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]

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?

Mud, bergs, and cobbles / by Cindy Trossaert cc-by-nc

I don’t hide that fact that I think the spring classics are the best bike racing the season has to offer. Sure, in terms of complexity, drama and sheer scale they can’t match the sweeping scope of the Grand Tours, but then again, how many people do you find who hold up Moby Dick as a model of excellence in prose styling? While the Tour may mark the season’s traditional high point, the best racing you’ll see all year comes over the next few months.

Outside the all-or-nothing attacks of fresh legs on storied, unpredictable courses that (usually) encourage and reward aggression, the classics are also critical because they set the backstory over which the remainder of the season plays out. McEwen’s headbutt as Boonen sprinted to a win at the ’05 Tour (not to mention the ensuing ad) was built on the angst of Quick.Step’s dominant spring campaign.

And who can forget 2010 when “motorized doping” became the buzzword and the UCI trotted out bike scanners to randomly screen for the supposed secret motors at the Tour de France? We can all thank Fabian Cancellara’s sensational spring run for that.

The classics—especially the early classics—are also fun because of the welcome uncertainty that surrounds them. Recent years have seen one rider—Cancellara in 2010 and Philipe Gilbert in 2011—reach peak condition and then ride away from races with such mechanical efficiency that the outcome of each successive event seemed almost predetermined. It’s nice to have that feeling of not knowing how things will shake out, at least for a few weeks.

This year’s season is all the more open thanks to some notable absences. Yoann Offredo, a frequently electric—if thus far unsuccessful—animator in the spring races will be taking some time off due to blown whereabouts information. It’s a tough thing to keep up on documenting your whereabouts three months in advance, don’t get me wrong. But the rules of the game are well-established, and at 24, Offredo fortunately has a few more years to figure them out.

On the other side of the absence coin, we have team RadioShack Leopard Trek, which is voluntarily holding themselves out of this weekend’s opening classics under the auspices of careful management and risk avoidance. While Bruyneel has something of a point—KBK and Het Nieuwsblad are over a month removed from the biggest prizes on the classics calendar—it’s still not a tack taken by many major teams.

I’d guess this is because a full-tilt preview of the climbs and cobbles that feature in so many big spring races is hard to create outside of a sanctioned event, while the very act of holding position in a pack over such terrain probably requires as much practice as a rider can get. Then, of course, there’s the chance that one of your riders might actually win. While it may not have the prestige of Flanders of Roubaix, with nothing else to compete on the race calendar, a win this weekend might be just about equal in terms of publicity.

Related posts:

1. Bethel Spring Series – Ronde de Bethel – Report
2. Contador’s Clouds Gather, Germans Love Cycling
3. A Serious Flanders Post on April First

Don't worry, Bertie. We're still friends / DancingOnThePedals.net, cc-by-nd

It’s a welcome change each February to watch the lead stories in cycling move from the minutia of law and bio-pharmacology to the nuance and verve of actual bicycle racing. The wild line-changing leading into a bunch sprint, fading desperation of the second echelon, and poker-playing as a break pulls itself appart before the finish are the sort of nuanced, dynamic things that make bike racing an interesting sport.

You’d think that an organization entrusted with the management of such a sport would strive to cultivate an appreciation of these things. But the UCI seems to see the situation differently. In even holding court over whether or not Saxo Bank should retain its World Tour license, the UCI is essentially saying that only the winner of a WorldTour bike race should receive credit for the victory.

I don’t think the UCI needs it explained that no matter how doped up the winner might be, his triumph is but the closing movement in a complex choreography of wind-dodging, gap-closing, tactics, and tribulation. Mere dope doesn’t win bike races—the peloton of ’90s and early ’00s was arguably the most chemically well-prepared group of athletes in the history of mankind, and plenty of those guys never made the podium.

Arnaud Demare’s Stage 6 victory at Qatar provides further insight of how just how many factors beyond peak wattage and astronomical VO2 max can come into play in a win. I’d hardly call the rising French star and reigning U23 World Champ a scrub, but fact is that his campaign at Qatar had, up to the final stage, been a good-not-great mix of missed splits and steps-off-the-podium sprints. It was tactics (Tom Boonen securely in the GC lead) and fortune (an unlucky a touch of wheels for Cav) that finally put him in a position to win.

I’m not so naive as to think the UCI’s decision would be based purely on logic. Governing bodies like to send a message with their decisions, regardless of how little sense they might make. But I think there’s an equitable solution that will allow the UCI (if it is indeed hell-bent on taking a chunk out of Saxo’s hide) to proceed without implying that bike races might just as well be contested by a weigh-in and 60 minute threshold session on the trainer.

Returning to the example of Demare, note the the Frenchman is quick to praise his teammates. And with good cause—sprinters can’t lay down a minute at 670 watts 3k before launching a stage-winning burst. Nor, for that matter, can climbers lead themselves to the front group before paring the field down to heads of state, and still expect to gain places on GC.

Even the seemingly mundane tasks of providing a safe, steady wheel in an ever-shifting peloton so a leader never has to accelerate, or crushing fat kid watts at the front of field of 5 hours constitute unquestionably remarkable efforts. And while they may never cross the line first, I—and the portions of prize money parceled out after the race—would make an unequivocal claim these less glamorous players have a more than equal stake in the win.

So, if the argument is that 68% of Saxo Bank’s points came from Contador (471 of 696), let’s keep with that, but assign those points a weight equal to Contador’s contribution. Split ten ways—nine riders and the director—and doubling Contador’s share (a nod the marketing value of the win), the banned Spaniard’s points contribution drops to 13.53%. While the resulting points total (601) knocks Saxo back a few places, at 13th of 18, and with solid 25% margin on the next squad, it’s hardly a relegation-worthy performance.

Aside from actually reflecting the realities of how races are won, taking this tack would also provide some much-needed hand-holding for wary sponsors, who could bank on a squad not being barred from cycling’s largest events for the wayward actions of a single star rider. Likewise, it would provide an incentive for teams to keep their worker bees from doping—each rider that turned up positive, regardless of palmares, would take the team that much closer to exclusion from the top tier.

Of course, I maintain that the ideal outcome is to not have this reassessment process in the first place. I don’t seem to recall teams’ statuses at the highest level of the sport questioned after season-ending injuries or retirements. While a roster change due to doping is unfortunate, the impact on the team’s competitiveness is essentially the same. In fact, in the case of Contador, the comparison is far less apt, since he’ll be back racing again before the end of the season.

And, of course, one less step in the legal repercussions from his doping conviction is one less headline taken away from actual racing.

Related posts:

1. Maybe We Should Test For Accountability
2. The Piti of an Unrepentant Valverde
3. TD Bank Could Use Some Help

"So this is why I refuse to take my own side here…" / Tony Rocha, cc-by

It is nice, on occasion, to be right about something. The CAS decision against Contador went pretty much exactly as I said it would: an athlete had a banned product in their system. The CAS enforced the rules as written. The rest was just window dressing.

Of course, there are also times when it would be nice to be wrong. Like when hours later, the head of the UCI says “There are no winners when it comes to the issue of doping”; as I’ve noted before, the UCI always seems inclined to respond with the worst possible answer.

In this case, the statement isn’t just factually untrue (Cyclingnews has a list of winners newly-minted by the case), but in spirit, it spits in the eye of everyone trying to race the sport cleanly. Because of this case, everyone who didn’t take a supplement, or a cold medicine, or a saddle-sore cream because it might make them turn out a fasle positive, is a winner. Guys like Johan VanSummeren—who’s currently gutting it out at Tour of Qatar when a single, illegal cortisone shot could simplify his life tremendously—are the winners.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that Contador did come across Clenbuterol through a contaminated steak. Clearing him would send the message that going the extra mile to find clean food is wasted effort, and thus imply that any rider who spent time doing so senselessly undermined their own TdF performance. It would have also given anyone testing positive under less-innocent circumstances in the future the ready-made excuse of “the phantom steak”. These are the sorts of outcomes where no one is a winner.

It’s disheartening to hear no less than the great Eddy Merckx trot out the old boilerplate that “it’s bad for the sport” to see a rider like Contador punished to the letter of the law. Under what definition of “bad” would The Cannibal place the transition from ineffective tests and limp-wristed sanctioning to the most accure and rigorously enforced anti-doping program in the world?

Is it “bad” that fewer 20-something cyclists die in their sleep? “Bad” that low-wage cyclists don’t have to take a 10% haircut to cover “medication” for the season? “Bad” that if someone breaks the rules, they now have a reasonable expectation of being caught and punished?

I think RCS Sport director Michele Acquarone was unintentionally apt when he invoked the naiveté of children in his reaction to the news of Contador’s sanction. We’re grown-ups and we live in a grown-up world where sometimes people cheat, and we make the grown-up decision to try and punish them when they do. But I’m inclined to disagree with his assessment that everything that happend at last year’s Giro was “fake”—after all, the fantasy of Santa Claus does not make the presents under the tree any less real.

For those of us who can handle reality doled out in adult-sized portions, there’s a lot to like about yesterday’s decision. It showed that no matter how fundamentally corrupt your national organization is, and no matter how big the races you’ve won, and no matter how many powerful, politically-connected people come to your aid, the CAS is not going to be swayed by anything short of Nazi Frogmen. It’s a message that’s come about seven years too late, but I’m glad to see it get here, just the same.

Cycling won on Monday, and if there’s a scourge to match doping in the sport, it’s the hand-wringing defeatism of those who refuse to acknowledge the victory.

Related posts:

1. The Dissatisfying Taste of Due Process in the Contador Case
2. Contador’s Opening Salvo
3. Versus’ War on Contador

My club's current standings

As you might have gleaned from my review, I’m a pretty big fan of Strava. But I’ve always been a little disappointed in the Clubs pages.

After all, since I’m already following most of the people in my clubs, a listing of the club rides seems awfully redundant. And while a comments section for smack talk and general announcements is a cool feature, it’s still going to take a back seat to the club listerv as a means of information exchange. While the Strava ride pages have been the continual recipients of cool new features, the club pages have remained rather barren.

What I think would give me a lot more reason to use or visit the club pages is a little friendly competition, and with that in mind, I’ve cooked up a web app that generates and updates standings for Strava clubs. It totals up the ride data for each rider in a given club, and then ranks everyone based on elevation gained, miles traveled, or time spent.

The site also creates RSS feeds for each competition (to keep you abreast of changes or deliver you data to play with) along with some embeddable widgets so you can put the competition up on your site (see sidebar). They’re only available at a width of 252px right now, but that might change soon.

Currently, there are only a handful of the hundreds of Strava clubs on the site, but if you submit yours, the site will give you a permalink for your club standings, and the page should be live in about an hour. I’m still working out a bug or two, but it should be more or less ready for public consumption.

Related posts:

1. Strava – Review
2. The Wiwi Fan Club
3. Welcome to Flanders Club, Hoste Can Take DaPanne

“[T]hey wouldn’t even do that to a criminal. None of what they did was legal”
-Alejandro Valverde

It’s tough to imagine a doping scandal more fraught with irony than Operacion Puerto. Even before it had a name, the fantastic contradictions were there; Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes ran a doping ring where he saw his job as ensuring “that riders could put up with the physical demands being made of them”, but a client alleging his health had been ruined by the treatments was what finally blew the lid.

Two years later, when the scandal finally broke, the investigation proved itself an embarrassment to nearly everyone involved—Fuentes, who could have better concealed his clients’ names with a cereal box decoder ring; the Guardia Civil, who revealed their investigative skills outstripped in ineptitude only by their inability to prevent leaks; the riders themselves, caught red-handed; and the Spanish courts and anti-doping officials, for being unable to drive home a slam-dunk case.

Is that 50,000 EUR in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? / pd, wikimedia commons

Most embarrassed of all were the ASO, organizers of the Tour de France, who now had to host a race where everyone even remotely considered a favorite had run on the front page of every sport daily from Lisbon to Kiev in a photo collage of blood bags and syringes.

The Tour’s response to Operacion Puerto was blunt and idiotic: cajole any TdF teams with riders implicated in the scandal to voluntarily withdraw them before the race. I’ve scattered ample pixels already on the inequity of this—let’s just say I found it wonderfully poetic when Floyd Landis’ late-race urine sample came up positive a few days after the Tour finish, giving the ASO the very “Tour Winner Was Actually On Drugs” headlines their pre-race purges had been conducted to avoid.

Strangely enough, Valverde could have saved the Tour organization from this embarrassment. While no one can say for certain what would have happend if the Spaniard hadn’t broken his collarbone in a mundane crash on Stage 3, Valverde had long gotten the better of Landis in the mountains, and his 5th place finish in the dead flat ’06 prologue was as brilliant as it was suspicious. It’s the opinion of this humble commentator that the 2006 Tour was Valverde’s race to lose.

Still, I hesitate to call Valverde’s crash “bad luck”. While Puerto left entire teams fluttering in the wind, Valverde healed up and battled gamely for the Vuelta title—holding the leaders jersey and taking a stage win in the process—before making the podium at the World Championships later that year. Puerto fallout continued into 2007, as investigations pinned Ullrich to hijo rudico and retirement, while Basso, accorded no other option by investigations in Italy, made the ludicrous claim that he didn’t inhale—but Valverde kept right on riding.

In fact, from the day some Spanish cop found a bag labelled “val.(piti)” to 2009, Valverde’s right-to-ride encountered only one major challenge: the Germans attempting to keep him from riding at the ’07 Worlds in Stuttgart, a prohibition summarily overturned by the CAS. When you’re riding dirty, it sure doesn’t hurt to have your national cycling federation, and indeed, your country’s entire judicial system willing to bend the rules on your behalf

For all of McQuaid’s flack about “mafia nations” it was the Italians who finally clipped Valverde’s wings, matching DNA taken from a rest day sample at the 2008 Tour to DNA in the EPO-laced Bag 18 seized at Operation Puerto. After another year of trial and appeal, the CAS concurred with the Italians, and slapped a two year ban on Valverde, backdated to the beginning of 2010.

To recap: Valverde, for a bag of blood that showed he’d been cheating in 2006, got 18 months off racing, a few results scratched from the records books, and four years of otherwise unencumbered competition, during which he amassed palmares including—but hardly limited to—a Vuelta, a Liege-Bastogne-Liege, a San Sebastien, and two Tour stages. And somehow, this is his idea of rough justice.

There have been a few interesting reactions to Valverde’s unrepentant stance. Joe Lindsey respects the blunt, twisted honesty of it, while @inrng sees holding the Armstrong line as a media management mistake and a bad example. But for me, the biggest problem of Valverde’s response is the delusional excoriation of the very system whose assumptions of innocence let him continue to ride.

Valverde’s sanction wasn’t the result of nefarious forces arrayed against him—it was the product of being extended the benefit of every doubt available. For anyone who missed Tyler Hamilton’s appearance on 60 Minutes, Valverde’s continued sense of persecution might be the best example of the insidious self-deception that is so often the byproduct of an artificially high hematocrit.

Related posts:

1. Pro Cycling News – Boonen Loses at Qatar, Valverde Quicker, Bode Cheats?
2. Not Earning His Billables
3. Basso “Confessed”, Valverde Accused, Dekker Victorious

I’m hardly one to bugger flies on the finer points of the UCI or USAC rulebooks, but I’m also of the opinion that the exhilaration of cyclocross stems mainly from the competitive aspects of the discipline.

It’s not that hurdling barriers in a dog suit or executing a clockwork-perfect beer handup isn’t freakin’ awesome; it’s that tightroping against your lactate threshold while trading elbows for a clean line through half-frozen, off-camber bends is much more so. And rules—specific, unfeeling, inflexible rules—are critical for the integrity of the competition that provides this thrill.

That’s not to say there aren’t rules with gray areas, or that there shouldn’t be races with costumes, smoke grenades, and shaving cream, but having a few arbitrary, black-and-white dictums along the lines of “no flat bars” or “no triple barriers” lets the participants know—like a dress code that bars hoodies and sneakers—exactly what kind of party this is going to be.

This is important because no one flies halfway across the country to the frozen tundra of Wisconsin in the few precious weeks most cyclists reserve for dark beers and second helpings for a catch-as-catch-can goat rodeo. They do it to race a serious, well-organized, tightly-run, national-level competition, and to test their mettle against other freds on the same course that the pros use.

As innovation crushing and counter-productive as the standards of the sport’s governing bodies might be, they are also what makes a top-level ‘cross race top-level—as integral to the experience as immaculately prepped course tape, a well-ordered starting grid, and 1970s boxing analogies from Richard Fries.

While he may have been teasing just a bit when he said it, Cycleboredom pretty much hit the nail on the head:

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – Rules of the Group Sprint
2. It’s Good Not To Be The King
3. “A Sprint that will be Talked About”

Now that allegations have surfaced that Vino’ may have bought the win, I’ve gotten a few messages asking me how I feel about it. And after re-watching the video, I don’t feel all that different. Certainly, as far as the racing goes, I stand by everything I said—especially the parts about Vino’ intentionally waiting up for Kolobnev, and about how Vino’s final separation from the Russian seemed “downright pedestrian”.

In cycling, the realities of the sport make the occasional negotiated outcome a near-inevitability. Grand Tours simply wouldn’t be possible if every so often, the pack didn’t roll in at a snail’s pace behind a small breakaway—and you’re crazy if you think the makeup of that lucky group isn’t the result of some pretty intense discussion within the pack and between team cars. And it’s almost expected that stage race leaders will “gift” stages to teammates and competitors alike, once their position at the head of the GC is secure.

While the UCI’s rules set out that collusion is explicitly illegal, this sort of “acceptable collusion” makes the unacceptable kind very difficult to define. Compounding the problem, groups of riders in every race collude to give one of their number a disproportionate chance of winning—they’re called “teammates”. Even between teams, there’s a tremendous ebb and flow of politicking, posturing, support and payment.

For example, if Team A takes the promise of future support from Team B to help chase down a breakaway, have they cheated? What if Team A agrees to help for a share of the prize money if Team B wins? What if Team B wires them a bank transfer mid-race? What if there’s no payment, but some Team A gains some advantage that Team B is unaware of? In all four cases, the outcome is the same—the only ethical distinctions between the cases lie in what motivates Team A’s efforts.

Granted, the ethics of the Vino’/Kolobnev case are a bit more cut and dry, but there’s still the question of proving that any illicit cooperation took place. If it weren’t for the enterprising muckrakers at l’Illustre we might not be having this discussion. For an insider’s view of payment and cooperation, you’re not likely to better than Mike Creed—though I suspect that in the highest level of the sport, the money, prestige, potential damage to reputation, and future income stemming from a major win outweigh the offer to lie down.

If anything, the biggest question here isn’t how could this happen, but how could Kolobnev sell so cheap? Joe Lindsey has a great breakdown of the longer-term costs to Kolobnev, but even in the short term, the deal didn’t make a lot of sense for the Russian. Sure, 100,000 Euros is a lot of money—especially when a win is only 20,000, split eight ways—but keep in mind, too, that in all likelihood, the bribe was only roughly equal to a year’s pay.

After winning Liege in 2003, Tyler Hamilton was rumored to have landed a contract with Phonak for over 800,000 euros. Though the American brought a GC threat that Kolobnev simply doesn’t have, it seems more than probable that Kolobnev could have garnered a salary boost well beyond the 100,000 EUR of Vino’s payoff.

And Kolobnev and Vino’ aren’t exactly strangers. In the recently-published emails, Kolobnev claims that Vino’s nationality (non-Belgian) and the bad press surrounding the Kazakh’s doping affair (apparently it was a raw deal) made his offer of collusion slightly more palatable.

So Kolobnev must have also known that Vinokourov is a very well-known man in an very corrupt country—honorary colonel in the army, Peoples’ Hero First Class, aspiring politician, and pasta spokesman. If Vino’ wanted to buy a bike race—Liege, of all things!—Kolobnev should known to bleed him for retirement money.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that Kolobnev’s legs must have been pretty well fried. If I were in Kolobnev’s pedals, and was as confident in my sprint as the Russian seems to have been, even Vino’ probably couldn’t have named me a price high enough—especially given the potential difficulty in collecting on the offer. But if I were on the rivet and clinging to my last reserves of strength, it’d be like getting paid 100k to lose a race I would have lost anyway. And where’s the fraud in that?

If there’s anything I feel bad about about in this affair, it’s the fortunes of Alexandr Kolobnev. His recent doping positive—and the soon-to-be-overturned slap on the wrist his national federation handed out—not withstanding, I found both his aggressive riding style and tenuous grasp of written English refreshing and entertaining. Even if he never seemed to have it in him to win the biggest races, it was always fun to watch him try.

But reading through the recently published emails between the two, I find him a startlingly sympathetic character. He clearly had a lot to gain from a win, and his emails reveal a recurring internal conflict, ineffectively placated by promises from Vinokourov. Before, Kolobnev was waiting for his bronze medal, now, having sought out seedier means of compensation, he’s waiting for his 100,000 euros. Thankfully, it hasn’t seemed to impact the quality of his tweets.

Vino’, of course, has been his usual, inscrutable self. First panning the “gutter press”, then claiming that it’s his personal life and he loans money to people all the time, and then—like Bettini before him—launching the inevitable lawsuit. The UCI has addressed that the case exists with its usual gibberish, though with Vino’ finally retiring after 2012, and Kolobnev facing the CAS, any resolution that comes for the alleged crimes in this case is likely to be purely symbolic.

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – 2010 Tour de France, Stage 11
2. “This Is Not A Mickey Mouse Race”
3. No More-Ov Vinokourov

As someone who’s watched a lot of road sprints, it seemed like a pretty obvious case of Nys closing the gate on Pauwels—and I certainly wasn’t the only one who thought so. On the road, Nys would have been relegated to second at best, and likely full-on disqualified, but after a protest and some deliberation (“a sprint that will be talked about” was how Nys’ Sporza interviewer styled it in English) the result was left unchanged.

The UCI’s official explanation of the decision—that Pauwels wouldn’t have been strong enough to get by—is…well, the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from the UCI over the years. Aside from the fact that it’s essentially impossible to assess exactly how strong a blocked rider might be, it also makes the counterproductive implication that it’s totally OK to cut people off, so long as they wouldn’t have beaten you anyway.

But as nonsensical as the “official” announcements of race directors can be, they also tend to reveal certain implied rules of the sport. When Mark Renshaw was kicked out of the 2010 Tour for headbutting (generally just a relegation) it wasn’t his actions that got him bounced—it was the fact that his teammate, Mark Cavendish, went on to win the stage. The officials couldn’t punish Cavendish–he’d done nothing wrong—but relegating the Australian would be essentially no punishment, since he hadn’t been riding for a result anyway. The message: don’t use dodgy riding to give your teammate an advantage.

So assuming the UCI officials aren’t crazy—or, as Mario De Clerq gamely suggests, swayed by Sven Nys’ position as one of the greatest ‘cross racers of all time, and a member of the UCI cyclocross commission to boot—what’s the major difference between road and cyclocross sprinting that sees Nys keep his result while, say, Giuseppe Calcaterra gets relegated?

First of all, the final sprint in cyclocross just an entirely different animal than what we’ve become accustomed to seeing from the modern road peloton. In flat stages at the Tour de France, the final kilometers are the battle ground of some dozen sprinters who’ve been keeping themselves rested and fresh all day long, before slingshotting off megawatt trains of domestiques to top speed for a final, all-out, all-or-nothing burst.

Behind them, nearly 200 others, often exhausted and essentially blind, cling desperately to the wheels in front of them just hoping to make it to the next day of racing without losing time. The bunches are huge, the speeds are incredible, and the collateral damage from a split-second mistake can be enormous.

A cyclocross sprint, on the other hand, comes following an hour-long, non-stop, full-on effort, punctuated by dozens of unsustainable surges as riders try to put daylight behind their rear wheel or draw back their rivals. Technical course features open gaps, and it’s rare to see more than a handful of riders contest a final charge. When they do, it’s a low-speed, nearly-cooked effort, on a short, straight-line finishing stretch. There’s room to manoever, plenty of road for everyone, and in the event that disaster does strike, the fallout is limited.

But I think it’s the very reality of a cyclocross race, rather than any consideration for safety, that plays the largest role in sustaining a result like yesterday’s. While position and line selection is important in road racing, in cyclocross it’s a constant consideration—as soon as you exit one corner, you’ve got to be mentally assembling your approach to the next.

The focus on where you’re putting your bike is relentless—it is as important as wattage in preserving your position, closing the gap to the riders ahead of you, and—most relevantly—denying the riders behind you an opportunity to pass. To suddenly apply the stricter (if somewhat more capriciously enforced) rules of the road sprint to cyclocross would be to suddenly alter this equation, turning the tables away from the very unique set of skills that are the essence of ‘cross.

In his post-race interview (or at least the English portion of it) Nys was unambiguous about saying he’d gone to the opposite of the road specifically to get in Pauwels’ way. What made it legal, Nys contends, is that Pauwels wasn’t yet alongside him.

The implication seems to be that Pauwels’ attempt to ride though a not-quite-wide-enough opening along the barriers was the Sunweb rider’s own poorly-calculated decision, same as if he’d tried to dive for the inside line through a corner earlier on the course, and gotten stuffed by riders ahead of him who’d set up more sensibly.

Of course, Pauwels had a different story, claiming that Nys’s knee banged into his front wheel and handlebars as the Landbouwkredit rider drove him from one side of the road to the other, before pinning him against the barrier. And if that’s true, by Nys’ own admission, he ought to be punished.

Sadly, without the all-determining helicopter camera shot, there’s no way to determine exactly how the barrier-to-barrier dance between Nys and Pauwels went down. Pauwels’ body English certainly suggests contact, but there isn’t anything definitive in the photos and videos I’ve seen. If nothing else, the last few seconds of the race are a great example of how, in cyclocross, leading out a sprint early can actually play to your advantage.

Related posts:

1. Pro Cycling News – Worlds ’05: To Sprint or Not to Sprint
2. The First Sprint Stage
3. How The Race Was Won – Rules of the Group Sprint