Eight Days of Epicly Poor Branding

The Tour of California has an image problem. Mercifully, it’s nothing to with jersey zips—it’s more that the race’s marketing material is absolutely incomprehensible.

Let’s overlook the fact that “Eight Days of Epic” uses the most cored marketing term in recent memory (it’s been a joke on Archer for crying out loud)—the Tour of California is anything but. The race has struggled to find hilltop finishes that don’t end in a bunch sprints and Phil Liggett once described the peloton as “lost at sea” on the state’s enormous swathes of tarmac. There have been some interesting crashes, but beyond that, not a whole lot of drama—unless you count hockeygate.

It’s nice to have a rest day so early in this years’ Giro d’Italia, because it makes for less footage and fewer competing stories for the grueling stage race HTRWW. The tenuous creative thread running this latest piece is all over the place—linguistic, geographic, and historical anachronisms abound—but I’m too exhausted to care.

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I’d love to go into super-detail arguing about Ferrari’s sprint, and how 1) moves like that happen a lot and 2) when they do go wrong, relegation is invariably the sanction, but there really isn’t much point. Take out two of the most popular riders in the English-speaking world in front of an audience that generally sees bunch sprints in slick 8-second clips (as opposed to watching the whole run-in), and people will be calling for your head on the internet. And it’s just not worth arguing details with the fanatics.

Brad Wiggins’ performance earlier this week in the first stage of the Tour of Romandie was a rare treat for the modern cycling fan: a real Grand Tour contender duking it and taking the win in a bunch sprint.

It wasn’t in a Grand Tour, of course, and it took a couple pretty serious climbs to thin out the field, but still—watching Wiggins reach back to his trackie days to hold Liquigas’ leadout, jump from the cheap seats, and even gamely extend his twiggy little elbows in the final meters was pretty damn cool:

The last time I saw something like this, it was 2004 and the biggest race in the US was a mid-April appointment in Georgia. Taking advantage of a field thinned by some late climbs, and leaning on his unique ability to lay down power at a high cadence, Lance Armstrong made a late surge in a fast, downhill sprint. Hate the Texan all you want, but respect the skills and instinct—rest day refills almost certainly didn’t help him here:

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A little later than I like to be on these sorts of things, but what can I say–with a new corporate sponsor on board, there’s bound to be a little meddling in editorial. Also, some of you might also have noticed that I was moving around a little bit during the event itself.

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And with that, the spring is officially over. Trends that struck me across my many bleary-eyed hours of watching, re-watching, writing and editing were (aside from the obvious) the emergence of Europecar as race-makers and champions, and the sound and fury that BMC put into controlling large sections of Amstel and Liege to come away grasping and feathers in the finale.

Another new course this spring, though certainly nothing on par with Flanders’ change-up. Despite the re-worked parcours, this one unfolded sleepily, feeling at points like a Tour de France sprint stage. But comic relief at the back, some lively riding as the break wore down and an attack from a very surprising source set the stage for a fantastic finale.

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Fancy that, naming something awesome (a bike race) after your product. To think that there are still a) unbranded products and b) products advertised with banner ads—boggles the mind, does it not?

Tom Boonen powers away to win number four in an historic display of strength and commitment. The only thing to feel bad about was that we didn’t get to see Fabian Cancellara shoot it out with him. Of course, had Cance been at the start line, Omega Pharma would have doubtlessly played their cards a little differently—but no matter. Enjoy the latest How The Race Was Won video, tentatively titled “Our Cobbles, Ourselves”; it’s a bit of a creative turn, but hopefully enjoyable none the less.

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An ambiguously-branded video recap and commentary for the 2012 Tour of Flanders. Some backstory might be helpful.

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You might get another one of these this year. You also might not. The way I made this was by not sleeping last night and that’s not really sustainable. Or pleasant. Consider it a reminder of how well I can do this sort of thing now that others seem to think it’s a worthwhile idea.

If you’d be interested in bankrolling the production of similar videos in exchange for promotional consideration, I am all ears.

Boonen didn't perform well in the national colors / Cindy Trossaert, cc-by-nc

In 2005, Tom Boonen’s ascendancy was nothing short of meteoric, and his failure to maintain that level of success since has prompted no shortage of discussion. While I was one of the first to suggest that the Belgian might just be the first of a new generation rather than the next Merckx, I’ve also been pretty stalwart in Tommeke’s defense. Few riders with his palmares have ever had to endure quite as much criticism, and fewer still have been able to bounce back with such aplomb.

There have been plenty pieces chronicling Boonen’s return this year, but few have really focused what I see as the key difference in his performances—the dude seems utterly relaxed. When Boonen broke loose with Vanmarcke and Flecha at this year’s Het Nieuwsblad, it echoed a tactic that’s been hauntingly unsuccessful for him over the past half-decade—a powerful move over a berg that slices off a select group, followed by a painful loss in a three-up final kilometer battle.

I think I may have surprised some people by not flying into an Internet rage yesterday when VeloNews launched a familiar-looking video feature with a not entirely unique name.

In happier times.

My magnanimous response not withstanding, I should clarify that I’m not psyched about the development. Indeed, there was a time when I would have let fly the dogs of Internet War over such a slight—and that time was two years ago. I lived in Boston, had my own apartment, could pedal office-to-doorstep in about 20 minutes, got paid enough to buy decent computer hardware, and could reliably turn out sharply-edited video recaps of European bike races 24-48 hours after they wrapped up.

Maurizio Fondreist disregards fairness
on the Poggio / Max Nicolodi, cc-by

For a guy who made obsessing over aerodynamics and other tech geek foibles into the development and marketing norm in the sport, Gerard Vroomen is surprisingly attuned to the sloppy, cut-and-run realities of professional bike racing.

After some muttering from fans following Sanremo, and some atypically direct criticism of RadioShack by Philippe Gilbert, Vroomen put together a nice little blog post on how “negative racing” is actually “bike racing”, and that pretty much everyone involved knows the score. It’s about trying to matching your strengths with your opponents weaknesses.