It is a telling sign of the state of our sport that picking the Anit-V moment of the year was a more difficult task than picking the V Ride of the Year. Best ride of the year? Clean, unanimous vote among The Keepers on that one. Low point of the year? Dissention in the ranks as email traffic filled our inboxes to overflowing.
Veino in Liege. Piti continuing to rack up wins even as his suspension was imminent. The defiance of the Spanish Cycling Federation. The UCI’s thinly veiled “fight” against doping, as long as I’m naming governing bodies. The Landis Allegations. The Cavendish/Haussler crash in the Tour de Suisse. The neutralization of Stage 2 of the Tour. The threat of the rider protest prior Stage 3. FedEx’s expulsion for irregular sprinting. Bjarne Riis’ constant complaining about the mass exodus from his team. The Motorcus Myth. Alberto Contador’s positive test for Clenbuterol.
Which brings me to my nomination of the lowest moment of the season: Chaingate. The incident was more than a moment of poor sportsmanship, but marked a new phase in Cycling’s steady departure from the great traditions of our sport. Not to mention that the Grimplette’s chain needs a stern talking to. There is no higher honor for a chain than to get jammed onto the big ring while carrying the Maillot Jaune away from the bunch on its way up some fabled climb in the Tour de France. The fact that it cocked it up is inexcusable. Into the trash heap with you, Chain. But I digress.
There was a time when the sport was headed by great personalities who recognized they were but a chapter of a great epic that spanned generations. They understood that one of the things that distinguish cycling from other sports is the rich history and time-honored traditions; Cycling’s icons – the Great Races, the Cobbles, the Mountains, the Jerseys – are made up of much more than any one athlete and are to be respected as such. Their actions are the mortar between the stones of our sport and form a foundation for later generations. Coppi, Bobet, Merckx, de Vlaeminck, Zoetemelk, Hinault, Fignon – these were riders with personality and strength of character, who understood their place.
Like small fluffy dogs chasing a passing car, Chaingate marked the moment when the top riders of our sport forgot their place in the misguided notion that the time gained at the finish is the stick by which we measure their greatness when in fact it is how they get there: with no one else in the picture.
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Although this is technically beside the point, it also needs to be said that in my opinion the notion that he "dropped" his chain is insane. You don't drop your chain going from the small to the big ring; you may overshift, but that wasn't what happened. The detail shots and video clearly show that what his chain did was much closer to chain suck than a dropped chain. It was a mechanical failure, and the rider was no more at fault than a rider getting a puncture. We generally don't go around accusing riders of deserving a puncture by claiming they should have avoided the invisible sharp crap in the road when they were going 60kmph.
I'd also be careful taking other riders' in the Tour's word as gospel just because they were there. They may in fact know what's going on, but by and large, they admit freely that they really have no clue what's going on with other riders during the race; do your job, to the finish, to the massage, dinner, bed, to the start. Not much time for analyzing all the crap that just us idiots care about. Even the commentators like Paul and Phil admit freely that they really don't have the time to dig into this type of stuff (not that it keeps them from forming opinions like we do.)
One of my all time heroes said, "You haven't won the race, if in winning the race you have lost the respect of your competitors." Paul Elvstrom, 4 time olympic gold medalist, plus too many more to mention here. "The honour of winning has been lost in the Benjamins" Hitchhiker, Zero times winner of zero.
Happy New Year all.
Chainsuck could only have happened because he was in the small/small gears - that's HIS fault and no one elses.
I think many peoples take on the situation is naive, and that even in the mythical days of yore where every rider displayed perfect ethics at every occasion this would have been regarded as a perfect time for Contador to profit. If Contador had stopped to wait he would have been laughed out of the Pantheon of Tour heroes, and would have been extremely unprofessional to boot.
Plus, the race unfolded thus: Shleck attacks-Contador seems glued to the road-Vino chases-Contador jumps at the same time as Shleck starts having problems-Shleck stops to free after Contador has passed. Was AC supposed to ascertain from ahead if it was an ethical etiquette time to go or not?
I ascribe the laying down of these arbitrary guidelines of what is and isn't acceptable morally (as opposed to in the actual rules) is an odd soap opera way of looking at the sport, and bears little resemblance to the reality of a sport that's perfectly beautiful without having some silly Sir Galahad bullshit foisted on it.
That doesn't mean I want to lose the quirky traditions and ethics that help the peloton revolve, I love those aspects as much as anyone. I think that in this situation though people are shoe-horning those things onto a foot that just doesn't fit.
Quote of the year right there...
It did lack class indeed in my book.
But let's not quibble at this point; allow me to wish you all une bonne annee 2011!
Great stuff Frank! Love how Cuntador says he had no idea Schleck was having a maechanical when he blew by him...bullshit. That would be like saying Armstrong didn't see Ullrich go into the ditch on the descent in 2001. Come on...
I couldn't agree more with you Oli. Schleck is awesome but he screwed up. You do not wait for someone who makes a mistake. A puncture, a crash, you wait if you are going by the unwritten rules with honor. If your adversary fucks up, he's fair game. And I totally cr bullshit to the claim that it was not Schlecks fault. Come on, really?
As far as the GC contenders were concerned, it all started and ended w/the cobbles stage. Balls to the wall and mechanicals or others be damned. The rest of the race was nothing more than the conservation of energy so that they could try and counter if one of the others even thought of displaying some V. Sit in the slipstream for 3400 out of a 3471 km, eat some spanish beef, and push the attack when your competitor drops his chain is the definition of V isn't it?
Had Clenbutador slowed they all would have slowed, and even if Menchov didn't it wouldn't have mattered, he was still nearly a minute and a half back from Schleck when they reached Paris. Sorta reminds me of the stories from WW2 fighter pilots, you did everything to kill your adversary, but once he was in the silk you didn't shoot him. Even when the game was a matter of life and death there was a sense of fair play to it. It was an accepted fact that all was fair game for stage 3, not so for the other stages. If this is the precedent that is being set, I say attack on the final stage while the yellow jersey is sipping his traditional champagne. It would be his stupid fault for drinking it.
Any fantasy scenarios you can dream up have zero bearing on this occasion, and even the lame excuses Contador pulled out afterwards don't. Even if he clearly saw what happened (as he was attacking, not because of which) he still should have gone as he did.
And how do you know the others would have slowed if AC did? How would he have known what they might or might not do at the time, remembering this is all happening on the road so fast it's even difficult to tell wtf is going on with the hindsight of repeated replays?