Tuesday, April 24, 2012

 

Great Migrations


The Schlecks are off form, so is Gilbert, and Fleche
 Wallonne as currently structured is doomed to three minutes of sincere action. Among other things, that’s what the 2012 Ardennes classics revealed, though none of that was really news. But what the three Ardennes winners and their teams did highlight is just how much one aspect of cycling, driven by external political and economic forces, has reversed itself in the last two decades or so. 



At the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, a wave of riders old and young poured out of Soviet-controlled eastern Europe and central Asia through an increasing number of holes in the iron curtain. They experienced a great deal of success, mostly on Italian teams, though there were notable exceptions. In Italy, the red-and-white striped Alfa Lum team was the tip of the spear. Faced with the wholesale departure of its Italian riders after the 1988 season, which ended with Maurizio Fondriest winning the world title and leaving for Del Tongo, Alfa Lum management rebuilt for 1989 by importing a cadre of 15 Soviet riders.

Among those Alfa Lum Soviets were aging legend Sergei Sukhoruchenkov, winner of the 1980 Olympic road race, and four men who would define the new crop of eastern professionals in western European cycling. Dimitri Konyshev, a Russian, exploded onto the scene by taking a couple of Italian classics and finishing second (behind Greg Lemond and ahead of Sean Kelly) in the 1989 world road championship at Chambéry, France. He delivered the team a Tour de France stage the next year and went on to race professionally until he was 40.

Moldovan Andre Tchmil didn’t linger in Italy after two winless years with Alfa Lum. He headed northward to ride for Belgian squads, where he ultimately ended up at Lotto. In his eight years there, he won two editions of the E3-Harelbeke, Dwars door Vlaanderen, two Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, Paris-Tours, Paris-Roubaix, the Tour of Flanders, Milan-San Remo, and a World Cup. In 1998, he traded honorary Belgian citizenship for the real thing.

Uzbek Djamolodine Abduojaparov arrived at Alfa Lum a year after Konychev and Tchmil, fresh out of the Soviet national program. He went on to become known as the Tashkent Terror for both the ferocity and pure recklessness of his sprint. In a seven year pro career cut short by a positive test at the 1997 Tour, he amassed three Tour green jerseys with 9 stage wins, points classification wins and stages at the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta, and a Gent-Wevelgem victory. 

Piotr Ugrumov, a Latvian, was the lone general classification threat of the group. At Alfa Lum, he won the Vuelta Asturias, which may have led to a brief stint with the Seur team in Spain before he returned to Italy for Mercair-Ballan, predecessor to the mighty (and notorious) Gewiss-Ballan. He had his best years there, finishing second in the 1993 Giro d’Italia, second in the 1994 Tour de France, and third in the 1995 Giro. But maybe more importantly, at Gewiss, he would help guide the next generation of eastern bloc homesteaders. In 1994, blonde-haired Russian Evgeni Berzin would win both the Giro and Liege-Bastogne-Liege and contribute to the team’s infamous sweep of Fleche Wallonne, while teammate and countryman Vladislav Bobrik would close out the team’s EPO-fuelled 1994 rampage with a win at the Giro di Lombardia.

Doped or not, riders from the former Soviet Union were now firmly implanted in the European professional peloton, both in Italy and beyond. And they’d continue to come – a young Kazakh Alexander Vinokourov turned up on Casino’s doorstep 1998 with Andre Kivilev not far behind; after a few years with the Polish Mroz team Lithuanian Raimondas Rumsas would hit the big time with Fassa Bortolo in 2000. Former East Germans like Erik Zabel and Jan Ullrich fuelled the success of Telekom and T-Mobile for a decade.

Released from the confines of state-supported “amateur” racing by the snowballing effects of Gorbachev’s glasnost, the products of the USSR’s extended sports machine were freed to pursue careers that went beyond Olympic success and inside-the-curtain events like the Peace Race. The partnership was a good deal for both sides. The west got riders who worked hard, delivered results, and asked for little. The riders got the better salaries, bigger opportunities, and higher standards of living that the free-market, private capital-fuelled western system offered.

But a look at Ardennes races this year shows how things have changed since the borders of the USSR and its satellites first cracked.

In 2012, two teams accounted for wins at Amstel Gold, Fleche Wallonne, and Liege-Bastogne-Liege. Astana, the Kazakh team financed largely by Kazahkstan's substantial natural resources wealth through quasi-state entities like Samruk-Kaznya, won both Amstel and Liege. For all intents and purposes, the squad is a state team, a vanity project designed to advance the image of the nation, much like those old Soviet systems but with a more progressive face.

In Liege, Astana won with home-grown Kazakh talent Maxim Iglinsky, allegedly inspired by an encouraging phone call from team godfather Vinokourov. For a team with nationalist objectives, it was perfect, much like the Russian Katusha squad’s 2009 Amstel win with native son Sergei Ivanov. What’s far more telling is that Astana won Amstel with Enrico Gasparotto, a 30-year old Italian from the Friuli region who began his career with Liquigas. Along with teammates from Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Slovenia, and Croatia, Gasparotto was aided by two other Italians – Francesco Gavazzi and Simone Ponzi.

On the Wednesday following Gasparotto’s Amstel win, the Russian Katusha team, also running on a state-sponsored sports model with a 21st century facelift, carried off Fleche Wallonne. It did so with 32-year-old Joachin Rodriguez, a diminutive but explosive Spaniard from Barcelona who's a threat in any uphill finish. For a rider of his kind,  Fleche is one of the ultimate prizes, and for a squad like Katusha its age and prestige make it a substantial scalp, even if they have to achieve it with a little foreign help.

For much of the spring, Katusha's other prime attention getter has been Oscar Freire, the Spanish three-time world champion who gave the Amstel Gold it’s best moments of suspense with a late-race break. All told, the team counts seven Spaniards, along with a smattering of Italians, a Belgian, and a Norwegian to bolster its eastern core. Under the influence of former director Tchmil, the team has also tried its luck with western standouts like Leif Hoste, Gert Steegmans, and Pippo Pozzato. To hear most tell it, the cultural differences between Tchmil and the riders were just too much to handle. 

While today’s top teams' compositions are more diverse across the board than they were in the 1980s, one implication is clear. The great east-west rider migration that began in the late 80s has reached a certain equilibrium, or even reversed. Where former eastern bloc riders once fled crumbling Soviet economies to seek their fortunes with western trade teams, riders from traditional cycling countries like Italy, Spain and Belgium are jumping at chances to go to eastern, quasi-state run programs. They aren’t packing suitcases like the Alfa Lum recruits did and moving to Moscow or Astana, of course, but the principle is the same. They’re seeking good salaries, relative stability, and better opportunities to ride the biggest races. It’s just that, with corporate sponsorship suffering in the current economy, all those selling points are being offered by teams with government backing, and the governments that are willing to spend money on sports are in the east. It’s in their genes, and they appear to be passing those genes on. Western, “non-traditional cycling nations” like Great Britain and Australia are adopting the state-backed systems that looked like endangered species at the dawn of the 1990s. For riders like Konychev, Tchmil, Abdoujaparov, and Ugromov, who burst through the door the second they heard the key turn, the change must be astounding.

Broomwagon

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Friday, April 13, 2012

 

Triangulation


The Ardennes classics, which kick off this year with the Amstel Gold on Sunday,
* are the third stage in understanding professional road cycling.

The grand tours, and the Tour de France in particular, are cycling’s window dressing, the defacto gateways to the sport.** They're what makes the papers and sometimes TV, even in those non-traditional cycling countries the UCI's always making eyes at. From those first Tour experiences, those seeking deeper cycling fandom tend to reach toward the cobbled classics, a sort of sensory antidote to the near-unbearable beauty and sunshine of the grand tour Alpine idyll. Often cold, tinged with grey, always brutal, and run on roads that have sometimes been un-paved rather than re-paved in anticipation, they introduce many of the sport’s rougher truths, not least that of lost time that must be reclaimed immediately, not in tomorrow’s mountains or next week’s time trial. There is an appealing coarseness and urgency that comes with the cobbles, and with it a sense of appreciating beauty in something ugly and subtle that most people don’t understand. I imagine it is something like what boxing fans feel.

But appreciating the Ardennes classics? That comes later, if at all. At least over here. La Doyenne though she may be, Liege-Bastogne-Liege probably hasn’t been the lure that hooked many new cycling fans, at least not those who didn’t spend their childhoods in the wooded hills of Limburg or Wallonia. The optics, as they say, just aren’t as good as the grand tours or the stones. There’s no readily apparent sense of violence in the Ardennes, and no serialized drama to replace it. No special or one-off equipment, few behind-the-scenes photo galleries or Scandinavian documentaries to be had. No carefully orchestrated new product releases. No win-a-bike-and-a-trip sweepstakes, no co-branded bike shop promotions. Just bike racing. No tricks, no frills, no gimmicks.

But for those who stay long enough to embrace them, the Amstel Gold, Fleche Wallonne, and Liege-Bastogne-Liege (along with the less conveniently packaged Milan-San Remo, Giro di Lombardia, and Paris-Tours) have a lot to teach. After mapping the grand tours and cobbled classics, the tarmac classics are the crucial third point in the triangulation needed to navigate the world of bicycle road racing. They defy the generalizations and dispel the misconceptions the cobbles and tours create and which, left undisturbed, could easily decompose into accepted fact.

They teach that Belgian classics don’t all have cobbles, and that Flemish and Belgian aren’t synonyms, even in bike racing. That the classics and the northern classics aren’t interchangeable. That classics specialist doesn’t necessarily mean cobbled classics specialist. That general classification riders are capable of riding races that only last a day. That they can even win them. That there is a whole breed of classics specialist that Tour fans probably only know as stage hunters. That what it takes to ride 260k of shorter cobbled hills can take something different than riding 260k of longer paved hills. But not always. That climbers can win classics. So can sprinters. So can rouleurs. That Michele Bartoli and Paolo Bettini and Claude Criquielion are mentioned among the greats for a reason. That former eastern bloc riders do have a specialty if you look hard enough. That you don’t need bad roads or mountains to create tension and excitement.

The list goes on, so pay attention this week, even as you try to shake off the Holy Week hangover. The Ardennes races and the other tarmac classics (yes, even San Sebastian) give us the beautiful rebukes to all the sport’s oversimplifications. They provide a disproportionate number of cycling's excepts and buts and thoughs – he was only ever a GC rider but...a cobbled specialist except…couldn’t climb, though… – and knowing them is, somewhat paradoxically, the key to both winning trivia contests and understanding the sport more deeply.

* Yes, I’m using “Ardennes classics” to cover Amstel Gold, too, even though the traditional “Ardennes week” was only Fleche and Liege. Let’s not get technical.

**In a way (specifically, in a way that conveniently excludes consideration of money, influence, and promotion), it’s surprising that people come to the sport through the grand tours, because they’re about the most complex interpretation of road racing imaginable. And frankly, they lead a lot of new fans to overthink everything they see in the sport from then on.

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Thursday, April 05, 2012

 

Adapt


At the conclusion of Wednesday’s rain-soaked Grote Scheldeprijs race outside Antwerp, several riders hit the slick pavement just beyond the finish line. Saxo Bank's Jonathan Cantwell collided with photographer Taz Darling of Rouleur magazine, who suffered, at last report, a fractured eye socket, ruptured spleen, and a broken collarbone. Cantwell suffered a punctured lung, while the other riders involved got off more lightly.

Of all sports, cycling has one of the more intimate relationships with the weather. Unsheltered by stadiums, without rain delays and tarps, without a clock to expire and locker rooms to retreat to, road racing is exposed to the sun, wind, and precipitation like no other competitive sport. Riders survive bad weather, maybe even use it to their advantage; as fans, we embrace it.

Bad weather has been the catalyst for many of the sport’s fondest memories – Breukink and Hampsten on the Gavia in 1988, Hinault at Liege in 1980, Museeuw at the 2002 Roubaix, Evans’s strade bianche ride in the 2010 Giro d’ Italia. But those moments often come at a peril that is often under-recognized, even though part of their very value is in the danger, the risks the athletes take in pursuing victory despite the circumstances. The Scheldeprijs incident highlighted that risk, and Darling’s injury illuminated how the sport's dangers can sometimes extend beyond the riders and even beyond the finish line.

What can we do to reduce the risks? In many cases, nothing. As any U.S. amateur racer has been warned by countless pre-race releases, "bicycle racing is an inherently dangerous sport." Most so for the riders, but occasionally and unexpectedly so for support staff, media, organizers, and spectators. Darling’s injuries demonstrate that today, but there are examples to be had every year: the motorcycle crashes that punctuated last year’s snow-plagued Tour of California, the various deadly incidents that marred the long history of the Tour de France. To try to write rules around every possible circumstance that could be encountered on the open road, if this, do that, to try to bubble-wrap one of the last great daring adventures in organized sport, would hamstring races and do the sport a disservice. Rigid regulatory frameworks and road cycling have always been a poor fit.

What we need to do is encourage people – organizers, officials, teams, and media alike – to think. To make and accommodate changes based on current, on-the-ground circumstances, rather than what was planned for days, weeks, or months before. Apply relevant, accumulated knowledge to the situation at hand. Crazy, I know.

The conditions that led to the Scheldeprijs finish crash were utterly predictable. The surrounding area had been dry for weeks, leaving a substantial layer of accumulated diesel on the road, ready to be reinvigorated by those first few raindrops. The potential for slick roads was evident from the time the first clouds gathered. The amount of painted road markings near the finish was also plain to see, and anyone who’s been to a couple of rainy bike races knows what that means.

A quick review of the pancake-flat Scheldeprijs’s 100-year history will also reflect that it tends to come down to a storming bunch sprint amongst some fairly hefty (by bike racing standards) northern bruisers. It is not a mountain top finish, with 120-pound climbers twiddling across the line. The final has a certain momentum behind it. It’s also a known fact that winning professional bike races – even mid-week ones – is not easy, so it was always fairly likely that participants would be a little cross-eyed and oxygen deprived as they crossed the line.

The final factor? As Bicycling’s Bill Strickland pointed out via Twitter, “Knowing Taz, bet she shot all the way to impact.” I don’t know her at all, but I’m betting that’s probably true as well. Not just because good photographers are as committed to getting the shot as sprinters are to getting the win, but also because there’s not much depth perception to be had through a zoom lens. The longer the lens gets, the more compressed the depth perspective becomes, and it gets a lot harder to tell whether the rider in the viewfinder is 50 meters away or five. I don't mention this to blame the victim, but to point out that “get out of the way” isn’t a very viable back-up plan considering the job photographers are doing and the equipment they use to do it.

Given all those factors, what should have been done at the Scheldeprijs? Granted, I’m commenting a day later from the cheap seats across the Atlantic, but the immediate action as conditions worsened should have been to move the photographers back from the line. The diagonal, offset lines that the photographers stand behind are typically marked in tape or chalk (or, sometimes, by an official holding his arms out). Moving them farther up the chute would have been maybe a 10 minute job for one or two staff members. Doing so could have mitigated the effects of riders having to brake hard and swerve to the center of a painted, greased roadway, all within microseconds of maxing out their cardiovascular systems.

Some of the photographers would have complained, but they’re mostly shooting with 300 to 400mm lenses. They’d have managed the extra distance. And I’m sorry, if you don’t either have or know how to access that equipment, chances are you shouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a professional bunch sprint to begin with. Since the photographers would still have been stacked together, the playing field would have remained level: nobody would have been out-shot by a competitor due to moving the whole mess a few meters farther back.

Would it have helped? Maybe not. Cantwell and the others might have slid out whether the photographers were where they were, further back, or not there at all. And they still may have slid into someone or something else - it's clear in the footage that wheels are coming right out from under riders at the slightest movement. But given the conditions, I’m betting a few extra meters of breathing room couldn’t have hurt.

The catch, of course, is that there was a curve to the left after the line that might have complicated moving the photographers further back. It’s hard to tell from the finish shots, and again, I wasn’t there. Sometimes finish areas are tight, crammed into medieval town centers that weren’t meant to accommodate cars, much less TV trucks, dope control trailers, scaffolding, and team buses. Things get tricky, but in the end, that’s not an acceptable response to safety issues. Work on it. Figure it out. Or find a place that can safely accommodate what you need to accommodate. Think. Adapt.

Broomwagon

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