Hollywood Ending

Stage 20

I am going back to my regular blog after this.

Politics and Cycling in the South of France

http://thomasvasil.wordpress.com/

It is over. On the other hand, the Tour 2013 has just begun. Its like that.

The final sprint played out exactly as I thought it would, to the finest detail. Mind you, I expect several thousand people also thought exactly as I did. It was EBH for the last leadout. He really is good EBH, although it is shame he was born at the same time as Sagan. Same thing happened to people born at the same time as Merckx or others. One deals with it. Maybe Sagan will win a few Classics before he decides to lose weight. Be interesting to see him take on Boonen and Cancellara while he learns about the Classics. I think EBH is the highest quality rider to lead out someone for the victory in the Champs for some time. And just before that, to help Cav out, straight up the Rue de Rivoli (a more or less flat surface), who can actually ride faster than Bradley Wiggins? Answer, maybe Cancellara, but today Bradley had the Yellow Jersey on. It was rather cool. A bit of panache to end it. If the French can get it.

But Cav took it. He seemed to go from a bit too far out for my taste, but still. First guy to win four in a row on the Champs. First guy to win it with the rainbow jersey. To be honest, it has so much a touch of Hollywood that I am glad I watched it live. It was live, right? I bet Cav is a happy guy. Bradley is a happy guy, which makes Froome a little happier, and with Millar (and Stannard) they seem ready for the Olympics. That is only six days from now. Bradley said he is going home immediately, and then doing the last preparations. He does the time trial too. It would be a bit much if Cav won the road race and Bradley won the time trial. Actually it would be TOO much in some sense that I am only beginning to think about. Although very solidly English/British people will almost certainly not like to admit that Sky riders are winning too much. A great British accomplishment, or at least a Welsh accomplishment, as that is what Brailsford is. You get loads of money from the Lottery, set up a programme to win loads of medals. Done. Then you try to win the Tour “with a British rider”. Although along the way this year, the only Englishman on the Sky team won Paris-Nice, Tour of Romandie and Criterium Dauphiné. You see my point. Should anyone or any team be that good? Even USPostal just did Tour/Lance, and then pretty much vanished. In addition, Cav keeps winning, when he is allowed by the Sky people. In fact the same people run the Sky Team and the GB Team. That confusion of roles, personnel, organisational structure and money always seemed a bit confusing. For example, who is going to do what EBH does on Sky? If it is a big sprint, most sprinters have a lead out guy. I ramble, but the point is that Cav is having a totally excellent year, no matter how you look at it. He wanted to make the Rainbow Jersey proud, he said that many times. He has. He even won, most of you won't know this, just before the Tour, some small Belgian flat stage race, which I had never heard of. He might have won one stage, maybe not. But he won the entire stage race. He has never won a stage race before. As I said, it was dead flat.

Lame French interviews on the sports programme after. Asked Brad if he had done this for his father. Really stupid and tactless question, if they had been prepared properly. Maybe it was one of those “tough questions” you thrust at a sports personalty in the studio about some difficult part of their life. But Bradley was just off his bike, just off the podium, totally spaced having won the Tour de France, and they ask him about his father. Any bike journalist knows that his father, an Australian cyclist, buggered off very early on, and Bradley does not have anything to do with him. He was raised by his mum. Bradley brushed off the question by sitting upright, making brushing motions with his arm and not even responding much. Someone's idea of how to try to bring guy down at a moment of fulfilment. That Stade 2 guy went way low in my estimation. Anyway shortly after that, the same guy tried to emphasize how much Bradley must feel good to be the first British rider to win, and how proud of him the country would be. Bradley did a double take and said, pointing to himself, I won the Tour de France. My country didn't win it, I did. Interesting. Terribly tasteless stupid interview. I think it might take a bit longer for the true intercultural understanding to happen. They have done it with Cav, but Bradley is trickier.

I keep realising what a management task it must be to keep the group sweet, the world champ, the yellow jersey, and the only guy who might beat the yellow jersey, plus two or three who could be leaders on another team (EBH, Porte, at least). Then there are the Sky guys left home, including some young ones who did rather well in the Giro. Brailsford seems quite clear, if someone wants to leave, they leave, get a buyer for their contract and they leave. I actually think he knows that a team of relatively happy people are more likely to win. Everyone has a chance. I was a little bit surprised that Froome behaved so badly. But he has not been at this high level for long, as Bradley suggested at one point. One reason I don't think there is a problem is that if Froome wants to leave, no one much will care. It is up to Froome to make sure he does what he is told. I mean the guy is team leader for the Vuelta. Mostly likely there will be some very classy younger riders to give him support. Not only to give him support, but to take his job if he leaves. They finished seventh and ninth in the Giro, and are called Henao and Uran. The Sky team is really very well constructed. I should think having loads of money does make it way easier. But you have to have the staff. The Katusha staff clearly did not do much to get Menchov and his support team ready. And they have the second biggest budget. BMC, probably the third richest, did get a consolation prize, but not even close to the big yellow. Money is not quite all there is.

The final time gaps were rather huge for recent Tours. I am afraid I am not going to look up how long is has been since such and such a gap existed between the first guy and the tenth or the second or whatever. But big gaps, really quite big. And NOT a mountainous Tour. Interesting.

Just so I say it in one sentence, in spite of the fact that their sponsor is a super-rich liar, and cheat, and truth distorter, that Sky team said they would do something and they just went and did it. Bravo.

Not a lot I need to say really. I could tell you how I did on the Fantasy teams. Me and my Lancaster friend lost interest and never even used up all our rider change options during the Tour. I am not going to do that kind of league, it just silly. You got what you got. There are no substitutes in the the Tour. Don't know if I beat her or not. We were pretty much even. On the cobblestone Fantasy League (all year round), I have been trying to beat this guy from one of my forums. I seldom if ever manage it. I am always second, sometimes third in our forum sub-league. Looks like I might whip his ass on the Tour. A minor delight. As far as the season-long, outside run fantsy league that many of my forum people enter, I am much as usual. http://www.nrtoone.com/fantasy/cycling/index.php?page=home It appears that one of our guys, who also wins the winter quiz http://www.cyclingrevealed.com/trivia/triviaindex.htm, might have won the entire global competition. I think there are about a thousand in that league. I am about 250^th, and within my forum, I am about sixth or so. My usual. Still good, but I am not often lucky as well as skilful. Through injury, I lost Sanchez and Gesink from my team this year. But it turns out Gesink might not have done a thing this year anyway. To win or do well in a Fantasy Game, you have to do the right thing and not lose anyone. So a good team would have Sagan, Cancellara, Wiggins, Tejay, Greipel and Cav for sprinters, Evans and Froome, with careful use of extra credit on certain stages, and that is exactly what our guy did. Actually he had Voeckler and did not have Nibali. So the overall verdict on the fantasy league is as usual. Not that bad, not that good, with rare moments of excellence. After picking Cancellara for double points, and having two or the top four riders and whatever, I was eleventh for the first day of the Tour. Cancellara … I guess we could hope that he disrupts the pattern of Sky domination a bit. Bradley has won enough this year. Unless he wants to go and ride for Chris Froome in the Vuelta. (laughing out loud icon). My performance was about like finishing 47^th in GC and 21st in the mountains competition. A cross between Nerz and Fedrigo. Moments, but not a great performance.

Tejay is the third Etats Unien to have the young rider's jersey after Greg and Andy Hampsten.

Apparently Sagan had more points than anyone since Sean Kelly. Sagan really did wipe them all out. No contest. Came second on the Champs in case anyone forgot him in all the Sky glory. The guy is nearly flawless. Nice shy smile. Modest in his Italian speech. Probably speaks English too, certainly can understand French. Assuming he does not get corrupted by the high life, fall in with the wrong crowd, use drugs, get injured badly, stop training to have holidays with models, transfer teams who promise him everything …. then he should be one of the greatest race winners there have been. He does have to lose weight if he is going to keep up in the mountains. Oops he already can in the high mountains, until the heat is turned up. I will have to look up who else besides, Merckx and Bartali had any kind of record equal to his. He really is just a few months older that Thibaut Pinot. And Tejay.

Which reminds me of the young riders. I know I am always excited abut young riders coming up, holding their own. Because I live in France and know how much the French really would like a big winner, I find the new young lads quite exciting. Must check with my cynical clubmates to see what they think. Pinot is my guy. I have, sadly, come to dislike Rolland, even though he is a superb young climber, capable of winning a stage in any Tour he enters. Whoops, he already has done that. Thing about him is that he really can't time trial, in fact, Pinot can't yet either. They need to learn fast or they are only going to be an “occasional stage winner”, like the last generation of French heroes, Chavanel, Gadret, Pineau, Casar, Voeckler, Feillu, Casper and others. As a spectator, I am tired of those guys. They don't do much all year (except Chavanel) and put it all on theTour. Too French, not global enough. Too far down the top level. I want someone who can win a stage in the mountains by being clever and strong. And, in fact, both Pinot and Rolland have done this. Rolland twice. I have not even mentioned the young French sprinters who won't ride the Tour until next year or even later. I am not saying they will beat Cav, Goss, Greipel, Sagan in every race. They are young. But they have beaten serious opposition. We shouldn’t forget Tony Gallopin who was doing outstanding riding including some serious climbs, until his guy went wonky. Tejay and he are the guys for the future on that BMC team. The guys from the past, Gilbert, Evans, Hushovd have not really done very well at all this season. BMC have Taylor Phinney too, not in the Tour this year. Anyway, all we have to do is wait a bit and see how they do in the next few years. I think if I am lucky there will be another generation after them that I will have to get to know. Guys who are about 14-15 right now. Probably not even riding road bikes yet.

For some reason my wife (and I) decided to watch a bit of the English ITV4 coverage. We often turned it over to the French coverage, as the Brits have a huge number of adverts, really quite disruptive to view. Anyway we heard Bradley’s speech. The one that started with the joke about the raffle tickets being drawn now. He grabs a mike on the Champs Elysée, crowds of I don't know how many tens of thousands of people, and he cracks a joke about raffle drawing. The French won't even get why taking a mike for a simple guy from Kilburn would automatically turn his mind to that. Then he said banal things, then mentioned specifically his mum who was there and who would be totally happy, dream come true. Then at the end, he said drive carefully, don't drink too much tonight. All totally Bradley and he said it in english. Usually on French TV, in fact, ALWAYS, he speaks excellent French. Not perfect, but better than 90% of all English immigrants I have met here. Good street expressions too. Then we turned over to the French coverage and they were just translating the speech. Weird that. The French are behind the actual live event, I guess so they can take care of errors … Anyway, the translator is very good. I have listened to her voice for three weeks and am perfectly able to judge her work rendering the English into French. Although Brailsford, Millar and Bradley always speak good French. The translator is good. Could you believe it? They didn’t mention the raffle ticket joke, deleted. They mentioned something about his father, NOT his mother, and they just skipped the joke about not drinking too much tonight. His speech was really short. I got really upset about this. They just didn't mention don't get drunk. They claim he mentioned his father, when it was his mother. This is serious French messiness, the kind that blew up the Rainbow Warrior. I hope Hollande apologizes for the public TV station.

Later in Stade 2, the big sports Sunday show, they offered Brad a pint of some kind of amber liquid. Probably some French stuff. Bradley made a little automatic gesture, but said no thanks, he had the Olympics just around the corner. It wasn't a joke. I don't think the guy is going to get drunk to celebrate, until maybe after the Olympics.

Nice interview, or part of it, with Bradley. http://www.cyclingnews.com/tour-de-france/stage-20/results

Getting quite late. Must hit the hay. Sometimes I promise a wrap up reflection blog. But I have not written one for years. Time for the Tour to be over.

I am going back to my year round blog. Its been hectic, but fun. See you next year.

Politics and Cycling in the South of France. http://thomasvasil.wordpress.com/

Time Trial, Must be Wiggo

Stage 19

Let's see, what is there to talk about today? Nothing about tactics. The riders ride as fast as they can for 50k. All by themselves. Admittedly, only a very few of them ride as fast as they can, most ride pretty fast. Many ride only as fast as they need to ride to finish within the time limit. There are some points at stake, but after the first twenty or so, whether one finishes 65^th or 68^th is really of utterly no importance to anyone. Just finishing the Tour is a major accomplishment for anyone, even these guys. Riders who finish that low are usually working hard for their leaders and the GC has no bearing on whether they have done their job or not. Others had bad days, like Rein Taaramae, my choice to young rider, or Cadel Evans. Rein rode well in the TT, mainly to recover a bit of pride. As it happens this year, there were not many questions the time trial would solve.

The first was whether Bradley would beat Froome. If he did, then he would win two stages, and would demonstrate that he is the very best time triallist, and also nearly the best climber. That is precisely the combination that would win this Tour. Not THAT many mountains. And Bradley won very comfortably. We will never know if he was riding as fast as possible or whether Froome was riding as fast as possible. We think so.

Another question is whether the young French lads, Roland and Pinot would ride well enough to remain in the top ten. They both did, rather comfortably. Of the two, I think I would bet on Pinot to turn into the real GC contender, the first Frenchman to win since 1986. But maybe one day, Pinot and Rolland will be duking it out with Tejay to win the Tour. It is a bit noteworthy, to see that three (Rolland is almost young) young riders ended up in the top ten. Obviously we don't know where Tejay would have finished if he didn't have to work for Evans, just as we don't know where Froome might have ended up if he didn't have to work for Wiggo. This is often the case in the Tour. These matters will entertain us cycling buffs during the months to come.

One could not avoid mentioning that Evans had a terrible time trial. He lost the Tour some days ago, but I thought he might pull out a good time trial to save face. No luck. He was totally demoralised or else has some kind of physical problem we don't know about yet. He had, perhaps, the most disappointing Tour of anyone. During the time trial there was a moment when the young Tejay overtook the not so young Evans, both are on the same team. That was not a happy scene, although watching the young come up to the top, and the old one stop riding well is certainly quite normal and has been going on forever.

None of the jerseys changed. The changes in the top fifteen were minimal. Evans changed place with Zubeldia, as Zubeldia beat Evans by 22 seconds, enough to take sixth place from Evans. This should never have happened. Evans has not said anything, I think he was just crushed by his performances. Roche and Kloden changed places, Roche doing a good time trial. I won't search much further, but nothing else changed in the top fifteen.

Some results to note would be Pinot's rather good ride two and half minutes out of the top ten. He really does need to do a little work on his trialling. Tejay's rather promising work in the TT was noticed. I see that Peter Velits was quite fresh at the end, perhaps he should move to a team that uses him a bit better, supports him more. We can see that even after doing all that work for Wiggo, Richie Porte was still fresh enough to do an excellent TT. I think he might find himself moving to Orica Greenedge soon, as they don't really have a GC contender on the team. No doubt Richie could finish in the top ten with a bit of support. Menchov had a very disappointing Tour, since he was meant to be an outsider and because of crashes or lack of form or whatever, he really never appeared in the picture that much.

Tomorrow nothing will change much either, as no riders will attack until the Champs Elysée. The first few attacks will be harmless and give riders a chance to show themselves and their sponsor's jersey, especially if they have not done all that well during the rest of the Tour. But the result that seems most likely will be a victory for the Sky Train and Cav. The only question will be whether some other team or individual will mess up that ending. It is quite possible, but unlikely. British sports fans will be delighted. I noticed they are flooding in now with comments on newspaper stories, and revealing that they know nothing about cycling, except that a British guy won. Fair enough. They might spend a bit of money or a bit of elbow grease and get out on a bike. Now THAT would be great.

It was a good Tour in the sense that some stages were quite good racing for a few minutes or longer. On the other hand, for the most part, the suspense was not that great. There were more surprises through crashes than through good, daring riding. Let's be honest, the total dominance of Sky pretty much smothered the suspense that makes a race exciting. The mountains jersey was uncertain for a bit, but only because no one much cared until the last couple of stages. The green jersey was won at the end of the first week. And although Pinot put up symbolic opposition, the young riders' competition was not a competition. It was a good Tour, but not enough uncertainty. I prefer when five or six guys wear yellow rather than two. I am not that disappointed, for example, the revelation of how good some of the young riders are was quite uplifting.

It also has to be said that Sky were well organised, had a plan, had the form, did the job. It was maybe not such good spectator sport, but it was a team who did what they said on the tin. Bravo. I especially liked watching the French try to incorporate a British winner into their understanding of what was “normal”. They might take months or even years to really accept it. When you see riders “warming down” after a stage, you can remember when that change happened. Thank Wiggo and Sky.

Tour gossip from l'Equipe this morning. I guess you have all noticed the emergence of the terminology "Colonel Wiggo", which somehow amuses some French journalists, and allows them to use all sorts of military metaphors to describe the planning, and execution of the plan for the Tour by “the British”. I find it slightly annoying, but maybe it suits someone. Never knew Dave Brailsford, who speaks very good French, was a mediocre rider for ASPTT St. Etienne for three years in the 80s. His father was a mountain guide too, so he spent much time in France. Apparently he learned attention to detail from his dad, or so they say. Bradley will use his usual black TT bike with a bit of yellow, but his front brake will be yellow (instead of blue) to celebrate. Froome the latest to be connected by rumour to offers from Astana. Brailsford quoted as saying it is very simple, someone can stay with the Sky team or not. If they want to look elsewhere to be happier, let them go. Sky bought out contracts and so can anyone else. Omega Pharma interested? The first twenty riders got a fast helicopter ride last night to today's stage, the rest took the bus. Apparently there are no fast train connections and not enough planes to rent, or whatever they do with plane rides. Sounds strange. A lot of the masses of the riders are moaning a bit, but I can understand that. Michelin tells me that it is four and half hour drive from Brive to Bonneval. That means arriving at about 11h00. Apparently the Brits are putting the stages at the weekend on ITV 1 instead of ITV 4. Indicating they think the masses might want to watch. Usually rubbish being spouted by Virenque in a continuing strange feature interview. A fake interview is constructed by the editors, and Virenque (or another riders) corrects it. Millar had one, Wiggo. Kind of stupid. N idea why they did Virenque, hwo is not even a rider. The French are still working out what having the first British winner of the Tour means, and therefore what being British means, and how they are different to the French, and so forth.