On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 8/1/2002
Americans in Paris....a look back
Last month I wrote about the growing number of American riders in the pro peloton in Europe, especially those participating in this year’s Tour de France. Now, with the race in the record books, let’s go back and see how those various riders fared.
(But first my apologies for being late with this August column. I flatter myself that some of you check in at the first of the month to see my new scribblings, and if you did, you were disappointed to find the July babble still there. I was away on a wonderful cycle tour of the Sierra when the month turned over, and as I needed to see the final results of the Tour before finishing the column, I had to wait until I got back to put the pieces together.)
You won’t need me to tell you that Lance Armstrong won his fourth consecutive Maillot Jaune, and that he did it with ease, supported by a US Postal Service team that many are calling the strongest in history. Besides having a strong team of riders on the road, USPS also has by far the best behind-the-scenes organization. It seems odd that a supposedly outsider team from America would have turned out to be so much better at the Euro-pro game than all the homegrown teams, but it’s true. Their daily logistical support--from Directeur Sportif Johan Bruneel on down through mechanics and soigneurs and cooks--is the best. The business end of the team is absolutely solid, and the training and coaching are light years ahead of any other team. Their success is no accident.
Armstrong was clearly the strongest rider in the field, and it almost seemed unfair to see him so well supported by his teammates, who kept him out of trouble and towed him through every stage and up every mountain. They set a tempo so fierce and unrelenting that almost all of the other teams and their top hopes were shelled out the back before Armstrong even had to make a move on his own. On one memorable day, the team still had all nine members in a pack at the base of the final climb, after several major mountains had already been dealt with....an almost unheard-of show of strength and depth.
In fact, his two final, mountaintop lead-out men--Roberto Heras and Chechu Rubiera--complained that their other teammates were so strong and stayed on the front so far up the big hills, that there was hardly anything for them to do. It was politic of them to say so, and maybe even a little bit true, but when they did finally get in their licks, they shredded the remaining lead group with wicked surges of power. Day after day in the Pyrénees and Alps, the scenario was the same: after the rank-and-file Posties had weeded out the chaff, first Rubiera and then Heras would each take a strong pull to complete the winnowing process, and then, finally, with only one or two hopefuls still hanging on by their fingernails, Armstrong would launch one of his patented small gear, high cadence attacks and leave them all gasping in his wake. The process was so methodical, so mechanically regular, and so overwhelmingly successful, some people complained that it made for a boring race. I have to point out that these complainers are the same ones who groused in previous years that Armstrong was too flashy and arrogant in some of his earlier victories. Now that he’s doing it methodically and without such visible panache, they say it’s boring. With some people, you just can’t win.
Speaking of panache and arrogance, I have to say I’m more than fed up with Armstrong’s detractors who say he lacks class, pointing to the “look” he gave Ulrich a year or two ago or to some episode of fist pumping as he crossed a finish line. They seem to forget how he waited for Ulrich when he crashed last year, or how he allowed Ulrich to win a stage to preserve second place from Beloki (prompting a finish line hand shake from Ulrich). Or how he bridged up effortlessly to Carlos Sastre this year and then, when he could have dropped him, sat up and let Sastre have the placing. That, in my opinion, is class.
I don’t see Armstrong as arrogant at all. He is honest with himself and with others, sometimes brutally so. His vision of the world is so focused and so laser keen, there is no room for false modesty or soppy sentiment. He says what he knows to be true, and sometimes others are offended. Too bad. I have read probably every significant interview he has given in the last four years, and I see nothing there but honesty and honor. He is articulate and thoughtful in his responses. He shows a deep understanding and respect for the sport of cycling and for his own place in that sport.
I was not always such a fan. In his early years, he was brash and cocky, the quintessential Texas hotshot. But since his well-documented resurrection, he is a changed man, both as a rider and as a person. Others who recall those youthful excesses seem disinclined to forgive him and remain predisposed to find fault in any and every little lapse they imagine seeing in his current behavior. I would like to see each of us under such close and constant scrutiny without offering up a few moments of human frailty and flaws. Frankly, I think he shows as much class and dignity and modesty as any other cycling superstar....Merckx, Fignon, Hinault, Lemond. All were (and continue to be) brutally honest; to not suffer fools lightly; to have fairly well developed egos. And why shouldn’t they? They were great! Indurain may have kept a lower profile, but that was due more to his own shyness and a language barrier than to any particular classiness on his part.
People complain that Armstrong only does the Tour, that he is not the complete champion that he might be if he also competed in (and won) other grand tours or classics. I too would like to see him do the Giro or Vuelta, but as he points out--patiently, again and again--to journalists who pose this question, times have changed, and there is so much pressure around the Tour now, and so many riders putting all their eggs into that one basket, that it’s almost impossible to be in top form for two grand tours in a row. Tyler Hamilton did both the Giro and the Tour this year. He finished a close second in the Giro--and might easily have won--but only 15th in the Tour. He pointed out that doing the two of them back to back means having to go two months without a single bad day. Quite a challenge. In the past two years, Armstrong has won three prestigious minor tours--the Tour de Suisse, Midi Libere, and Dauphiné Liberé--and has helped some of his teammates win other events as a payback for helping him in the tour. While we could wish for more from him, I don’t think we really have any right to expect it. So what about the other Americans? Armstrong’s American teammates George Hincapie and Floyd Landis did very well in support roles for their boss. Landis, in his first grand tour, waxed and waned from day to day, sometimes looking very strong and sometimes looking a little out of his depth, but generally helping the team. Hincapie is the only American to have been on all four of Armstrong’s winning teams, and he was one of the most powerful and consistent engines in driving the team and controlling the tempo of the peloton throughout the race. His leadership and strength were noted repeatedly, and respected cycling commentator John Eustace called him the MVP of the tour.
Santa Rosa’s own Levi Leipheimer had a very good first Tour, finishing 8th overall. He was put behind the 8-ball early on by the relatively poor performance of Rabobank in the team time trial, but after that he stayed in the lead pack most of the time. His shiny bald head could usually be seen right off Armstrong’s shoulder well up into the mountains each day. And while his time trials weren’t as fast as he might have wished them to be, his time in the final one was still enough to move him from 9th to 8th on GC. And guess who he leapfrogged to do it? Roberto Heras, the same guy he overtook in the final TT at the Vuelta last year. Heras is going to want to stick pins in a little Leipheimer doll. Either that or figure out how to time trial better.
As noted above, Tyler Hamilton rode to a very respectable 15th overall for the CSC-Tiscali team. We recounted last month how he very nearly won the Giro, even though he suffered through the final two weeks with a broken shoulder. The time off between the tours allowed his shoulder to mend a bit, but it was still plaguing him in the tour, and then he came down with a cold mid-Tour that really sapped his strength. It would take more numbers crunching than I’m prepared to do to figure out how many riders did both grand tours this year, but I can’t offhand think of anyone else who did as well as Hamilton in both of them combined. This has to be considered his best season ever, and I’m pretty sure we have not seen the best of him yet.
Bobby Julich and Kevin Livingston rode in support roles for Deutsch Telekom without really having a team leader to support. With Ulrich missing, their only task was to help set up Erik Zabel for the sprints, in pursuit of another green points jersey. This they did, but Zabel was bested repeatedly by Robbie McEwen, and the formerly powerful team ultimately had its most lackluster tour in years. Julich finished 37th overall, a decent result but a long way from his podium step in 1998, when so much was expected from his future Tours. Crashes and injuries have dogged his career since then, and although he says he still loves the Euro-pro scene and plans to ride for two or three more years, it would appear his best results are behind him. I would dearly love to be proved wrong, because he’s such a nice guy, but....
Livingston finished 57th and announced his retirement. Once Armstrong’s right-hand man and a powerful rider in his own right, he left USPS for more money at Telekom two years ago. The move puzzled many at the time, and it never really panned out for him. He went from being a leader on a winning team to a supporter on a losing team, and he has never shown much form since then.
Fred Rodriguez wasn’t expected to do much in the Tour, and he didn’t disappoint. He might have hoped to contend for a sprint here or there, based on his strong showings in the spring classics, but he came into the Tour with a nagging case of bronchitis and never really made an impression anywhere. Finally, on one of the last mountain stages, he suffered the ultimate indignity of being disqualified for finishing outside the allowable time limit. His career is far from over though. He will contend again in the classics and I fully expect his name to be at or near the top of some results next year. But grand tours are not his strong suit and never will be.
Jonathan Vaughters’ bad luck in the Tour continued. He crashed again and had to drop out. If my swiss cheese memory is correct, he has now abandoned all four of the Tours he has started, three times because of crashes and once because of an allergic reaction to a wasp sting. That seems like an incredible run of bad luck, but people often seem to make their own luck, and as Vaughters will attest, he often put himself in a position where bad luck was likely to find him. He wrote a couple of very articulate and thoughtful articles about his withdrawal from the tour and his subsequent resignation from his European team. He does a better job than I can of explaining the reasons why he has had such a hard time in the Tour. You can read one of those pieces at VeloNews.com
If you don’t want to bother, I can sum it up by relating that he felt he was always in over his head in the Tour; just hanging on by his fingernails on every stage, close to exhaustion, scrambling to keep up, to not get sick, to avoid trouble. Unlike the powerful tour leaders we see on TV every day, riding at the front and controlling the tempo, he was one of those back markers on the ragged fringe of the bunch, and as we all know, that’s where bad luck hangs out: when you’re tired and dazed and scuffling along in the back of the pack, you’re much more likely to get taken out by any bad things that might develop. This is not news. If you read his account, you will gain a much better understanding of how hard it is to endure the grind of constant racing and training in the Euro-pro ranks. This is not recreational riding. This is hard men doing a hard job, where only the strongest survive.
Summing up our Americans in Paris, we see that the big three--Armstrong, Leipheimer, and Hamilton--did quite well, all finishing in the top 15, with Armstrong well ahead of everyone else and joining the pantheon of the sport’s legendary elite. It wasn’t the yank podium that some foolish prognosticators had talked about, but it was as many Americans near the top as we have ever seen. As for the rest, their results mirror those of their peers, from respectable to forgettable and painful.
We now see assorted American riders scattered throughout the peloton, at the front, mid-pack, and off the back, just like the pros from most of the other bike-crazy countries of the world. Seeing American pros competing at the highest level in Europe is no longer a novelty. Some will succeed and some won’t, but the fact that we can now take their presence for granted is a mark of how far we have come from the days of George Mount and Jock Boyer and those other pioneers from across the pond.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net