On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 7/1/2008
Tour de Farce
Here we are in the month of July. For cycling fans, July means just one thing: the greatest show on earth; the Tour de France. While it’s true that there are three Grand Tours--the Giro, the Tour, and the Vuelta--it is also true that the Tour stands a bit taller than the other two and taller than any of the other monuments of bicycle racing.
What distinguishes it and gives it this special status and cachet? It typically has stages that are slightly longer and harder than the other two, but this is a matter subject to some debate, for in any given year, the parcourse for each three-week tour varies, and in some years, the argument might be made that the stages in the Giro add up to a more formidable challenge, or even in the Vuelta. (This year’s Giro certainly looks to be at least the equal of the Tour for difficulty and challenge.) So we can’t really put the Tour’s alpha status down to just the sum total of its stages.
No, what really sets the Tour apart is that it traditionally has the strongest field of riders; the very highest level of competition that the sport has to offer. Sometimes teams may do the other two Grand Tours with line-ups that do not contain their strongest team leaders, or they may bring those best riders, but they will ride at less than 100%, using the Giro, for instance, as a three-week training camp to polish their fitness for the Tour, later in the year. But for the Tour, every team trots out its top guns, such as they may be, and does its damnedest to win the whole tour or at least a stage or two. Nothing else equates with a successful season like a little prime-time glory in the Tour, because when you win at the Tour, you know you’ve beaten the best the world has to offer when those best teams and best riders were doing their best to be the best.
So what do we have to look forward to this July at the Tour? Will the very best teams be fighting it out to see who is in the maillot jaune when the weary riders roll into Paris on the final stage? Unfortunately, no. Barring an extremely unlikely, eleventh-hour change of course, the very best team with the very best riders, including the defending Tour champion, will be sitting this one out, barred from competition by the Tour’s organizers. Anyone who does win the tour this year will always see an unofficial asterisk next to their name in the record books, because the best riders will not have been there.
I’m sure if you follow the sport at all, you will be aware of at least the bare bones of this story. But if you want to learn a little more about it, read on.
There are essentially three players in this drama. In one corner, we have the Tour’s owners, Amaury Sports Organisation, represented by Patrice Clerc and Christian Prudhomme. ASO is a subsidiary of French media group Amaury, which owns newspapers Le Parisien and L’Equipe. Besides the Tour de France, ASO controls, among other events, Paris-Nice, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Fleche Wallone, and Paris-Roubaix, as well as the Dakar Rally. They have also recently acquired a 49% stake in another Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España, and have also formed a promotional partnership with the Tour of California. In short, they have their fingers in just about every pie around. They may not quite be a monopoly in the world of bike racing, but they’re the closest thing to it, and like the 900-pound gorilla in the middle of the room, they pretty much rule the roost.
In another corner, we have the UCI, the governing body for the sport of cycling, represented by its current president, Pat McQuaid and, by extension, his predecessor Hein Verbruggen. (Verbruggen is a vice-president of the UCI now, but it was during his prior tenure as president that much of the current controversy begins.) In theory, they control the world of bike racing, but as we have seen in recent years, their control is somewhat tenuous and toothless.
In the third corner, we have the Astana cycling team, represented by its current general manager, Johann Bruyneel and by his stable of riders, headed by team leaders Alberto Contador, Levi Leipheimer, and Andreas Klöden. As you probably know, Astana is the thrice-reincarnated team that was, in past seasons, plagued by an assortment of doping violations. More about that in a bit.
It would take a book’s worth of words to comprehensively cover this entire saga, with the backstories fleshed out in all their convoluted detail. I don’t have the time nor the energy to go into it all here. If you want the whole story, you will have to dig through at least four years’ worth of press releases and news stories. If you want a teeny digest of the matter, you can revisit my column from last March, which was primarily about this year’s Tour of California but also included what I hope was a reasonably coherent summary of this current turf war.
What it boils down to, in the shortest of all shorthand, is that the monopolistic ASO is locked in a power struggle with the UCI for control of the sport. One of the weapons they have elected to use to demonstrate their power over the UCI is their ability to choose which teams to invite to their races. Last year, they picked on the Unibet team as the pawn in their little ploy; this year, Astana is the team getting jerked around.
In neither case was the team in question guilty of any wrongdoing. There were of course trumped-up justifications for the exclusions, but they were--they are--transparently illogical and inconsistent and arbitrary. In the case of Unibet, it was not such a big story because the team was a relatively minor player. But Astana is, without any doubt, the best stage race team in the world right now, not to mention having, in Contador and Leipheimer, last year’s first and third place finishers from the Tour, and in Klöden, a two-time second place finisher.
ASO’s ostensible reason for excluding Astana from the Tour was the taint of past doping scandals associated with the team in its previous embodiments. On the face of it, this sounds plausible, but it ignores the fact that this year’s edition of the team has almost nothing to do with the teams of years gone by. Bruyneel was brought in from the disbanded Discovery/US Postal team, bringing Contador, Leipheimer, and several other of the Disco boys with him. All the bad apples from the old team are gone, and almost the only thing that remains is the team name and its sponsors, a consortium of Kazakh business interests. Furthermore, Bruyneel and his staff have implemented one of the most comprehensive and expensive drug prevention programs of any team in the sport...far more stringent than those of many teams entered in this year’s Tour. In fact several teams had their reputations besmirched by doping scandals last year as well: T-Mobile (now Columbia), Rabobank, Cofidis. But all of them are welcome in this year’s Tour. Go figure.
Everyone understands the ostensible justifications are a load of crap. No one really pretends otherwise. One might even say: the thinner the pretext, the better. Because the whole point of the exercise is to give ASO an excuse to thumb its nose at the UCI; to demonstrate to the world that they can twist Pat McQuaid’s tail with impunity. And so far, they have done so, with consumate gallic disdain.
ASO not only banned Astana from the Tour, it excluded them from all its events, which meant Contador was unable to defend his championship at Paris-Nice as well. Early in 2008, the Giro d’Italia organizer, RCS, represented by Angelo Zomegnan, fell into lock step with ASO on the ban for Astana, meaning Andreas Klöden was unable to defend his championship at the RCS-owned stage race Tirreno-Adriatico. They also said they were banning Astana from the Giro, but in one of the most deliciously astonishing twists in this tale, this turned out not to be the case, as we shall see in due course.
Back around Paris-Nice in early March, Bruyneel realized it would do no good to lobby for a change in ASO’s absurd position. He decided to remain relatively quiet in the war of words and let his team members do the talking with their legs, proving to the world that they are indeed the best stage race team around. How has that policy panned out? Let’s take a look...
Tour of California (February 17-24): Levi Leipheimer won the overall. He finished second in the prologue, then took the lead with a second place, on equal time, on the decisive Stage 3 with its big mountains. Finally, he blew everyone away in the Stage 5 individual time trial.
Volta ao al Argarve (February 20-24): Thomas Vaitkus won Stage 2 and finished third overall. (Vaitkus also won the Ronde van het Groene Hart on March 23.) Vaitkus is one of Astana’s chief lieutenants...a solid work horse.
Vuelta a Castilla y Leon (March 24-28): Alberto Contador won the overall and Leipheimer was fourth. They finished first and second in the individual time trial and Contador won the decisive mountaintop finish on Stage 4.
Vuelta al Pais Vasco (April 7-12): Contador won the overall. He won Stage 1 with its mountaintop finish. He finished second to Cunego on Stage 5 to extend his lead. And he polished it off by winning the individual time trial on Stage 6. Of particular interest: in their only head-to-head meeting, he beat his big rival Cadel Evans at every stage, including the time trial.
Tour of Georgia (April 21-27): After his Tour of California victory, Levi Leipheimer was probably the favorite, but he only finished third overall, 14 seconds out of first. The team finished second in the team time trial and was first overall in the team classification. It would have been better for this narrative if he had won it all, but bike races are not scripted like pro wrestling matches. Favorites still have to deliver the goods. In a way, this makes any good results all the more impressive, and a third overall and first for the team is nothing to sniff at.
Tour of Romandie (April 29-May 4): Andreas Klöden won the overall. Maxim Iglinsky won Stage 1 and Klöden won the Stage 3 individual time trial.
Dauphiné Libéré (June 8-15): Levi Leipheimer finished third overall. He won the prologue and was second in the individual time trial.
Tour de Suisse (June 14-22): Andreas Klöden finished second overall. He was second at equal time on the biggest mountain top stage and third in the mountain time trial. Maxim Iglinsky won the climbing classification and Astana won the team classification. Klöden was fighting a virus at the start of the tour and lost a few seconds on each of two early stages, then rounded into form near the end, but couldn’t quite recoup all of the lost time.
This list represents most of the significant stage races of the first half of the cycling season, leading up to the Tour de France, excluding Paris-Nice, where Contador was the defending champion (but was not allowed to compete) and Tirreno-Adriatico, where Klöden was defending champion (but was not allowed to compete). Not all of the races are of equal importance, but each is a stepping stone on the way to the bigger events, and collectively they help to clarify the picture of who the strongest riders and teams are.
To sum it up: in eight of the most significant stage races of the first half of the year, Astana had four wins, one second, three thirds, and a fourth. And then there were the two races where they were excluded as defending champions. There were other wins as well, and collectively, it all adds up to Astana being the number one ranked team in the UCI team standings at this point.
But wait, there’s more: I left out one race. That would be the Giro d’Italia, the first Grand Tour of the year in May and the most important stage race of the first half of the year. Recall that RCS had announced its intention to exclude Astana from the Giro, in collusion in this respect with ASO. But the Italians are more realistic and pragmatic than the obstinately obtuse French, and in a dramatic, last-minute turnaround, Angelo Zomegnan changed his mind and extended an invite to Astana to start the Giro on May 10. What a shocker!
On May 3, we saw Levi competing in--and winning--a local Grasshopper race in Sonoma county, a quirky, half-road, half-off-road amateur race, just for fun and a little training. That evening, he got a call telling him he had to be in Sicily in a week! Contador was lying on the beach in Spain, working on his tan and recovering from dental surgery. Only Klöden had been in serious combat recently, coming off his Tour of Romandie win.
Bear in mind that most teams train intensively for their Grand Tours; they scout the important stages, sometimes riding them repeatedly. They have all their ducks in a row with respect to the team’s support staff and materiel. So here’s Astana, with one week’s notice and not one day’s worth of prep time invested in the Giro, having to scramble like mad to even get the bikes and riders and follow fleet down to Italy in time to answer the bell. But they did it. Boy, did they did it.
They worked themselves into form over the first week, for the most part staying out of trouble, except for one crash where Contador fractured his elbow. Sounds like a race-ending injury, but it must not have been all that bad because he carried on. Somewhere along in there he also had to have follow-up dental procedures, which can't have been much fun in the middle of a major stage race. Finally in the Stage 10 time trial, the team showed its cards. Contador was second, Klöden third, and Leipheimer ninth, which moved them all well up in the GC standings, with Contador--fractured elbow, sore tooth and all--stepping into the role of race favorite.
On Stage 14, the first real mountain top finish of the Giro, the remnants of a breakaway of unimportant riders took the top positions, but behind, in the battle among the real GC contenders, Contador moved to within five seconds of the lead. The next day, with a finish atop the infamous Marmolada, he again rode smart. He didn’t win the stage, but he did enough to ride into the lead. The next day, on the ferocious uphill time trial, he again did not win, finishing fourth, but he managed to widen his lead over his nearest rivals. Meanwhile, Klöden and Leipheimer were both dropping down the standings. When it became clear that Contador had the whip hand, they both dedicated their efforts to supporting him at the expense of their own placings. Klöden worked hard for Contador for several days but then dropped out with the virus that would still be slowing him down at the start of the Tour de Suisse. Leipheimer hung in there and finished 18th overall, a very respectable showing for a rider in a support role.
Astana protected Contador’s lead until the mountaintop challenges resumed on Stage 19. In this epic stage, he was under constant attack and almost lost it all, conceding all but four seconds of his lead to Ricardo Ricco. But that’s as close as his nearest competitors got. He protected his lead in the mountainous Stage 20 and then blew them all away in the individual time trial on the final stage. No, he did not win that time trial; was in fact only 11th. None of the GC leaders did well in the final ITT. TV commentator Paul Sherwin suggested they were all tuckered out from their battles in the mountains over the past few days. That might be part of it, but I suspect it had more to do with timing. There’s a three-hour difference between the start times in a time trial for the lowest ranked riders, who go first, and the top riders. The window in this case was from noon to 3:00 pm. The course ran from north to south into Milano, and I suspect a strong breeze blew up from the south later in the afternoon, hammering right into the riders’ faces. The later the start, the stronger the headwind. I don’t know this for a fact, but it’s almost impossible to explain the results any other way.
If you look at the results in the ITT for just the top 20 riders--the last 20 to start--the times look like this...
| 1 | Contador | :00 |
| 2 | Leipheimer | :17 |
| 3 | Savoldelli | :27 |
| 4 | Menchov | :50 |
| 5 | Pellizotti | :51 |
| 6 | Bruseghin | :54 |
...and so on. Ricco, who had been trailing Contador by those four little seconds, lost 1:53 in the ITT, so that Contador’s final margin in the overall was a comfortable 1:57.
So, how about that? Astana gets a last-minute invite, and their team leader takes home the maglia rosa! It’s a storybook ending. The results may not be scripted like pro wrestling, but it would be hard to write a script as improbable and intriguing as this one. Contador is now the defending champion in both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, and you can bet he’s going to pull out all the stops to win his home Grand Tour, the Vuelta, in September. If he does so, he will join the legendary ranks of Eddy Merckx, Jacques Anquetil, Felice Gimondi, and Bernard Hinault as the only riders to win all three Grand Tours. Heady stuff!
In a way, I am coming to see the non-invite to the Tour as a blessing in disguise. It has allowed us to see Levi and Alberto and the rest of the Astana team at full strength in the Giro, and not just in a token appearance with little in the way of results. They stole the show. This never would have happened if they were going to the Tour. We will get to see a strong team at the Vuelta, where you know they’ll be highly motivated. And without the Tour on their dance card, they have funneled their frustrated energies into every other race they could get their hands on, with spectacular results, as documented above. And don’t forget this is an Olympic year, and all the Astana boys will compete for their national teams with fresh legs, while the guys coming out of the Tour may be a little flat. We’ll see if that amounts to anything in August.
Best of all perhaps is that the two principals at ASO, Patrice Clerc and Christian Prudhomme, come out of it all looking like a prize pair of dunderheads...total idiots, with egg so thick on their faces they look like a couple of walking omlettes. They chose, in an almost maliciously capricious manner, to torment the UCI by throwing Astana overboard, but that act of folly has come back to haunt them. Their Tour, the supposed pinnacle of the sport, will now be seen to be thoroughly compromised and diminished, and not a stage will go by without the media harping and carping on the issue of the best team in the world, with the best riders in the world, not being there. It will overshadow and taint the accomplishments of all the other riders who are there. The haughty high hats at ASO complained about the damage done to the Tour by Astana last year, but they’ve done more to damage the reputation and credibility of their own event this year than anyone else has ever done.
Of course Clerc and Prudhomme will never admit that they have blundered. They’re like Bush-Cheney: no matter how egregious and obvious their mistakes may be, they will never back down, never express remorse, and never admit they screwed up. But the rest of the cycling world and the sporting press will be happy to point it out for them. At first, they at least had the company of the Giro boss to share the blame, but the slippery Zomegnan turned on his co-conspirators in the end and left the two ASO-holes to twist in the wind on their own.
Will we watch the Tour de France this July? I expect I will, although that asterisk will be hovering over the TV screen at all times. Will Evans finally win or will Valverde at last realize his full potential? (They both looked good in the Dauphiné.) Or will some other new star be born, as Contador was last year? There are some very encouraging signs in the sport right now, with high-profile sponsorship deals just having been arranged for three big teams: Saxo Bank taking over CSC; Columbia Sportswear stepping up for High Road (formerly T-Mobile); and Garmin coming on board at Slipstream. All those teams will be lining up in their new livery for the Tour. (Thank god we’ve seen the last of those lame Team High Road 70’s graphics!) After the litany of bad news in the sport in recent years, this is very promising and upbeat. Now, if only ASO and UCI can mend their fences, perhaps things will start looking up soon. Mind you, I’m not counting on those goombahs wising up any time soon, but we can hope that eventually they’ll get tired of banging away at each other. As a gangland boss might say about a turf war: “It’s bad for business!”
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net