Ah…now that’s what I was waiting for. Tom Boonen comes through with the big win (30 meters clear in a sprint!) just to remind you that he’s still the greatest classics rider of his generation. It’s hard to pick a more elite group to come into the line with, too: the 06′ Roubaix winner and the ‘07 Flanders champ. Not bat company at all.

While Silence-Lotto threw down the first glove, splitting the race with Johan VanSummeren at the Arenburg Forest, CSC and Quick.Step held court from then on, going punch for punch right up to the velodrome. Devolder went up the road (which probably made Boonen a bit nervous), and O’Grady was sent to follow. The two dangled out that familiar 18 second gap until Silence-Lotto was forced to burn out VanSummeren reeling them back.

Cance then tried a very familiar attack (see Roubaix 06), but Boonen was ready, and Ballan hopped on for the ride. With the heads of state away, the CSC/Quick.Step battle continued, turning Devolder and O’Grady into temporary allies in a frenzied attempt to get some more cards into the hands of their leaders up the road.

The only tactical move I didn’t like was Cance’s late attack. The Swisstalian has pushed Boonen in a classics sprint before, and as Erik Zabel has noted, it’s a different game entirely sprinting after 260km. My money would be on holding back until the final 300, letting the less experienced Ballan make the mistakes, and hoping to get a drop high off the wall on Tommeke.

Of course, you never really want to full-out sprint when you’re cramping like the umpteen-time world TT champ allegedly was, and honestly, even with a bidon-full of pot belge a couple vials of EPO, I don’t think anyone was coming around Boonen at the end of this one. Maybe Oscar Freire. But the hard part for him - if he ever manned up for Roubaix - would be getting to the velodrome in the first place.

Luck played a factor, as it always does, and I can’t help but notice that the riders tagged as “biggest rivals” by the favorites never factor in the result. Boonen, probably still sore from the trashing Devolder gave him at the 05 KBK (leading to a Hincapie win), tagged the recently crowned Flanders winner as the favorite before his 2005 win. Today, Tommeke tabbed Backstedt as a man to watch, and the Swede never figured in the race.

Cancellara, too, engaged in the gamesmanship, giving perennially unlucky George Hincapie the “rival” mark. Two flats and a poorly-timed attack by teammate Bernhard Eisel later, GH was solidly OTB. Nobody, not even the blatantly America-centric Velonoews, picked Slipstream’s young Dutch thunderer Martyn Maaskant. So what if he just sat in the wheels? No one gets a “lucky” fourth place at Roubaix.

No Comments »

I’ve always admired Stijn Devolder’s penchant for attacking. He’s been a massively important protagonist for years in one-day races, and despite what John Wilcockson says, he’s been in contention for a classic win at least once before. And while claims that he’s a Tour contender still seem a bit unwarranted, winning the Ronde in the Belgian Champ’s kit certainly cements his legacy with a solidity it had not heretofore achieved.

That having been said, Tom Boonen won this race. Just like two years ago, he marched over the Koppenburg with all the grace a man can display in powering a bicycle over a mucky, cobbled, 25% incline. Just like two years ago, this shattered the field and gave notice - with some 70 kilometers of racing to go - that all paths to the finish must go over, under, or around Tom Boonen. And just like two years ago, Quick.Step’s flawless tactical execution send them home with the trophy.

In 2006, Discovery Channel’s Leif Hoste jumped away over the Valkenburg, 30km from the finish, much as Devolder did in yesterday’s event. But unlike Hoste, who had a practically unbeatable Tom Boonen in his wake, Devolder immediately fell back on his ace in the hole: no need to pull through when you’ve got the guy who just tap-danced up the Koppenburg wearing your kit and lurking in the chase group’s wheels.

Hoste could have played the same hand, forcing Boonen either to tow, or to drift back to a chase group in which Disco riders outnumbered any other team 2-to-1, but instead he rode a two-man time trial with the reigning World Champ, only to be righteously and predictably thrashed in a two-up sprint.

Devolder’s reticence to come around left him relatively fresh, kept Boonen fresher, served to tire his competitors, and put the impression in their minds that he was riding only for his captain. A few kilometers later, no one’s willing to burn the matches to follow the impetuous Devolder, let alone organize a chase that would essentially serve as Boonen’s personal stagecoach. 45 minutes later, we have a new Flandrian champ.

Despite the grit and agony etched on finishers’ faces, it’s clear from the 20 man pack less than 30 seconds behind the triumphant Belgian, that more effort could have been made to break this race. For all the squads milling around the front of the field, only Rabobank made serious overtures at contesting the win.

While it’s a powerful testament to the respect the peloton pays Tom Boonen, I’m hoping it also serves as inspiration and motivation for other teams that the Q.S juggernaut must more aggressively, unless they want to see it walk off with the unprecedented trifecta of Flanders, Wevelgem, and Roubaix.

2 Comments »

In response to Velonews’ pre-race question “sprint or break”, the answer is “no”. Drawing obvious comparisons to last year’s staggering TdF stage win at Compeigne, Fabian Cancellara once again turned savvy, raw power and a confusing race situation into a glorious breakaway win.

While TT riders can be notoriously poor performers in tense, tactical race situations (see Zulle, Alex), Fabian Cancellara has shown he can outfox classics riders on the cobbles and sprinters on the tarmac, making him one of the most versatile riders in the peloton. He can’t really be discounted from any races less hilly than Lombardia. Let’s not forget, Cance challenged Boonen all the way to the line in a 4-up sprint at last year’s E3.

5 Comments »

Ah, finally, good cause to ignore all the piddly little races that have filled up the cycling calendar so far. Not that I haven’t ignored them up to this point, of course, but now I have an excuse…

In 2006, Phillippe Gilbert broke out onto the international cycling scene by taking his first Het Volk. Classy victory though it was, Gilbert took it largely though pluck and tactical nous, plying a weakened and out-classed breakaway group, and a heavily marked Quick.Step Team to his advantage.

Saturday’s win, on the other hand was a brash and ballsy, the kind of counter-intuitive high-risk attack that you simply don’t see outside the one-day events (and certainly not at the Tour of California). While comparisons to Merckx might be a bit overstated, I don’t think likening it to Fabian Cancellara’s victory at the ‘06 Roubaix would be too far a reach.

On Sunday, Quick.Step’s DeJongh became the second two-time winner on the weekend, thanks to some devastatingly concerted work from the rest of his team. Any time you get five men in a move of eleven, the psychological advantage alone makes the result almost inevitable. My only worry for the Q.S boys: WTF Tom Boonen losing a sprint to Matthew Goss?

If you’ll recall, Quick.Step pulled similar rebounds in 2007 and 2006, after essentially making the race most of the day at Het Volk, but missing out entirely in the final hands. Discovery Channel did the same thing in 2005. While one-day turnarounds are historically suspicious, it’s important to note these HV/KBK 180’s involve a team being strong both days, and just more motivated - or more lucky - the next.

Final assorted notes on the weekend - French reign of terror continues. Even if Gilbert is just a francophone Belgian, his squad is unquestionably of the Hexagon. Also impressive was Slipstream-Chipotle, making their presence felt through hard-man breakaways and moves that matter, rather than simply the suicide publicity attacks one used to see from the wild card squads at these events.

All in all, a promising weekend of racing - let’s hope the cheery outlook holds through the rest of the month.

1 Comment »

So that last post extinguished my urge to talk about baseball for the next decade or so, but I still feel obligated to note that, after a mere three days, baseball already has its own David Millar and Tyler Hamilton. Clemens might do well to note that had Tyler just come clean back in ‘04, he’d be racing today. As it stands, the first American LBL winner hasn’t even updated his webpage in five months.

But let’s keep the focus of this post domestic: the USCF recently crowned its men’s and women’s sandbagging champions. Great to see the national federation putting my $50 a year toward such a noble cause. One hopes next year’s prize package will be expanded to include a free UCI license, a legally binding agreement never again to race below Category A or P/1/2, or, failing all else, a swift kick in the ass from every other rider in the field.

In all honesty, why does the USCF expound their road upgrade guidelines in mind-numbing detail while leaving ‘cross utterly at the mercy of self-selection? Going to argue that ‘cross doesn’t need a hierarchical upgrade system that road has at because the potential danger of out-of-place riders isn’t as high? Tell that to Ryan Trebon, who lost his shot at another national title because some doofer couldn’t keep it inside the tape.

To me, though, the issue isn’t safety; it’s the mindset self-selection represents. Despite my very limited visits to Europe, I get the sense (considering that this dude can just come over and race) you either slug it out with the top names, or slug it out in the beer tent. Here in America, though, we’ve got the Lake Wobegon effect, and as a result, a “B” National Cyclocross Champion. Is it any wonder that guys like this think they can get a yellow jersey on their wall?

3 Comments »

Yes, after 24 hours of on-and-off 503 errors, I am finally able to make my last post on the 2007 Tour. The finish, despite the cagey “maybe I will, maybe I won’t” attitude of Cadel Evans, and rumors of a mass protest, was a confirmation win for Danielle Bennati. His Lampre team hadn’t been having the best race, but they dug hard on the final circuits to bring back the obligatory escape attempt, and the Italian turned a botched Quick.Step lead out (Sebastien Rosseler going hell for leather at 400m, while Tom Boonen launching his own sprint about 6 wheels back) into victory.

For GC considerations, yesterday was mostly about “what ifs” - what if Levi hadn’t gotten that 10 second penalty? What if Michael Rogers hadn’t crashed out in Stage 8? For me, the biggest question was what if Contador didn’t have Rasmussen to work with on the stages where he put time into Evans? Could the Australian possibly have bled 23 fewer seconds on one of those long, Pyrenian ascents if Contador hadn’t had the questionable performances of The Chicken to assist him?

That’s the tricky thing with cycling - one doped rider can have a myriad of cascading effects on the entire results sheet. Kind of like how when one moronically oversimplified doping story breaks in the mainstream press, dozens more are sure to follow. While I was pleasantly surprised and even entertained by the Versus coverage this year, especially by a very much improved Al Trautwig, the steady burble of uninformed “cyclists are dopers” stories from the nether regions of the popular press - even from allegedly reputable publications - really rubbed me the wrong way. But as Dirk Demol once said, I will have my sporting revenge.

4 Comments »

So that was a pretty good TT. Leipheimer riding like a man possessed, Cadel Evans looking like a wounded beast, and Contador feeding Evans slack the whole way, knowing all along that he had plenty to give. In the end, the Top 3 remained unchanged, but the tight time gaps (:31 between first and third) made for some dramatic finishes.

I thought Levi might just have been on form to slip by both Evans and Contador, but the post-race interviews revealed the same old Leipheimer, with quotes along the lines of “yeah, I was going fast so I could ease up in the corners”; “you know, I really just got to relax and enjoy it”; and “Cadel won’t have to worry. I won’t try to get those last 9 seconds tomorrow”. Now you know why Armstrong choose to ride behind Contador instead.

Anyway, pre-race, there were the usual tech stories, checking out a few of the badass TT bikes, or critiquing chrono positions in the least aerodynamic prose ever (I realize Zinn literally wrote the book on bike tech, but please, someone get him an editor). But I was sad to see that no one wrote anything on the tech topics I want to hear about, like Millar’s sweet disintegrating disc wheel, or how the Tour was able to determine they should slap three seconds onto Contador’s finish time yesterday.

Maybe the journos who were supposed to write those stories up got a little sidetracked yesterday. Can you just see some overly-jovial Danish newspaperman being like “another positive? Police raids? Hell no! Only story here is you jokers got Punk’d!”. You think the Danish press would have learned their lesson after that whole Mohammed thing. Of course, even if those reporters hadn’t been otherwise occupied, they’d probably write it up with some pathtically ambiguous title; was the Tour marred by doping? Or was it the time trial?

Not that the press cares about such matters. They don’t even take the time to correct Dick Pound by pointing out that ineffective drug testing wouldn’t result in any positive tests. Or to mention to Christian Prudhomme that if the UCI really didn’t want a clean Tour, they could have saved themselves time and money by simply not doing any drug tests. Am I the only one out here who’s bothered by the fact that the only organization actually catching cheats is getting a lot of flack for actually catching cheats?

4 Comments »

Say what you will about doping; I think today’s finish was the saddest and most unfair of the entire ‘07 Tour. Not that three-time runner up Sandy Casar was an undeserving winner - he bounced back from an early spill, made his turns in the break, and played his speed edge perfectly in the finale. But poor Michael Boogerd; after two weeks of flogging himself to exhaustion, over the most heinous mountains in the world, in his final Tour de France, all for cheatin’ teammate he didn’t much care for, if there were any justice in this world, today’s stage would have been Boogie’s.

Not that anyone else out there thinks that. Ask people who don’t know what they’re talking about and the consensus is clear - all bike riders everywhere are on drugs. It’s kinda funny, really - cops make a drug bust, and it’s great press. Cleaning up the streets, they’d say. Cycling makes a drug bust, and it’s a sport “mired in scandal”. What a bunch of crotchless journo hacks. When Shawne Merriman gets a two year suspension, plus two seasons playing to empty seats in Utah, then you can talk to me about clean sport. Besides, it’s not like the doping bothers cycling fans that much. As The Simpsons so perfectly allegorized (in an episode about drug dependence, no less), fans of a sport will blind themselves to the most heinous of its flaws.

Which brings us to this - what if the Chicken really is telling the truth? Granted, if this is the case, it should be pretty easy to prove (well, prove convcingly) that he was in Mexico, not Italy, for his pre-Tour training. But with lawsuits flying, organizers dis-inviting, governing bodies using the the dope stories for political leverage and calling for summits, maybe Rabobank figured the advertising dollars weren’t worth the cost and cut the Dane free - even while still giving the riders their Tour winning bonus. Certainly, an ejection of an unpopular and probably-dosed-up rider isn’t something fans will think too deeply about.

And then there are those news stories that no one wants to hear. Greg Lemond, for example, turning the spotlight of suspicion onto Alberto Contador. While one would like to think the youngster is clean, for someone with the future of the Tour on his shoulders, he has something of a checkered past. And does it strain credulity that, stage after stage, Disco could put three riders against an isolated Rasmussen and Evans? Should we maybe inquire to see if these guys are on the UCI’s watch list - or would we rather just sit back and watch them sock a few dingers?

10 Comments »

So finally, the Chicken has been plucked. But when one asks “Why now? Why not ten days ago?”, that’s when the feathers really fly. Rabobank Manager Theo DeRooy says that the Dane claimed to have been training in Mexico all through June. But yesterday, DeRooy heard from an Italian Journalist that Rasmussen was in Italy during that time. After this, the stories diverge.

DeRooy claims Rasmussen admitted that he was, in fact, in Italy, and thus the team fired him “because you don’t lie to family”. Rasmussen says “I was never in Italy, and I never told you I was”. Great. Another innocent cyclist, just like Vinokourov, Sinkewitz, Landis, Basso, etc. ad nauseam. It gives one a paradoxical respect for Cristian Moreni, (even though he protested against dopers mere hours before being caught doping) because he manned up an admitted he was wrong. If only there were some way to incentivize such honesty…

While Rasmussen had been enveloped in the stench of suspicion for some time, his involuntary departure does set a dangerous sort of precedent. Or rather, it follows the dangerous precedent set before last year’s Tour: if the right people boo loudly enough, your team will collapse to their pressure and give you the ax.

While he tested clean across the board, and went out of his way to keep the UCI informed of his whereabouts, Lance Armstrong was at times as reviled as the Dane had come to be in the past few days. And certainly, there was never a shortage of allegations against him. One gets the feeling that, were he still racing, Disco might feel inclined to yank him, due solely to the number of Frenchmen shouting “dope!” as he rode past.

But for all the mayhem, the race still went on pretty much as normal today, with sprinter Daniele Bennati winning a small break sprint to take his first win. This continued racing is a very good sign; back in 1998, the riders almost refused to ride after the last round of major dope ejections. Today, there was only one apparent protest departure, and by and large, the riders seem determined to root out any remaining dopers.

Additionally, the alphabet soup of organizers seems happy with the ejections, and many companies have announced their intentions to continue sponsorship. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the biggest threat to cycling wasn’t doping, but the European press. But why would a bunch of European journalists want to destroy the sport that helps feed them? Commentator Bob Roll has a few theories.

No Comments »

So - who do you believe least - Alexandre Vinokourov or Lindsay Lohan? After all, each claims to suffer from some persecution; and, to Vino’, at least, the official response is “well, duh”. While I still wouldn’t mind seeing B-samples before I see headlines, the results of Stage 15’s test sure don’t look good for Vino, either. Furthermore, there was another positive test announced today, but the 9am EDT deadline for release passed without anyone being named. Since only 8 riders were tested on Stage 11, I’ll go out on a limb and say it was Astana’s Maxime Iglinsky or Lampre’s Patxi Vila; all the other names are still in the Tour, and ASO would never let a positive rider toe the line.

The shock and chaos aside, I think a lot of people are rallying around Vino’s positive for the sake of the sport. Tom Boonen says the positive test is a good thing, and certainly, the press caravan seems to agree. Half the peloton staged a protest at the beginning of today’s race, not for rider’s rights (like the last time around), but against the dopers among them. It’s kinda like an inverted, real-life game of Mafia, as the peloton tries to sway organizers to snuff certain riders out. And if the threat of Olympic exclusion wasn’t enough, the boos of the fans may have been, as Michael Rasmussen finally made his case to the press about why he shouldn’t get kicked off the island.

Anyway, there was indeed a Tour stage today, won by none other than Michael Rasmussen. The Dane dropped a less-than-stellar Alberto Contador 1km from the line, and the young Spaniard was then inexplicably eclipsed by teammate Levi Leipheimer (hello? bonus seconds?). As the Dane took his second stage with a now 3:00+ GC gap, you could hear the boos from Boston. Strangely, while French and Kazakh fans seem upset (for different reasons) with this race status quo, Italians seem to prefer a questionable victor - or at least that’s what a highly informal, open-to-non-Italians, and statistically unsound survey says. Basque fans blew some stuff up, but otherwise, seemed ambivalent about the latest race events.

10 Comments »