On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 8/1/2010
Monday Morning Tour de Francing
If this is August, it must be time for a Tour de France rehash (2010 edition)…the cyclist's version of Monday morning quarterbacking. As is the case each year with these looks back at the past three weeks of racing, I am assuming you already know the results and probably a good deal more than just those bare-bones facts. You probably watched the stages on Versus and may have read the reports on VeloNews or CyclingNews. So I'm not going to attempt any sort of conventional report on what happened. Instead, this will be a bit like hanging out at the water cooler and kicking around impressions with your pals, or doing the same on a ride.
So let's get right after it with the main course: the battle between Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck. When all the dust had settled, these two were off the front, on their own. Everyone else was racing for third place. In the end, Contador won by :39, the fourth closest finish in Tour de France history. (Interestingly, the second closest finish ever also goes to Contador: his 2007 margin of :23 over Cadel Evans and :31 over Levi Leipheimer.) Clearly, these close finishes support Armstrong’s old maxim that every second counts. This year in particular, the parsing of a few seconds is critical to the narrative.
To recap how the two chief protagonists swapped their few precious seconds around, we have to go right back to the beginning of the Tour. Here's a quick thumbnail of all the stages where the gaps between the two of them change…
Prologue: as most had predicted, Schleck stinks up the joint in this first time trial, losing :42 to Contador in just 8.9 K. That's almost five seconds per kilometer. (Hold that thought.)
Stage 2: Schleck crashes three times, most severely on the Col de Stockeu (along with many others), but his teammate Cancellara manages to neutralize the stage at the end. Everyone waits, allowing Andy to get back on. No time change.
Stage 3: many more crashes on the cobblestones of Belgium create havoc throughout the field, including Andy's brother Frank crashing out with a broken collarbone. Contador is caught up in the crashes and loses time. Another rider runs into his rear wheel, breaking one of Contador’s spokes. He rides the last few kilometers with an out-of-true wheel rubbing on his brake. (No time for a bike change.) Meanwhile, Andy Schleck has come out of the cobbles unscathed and at the front of the field. Paced by super-domestique Cancellara, they don't wait for any of the assorted victims of the cobbles crashes. Schleck gains 1:13 on Contador and ends up leading him by :31.
Stage 8: on the final climb to Morzine-Avoriaz, Schleck launches a modest attack, very late. Only Sammy Sanchez stays with Schleck. Contador is gapped just a bit and loses :10. So, as they hit the first rest day, Schleck leads Contador by :41.
Stage 9: Schleck and Contador finish together, so no change in their positions, relative to one another. But on the massive Col de la Madeleine, they dispense with enough of the other contenders that Schleck takes the maillot jaune as leader.
Stage 12: on the short but steep wall at the end of the stage into Mende, Contador attacks and gains back :10 on Schleck. Schleck's lead is trimmed to :31.
Stage 14: on the final climb to Ax-3 Domaines, Schleck and Contador finish together, but while they're marking one another, they allow 3rd-place Sammy Sanchez and 4th-place Denis Menchov to sneak off and gain :14. While it's true that Schleck and Contador are the two real "heads of state" at this year’s Tour, Sanchez and Menchov are hanging around, complicating the issue. After this stage, Sanchez is only 2:00 behind Contador…too close to be ignored…
Stage 15: this proves to be the pivotal stage and the one cycling fans will be discussing for years. To set the scene: there is a long, final ascent of HC Port de Bales, followed by a 21.5-K descent to the finish. Thanks to the hard tempo set by Schleck's Saxo Bank teammates, the lead group is reduced to just a handful near the summit of the climb. With two kilometers to the top, Schleck launches the most aggressive attack yet, opening a gap on everyone else. However, just as he’s getting into full rocket mode, he jams or drops his chain. He has to dismount and fiddle with it for a few painful seconds before remounting. Meanwhile, those few remaining lead riders, all of whom had gone code red when he attacked, race past him. No one waits. Sanchez, Menchov, and Contador go over the summit :13 ahead of Schleck. At this point, he still has the yellow jersey, but he's not a great descender and the three guys ahead are pouring on the coal. Poor Andy: in spite of turning himself inside out on the run to the finish, the gap eventually grows to :39 and Contador takes the lead by :08.
Vast quantities of ink and air space have already been devoted to second-guessing this moment. I'll add my little stick to the bonfire. As most fans know, there is an unwritten gentleman's understanding in bicycle racing that you don't take advantage of another rider when he has a mechanical or a crash. We have all seen many instances of great sportsmanship where this was put in practice. Armstrong waiting for Ullrich when he crashed. Hamilton, Ullrich, et al waiting for Armstrong and Mayo in the famous musette tumble. On the other hand, any student of racing can also recall many cases where the leaders did not wait for the unfortunate ones. Almost every time a rider is left behind in such circumstances, someone cries foul and claims the traditional gentleman's agreement has been tarnished.
But bike racing, like life, is never simple. What might seem easy to analyze afterward, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, might have been confusing and complex in the crazy scrum of battle. Contador benefited from Schleck's mechanical. Afterward, after he was booed on the podium, he realized his victory came with some heavy baggage. He did his best to spin it in his favor. He apologized to his friend Andy (on Facebook). He claimed that in the heat of the moment, up on Port de Bales, he didn't understand what had happened to Schleck. Further, he had Sanchez and Menchov to deal with, and they were both attacking. Replays and photos appear to show that Contador should have been able to see at least the general nature of Schleck's problem. He had enough time and a clear view of it to be able to grasp it. But okay, let's let that one go. It had to be chaotic there, in the midst of the roaring crowd, with all hell breaking loose on all sides. He can be forgiven for not immediately apprehending the situation and sitting up to wait. Ditto for Menchov and Sanchez.
However, the two kilometers to the summit are not where the jersey changed hands. That happened on the 21+ kilometer downhill to the finish. Over that span, all three of the leaders shared the work load, and work they did. All three of them had to know by then that Schleck had suffered a costly mechanical. Their team cars would have conveyed that information to them by radio (at least we must assume so). And yet all three continued to hammer their brains out, all the way to the line. All three were taking hard, intense pulls, working together. Schleck never had a chance.
Contador benefited, but he also paid a price for it. Racing fans will forever remember this moment and its taint of poor sportsmanship. But I hold Menchov and Sanchez equally culpable. Once they knew what had happened, they should have soft-pedaled and waited for Schleck, but they didn't. Those two were the instigators. Contador is correct in saying that he couldn't ignore them and let them go. As long as they were attacking, he had to cover them. However, he could have simply sat on the back of them, as his teammate Vinokourov was doing with Schleck. But he didn't just sit on. He took his pulls along with the others. To me, that is the factor that gives me pause; that does, in the end, leave a slightly unpleasant aftertaste about this whole affair. But we must also recall that Schleck and the other leaders did not wait for Contador (or anyone else) after the mayhem on the Belgian cobbles, where Schleck took 1:13 from Contador. Different stage, different circumstances, but some of the same gentleman's agreement might have applied. At the urging of Cancellara, the leaders had waited for Schleck on Stage 2, but Schleck and Cancellara did not wait for anyone else on Stage 3. I recall--vaguely--another TdF stage on cobbles a few years back where riders were left behind after coming to grief on the stones. I suppose the justification in both these cases is, if you can't handle riding on cobbles, then you deserve to be dropped. But Contador was handling the cobbles just fine when he was hobbled by some other rider's gaffe. The bottom line is that the so-called gentleman's agreement is very much a situational ethic. Sometimes it is applied and sometimes it is ignored.
So Contador took :39 from Schleck. Amidst all the "should-he-have-waited?" questions, fans and analysts said: well, Contador is going to clobber Schleck in the final time trial anyway, and the final margin of victory is going to be way more than :39, so all this hand-wringing won't end up mattering after all. (Hold that thought too.) Back to the stages…
Stage 17: in a fit of pique and frustration after Chain-gate on Stage 15, Schleck vows to take his revenge on the ultimate mountaintop finish: Col de Tourmalet on Stage 17. Doesn't happen. The two top dogs take a few runs at each other on the huge ascent, but neither can get clear. They end up crossing the line together. Schleck gets the victory, but no seconds change hands. Advantage to Contador at :08.
Stage 19: the one full-size time trial of the Tour: 52 K. The race of truth. On a flat and rolling course, buffeted by head and cross winds, which should have been pure misery for Schleck, he actually does much better than anyone expected. Meanwhile, Contador is turning in a rather lackluster time trial. (Both of them were well off the pace of the fastest finishers.) Schleck even leads Contador at the first time check, but eventually concedes :31 seconds, meaning the final margin between the two is :39. Yes, the exact same :39 seconds Contador took off of Schleck in the pivotal dropped-chain debacle on Stage 15. In other words, had Contador, Menchov, and Sanchez waited for Schleck on that day, as many people think they should have, and had nothing else happened differently, the two leaders would have finished the entire Tour in a dead heat.
I'm not sure what would happen then. Perhaps the time trial results would be factored out into fractions of seconds to determine the winner. Perhaps, without the chain deal, and with the two of them arriving at the Tourmalet with Schleck still holding onto his :31 lead, Contador would have dug a little deeper to claw back some of those seconds. He did make one rather frisky attack, which Schleck covered easily, but he (Contador) didn't have to attack. He was ahead. All he had to do was mark Schleck and wait for the time trial. Who knows what he might have done had he been behind?
Such a close margin of victory leaves all of us race fans a bit breathless. We are left to ponder over all the little things. For instance, what if Schleck had done as well in the Prologue as he did in the final time trial? In the big ITT, he lost :31 over 52 kilometers, or .59 seconds per K. Had he ridden at that pace in the Prologue, he would have only lost :05 that day instead of :42 …a savings of :37. Had he railed his chain back on the first time he tried on Port de Bales--instead of fumbling with it for awhile--he would have saved several seconds and probably could have bridged back up to Contador, Menchov, and Sanchez. And so on. You think Andy's not lying awake at night right now, thinking about all those little what-ifs? If he is, he had better also remember not waiting for Contador on the cobbles of Stage 3.
So much for the front of the race. I'd like to touch on a few other little items from the big dance before wrapping this up.
First off, two things: crashes and rain. This is just a general observation about being a pro racer, and how they're different from the rest of us recreational cyclists. I will ride in the rain if I have to, at least if I get caught out in it. If it's raining at the start, forget it. I don't need it. Change of plans. I'll stay home today and do something else. But the pros ride in the rain all the time, even in snow now and then, and most of the time, they seem to do it without even putting on rain jackets or arm warmers or long tights or long-fingered gloves…all those extra layers we reach for at the first sight of a dark cloud. Okay, yeah, sometimes they do put on the layers, but most of the time they just keep slogging along, with bare arms and no vests or jackets, no knee warmers and so forth, hour after hour. One or two hours in the rain will reduce me to a state of abject misery. I have to assume the pros must be miserable too. You'll hear them talk about it afterward. But they don't quit. Okay, they do, sometimes. Andy Hampsten's famous Gavia stage comes to mind. But most of the time, they keep on keeping on. They have a job to do. They're not paid to quit.
It's the same with crashes. Have you ever seen more crashes than there were at this year's Tour? I don't know if there are more crashes in races these days than in some previous epoch of bike racing. Some people seem to think there are. All I know is that almost everyone in the Tour this year was on the ground at some point, and a lot of riders crashed more than once. Some crashed more than once in the same day, like Lance Armstrong on Stage 8 or Andy Schleck on Stage 2. And yet only 27 riders out of the original field of 197 failed to finish the Tour. A few went out for non-crash reasons, like Mark Renshaw, the human cannonball. But most of the withdrawals were for serious injuries. Broken bones too serious to continue riding. Tyler Farrar tried to carry on after breaking a wrist, but couldn't handle the pain. Cadel Evans rode almost the entire tour with a fractured elbow. Almost everyone was sporting those white gauze wraps to cover some road rash. Jens Voigt fell at 40 mph on Stage 16 and claimed to have scraped up almost every inch of his body, but he still soldiered on to Paris. Sammy Sanchez fell badly on the all-important Stage 17 but got back on the bike and, after getting back to the group, performed very well on the big Tourmalet climb. (By the way, Alberto Contador organized the slow-down of the peloton when he learned of Sammy's crash, a very different reaction from him than on Stage 15, when Schleck was in trouble.)
Most of the time, when we crash, we get back on the bike. But it often hurts like hell, and it can be a terrific blow to our systems, leaving us pretty beat up, both physically and psychologically. Moreover, it hurts even worse the next day, after the shock and adrenalin have worn off and the wounds have stiffened up. Most of the time, after one of our infrequent crashes, we grant ourselves a few days off, to let our wounds heal. But not the pros. They come back, day after day, with any number of scrapes and contusions and sutures and even fractures, and keep hammering away at the hardest race in the world. Any bonehead sports fan who thinks football players are tough guys and bike racers are sissies ought to be made to do what these road warriors do for a living.
Now then, after the Alberto and Andy Show, what about the other contenders? Whatever happened to the rest of the big dawgs? Before the tour, I made some predictions on our club chat list. I said Contador was the favorite…that it was his tour to lose. That was a pretty safe bet. I listed a few others who I thought would make up the A-list of top contenders (in no particular order): both Schlecks, Ivan Basso, Denis Menchov, Levi Leipheimer, Andreas Klöden, Alexandre Vinokourov, Christian Vandeveld, Roman Kruezinger, Cadel Evans, Carlos Sastre, Sammy Sanchez, Luis Sanchez. And of course Lance, although I didn't expect much of him. All of that was fairly safe. I also stated that Radio Shack had the strongest team and that the Astana and BMC teams were suspect. So how did my predictions play out?
I was correct that BMC would be weak. Where was George Hincapie? He was going to be the difference for Cadel, for improving on his 5th place at the Giro. He was effectively invisible, even in his stars-and-stripes jersey. Astana's boys, on the other hand, were stalwarts, chugging along at the front, grinding out a brutal tempo on most of the climbs. Vinokourov was his usual loose-cannon self, but the rest of them were solid.
Surprisingly--to me at least--Radio Shack was not that strong at the front of the field, although they did win the team prize. Maybe it was because they never had a dominant team leader to work for. Lance was out of it early and Levi was steady but unspectacular, buried in the middle of the top ten. So they never had to take a leading role in controlling the race. But I wonder how well they would have done if they had been called upon to take a leading role. Radio Shack riders I expected to see near the front on the long climbs were often seen dropping off the back very early. Popovych, Brajkovic, Paulinho, Klöden…all faded fast. Hats off though to Chris Horner, the aging workhorse from Bend, Oregon. Whoever would have predicted that he would make the top ten and be the highest placed American in the Tour? And he did it while working as a grunt for the team…usually the only RadioShacker still hanging around with Levi in the high mountains.
Levi's Tour is a bit of a mystery for me. He was there, most of the time, doing what he usually does: hanging on for dear life on the long climbs; never having enough to attack, but good enough to hang in there, so that he was in 7th place after 16 stages, just a few seconds out of 6th. Then on the big, bad Tourmalet climb, he lost a whopping 8:59, dropping from 7th to 13th. I have been digging all over the internet and talking with others about this, trying to figure out what caused this sudden meltdown. The Radio Shack site referred to an "ailing Leipheimer" on that stage but didn't specify what was ailing him. Someone I talked to said they saw a tweet about a bug working its way through the team. Whatever it was, it didn't adversely affect him for long. He put in a respectable time trial on Stage 19, :16 behind Contador and :15 ahead of Schleck. Third among the top contenders. Had he not tanked on the Tourmalet, two days earlier, he would have easily moved ahead of Robert Gesink into 6th on final GC.
Frank Schleck and Christian Vandeveld both crashed out. We could almost say the same for Lance Armstrong. He made it to Paris, but his three crashes on the first real mountain stage gave him the excuse he needed to dial it back and concede defeat gracefully. (To his credit, he was graceful and gracious throughout this swan song tour, especially with the doping investigation looming in the background. I never thought he should have come out of retirement in the first place, but having done so, I have to admit he handled it pretty well, with a fair degree of class.)
Cadel Evans and Ivan Basso are the poster boys for the Tale of Two Tours. Both of them performed well at the Giro d'Italia in May, and both apparently paid the price for that at the Tour de France. As the stages ground along, they grew more and more fatigued. At the end, all they were trying to do was make it to Paris with dignity intact. Admittedly, Evans also had the minor complication of that fractured elbow, which nagged him throughout. But it was the double dipping of Grand Tours that really fried these guys. Eight of the top 20 from the Giro entered the Tour. Here is a list of their names, with their finishing places in both tours: Basso (1/32), Evans (5/26), Vinokourov (6/16), Sastre (8/20), Damiano Cunego (11/29), John Gadret (13/19), Vladimir Karpets (14/DNF), and Linus Gerdeman (16/84). None of them improved their position and most did much worse. More telling is the performance of some of them in that final time trial. Out of 170 riders, Basso finished 145th, Cunego 162nd, Evans 166th, and Gadret 170th…dead last. These are people who can crank out some pretty snappy time trials when they're on their game. Evans and Gadret were 2nd and 3rd in one of the Giro TT's this year, for instance. It is often said that you can't do well in both the Giro and the Tour anymore. These numbers appear to bear that out, at least for another year.
Of my other pre-race faves, the big winners were Denis Menchov, 3rd, Sammy Sanchez, 4th, and Roman Kruezinger, 9th. Luis Sanchez did well too in 11th. Menchov has to be the most unheralded, underrated star in the cycling firmament. He has won both the Giro and the Vuelta (twice) and has finished on the podium at the TdF (twice). And yet you hardly ever hear his name mentioned as a favorite before or during a big race. He can time trial with the best of them and can hang tough in the mountains. It seems as if he's been around forever, but he's only 32. He has already accomplished a great deal in his career and could do a great deal more.
There are always some big surprises in the top ten. Two years ago it was Christian Vandeveld in 4th. Last year it was Bradley Wiggins in 4th. This year's eye-openers were Jurgen Van Den Broeck, 5th, and Ryder Hesjedal, 7th. Van Den Broeck was 15th last year, so maybe this isn't such a big leap, but even a Flemish friend of mine--who knows all the Flemish riders--was puzzled about his performance. Canadian Hesjedal was let off his domestique leash when both his team leaders--Vandeveld and Farrar--crashed out, and he made the most of that freedom. I had no idea he could climb like that. He was 4th on the monster Tourmalet climb, showing he still had good legs at the end of the Tour. Garmin-Slipstream may have to rethink their team leader roles for next year.
Finally…chapeau! to Alessandro Pettachi for winning the sprinter's jersey. Years ago, he was the most dominant sprinter in the game, but he never made it past the mountains in the Tour. This year, in the twilight of his career, he managed to do enough to win the green jersey. He has always been one of my favorite sprinters, mostly because he never seems to indulge in the bully-boy crap that some other sprinters like to do. I'm glad to see him win as a sort of lifetime achievement award, and also because it kept the unlovable Mark Cavendish from winning, at least for this year.
Okay then…enough! Another wonderful Tour de France in the can. Another feast of great racing, with a little spice of controversy thrown in. Can't wait for next year!
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net