both Midi Libre and Dauphiné Libéré, the two most important Tour prep stage races in France. Before now, only Eddie Merckx had ever won both those events in the same year. Last year, Armstrong sharpened his claws for the Tour by winning the Tour de Suisse. Before Armstrong, only Merckx had won the Swiss and French tours back to back. Very good company indeed.
Armstrong is fit, confident, and relaxed, and his US Postal team is perhaps as strong as it has ever been this year. A small measure of that dominance is indicated by the fact that his previously unheralded young teammate Floyd Landis finished a strong second to Armstrong at the Dauphiné, while Armstrong’s teammate Roberto Heras, leading another batch of Postal riders, won another major TdF tune-up, the Volta a Catalunya. (There are three significant mini-stage races leading up to the Tour: the Tour of Switzerland, the Dauphiné and the Volta. US Postal won two out of three of them this year. There are two other short stage races ranked just below these three for Tour prep: Midi Libre and Route du Sud. Armstrong won Midi Libre, and more about Route du Sud later.) I make no predictions here about how Armstong will do in the Tour this month, but if you listen to the comments of other riders and their Directeurs Sportif, you realize all of them consider him a lock to win a fourth consecutive Tour unless he’s a victim of some unpredictable catastrophe, such as a crash or a highly unlikely jour sans.
Then there’s Tyler Hamilton, who recently finished second at the Giro d’Italia, despite riding from the fifth stage on with a broken shoulder....an incredibly gutsy performance. (He went over the bars when his chain snapped and broke the shoulder. Then, the next day, several riders went down ahead of him and took him down, and he landed on the same shoulder again. Without the injury, he might easily have won, and just to have finished the Giro at all, let alone to have stayed in contention until the final day, is truly heroic stuff, and the Italian fans loved him for it.)
Hamilton rode for years for the Posties as one of Armstrong’s top lieutenants, but now he’s moved on to be the leader of CSC Tiscali. Rather than riding in a support role for someone else, he is now the one around whom the team is built, for whom the domestiques do the fetching and carrying and for whom other lieutenants do the lead-outs. In the Giro, he was the acknowledged team leader, but in the Tour, he will be co-leader with Laurent Jalabert, and it will be very intriguing to see how that plays out: who supports whom. On paper, Hamilton has the better shot at winning the overall, at least if his shoulder has mended well. He’s at least the equal of Jaja in the hills and a better time trial rider. But this is France, and Jalabert is one of France’s best hopes for glory. We shall see.
Another ex-Postal lieutenant now in a team leader role is Santa Rosa’s own Levi Leipheimer, currently on the Dutch Rabobank squad. Last year, riding for USPS, he rose to prominence by finishing third in the Vuelta a España, bumping his own team leader--the defending Vuelta champion, Roberto Heras--off the podium. Talk about intriguing! Heras had worked hard to support Armstrong in the Tour, with the understanding that the Postal team would support him in the Vuelta, his home tour. In fact, Leipheimer did support him, sacrificing his own rides to work for Heras in the mountains. But Leipheimer was so strong in the time trials--of which there were four--that he leapfrogged his boss in the final standings. Team orders don’t count for much in time trials. You just ride hard and let the clock tell the truth. Although Heras has no one but himself to blame for not having been faster, he was still more than a little miffed at what he perceived to be a failure of the quid pro quo, and while I’ve never read any public comment from the team on the matter, it seems obvious that Heras felt there wasn’t room for both of them on the same team anymore.
Fortunately, Levi signed on with Rabobank, another powerful team that was looking for a stong all-rounder to contest the big stage races. Dutch star Erik Dekker has been the Rabobank leader in recent years, but while he has demonstrated a remarkable ability to win individual Tour stages, few imagine he can win it all, whereas Leipheimer just might. Levi has had a rather quiet spring, with respectable showings in the Tour de Romandie and Tour de Luxembourg (8th overall), but nothing really sensational. But an acquaintance of mine--who had dinner with Levi while he was home in Santa Rosa recently--told me Levi claims to be right where he wants to be with his spring training, and is now ready to ramp up to the Tour. Sure enough, right on schedule, he won last week’s Route du Sud, another of the prestigious mini-stage races used as a launching pad for the Tour. And he did it the same way he moved up at the Vuelta: by clobbering the snot out of everyone else in the time trial. The mighty Team Telekom of Germany has two US riders operating as top lieutenants for Jan Ulrich: Kevin Livingston and Bobby Julich. But now Ulrich is out of the Tour with a bum knee, so who will be their team leader? (The team always works for Eric Zabel in the sprints, but will they work hard for anyone for the GC?) Both of these riders have shown flashes of brilliance in the past and the promise of big things to come, but neither has done anything too spectacular this year. They performed moderately well in the Tour de Suisse, includidng an impressive second place for Julich in the final 34-km time trial, but both ended up behind their German teammate Rolf Aldag in the general classification. Without Ulrich as the clear team leader, it remains to be seen what the team’s strategy will be in the Tour, but in all likelihood, all three of them will be working for Alexandre Vinokourov.
Jonathon Vaughters is yet another former USPS trooper now well placed with another team, Credit Agricole. Like Julich and Livingston, he has teased us with little snippets of good form, but has not really risen to the highest level yet. All three of these very good riders have--based on past performances--the same arsenal of weapons that Armstrong, Hamilton, and Leipheimer do: they have shown impressive strength in both the big climbs and in the races against the clock. It’s amost certain that Vaughters will be expected to ride in support of his team leader Christophe Moreau of France, one of the few French riders with even an outside shot at winning the Tour. Only if Moreau tanks big time would Vaughters be let off the leash to ride his own race.
Other notable US pros in Europe:
George Hincapie has remained at US Postal as the right hand man of Armstrong, and his team has rewarded him by supporting him in some of the races in which he excells, the one-day spring classics. He is considered one of the best of that fraternity of hard boys who slog it out in the cold and wet of the classics. His palmares include impressive wins in 2001 at the San Francisco Grand Prix and at Gent-Wevelgem, and several more top five finishes. Although he is an excellent sprinter, it is unlikely that he will be allowed to mix it up in the big field sprints of the Tour. He is too valuable as a workhorse for Armstrong to run the risk of losing him to a crash in the mahem of a mass sprint.
Fred Rodriguez, now riding for Domo-Farm Frites, has been making a name for himself in essentially the same bullring as Hincapie: the long, hard classics that end in knock-down, drag-out field sprints. In two of this year’s major spring classics, he finished second to the great Italian sprinter Mario Cipollini, at Milano-San Remo and at Gent-Wevelgem (where Hincapie was third).
While tough sprinters like Hincapie and Rodriguez may win one day classics or single stages of tours, their talents are unlikely to gain them wins in major stage races. Being strong in both the mountains and the time trials are the twin keys to winning stage races. Armstrong, Hamilton, and Leipheimer are all among the best at both disciplines. In theory, each of them has the tools needed to win big events. We already know this to be true with respect to Armstrong, and we are just coming to see that potential with the other two. And who knows? Perhaps a Julich or Livingston or Vaughters will find the right moment to rocket to glory on this year’s Tour. It’s not impossible.
I hear bike race fans chatting in the bike shops or on rides, saying things like, “We could see an all-American podium in Paris!” Far-fetched? Maybe, but then again, maybe not. I won’t suggest it’s going to happen, but just the fact that we can talk about it without it sounding completely absurd is a testament to how far we have come with the caliber of the US pros in Europe. For now, let’s all sit back and watch what magic, mishaps, and miracles occur in the miles between here and Paris.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net