Well, as always, I’m following the Tour de France pretty closely. Today was a huge day for Lance Armstrong as he sets out to win his unprecedented sixth Tour – he now leads his closest opponents by over two minutes and he has made a clear statement that can’t help but challenge Ullrich and Hamilton’s confidence.
And for all those you join me in yelling “Go, Lance!”, here’s an article about how Lance…goes…
On any given stage, however, watch for the helicopter shots; the wide-angle full-peloton views that can’t help but show it all. At the edge of your TV screen and at the back of the pack, you might spot a rider — sometimes solo, sometimes braced by a hand-on-the-back from a teammate — coasting close to the roadside, his torso turned slightly askew.
Is he doing what you think he’s doing? “Yes,” says Danny Nelissen, Eurosport’s Dutch cycling commentator and a former eight-year veteran of the pro peloton.
So maybe I should follow less closely…
For good Tour coverage, I’d go to the TDF Blog, and to Velonews.
More later, including comments on the spat between LeMond and Armstrong, and the story of my honest-to-God lunch with Eddy Mercx and Jacques Anquetil.
With Ullrich slated to be such competition, I asked my buddy in Belgium (Europeans live for the Tour the way that they do the World Cup) how he ended up in 16th place today…
Here was his reply:
I myself am NOT a specialist, but I have the impression that the Ullrich of 2004 cannot be compared to the Uebermensch of 2003. This is how he reacted to German TV today, after his time loss:
“I had a bad day today. I had noticed it on the first col today, with the rain hampering me. This bad result is really a surprise for me. I really fought, but in the end I had to bend.”
Ullrich added: “The Tour does end only in Paris, but of course this is a major setback. One can only hope on a bad day for Armstrong. Then I can gain time on a day with good legs and good weather.”
Hmmmm. To me, that sounds more like Droopy than Road Runner.
It’s a long hard race. Lots of things can happen, ranging from crashes and other incidents to Armstrong misestimating his strength. Several previous Tour winners have lead for long stretches of the tour only to run out of gas near the end. Armstrong could crash, or a spectator could interfere and injure Armstrong (at least one previous five-time tour winner career was essentially ended by a spectator punching him in the gut as he went by…)
That said, as a non-expert fan (this is the third tour I’ve watched) Armstrong sure looks like the favorite to win again.
Well, strictly speaking Voekler, a young French rider who was in a big breakaway during the flat stages of the race, is still in the lead by a very small margin. (22 seconds, I think.) I find cycle racing enormously fascinating, and a good analog for a lot of difficult challenges in life. The primary bugaboo in cycling is aerodynamic drag, and all of the tactics and technology are set up to deal with that element effectively. For instance, that’s the reason you see large groups of riders. By “drafting” other riders nearby you can conserve up to 30% of your energy.
However, because everyone can generally manage to take advantage of these tactics and technology to optimize their performance vis aerodynamics it turns out that the critical contest, and the one that generally determines the winner, is against gravity. Victory in major cycling tours are determined not by who can go fast in the flat stages, but who can minimize the damage to their overall speed climbing the steepest hills. (And, to a slightly lesser extent those who can ride time trials, where drafting isn’t allowed.)
In addition, you need not win every stage to end up the overall winner by a wide margin. Today was the first day that Lance has won a stage in this year’s tour, although he has place second several times.
Lance says that climbing and time trialing result in two different “flavors” of pain. He describes climbing as a “sweet pain” and time trialing as a “sour pain.” I hate time trialing. You’d have to be pretty perverse to like it much. Nothing to encourage you but the clock, and the pain just grows throughout the race until it becomes all-but-unbearable.
Tomorrow is another flat stage, though there will be a lot of wind which may shake things up a little. Then a rest day (one of only two in three weeks of cycling), a mountain stage in the Alps, and after that a monstrous uphill time trial up the legendary climb of L’Alpe d’Huez, that imposes the sourest of all flavors of pain.
Here’s a fun TDF blog (you won’t find in depth reflection about TDF news of the day here…):
“It is about the bike: A Tour de France blog by Lance Armstrong’s bike”
http://www.statesman.com/sports/content/custom/blogs/tourdiary/
I saw part of the ESPN report and interview with LeMond. There are several former associates of Armstrong, including a former member of his medical support team, who are saying some rather incriminating things, but none of them seem to have any direct knowledge of EPO doping. The physician says that he was approached by several cycists with, what he called “veiled requests” for drugs, and shortly after he refused he was let go from the support position. That sounds incriminating, but it’s hardly a “slam dunk.” I doubt that his testimony would be worth much in court, since it largely amounts to hearsay.
Likewise a former pro cyclist said that he was at a meeting of cyclists where they discussed coming to a kind of collective agreement to dope, and Armstrong was on the “pro” side of the argument. But he also doesn’t seem to have any direct knowledge, and someone else who was at the meeting would probably have to come forward to corroborate what he says before I’d believe it.
LeMond is an order of magnitude more influencial than any of the other detractors, but I’ve only seen excerpts of his statements, and they seem to rest on his claim that he was threatened with financial repercussions for speaking out. But what, exactly, does he know? What can he prove and what evidence does he have? I can’t see that he’s offering anything more than inference from what appear to be guilty actions.
I can’t think of any particular reason why Greg would have it in for Lance, but haven’t been paying that much attention. I suppose he could resent all the ad contracts, and the fact that Lance is sort of overshadowing his record as the dominant American cyclist. The other folks could, likewise, be motivated by jealousy (in the case of the cyclist) or revenge (in the case of the fired sports consultant). But I don’t know any of those reasons as facts, nor have I ever seen any evidence for them.
I guess the most damning thing I heard was a statement by two women who were reportedly in the hospital room when Lance was asked by his doctor whether he had ever used performance-enhancing drugs. When asked what Lance’s response was the two women said that it was up to Lance to respond to that question. I suspect that if Lance had said “No, I’ve never used drugs,” there’d have been little reason to defer to Lance. But he could have said something a good deal less incriminating than “Yeah, I’ve been using drugs nonstop for years,” too. And even if he had used drugs, this would have been during the period prior to his cancer.
It’s interesting to speculate whether or not Ullrich would be declared a five-time winner retroactively, if Lance is determined to be guilty, since he was second to Lance thee times, and to Pantani once, who is known to have used drugs, though there’s no proof he used them the year he won the Tour. (Ullrich was also second to Riis, but I don’t think anyone believes Riis was a drug user.) Ullrich was once banned for six months himself, after testing positive for amphetamines.
Anyway, I’m not sure being retroactively declared the winner in those races would be worth much, since I imagine if Lance turns out to be a fraud pro cycling will be pretty much in the toilet. But we’re still a long way from that.