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.

And to use what appears to be the image of Mario Cipollini? While Cipo’ may have had his share of deep-dug, gritty wins, the man spent his career cultivating his image as an effortless winner who abhorred suffering: being literally towed to the start line in a chariot, flamboyant wardrobe changes up to three times a day at press events—heck, in 2003, Domina Vacanze bought his entire team to use the Italian’s reputation for getting in the beach time in their advertising. To grit him up and label him “epic” is almost insulting.

I won’t deny that there was a time when the ToC could have branded itself like this (and did). At its inception, the race was an early-season tune-up, complete with miserable early-season weather. But it offered riders way to suffer through the rust, torch those last few pounds, and get in some valuable race miles, all with the creature comforts of wide American roads, reasonably well-equipped, American-sized hotel rooms each evening, and the support of racing-starved American fans.

This isn’t to say that the Wellie-clad fanbase lining the bergs and cobbles in Belgium each spring is any less enthusiastic than its American counterpart, but yo-yoing at the back of a lined out field and trying not to swallow too much pig dung while fully-tuned classics specialists trade haymakers appeals to a relatively small segment of the peloton. The first Tours of California offered suffering, but on a much more sensible scale for anyone seeking peak fitness in July.

But the fact is, the Tour of Cali is no longer a boots-and-rain-cape affair. After a few rainy seasons, the race has grown up, taking a mid-season place in the cycling calendar where it fills a vital niche rebooting the campaigns of weather-beaten classics riders coming off rest, and providing a vital step in the training of Tour contenders who don’t want the full-on physical beatdown of the Giro. It’s a warm-weather, safe, comfortable retool, and—without intending the slightest disrespect—it’s about as non-epic as you can get.

And frankly, going whole-hog on that “glamor race” branding would be a perfect fit. It’s California, after all—land of movie stars, palm trees, sunny days, and legislative indulgence. I’m not denying that there are some awesome stages planned for this year’s race, or that there’s no glory in winning them. But no one with their eye on the Champs Elysees is going to make a redline effort to secure the Tour of California title.

Riding for Frodo, apparently.

I suppose the website banners and the San Jose poster almost have a sense of what I’m getting at; though the gleam-and-gradient on the lettering is a little more Las Vegas than Los Angeles, there’s at least some attempt to portray glamor. But the rest of the poster—a bunched peloton riding through a landscape that looks more like Mount Doom than the Pacific Coast Highway, falls back into the “epic” trap.

All that said, I do understand what the ToC organizers are going for with their “Eight Days of Epic”. But the fact is, it still doesn’t quite work. It’s a half-measure. And it doesn’t have quite enough mass appeal for the passive fan. So I’ve whipped up a little something that should snag the eyeballs they’re targeting with aplomb, all while trying to maintain the questionably-intended imagery they’ve chosen for themselves.

Related posts:

1. The 2011 Cycling Broadcast Media Challenge
2. 1987 Tour de Suisse
3. Has The 2011 Tour de France Really Been More Dangerous?

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download]

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.

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – 2009 Giro d’Italia Stages 3-6
2. Amstel Gold 2012 – How The Race Was Won
3. 2012 Paris-Roubaix – How The Race Was Won

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:

Embedded from Cyclocosmblr using Embeddlr
(Don’t have Flash? Click here!)

For all its current novelty, the sight used to be much more common. Eddy Merckx was a frequent contender and winner in bunch sprint stages, and as recently as the 1980s, Bernard Hinault made it something of a tradition to battle with the sprinters on the Champs Elysees. The Badger barely missed out in Paris at the end of his final Tour win in 1985, and scored convincing yellow-clad wins in 1979 and 1982:

If you’re a retro-grouch, you’ll call it the death of panache, and if you’re a techno-geek, you’ll chalk it up to modern training and equipment allowing cyclists to become more specialized. While a few modern GC contenders—Danilo DiLuca and Alejandro Valverde come to mind—have managed to regularly produce a mean finishing kick, unless El Imbatido can show me something different this summer, I’m inclined to say that both their stints as Grand Tour riders were more triumphs of biochemistry than multi-disciplinary focus.

But I’m guessing the main driver for the decline in overlapping ability is economic. When salaries were low and riders needed off-season jobs, they didn’t really get to train year-round. They came into the season on little or no fitness, and those with the most natural ability ended up winning in a fairly wide variety of finishes. With season-long sponsor pressure to perform dulling the razor’s edge of fitness, a rider’s ability just to perform through an endless barrage of race efforts outstripped the importance of fine-tuning a natural inclination toward sprinting or climbing for a few weeks in mid-July.

With today’s sponsors bankrolling year-round training and massive on- and off-course support, the single-digit percentages that separate the specialist from the rouleur have become minutes on the hills and bike-lengths at the line. As training became targeted toward peaks at Grand Tours or a handful of one-day events, entire teams coalesced around the specific abilities of a given rider. Mario Cipollini’s Saeco team perfected the sprint train, Armstrong and US Postal perfected the comprehensive approach to winning Grand Tours, and nowadays, there’s precious little ground between them—though one does hope today’s GC winners are somewhat less “comprehensive” in their preparation than Armstrong.

Related posts:

1. Curing the Giro Hangover – News
2. La Vuelta: Training Race No More
3. “A Sprint that will be Talked About”

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download]

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.

Will HTRWW continue into the Grand Tours? I can only speculate. Physically, I’m really beginning to wonder whether I’m up to the task, and it certainly isn’t helping me out career-wise. Then again, if I had a different sort of career…

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – Liege-Bastogne-Liege 2010
2. How The Race Was Won – Liege-Bastogne-Liege 2009
3. Amstel Gold 2012 – How The Race Was Won

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download]

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?

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – Amstel Gold 2009
2. How The Race Was Won – Amstel Gold 2010
3. Tour of Flanders 2012 — The Race Was Won How?

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download]

Just for the record, this was completed about 16 hours after the race concluded and was live before any competing, similarly-named titles at other sites (though I did not beat the Specialized unfiltered cut). I suppose it’s possible that after I’ve published this, these sites could have release better-produced, more creative, cleverer, more sharply analytical videos, but somehow, I doubt it.

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – Paris-Roubaix 2009
2. How The Race Was Won – Paris-Roubaix 2010
3. Tour of Flanders 2012 — The Race Was Won How?

[right-click for iTunes-compatible download]

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.

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – Tour of Flanders 2009
2. How The Race Was Won – 2010 Tour de France, Stage 11
3. How The Race Was Won – Tour of Romandie 2009

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.

Off the top of my head, examples include E3 from 2009 (sprint loss to Pozzato), Paris-Tours 2009 (sprint loss to Gilbert) and E3 2010 (late escape/long sprint by Cancellara). When Sep Vanmarcke took the season opener after Boonen over-drove the escape and mistimed the sprint, it seemed like business as usual for the erstwhile world champion.

But since Nieuwsblad, Boonen has played it remarkably cool, and his record over the past two weeks speaks for itself. In a chaotic E3, Boonen made only one big effort—a shakeout move on the Taaienberg that everyone should have seen coming—and marked only the big-name attacks, leaving the hustle work of chasing down outside favorites to his most effective team in years. There’s an argument to be made that he opened his winning sprint too early, but with a curving finish a tired bunch, it seems likely Boonen’s early burst was spurred by confidence as much as nerves.

The story would repeat two days later at Gent-Wevelgem, where Boonen sat back in the bunch while an elite group including Peter Sagan and and Fabian Cancellara made a bid for freedom. Quick.Step certainly saw the danger in the move, briefly dispatching Gert Steegmans on a bridge attempt, but called him back halfway through the effort to pilot Boonen into the final kilometer.

The ensuing sprint had more elbows than the macaroni aisle, but Boonen, tucked just behind the leaders, was the very picture of serenity, avoiding the jostle and holding back until the door opened and he blew past Peter Sagan, accelerating all the way to the line in a tough headwind sprint.

But it was this past weekend at the Ronde where Boonen’s cool head really made the difference. The peloton took a conservative approach to a new, more rigorous, and far less photogenic course, letting a big group go up the road—without a rider from Quick.Step. But what might have been an nervous chase or bridging attempt in previous years was instead a lingering, calmly-answering-the-call-of-nature kind of ride.

On the race’s famous climbs, Boonen was relaxed, sitting well back over the first, non-decisive ascent of the Koppenburg, and about as calm as can be imagined cresting the Paterburg as the penultimate selection broke clear. The only time the Belgian elected to stick his nose into the wind rather than save matches was closing the gap to Ballan after the BMC rider’s initial surge, and final, unsuccessful attempts to escape in the closing meters.

You could fault Boonen a bit for launching the Flanders sprint a bit early—even he admitted it—but it’s tough to argue with a win. Indeed, the uncomplicated see-the-finish, win-the-race style with which he made his final charge harkens back to his heyday in 2005-06, when the wins came fast and and seemed effortless. It’s got to be disheartening for his rivals to see the old Boonen return right at the heart of the spring campaign.

Related posts:

1. Strange Happenings in Vlaanderen, Other Racing, Injuries.
2. The Model Bike Race
3. That’s Bike Racing For Ya!

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.

But it’s not 2010 anymore. I got word of the VeloNews post this morning where I spend most of my mornings these days—in a car, on an Interstate, trying not to think about how much longer I have to drive, or the fact that pretty soon, I’d have to turn around and head back the other way. It’s not a routine I’m particularly fond of, but as things stand, it’s the life I wake up to every morning. Suffice it to say, it isn’t getting any videos made.

And that’s the important thing, here—there are tactically focused race-recap videos in production again. They might not be as nifty as mine, but they’re covering races that happened in the past two weeks—I haven’t done anything in the past two years.

While it may well be that biting the style, name, and idea of someone else’s work without so much as a hat-tip is a dick thing to do (you certainly wouldn’t get any argument form me on that point), it is far more of a dick move to pitch a fit because someone else decided they wanted to revive or reuse something cool that you created, but for whatever reason, aren’t pursuing to the fullest.

In fact, one of the most maddening aspects of doing How the Race Was Won came about 12-24 hours after posting each new video, when some minion of the ASO would invariably file a takedown request with YouTube because he or she felt like my reusing two minutes of one six-hour stage of a 21-day race without kissing their pinky ring was somehow doing them wrong.

In an ideal world, there’s no doubt in my mind that I could do (and have done) a sharper, funnier HTRWW than currently exists. But the fact is that right now, I can’t. And as irascible as I tend to be, I just can’t justify venting any of that rage toward people who can. The best I can hope for is that sometime in the future, I’ll get the chance to remind everyone else exactly how it’s supposed to be done.

Related posts:

1. “This Is Not A Mickey Mouse Race”
2. How The Race Was Won – Tour of Romandie 2009
3. How The Race Was Won – Paris-Roubaix 2010

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.

While I wouldn’t say I was particularly effusive in my praise of Gerrans’ Sanremo, I certainly wouldn’t say I was overly-critial of it, either. It bears mention that the riders weren’t all just kinda hanging out on the Poggio, and Gerrans thought “hey, look, Nibali is attacking. Guess I’ll jump up to him and then draft him an Cancellara to the finish”. Prior to the winning selection were nearly 300k of attacks, climbs, tight roads and sharp corners, where even a momentary lapse of focus could tail a rider of the back, or force them to make a race-killing effort to get back on.

Gerrans had been looking punchy long before the Poggio (I briefly mistook him for Cav during some smart positioning moves on the Cipressa) and, perhaps sussing out Liquigas’ climb-controlling strategy, the Aussie parked on Nibali’s wheel before Agnoli’s recapture at 7.5km to go (4:52 in the video below). While the Poggio isn’t particularly long or steep, it is narrow and raced at eye-watering speed. If you’re not in the spot you need to be, you’ll be hard-pressed to get through a-reduced-but-edgy peloton, let alone make up time plowing your own furrow up a 4% grade at 30mph.

Indeed, Cancellara may have been the only rider in the remaining peloton capable of the feat—if you watch the video, you’ll see Cancellara is heavily marked and gets the drop on no-one. The separation only occurs when the riders behind him simply can’t put out the necessary wattage to keep his wheel. Cancellara’s prodigious strength bears additional consideration in light of the perceived lack of cooperation in the final selection—even if you wanted to come around him, the drop in speed between your max and his might doom the break.

Finally, the sprint wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Cancellara isn’t exactly a pancake in the final meters, especially after a 250+km, and the final margin wasn’t huge. In fact, were Cancellara a little more inclined to close the gate, and had chosen to lead out on the opposite site of the road (both the flags and waves show a strong tailwind/crosswind from the riders’ left), the additional effort required for Gerrans to come by might have made the difference.

On a more general level, last weekend’s race highlighted what I find to be the most interesting aspect of the sport—tactics as much as strength determines who wins races.

While everyone likes to feel that a winner took the day as fairly as possible, that sort of warm, fuzzy definition for “fair” favors the most dominant, predictable winners—and dominance gets boring in a hurry. Because of finishes like Saturday’s, teams riding for guys like Cancellara have to be tricker in how they leverage their strength advantage; just powering away is only occasionally an option. Even the most impressive displays of raw power, like Cancellara’s 2010 Roubaix win, are often triggered by a brilliantly seized tactical moment—in the case of Roubaix 2010, an out-of-position rival.

I think it’s safe to say most American fans got their introduction to the sport watching US Postal at the Tour de France. And it wasn’t a bad primer for tactics at the basic level—aggressively control the race, keep your strongest rider fresh, and then put him alongside his rivals at the moments where he can make the most difference. While that’s a nice big-picture plan, it requires a rare, generally not entirely organic level of dominance, and, as I mentioned above, it’s kinda dull.

The sport is really at its most interesting when favorites and spoilers are equally reliant on cunning to get across the line first. When Liquigas can dictate terms all day, and Fabs can single-handedly fend off the charging field, and still both can come away empty-handed, it’s clear that they’ll have to go back to the drawing board in terms of execution. I’m excited to see what they come up with to chase down wins through the rest of the spring.

Related posts:

1. 2008 Milan-Sanremo
2. Milan Sanremo 2009 – Another Good Finish, but…
3. How The Race Was Won – Milan-Sanremo 2009