On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 10/1/2008
Looking backward, looking forward
Here we are arrived at October, 2008. If you live in a place blessed with the prospect of a lovely Indian Summer, this may be one of the best months of the year for getting out on your bike. That late-season, low-riding sunlight imparts a honey-glazed glow to all it touches, making us feel as if our days are caught in amber...at least until the rains arrive and usher the balmy weather off-stage for a few months. We were out for a century ride yesterday, up in Mendocino and Lake Counties, cruising through the walnut and pear groves, with the mercury still on the high side of 90, but, at the same time, with all the hints in the air that the season is turning; that slate-colored skies and wicked-slick roads and clammy cold are just around the corner.
As we stand on this cusp of the seasons, with one foot still in summer and the other pointing toward the dark side, I am going to indulge in one last look backward into that summer just past, and then turn the other way and peer into the misty, murky future to see what lies ahead.
So enough with the mangled metaphors and literary flourishes. Let's get down to it..."it" in this case being the world of pro bike racing. I've devoted three out of my nine columns so far this year to the peloton, and I propose to add one more now, bringing things fully up to date and wrapping it all up with a big ribbon. The last column was my follow-up to the Tour de France, and if you read it and the one that preceded it--my pair of Tour de Farce pieces--you can guess that I am going to be ringing the gong one more time on the Astana saga.
Recall the basic theme: excluded from the big show, the Tour de France, on the flimsiest of political pretext, the Astana team takes its battle anywhere else it can and along the way wins pretty much every race it enters. (Not quite literally true, but about as close as one team has come in recent years to sweeping the board. My July column has a good catalog of how the team did in stage races this year.) The message to the Tour de France organizers was as plain as a pie in the face: tell the very best stage race team in the world that it is not worthy to compete in your event, and that team will proceed to demonstrate, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that, without them, your event is not the very best stage race in the world.
The final chapter in this saga was the Vuelta a España, run from August 30 to September 21. Astana was most definitely entered in this, Alberto Contador's home grand tour. And they brought their A team, including Contador and Leipheimer as co-captains, with Klöden and Rubiera and Paulinho as super-duper domestiques. When you consider that Klöden probably would have preferred to be the team leader for the Astana B-team at the Tour of Germany, running concurrently with the Vuelta, you can see that Johann Bruyneel and the Astana organization came to the Vuelta with one goal: total domination. In contrast, the SaxoBank team, the all-conquering titans of the Tour de France, brought a decidedly second-string team. Only Carlos Sastre and one or two water boys carried over from their powerful Tour squad. No Fabian Cancellara, no Stuey O'Grady, no Schleck brothers tag-team. It seemed like a bit of a slight to Sastre, after he'd delivered the goods at the Tour, to not support him a little better in his home grand tour. Not surprising that he has elected to ply his craft for a new team in the coming season. SaxoBank wasn't alone in giving the Vuelta a bit of a pass. Many teams sent altered--and diminished--rosters, if they entered at all. Of the top ten on GC at the Tour, only first place Sastre and ninth-place Valverde were entered in the Vuelta.
So on paper at least, it looked like Astana was in the driver's seat, with the best team leaders, the deepest team, and the most motivation. For once, the predictions proved to be right on the money. Contador won and Levi Leipheimer was a very close second at :46. Carlos Sastre, the Tour de France winner, was a distant third at 4:12. Not even close. No disrespect to Sastre, but seeing him down on the lowest step of the podium, with the two Astana team leaders standing above him, you can't help but wonder what the final podium in Paris would have looked like had the Astanas not been so unfairly ostracized from the event.
This is of course the take-away from the Vuelta. Winning the event for its own sake was dandy, but the story behind the story was the pie in the face to ASO, the Tour owners.
We didn't get to see any of the Vuelta on TV. (I would have missed it anyway, being off on yet another great cycle-tour.) I've read the reports and have even struggled through the on-line jungle to watch a few video snippets of the crucial stages, for whatever insight that might provide me (next to none). So I'm still a bit in the dark, as I'm sure most of you are, about the precise dynamics of what happened on those decisive stages. Essentially, there were four of them: two mountaintop finishes and two time trials. Contador won both the mountain stages and Leipheimer won both the ITTs. (Technically, there were three time trials, but the first one was--get this--a team time trial in the prologue. That strikes me as one of the silliest wastes of time ever: trying to get teams up and running in full time trial formation for a sprint of less than five miles. Sorry...doesn't compute. What were they thinking?)
In the first ITT, a conventional, flat stage, Levi took :49 out of Contador (who was fourth), and in the process donned his first-ever leader's jersey in a grand tour. The second ITT was uphill--a mountaintop finish--and in this one, he took another :31 out of Contador (who was second). So that's 80 seconds total.
The first of the two mountain stages was the really significant day of the race, and it's appropriate that it should have been: this was the mountaintop finish at l'Angliru, certainly the most fearsome ascent in Spain and possibly the toughest in all of Europe. With 2.5 K to go in this steepest of all climbs, Contador attacked. Valverde attempted to follow, with the assistance of his teammate Rodriguez. From the little video clips I have seen, and from what I have read, it appears that Leipheimer rode the stage as Contador's last, best lieutenant. Klöden took a big turn on the earlier climbs on the day, then Rubiera set the tempo on the lower slopes of Angliru, whittling the lead group down to just a handful of wannabes. Finally, Levi threw down a monster pull as the climb steepened, and that wiped out pretty much everyone except Contador, Valverde, and Rodriguez. He even shelled Sastre out the back.
When Levi pulled off and sat up (if you can sit up on a 20% wall), Contador launched his big move. At that point, Levi just sat there. What one cannot discern, from the video or from the write-ups, is whether Levi was tapped out from his big pull or whether he was following team orders to stay back and mark Carlos Sastre. Valverde and Rodriguez really didn't matter. They were already too far down on GC to be a problem. Sastre was the last guy to pose a threat, so that's the guy Levi shadowed up the steepest pitch on the hill. Meanwhile, Contador was dancing on the pedals, some ways ahead. After sitting on Sastre's wheel for a kilometer or so, Levi came back around him and dropped him, finishing :27 ahead of Sastre and 1:05 behind Contador. Unlike this year's Tour, the Vuelta was awarding bonus seconds for the first three across the line. Contador grabbed 20 of them for first and Valverde and Rodriguez got the rest, so Levi, in fourth, got none. That meant Contador gained 1:25 on Leipheimer, moving him from :18 behind at the start of the day to 1:07 ahead at the end.
The next day looked almost as brutal as l'Angliru, with the uphill finish at Fuentes de Invierno. It certainly shredded the peloton in about the same way. Both Valverde and Sastre were dropped by Contador and Leipheimer with about four K to go, and the two Astanas poured on the coal all the way to the finish. Contador was first over the line with Levi two seconds behind. Another 20-second bonus for Contador, but a 12-second award to Levi for second, which plumped Contador's lead up to 1:17.
Interesting symmetry here: Leipheimer was first and first in the two time trials; Contador was fourth and second. Contador was first and first in the two mountain stages; Leipheimer was fourth and second. Contador received a net plus of 28 seconds in time bonuses for his two wins, but Leipheimer received no time bonuses for his two wins because there are no time bonuses awarded in time trials.
So we're left with some interesting questions...
Leipheimer finishes second overall at :46, and of that total, :28 is the result of Contador's time bonuses. Without the bonus seconds, Levi ends up :18 out of first place. Now then...team orders. It's pretty much a "well, duh!" certainty that Contador was the chosen one on the Astana squad for this event. It was his home grand tour, and by winning it, he would--he did--become only the fifth rider in history to win all three grand tours. (Who are the other four? Eddy Merckz, Bernard Hinault, Jacques Anquetil, Felice Gimondi. Contador, at 25, is younger than any of the others were when they achieved this feat.) All of that was just too much of a no-brainer, and it would have taken some extraordinary circumstances to override the obvious imperative to support Contador ahead of all others. Had Contador cracked, perhaps Levi would have been let off the leash. But Contador did not crack, so Levi's role was clear: help Contador win and don't get in the way. Levi followed team orders to mark Sastre on l'Angliru, allowing Contador to build up a cushion of over a minute at the summit. That right there was the most crucial single moment of the whole stage race. We don't really know if Levi could have matched Contador's attack. And we probably never will know. That's just the way it is.
Throughout the Vuelta, Levi's comments to the media were those of a loyal domestique: he never had aspirations for the overall; he fully supported Contador and fully expected Contador to win in the end. Very noble and self-effacing and exactly what we have come to expect of Levi. A week or two after the Vuelta, a few minor cracks appeared in that facade. Contador hinted that Levi hadn't really helped him all that much, and Leipheimer allowed as how things might have been different had he been on a different team...
There is an interesting historical parallel here for Leipheimer. He first came to world-class prominence when he finished third in the 2001 Vuelta. He was there to work as a chief lieutenant for team leader Roberto Heras on Johann Bruyneel's US Postal team. Heras was the defending Vuelta champion. He had worked hard for Lance Armstrong in the Tour, and the quid pro quo was that US Postal would send a good team to the Vuelta to support Heras in defense of his title. Turned out though that Heras was not quite on top of his game for the overall and faltered on a couple of the big mountain stages. Levi did his job as a domestique and helped in any way he could to pull Heras up the hills and limit his losses, so that Heras could at least capture a step on the podium, even if it wasn't the top step.
The only problem with the plan was that there were four time trials that year: a fairly long prologue, an uphill time test, and two conventional chronos. In the time trials, supporting your team leader goes by the board. It's every man for himself, and in this case, Levi took time out of Roberto in every ITT: :40 in the prologue, :30 in the hill climb, and 2:36 and 2:32 in the two normal ITTs, adding up to a whopping 6:18. Even though Leipheimer had sacrificed his own chances on the regular stages to work for Heras, he more than made up for it in the time trials, with the final result that he bumped his own team leader off the podium. Heras finished fourth, :57 behind Leipheimer.
It's nobody's fault but Heras' for being such a turkey of a time trialer, and to bring it back to the present, Contador has made himself into a much better chrono-man than Heras ever could have hoped to be. Over the past two years, as teammates, he has beaten Leipheimer in time trials as often as Leipheimer has beaten him. But in this Vuelta, Levi appears to have had the upper hand. He took 80 seconds out of Contador in two time trials. What if there had been four time trials this year and he had taken another 80 seconds out of him? That would have put a pretty big dent in Contador's winning margin of 46 seconds.
Oh well... "What ifs" are the staple of armchair, Monday-morning quarterbacks; the things that make the hot-stove league so much fun. They don't cut much ice in the real world. So we'll leave the Vuelta as it is. Whether you were rooting for Contador or Leipheimer, the real winner was Astana, and the real moral of the story was this final slap in the face to the organizers of the Tour de France. As I said in July, the principals at ASO will never admit they made a blunder, but they have announced that Astana will be welcome in all of their events in 2009. Further, and almost more amazingly, they have begun to mend their fences with the UCI. They're still hammering out the details, but it looks as if each side in the turf war has given up a little and that there is some real possibility of peace in the peloton for the year ahead.
The year ahead... Looking forward... Shoot, when I look forward to next year at this point, I get a weird, whiplash-inducing sense of deja vu, as if I'm actually looking backward. The biggest news of the silly season is Lance Armstrong coming out of retirement and rejoining Johann Bruyneel and the Postal-Disco-Astana Express. Tyler Hamilton is back, wearing the United States Champion's jersey no less. Ivan Basso is set to resume racing with his new Liquigas team this very month at the Tour of Japan. And Floyd Landis will soon be back on the road, in the bunch, as well.
I hardly know what to think about the Armstrong story. It's too strange, too preposterous. It was amusing to see him sparring with Greg Lemond at Interbike in Vegas. It's hard to like Lemond, but he certainly keeps things lively, coming back again and again, like Banquo's ghost, to torment those still trying to get ahead in the modern world. I am going to reserve judgment on Armstrong's return, but I do feel a bit sorry for Contador and Leipheimer, who have every right to feel they've earned their status as team leaders, only to now find themselves overshadowed by the latest edition of The Lance Chronicles. Their reactions have been somewhat mixed to the news so far. Contador has pitched a minor hissy fit over it, threatening to leave the team if he's not accorded prima ballerina billing. Levi, in contrast, hasn't said a word, at least not in public.
Whether Basso and Hamilton and Landis can do anything significant in the few years left to them remains to be seen. I wish them all the best. There has been some rather strident squawking from some of the younger riders in recent days about how all these bad apples are getting back into the barrel and dragging the sport down again, but I can't take any of that too seriously. What has the new generation of riders done lately that is so fresh and different? We have Ratso Ricco out of the Tour for doping, and now we have that all-around nice guy Frank Schleck accused of paying thousands of euros to the evil Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes of Operacion Puerto infamy. In fact, there are reports circulating that have Schleck and his DS Bjarne Riis going to visit Fuentes' clinic together. If this can be proven, then I should think Riis would be in as much hot water as Schleck, and one has to wonder if it will be his team that will be persona non grata at the Tour next year. (Sastre jumping ship begins to looks like a smart play on his part.) If I were the new sponsors--SaxoBank--I might be wondering if I had made such a wise move in hitching myself to Bjarne's bandwagon.
(For the record, Riis and Schleck deny all the allegations and are insisting everything will be sorted out soon. In fact, Riis has just announced the acquisition of a co-sponsor to jointly front for the team: Danish hi-tech outfit IT Factory. The team will be known as SaxoBank-IT Factory in 2009, and both principal sponsors express complete confidence in both Schleck and Riis...for now.)
So...it has been an interesting year, with the ASO-UCI-Astana menage a trois running as a soap opera sub-plot behind most of the actual racing. Can we hope that things will be a little more normal next year?; that the racing will be the sole topic for all of us, and not the bickering and backbiting and political chicanery we have had to endure this time around? Stay tuned! With Lance prancing back onto the stage; with Ivan "Birillo" Basso and Tyler "Tugboat" Hamilton back in the mix; with Floyd Landis not far behind...you kind of have to figure 2009 is going to be as distracting and entertaining and just plain weird as anything we've seen lately. Ain't it fun?
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net