Somewhere in Halfords' Marketing Department, there is a Venn diagram with one circle labelled "spends £8000 on a bike " and the other labelled "doesn't google dealer reputations", and the overlap on those circles is apparently huge.
To be honest, I think Halfords perhaps get the wrong end of a lot of bike snobbery. The general perception is that the Carrera brand is overweight, and they'll build it badly, and that the Boardman brand is pretty good, but they'll build it badly. But you know what? If you're on an inexpensive bike (and I think the majority of cyclists in the UK are still pretty much commuting/leisure cyclists rather than club riders or sportive junkies) and you need a seatpost, or a cable or an inner tube, the chances are Halfords has sorted you out without rifling your wallet. Fair play to them.
Becoming a Pinarello dealer though? That's a sizeable step in the other direction. The idea that anyone who cares enough about bikes to buy a Pinarello is going to be willing to have it assembled by the Saturday kid from the Bass Tubes and Stereos department is ridiculous.
These are kids doing part-time work. It's not their career, or their life's passion; they aren't working in an independent bike shop in the hope of becoming a famous wheelbuilder. They're working in a high street shop that sells more Castrol GTX and Richard Hammond videos than it does bikes.
They're 17 years old and they've got things on their mind other than figuring out which way round the wobbly carbon forks go on your new Dogma 2.0, or adequately wiring up its Di2 Electric shifter. That's as it should be, frankly, if you want disposable labour. Let's not pretend that the £3.68 minimum wage paid to an under-18 is somehow buying you their enthusiastic fealty. When I was 17 I worked for minimum wage at a Happy Eater and you should have seen the blasé fashion in which I cooked your dinner. Sorry, I was busy thinking about Heavy Metal, white cider and cheap grass. You really wouldn't have wanted me fitting the brakes that are going to stop you on your way down the Cat and Fiddle.
I know that cycling is at an all-time high in popularity, and I understand that for young city types it has replaced poker as the willy-bashing pastime du jour, but I still don't believe there are many people out there who care enough about cycling to buy bikes that start at £3,000 but don't care enough to buy them from a place that will put them together properly.
The saddest prediction of all, and one that feels painfully likely, is that Halfords' will be able to undercut smaller Pinarello dealers and will flog a shedload of Italian beauties with shifters positioned at 45 degrees and saddles run forward on their rails. Then those dealers who should have had a £3,000 sale will have to be grateful for the chance to charge 25 quid here and there to repair and reassemble badly-built bikes that they would have built properly in the first place.
Some people are probably grumbling that this is only what you should expect when Italian frame builders start putting Japanese components on their bikes. The cycling equivalent of red skies and a rain of frogs, that is. If only they'd gone with Campag.
We’re eleven days away from the start of the 2013 season, and soon there will be a whole new bunch of cycling memories taking up residence in my mind. One last chance then, to dust off the best memories of 2012.
This isn’t a "Greatest Moments of 2012", as such. If it were, there would be a lot more of Hoy, Trott, Storey and Armitstead. Boonen would get more than one mention, and Cav’s Tour stages would get a lengthy write up. This is a more subjective list; the things that come unbidden to my mind when I relax and think of cycling in 2012, the moments from the season that effortlessly imprinted themselves on my brain.
I’ve tried hard to keep it to those first few moments, and to cut it off at the point where I feel I’m actively remembering things rather than just have memories wash over me. Sadly, that means I’ve excluded Nibali on Green Mountain (that point where I thought he was going to have great season-not my finest prediction ever). There’s also only room for Millar’s stage win at the Tour to be an honourable mention, which is a terrible shame, as it was as fine an example of why “winningest” should be a real word as you’ll ever see. Not the youngest, not the fastest, and not the best climber in his breakaway group, Millar marked the right moves and timed his own attack perfectly. That’s not even just down to experience: there are plenty of savvy, grizzled veterans in the bunch who couldn’t have pulled it off, but Millar won because not because he knows more about racing, but because he knows more about winning. He also gave a brave and timely victory speech.
Mirador de Ezaro
When the 2012 Vuelta’s vertiginous route was announced last January, most people gave the Mirador de Ezaro a passing glance, said “That’s got Rodriguez written all over it” and then went into raptures about Cuitu Negru and Bola del Mundo. At 2Km, Mirador de Ezaro didn’t seem long enough to be decisive in the race, and couldn’t help but be overshadowed by the many, many mountains on the rest of the route. But for some reason it sank its hooks into me. I blogged about it, I put it in my race preview, I posted links to ascent videos on forums and maintained it would be a key battleground in the race. I was going to look a right plonker if they sailed over it effortlessly.
As it turned out, the key battleground of the race turned out to be a tarmacked pimple a few kilometres into a stage that barely qualified as a medium mountains day. Having failed to dislodge each other on any of the real climbs, the battle between Purito and Pistolero was settled by a crafty Contador attack when Rodriguez wasn't looking, so early in a nothing stage that the TV coverage hadn’t even started. The Vuelta organisers are attempting to rectify this for the next edition by apparently having not so much as a single flat kilometre in the race.
So, all the hills and all the mountains turned out to be entertaining rather than decisive battlegrounds, true, but my little Mirador de Ezaro was one of them. Anyone who thought stage 12 would be a short, uncontested dash to the finish by Joaquim Rodriguez was way off, as the Ezaro’s mix of steep ramps, hairpins and false flats packed into just two or three Km of road was host to one of the Vuelta’s many agonising battles, as Rodriguez and Contador distanced the field and caught the escapees on the 24% sections of the climb, chugged painfully over the middle sections of the hill, before Rodriguez nipped out of Contador’s wheel to attack of the last fifty yards or so and take the victory. I suppose it did have his name all over it, but it wasn’t the sort of mad, unopposed dash we saw in his Giro stage win at Assisi, it was a fight.
Cavendish after La Manie
Not one of the happier memories of the year, but certainly one of the most telling. Everyone knows that Milan-San Remo doesn’t get going until the Cipressa and the Poggio, right? The chancers dash away hoping to exploit the old saw that seven seconds of advantage at the top of the Poggio will be enough to get you to the finish, while sprinters who fancy their chances on the broad finishing boulevard will do their tenacious best to control the climb and set things up for a gallop.
It was a shock to turn on the Eurosport coverage and see the Liquigas team in their fetching jersey (I know, I know, I am the only person in all of Europe who liked their kit) hooning it over La Manie in the middle of the race. Even in a 300Km leg sapper like M-SR its not uncommon to see a little bit of exploratory leg stretching, but this wasn’t a probe or feint, this was one of the best-drilled squads in the bunch pushing hard at the font loooooong before you’d expect anything decisive to happen. And there was Cav, in his World Championship bands, dropping out of the back of the bunch.
With hindsight, his particular brand of Kryptonite was every bit as obvious as a glowing green rock. Isolate him early, as it’s in no other team's interest to pitch in to the effort to bring him back to the front. All of a sudden, you could see the seeds of the negative riding that the Germans and Australians would adopt in the Olympic road race.
Boonen’s Roubaix When Boonen had his usual early season successes in the Middle-East, it seemed like business as usual. Three or four wins at the start of the season, followed by a gradual slide away from the sharp end of the races and another disappointing season for Tornado Tom. Except, at the time, I said I thought there might be something different going on this time-at one point, Boonen reeled back in a full-blooded attack by Fabian Cancellara, which not many people can claim to have done. There seemed to be a physical strength and a hunger that had been absent for a several years. By early February, I was starting to wonder if we were about to see a Tornado season as good as we got in '05 and '06.
Turns out, it would be better than that. Second in Het Nieuwsblad, followed by wins at E3 Harelbeke, Ghent-Wevelgem and the Tour of Flanders were impressive enough, but Boonen wasn’t going to settle for one monument when he could have two. A 50Km solo effort over the cobbles, with Sky's best efforts unable to bring him back, and Boonen had clinched Paris-Roubaix in a fashion that stands alongside the legends of the event. I had to watch a recording of it in the early hours of the morning, which added a strange extra frisson of excitement, like staying up to watch boxing from Vegas, only better.
A Tale of Two Time Trials
I’m cheating a bit by putting these two together, but I’ve got good reason. I saw Wiggo on his way to TT victory in the Tour De France from the foot of a hill near Abbans Dessous, barely a kilometre from the first time check at the not-at-all-confusingly-named Abbans Dessus. I saw him on his way to victory in the Olympic Time Trial in Bushy Park, 200 metres from the finish line, and in both cases there was a beautiful certainty in seeing him pass.
At Abbans Dessous, the time check was atop a hill, shortly before a left hander into a short, twisting descent. The hedgerow at the top of the hill was broken, and you could see riders flashing between the gaps in the privet a minute or so before they’d pass us on the descent. Cadel Evans passing through was exciting enough, but almost as soon as he’d passed the foot of the hill, there was a flash of yellow blurring through the hedges at the top, less than a minute behind. There was no need for timing chips, transponders or tenths of seconds, the difference was visible: having started two minutes apart, Wiggo had closed up over a minute on the defending champion in the first third of the time trial. I’d still spend the next two weeks trying not to jinx it, but at that moment, a little bit of me started to believe.
In Bushy Park, it was an equally perfect moment - we already knew that defending champion Fabian Cancellara was well off the pace, a season’s worth of injuries and a crash in the road race having scuppered his preparations. Wiggo may have been the second to last man to pass us, but for all intents and purposes, he was already on his victory lap, and had been since he started to pull into the lead over Tony Martin at the second time check, and then extend that lead at the third. By the time he came in to Bushy Park, we knew he’d won-there was no delayed gratification, the celebrations started as soon as we caught a glimpse of him. Sport would be rubbish if it always lacked tension, but every once in a while it’s nice to have a Hollywood victory.
Pozzovivo on Punta Veleno
Before the Giro del Trentino I think I’d seen Domenico Pozzovivo’s name in print a few times, but I couldn’t have told you much about him. The same goes for Punta Veleno, the “poisonous sting”. One afternoon in April changed that, as Pozzovivo took the lead in the Giro del Trentino with climb of this small but feisty mountain. The road twists and turns, blending long steep drags with shorter, steeper ramps, and each tree shielded corner has the potential to reveal another unexpected and heartbreakingly cruel pitch.
Pozzovivo led a slow motion dash up this brute, with Astana’s Roman Kreuziger, Liquigas’ Sylvester Szmyd and Lampre’s Damiano Cunego notable among the pursuers. For most of the bizarre chase, Pozzovivo was unable to drag the gap out to much more than four or five bike lengths, but equally, the chasers were unable to close it. For long, long minutes it looked impossible that an attack which had so little effect could succeed, yet equally impossible that it could be reeled back in. The riders maintained their respective paces through the worst of the climb until finally, painfully, the elastic snapped and Pozzovivo surged ahead onto the muddy plateau atop Punta Veleno, fog filling the steep drop into the valley beside the road, and stayed away to take the lead in the race, despite his supposedly timorous descending.
It’s strange, given that this was the year of Wiggo’s Tour and Olympic wins, but when I think of cycling in 2012, Pozzovivo grinding up Punta Veleno with his rivals only a few uncloseable feet behind him is what I picture.
I've just bought a Sensa Umbria Tiagra Special. As you can
imagine, I’m very excited. I love the Purple Peril, but it has put in 16 years of dependable service and it just isn't holding up very well anymore. I'm pretty sure the frame itself could put in another 16 years if need be, but everything else is old enough to require replacement or time consuming maintenance after even the shortest of rides. The point at which the bottom bracket started to make a combined grind-creak-click noise with every turn of the pedals made me think it was time for a new bike. These days it would cost me more to replace all the Peril's ruined bits than than the Peril itself cost 16 years ago. I suppose that's inflation for you.
Like a lot of people, I’ve had my eye on the Sensa range, and particularly the Sensa Umbria Tiagra Special, since
they first popped up on Merlin’s website about five or six months ago. The Sensa
range hung around quietly for a while, selling at a discount to riders who were
prepared to join a product feedback scheme. The feedback must have been positive, as the range then received a proper fanfare last November by way of announcements in Cycling Weekly and on numerous websites,
after which the Umbria Tiagra Special quickly became the “most popular bike we’ve
ever had” in the words of one Merlin employee. They sold two others during the forty five minutes I was in the shop.
The reason why it took me a while to actually commit to buying
one was simple: every time I googled the words “Sensa Umbria Tiagra Review”, I’d
get nothing. Sure, there were plenty of cycling forums in which people were
asking if they were any good, but precious few people replying who could claim
to have ridden one, and not a single professional review.
When mine arrives in a fortnight’s time, I’ll be posting a
review. I won’t call it a "professional" review, as I’ll own the bike, which is a
pretty unprofessional basis to start from. Having been a hardware reviewer
for the last twelve years, however, I can promise that it will be a carefully considered
opinion, weighed up in comparison to other entry level rides, and assessed using relevant criteria.
In the meantime, I can tell you what actually clinched it
for me when I finally got my hands on one in the shop.
For starters, the price really isn’t too good to
be true, which had been my original worry. The first things most people ask when assessing a full bike are: what's it made of, and what group does it have? The Umbria Tiagra is an aluminium
frame with a full Tiagra groupset. Given that the next nearest full Tiagra aluminium bikes are the Peugeot CR22 the Trek 1.5, which are a
disconcerting £90-150 more expensive, it was easy to wonder why Sensa's offering was so much the cheaper of superficially similar bikes.
(A quick addition, it turns out that TheBicycleMan is also selling the Sensa Umbria Tiagra, but for £799, much nearer the cost of the Trek 1.5. I reckon you call that London Weighting.)
It turns out there are some pretty clear differences between them. Having ridden
both the Trek 1.5 and Sensa Umbria in the last year, it’s clear that the Umbria is
heavier. Not a lot heavier, but heavier nonetheless. If you look beyond the two
big signposts of frame and groupset, there are also a fair few differences in
finishing kit: the 1.5 comes with pedals (not good pedals mind you, but even
basic nylon clips-and-straps are two pedals more than the Umbria). The 1.5 is adorned with Bontrager goodies-Trek's own brand, granted, but a name that stands on its own feet, while the Umbria comes with Sensa’s lesser known Supra own-brand components. Then there’s the fork: an all-carbon jobby
on the Trek, compared to a carbon blades/alloy steerer combo on the Sensa. So
yes, there is a £150 price difference between the Sensa and the next nearest
alu/Tiagra ride, but it’s a fairly easily explained difference, not a hint that
there’s something underhanded going on. There's also the simple difference that Sensa are a comparatively young and obscure Dutch manufacturer, while people have heard of Trek due to the seven high-profile Tour de France victories they had under Lance Armstrong's cheating, needle-riddled arse.
Given the Umbria’s old-school construction (straight lines
and big, round alu tubes) it’s unlikely that swapping all its finishing kit
for that of the Trek would actually make it as light as the 1.5. It’s also about half a
kilo heavier than the similarly priced Specialized Allez with 2300 group. On
the other hand, it’s by no means a heavy bike, and it weighs in at about half a kilo less
than the other hot entry-level road bike of the last six months (BTwin’s Triban
3). Given that I’m moving from steel to aluminium, it’s all featherlight to me
anyway, and I’ll happily take clean good looks over modern sloping tubes and kinked
stays.
Those last two points are obviously very personal, as is the Umbria Tiagra's big selling point for me: geometry. I’m six foot two,
with lanky legs and a long back. I’ve previously ridden a 59cm frame that never
seemed to have enough reach. First I bought a raked seatpost, then I ran the saddle
to the front of its rails, then I put a longer stem on it. Despite aggregating
all these marginal gains, the end result didn’t do much to stop me feeling like
I could rest my chest on the bars of my old Peugeot. As soon as I jumped on the
Sensa Umbria, I could feel a big difference: my back was sloped rather than
curled, and the bars felt much further forward. I’ve loved my purple Peugeot for 16
years, but even with all my tweaking I’m not sure it’s ever been as good a fit as the 58cm Umbria was straight from the box.
Obviously an advantageous spec, noticeable weight reduction compared to steel, and a better fit are all very subjective things: if you dislike the
idea of having to gradually upgrade house-brand wheels, post, fork etc, or if
you’re not making a such a sizeable switch from steel to aluminium, or if you’re
not a lolloping beanpole of a rider, then the Umbria Tiagra might not sing to
you the way it sings to me. Personally, I can’t wait to take it out onto Clandon
Hill, Richmond Park and anything else fun I can ride on round here. Once I’ve
got the miles in, I’ll put up an in-depth review.
Edit: This post is now far and away the most visited one on the blog, which is nice, but hey, doesn't anyone want to read about Mont Ventoux or the charity ride I'm doing with the Sensa Umbria?
A couple of months ago I did a track cycling taster day at Herne Hill Velodrome. I haven’t blogged about it here as I've written a one-pager on the experience for Cycling Active and it seemed a little cheeky to pre-empt them by repackaging it. In essence though, the early part of the session can be summed up with the words “No gears, no brakes, no bladder control.” The middle part would be a trepidatious “That looks a bit steep,” while the conclusion would be “Wheeeeeeeeeeee!”.
Once you get over the habit of grabbing for brakes that aren’t there, learn that you can’t backpedal the fixed gear and realise that the banking only looks 20 feet tall and vertical from the bottom, the whole thing stops being quite so nerve-wracking. After that you can revel in the smooth and effortless speed of the experience. I’d expected a big gear and a smooth surface to make a difference to the feel of the ride, but I had no idea how much difference. Without any noticeable effort I was hitting speeds that would require a head-down, sinew-clenching effort on the road.
Naturally, the next thing I wanted to do was let rip and enjoy this newfound rocket power, but Herne Hill’s taster sessions are about delayed gratification: they want to turn you into a track cyclist so you have the skills needed to really get the most out of riding the banked oval. Instead of going wild, we were taken on several laps of the track on the sprinters, stayers and ghost lines, before a turn round the very top of the banking. We practiced joining the track, leaving the track, doing through-and-off in a paceline, and maintaining our gaps. Then we got off and enjoyed startlingly inexpensive sandwiches.
Yesterday I visited Manchester Velodrome, where the food in the café is equally good value, and can be eaten on tables next to Ed Clancy and Sarah Storey (she was wearing a spangly frock and Union Jack shoes which seemed a bit glam for a Velodrome - later the same day, the New Year honours list would be released and her Damehood unveiled). The value of the food isn’t the only thing that the National Cycling Centre has in common with Herne Hill Velodrome - while one is a gleaming, modern building and the other is showing its age a bit, both are very welcoming. They seem to say: Come in, have a poke around, make yourself at home and enjoy your stay. Some sports only want your money, but cycling always seems to enjoy your company.
Things differed on the track, where another track cycling taster session was going on, Manchester Velodrome style. I’ll confess, I was only watching from the sidelines rather than taking part, so I could be wrong about this, but it looked very much as if the newbie track cyclists were given a couple of laps worth of instruction in starting, stopping and not hitting each other, then turned loose for half an hour of free time.
They divided themselves pretty swiftly into three groups. The nervous ones stayed near the cote d’azure and pedalled so slowly that they were having to jerk their bikes up the banking, like a dandy hitching up wayward pantaloons. A braver group spent their time rocketing round on the sprinter's line in small groups of two or three, while one or two exuberant souls hoicked themselves halfway up the banking and went round cackling and whooping and occasionally waving at the spectators. Not one rider went anywhere near the top of the banking.
It was an interesting contrast. By the end of my Herne Hill taster session, I was itching to be allowed to just ride, to enjoy the effortless amplification of power provided by the bike and the calming repetition of whirring round the track. Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t an option. It was just a few weeks after the Olympics and our enormous group of beginners had displaced an enormous group of intermediate riders, and were about to be displaced by a regiment of experienced track cyclists.
Denied the chance to just ride, I was initially a little jealous of the circling novices at the Manchester Velodrome, but by the time they were making their desperate grabs at the railings to bring themselves to a halt, I was starting to change my mind. They’d had as much time in their taster as Herne Hill offers, but they’d stopped learning new skills after the first ten minutes. I bet the top of the banking still looked vertiginous to them, and I doubt any of them could have dropped off down the middle of two parallel pacelines like the beginners at Herne Hill could by the end of their session.
I suppose it all comes down to learning styles. After some consideration, I think the Manchester Velodrome approach would have suited my steady, cautious approach by allowing me the chance to feel completely at home on the track before learning anything else. On the other hand, it would have driven my Herne Hill buddies crackers. They took off up the banking at the first chance, spent their session swooping out of the curves like kids playing Spitfires in the playground, and were clamouring to be allowed to run their intro session into the intermediate session that followed it. Being told to spend an hour circling gently and getting the feel of the track would have left them wild and distinctly un-zen.
Whichever approach I'd been offered, I wouldn't have passed up the chance to try track cycling. I'm no racer and have no interest in speed or competition, so I'm not sure it's a pastime that will endure for me in the way that pootling along open roads has, but it's a combination of so many familiar sensations with so many new ones that it's far too fascinating to do just once.
Image courtesy and copyright of DB Conlon, 2012. Perhaps his best photo of a cyclist since this one of Chris Froome .
I started writing this post back when USADA asked for copies of the FDA’s evidence against Lance Armstrong, but scrapped it when the writing became confused. I started it again when Armstrong announced that he wouldn’t contest the USADA decision and was stripped of his Tour results and, again, I abandoned it when I felt that the logic running through the writing had been tortured into an unrecognisable shape. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the fact that a post about twisted logic and ambivalence is probably going to look a little twisted and ambivalent, so here we go, attempt number three. This time, I’m just going to type, non-stop, until I feel like I’ve ticked all the boxes I want to tick. If it comes out a little rambling and confused then that’s as fair a reflection of my feelings on the subject as anything else. I’m not particularly interested in discussing what Armstrong did or didn’t do, as that’s been exhaustively covered just about everywhere else. What always interests me is my own reaction to him. I know, I know, that sounds terribly self-obsessed, but this is a blog, it exists to be a bit self-obsessed. The thing is, I can’t pretend that my feelings about Armstrong and doping are clear-headed and rational, because they so obviously aren’t. There’s plenty of obfuscatory thinking and hypocrisy in my feelings about the case, but I actually think that’s true of most cycling fans. Not to mention cyclists. Not to mention cycling’s governing body, the race organisers, the sports media and even fans of other sports who don’t give a hoot about cycling other than to point and laugh every time the sport stumbles through another scandal. To start with, I dislike Lance Armstrong. That’s just so you know where I’m coming from. And I don’t have any faith that his Tour victories were achieved cleanly. My distrust of his wins is slightly older than my dislike of him, but not by much. I think the fact that I decided he was a cheat a good year or so before I decided I disliked him says a lot about my attitude towards doping in cycling. I’ve wanted him to be taken down a peg or seven for years, but why? It can’t just be because he doped, because there are doped riders I’ve liked and supported. Maybe it’s because he doped to such an extent that his performances were laughable, but then, I’ve defended some pretty ridiculous doped performances in the past: I loved Bjarne Riis’ 1996 victory, my previous benchmark for OTT performances. There have been riders who have doped and I’ve defended their victories on the grounds that, at the time, everyone was doing it, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to use the same defence for Armstrong. Perhaps because he doped at a time when at least some riders were trying to clean up their act? Perhaps because his doping seems to have involved private jets, private dope couriers and resources unavailable to other cheats? Oh, the shame: could it be that I dislike the man because he had an unfair advantage in his pursuit of an unfair advantage over other riders who had an unfair advantage? Perhaps it’s down to his personality? It’s no surprise to anyone to hear that he was a truculent bully. Still, that’s hardly the only side to his personality: the support he gave his rival, Ivan Basso, when Basso’s mother was suffering from cancer was genuinely moving. He clearly wasn’t all bad. Very few people are. So where does the dislike come from? I didn’t dislike him when he won his first Tour de France in 1999, and at the time I didn’t have that gut certainty that he’d cheated his way to victory either, although I did have plenty of misgivings about the win. For a lot of people, the suspicion stemmed from the fact that he’d been at death’s door a few years before and was now winning the world’s most physically demanding sporting event. For me, that was barely a distraction. What bothered me was that he was a one-day rider winning a three week tour. That has always smelt rotten to me. The skills and physical gifts needed to be a classics man, a good one-day rider, aren’t the same as those required to win three week Tours. Occasionally the sheer physical gifts of a GT rider allow them to triumph in a one day race, but it’s not common, and it’s vanishingly rare that one-day specialists triumph in Grand Tours. Yet here was Armstrong, a rider who’d never been thought of as anything but a one-day eventer, winning the Tour. There was the claim that chemotherapy had caused him to drop a shit-ton of weight, but that’s been contested by riders close to Lance who insist that his racing weight was much the same as ever, or had dropped by little more than a kilo or two, not the game-changing seven or eight kilo figure (almost a bike’s worth of weight) that had sometimes been bandied around. It’s not even as if he matured into a GC contender the way some riders do; he was in his late twenties when the transformation occurred. Watching Armstrong - who’d won stages and classics and a World Championship but had never shown any skill against the clock or gravity - suddenly annihilating his rivals both in the time trials and again on the mountains rang more alarm bells than the positive test for Corticosteroids that was eventually explained away as a saddle-sore treatment. I know it’s daft, but in an age of EPO and HGH it was hard to be overly concerned about a drug I’ve been given for a sore knee. But watching Armstrong out-time-trial time-trial specialists was a bother, and then he went on to out-climb climbers, despite the fact that the skills for those two disciplines are usually as distant from each other as the skills of a one-day rider and the skills of a GC man. Armstrong wasn’t even climbing like a time triallist, using the dogged, measured power-plod that often sees time triallists hold their own on the slopes. He was launching explosive attacks like a pure climber, assisted by low-gear, high-cadence style that made you breathless just watching it. In 1999, it seemed that Armstrong had transcended all the boundaries between the sport’s different disciplines in a way that beggared belief. A few years later, he’d win a sprint at the Tour de Georgia as if trying to reinforce the point. Despite all of that, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt in 1999. Jan Ullrich and Marco Pantani weren’t racing that year, and Alex Zulle & Abraham Olano had both suffered massive losses in the crash on the tide-soaked Passage Du Gois. Sure, he was winning, but he’d been gifted a race in which several riders far superior to him were absent, and several other strong rivals had been scuppered by seaweed rather than Texan grit. At the time, I kidded myself that no matter how unusual his win looked, it was a fluke. If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have said he was lucky rather than doped. Obviously, the next few years would come as quite a shock. You couldn’t kid yourself in 2000. Ullrich was there, and he wasn’t fat. Well, not by his standards anyway. Pantani was there and, well, he’d had a bit of a rotten year. Still, he’d been blessed by the Pope, so that must have counted for something, right? Except it didn’t. Most people thought Ullrich was the strongest Time Triallist in the sport at the time, and perhaps one of the strongest in history, but it was Armstrong who won the race’s 58Km test. Worse still, he came second on the race’s first mountain stage, more than four minutes ahead of Ullrich. Then there was the Ventoux stage, where he chased Pantani (probably not the cleanest rider himself) all the way up the Giant of Provence, covered every move he made, then gifted the stage win to the greatest climber most of us have ever seen. Gifted it! At the same time that he began to stretch credibility to breaking point, we also got the first hints that he had a shitty character as well. He’d bullied Christopher Bassons the year before, but that had gone largely unreported and unseen. You couldn’t miss the blow up with Pantani though. It’s been shamefully glossed over, but as I recall it, Armstrong spent the press conference following the Ventoux stage all but screaming “It was a gift, I gave it to him” in the graceless manner of someone who had belatedly realised that he’d given away a stage win on hallowed ground and wished he hadn’t. When Pantani pointed out that such posturing was undignified, Lance proved just how undignified he could be, calling Pantani “Elephantino” in reference to his prominent ears, and describing him as a “little shit starter”.
Two days of on-road debate and finger-wagging followed, before Pantani went on a suicidal all-day mountain attack, giving Lance his only scare of the race, and then quitting the Tour. Within a couple of years, he’d have had his ears pinned back. In 2004, he overdosed in a hotel room. Neither of those things had anything to do with Lance, but even now I have a hard time not choking up when I think about how much joy I got from watching Pantani, and how sad his life became. There was precious little joy in watching Armstrong. With the exception of the tremendously exciting 2003 Tour, Lance’s victories were dull. His 2001 victory was man against boy, as he beat Ullrich by nearly seven minutes, gave him ‘the look’, and won two individual time trials and two mountain stages. In 2002 he barely bothered to race - he sat there until the first mountain stage, then allowed his superior teammate Roberto Heras to tow him into an unassailable lead on the very first mountain stage. Oh for a bit of internecine treachery! 2004 was so dull even L’Equipe was speculating about the 2005 event before the first week was over, and as for 2005 … well, catching and passing Jan Ullrich within 14Km of the first stage of the 3,592Km race made for a pretty tedious three weeks. Armstrong continued to throw his weight around in those years as well. There was the “No French” furore, the chase, catch and saliva shower suffered by Fillipo Simeoni for having had the temerity to testify against Michele Ferrari (Armstrong called it protecting the sport; I think the rest of us would describe it as bullying at best, witness tampering at worst). There were the “It’s Lance, you won’t need your notepad” Sunday afternoon phonecalls to the homes of journalists who’d criticised him, and in later years, the snide tweets about Alberto Contador. So, he was a shitty personality whose performances defied credibility, but he isn’t the first shitty sportsman, and he won’t be the last cheat, so why do I dislike him more than any of the others? Why do Ullrich, Zulle, Pantani et al get my forgiveness for their cheating, while I’m happy to see Armstrong nailed to the wall? Perhaps it’s because his cheating seemed so egregious. Plenty of riders have cheated their way to a Tour win, but to seven? In a row? With a career total of 25 Tour De France stage victories in all, including six in a single Tour? There’s cheating and then there’s cheating. It prompts the American quip - don’t piss in my face and tell me it’s raining. It was insulting. But then … Bjarne Riis. His 1996 victory was pretty shameless as well, yet I rhapsodised about it here. A bit of disturbing food for thought as well … why am I bothered by the appearance of cheating more than I am by proof of it? Why will I forgive confessed dopers like David Millar while continuing to rail against riders who haven’t technically been caught doing anything but just look too good to be true? Is it that a rider who has been busted can be treated as proof that we’re cleaning up cycling, while riders who consistently put in ridiculous performances without getting caught make it clear that we’re not? Am I guilty, in essence, of wanting the sport to look clean whilst not really caring if it actually is? Or worse, am I quietly doing what I loathe in everyone else, and assuming that any winning performance is also a shady one? Maybe it’s an anti-American thing. Sorry, I know how iffy that sounds, but I’m trying to be honest here. As a left-leaning, Chomsky-reading, pro-Palestinian liberal who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s barely been a moment in the last ten years when I’ve been able to watch the international news without a grouchy, perpetually-teenaged part of me feeling like the Yanks are the bad guys. Maybe that has poisoned my view of international sports as well? Greg LeMond’s victories in ‘89 and ‘90 were brilliant (I didn’t see his ‘86 win) but for me, cycling is a quintessentially European sport. Its headquarters are in Switzerland, its official language is French, and it’s littered with terms like “tete de la course” and “lanterne rouge”. Maybe I’m bitter because cycling lost a little of its je ne sais quoi when its races adopted English as their second language, American voices filled the roadside crowds and a bloke with a comicbook name became the sport’s biggest star. If that’s the case, I really am a huge hypocrite. I remember when Lennox Lewis was Heavyweight Champion and numerous Americans, including no less a figure than the late Bert Sugar, would exhort each successive American challenger to bring the belts “back where they belong”. It used to drive me up the wall. If you want to have a global sport, you can’t treat the victories of other nations as if they're some sort of aberration to be rectified. It’s offensive, it demeans other people’s efforts and it cheapens your own victories. If I’m guilty of treating cycling the way that the Americans used to treat boxing, I’d be particularly ashamed of myself. But … but I loved LeMond’s victories. To this day I cheer for George Hincapie. I was in awe of Tyler Hamilton’s broken collarbone rides in the Giro and the Tour, and rooted for Bobby Julich in 1998. I just don’t think my dislike of Lance can be blamed on anti-Americanism.
Maybe it’s because Lance has behaved like a nasty piece of work so often and so publicly? Certainly, I loathe Floyd Landis for the way his defence team treated Greg Lemond. I tend to think that if you surround yourself with people who would stoop that low, you’re probably pretty vile yourself. If you don’t know what I mean, Google “Will Geoghegan” because I’m not going to repeat the story here. I can think of footballers, boxers and athletes I’ve disliked because of their behaviour, without any hint of shady tactics. Taking against Armstrong’s personality is as good an explanation as any I can come up with for why I dislike him so much more than other dope cheats. The funny thing is, after all these years of wanting him to get his comeuppance, now that it has finally happened, I almost wish it hadn’t. Not for Armstrong’s sake, but because the last of his Tour wins was nearly a decade ago. In the intervening years, the sport really does seem to have taken great strides in cleaning up its act. I’ve followed cycling for too long to ever feel comfortable making a definitive statement about a rider’s cleanliness, but I’d give Carlos Sastre the benefit of the doubt, and I’m as close to certain as I can be that Cadel Evans and Bradley Wiggins are clean. Ryder Hesjedal’s Giro? Clean. Vincenzo Nibali’s Vuelta win? Clean. David Moncoutie’s four Vuelta mountains jerseys? Clean. You can see the change in riding as well. Multi-mountain breakaways have become a suicidal dice roll rather than a normal tactic, one that riders will pay for whether they seize the race lead or not. Late Km attacks, defensive riding and bonus chasing (the purest form of marginal gain there is) are the new race-winning tactics, rather than the Hautacams and Luz Ardidens of the bad old days. The fact that the Armstrong decision has taken over the headlines means that doping stories from the dark days of the ‘90s and early ‘00s are more prominent in people’s minds than the steps the sport has taken to clean itself up. Once again, cycling is the whipping boy of sports. This always gets my goat. FIFA carry out roughly one-sixth as many dope tests in a year as the UCI. When Spanish Police busted Eufemiano Fuentes as part of Operacion Puerto, he made it clear that he’d worked with tennis players, athletes and footballers, yet Puerto was treated as cycling’s scandal. In football, we’ve got a selection of racists, thugs and airgun wielding idiots shooting the work-experience kids. In boxing we’ve got steroids, the man in the hat nobbling judges, and blocks of plaster of Paris in the handwraps. Formula 1 teams sell trade secrets while taking races to repressive regimes. Yet it's always cycling that's seen as the sewer of sports. Cycling is the joke. Cycling is the whipping boy. I wish Armstrong had never cheated to win his races. I wish he hadn’t treated those who tried to tell the truth with such cruelty, and I wish he hadn’t shown such contempt for his rivals. But I don’t think his crimes somehow make cycling worse than any other sport. I don’t think cycling is dirty and other sports are clean, but thanks to Armstrong’s prominence, it’s cycling that has the grubby reputation. Maybe that’s why I dislike him so much.
Omega Pharma-Quick Step have sacked 38 year old Levi Leipheimer as a result of his doping admissions detailed in the USADA reasoned decision, leaving the ageing rider searching for a new contract while carrying a six month suspension (albeit one that will be half spent by the time the new season starts.)
I suppose I should be thinking in terms of dope-scandal fallout, truth-and-reconciliation and the like, but can I be honest? Really, I'm thinking that Omega Pharma-Quickstep have just saved themselves a pile of cash and opened up a space in their squad. What's the betting Lefevre is on the phone to Tanzania as we speak?
..I knew the name change would hurt my traffic, but I didn't think it would eliminate it entirely. Oh well, I'll get you back here one by one I'm sure. I suppose the first trick would be to post something, really, wouldn't it?
Writing the blog has taken a back seat to writing about cycling for Cycling Active and The Ride, not to mention writing a dissertation sized article on comics for Back Issue magazine, all of which has pushed blogging off the radar for a few weeks. Sadly, I'm back to being comparatively underemployed as off today, so I'm going to start bashing something together about Lance Armstrong and the hypocritical glee I feel at his downfall.
