There are moments I hate Phil and Paul

I'll see if I can find the final 5k video and commentary from Anglo commentators Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. When today's stage winner Luis Leon Sanchez won, they called him a deserving winner. It's as if they forgot four of the final five kilometers. When Vladimir Efimkin attacked, Sanchez sat at the back and refused to chase with Mikail Astarloza and Sandy Casar. He spent four K shaking his head as the other two took hard pulls and looked back at him for help. Then, with less than 1K to go, he went to the front. Savvy racing, but he cheezed off his fellow chasers when it counted. To me, Astarloza and Casar were more deserving; they never skipped a pull. Casar got dropped on the last mountain and chased back and Astarloza put in some good attacks.

Oh the Tour, it's related to this story, sort of

"Area riders spending summer pedaling the world on one, two, and three wheels"

It's in the first three sentences, then "While the international cycling superstars climb the gut-busting peaks of Europe, some bold local cyclists are tackling challenging bike tours of their own, on trips across the United States and in Africa and Croatia."

While I understand a rationale behind designating May as Bike Month in the US, it seems that when you look at the media, Bike Month is July. As with the story above, it's because of the Tour.

I've been arguing for years that the bike community should piggyback on the Tour and make July bike month. So far, they're not listening, which is a pity. Most of hte media seem to be scraping for whatever they can to make a Tour story somehow with their content.

Did Contador Sit Up and Cause Stage 3's Split?

I find this a bit hard to believe, but a French rider claims that Alberto Contador sat up to help foster the split that occurred near the end of stage three. The result of this move was Contador lost 41 seconds to teammate Armstrong and a few other favorites.

It seems that such a move is a bit early for Contador, or any favorite to be playing. He could have lost more time than just 41 seconds. He allowed two other potential winners to gain that time as well.

Then again, if it was deliberate, maybe that's why Popovych and Zubeldia were helping drive the escape, when most woudl have expected them to sit at the back, thus minimizing the time penalty to Leipheimer, Kloden, and Contador.

Nice soap opera stuff. Which is why the Tour can be so compelling.

Sports Illustrated gets so much right and still gets it wrong

I've been troubled by a story on cycling in Sports Illustrated. Tour de France, cycling a clash of cultures for Americans, Europeans by Alexander Wolff. The guy did his homework. Lots of references to knowledge only the most avid students of bike racing would know.

Despite doing such diligent homework, he failed in his own memory. He writes of visiting the legendary climb of L'Alpe d'Huez in 1987. "Sure enough, Ireland's Stephen Roche clinched the Tour that day, clawing back seconds in the final meters before collapsing from the effort. He had to be revived at the finish." Only the effort he's discussing happened not on the Alpe, but atop La Plagne, as he would have known if he had re-read his own story. And the performance didn't clinch the Tour as much as save it for Roche; he wasn't in yellow (lost on L'Alpe d'Huez), he just minimized his deficit so he could beat Delgado in the time trial.

But his thesis, a variation of Americans are from Mars, Euros are from Venus, specifically the tired trope of naive, idealistic Americans vs. cynical Europeans, doesn't hold up for me. Maybe it was novel in Henry James' time, but I've been reading about it since Catch-22. Wolff opens with an anecdote about how the European press spilled gallons of ink on Contador bonking in the Paris-Nice stage race this year, a mistake which cost Contador the victory, while Armstrong dissed his teammate and the most impressive current stage racer in the world in a sentence.

What Wolff fails to mention or know or understand is that Armstrong's put-down would hardly be out of character for any number of European cycling champions. Bernard Hinault was famously dismissive of competitors, even of his talented teammate Greg LeMond. Wolff also didn't appreciate the irony of reading Armstrong putting down his young teammate for the same mistake that nearly cost Armstrong the 2000 Tour.

To be fair to the European press, I have no idea if Wolff really read all those Dutch, Flemish, French, Italian, Spanish, and German reports so as to accurately compare.

It doesn't matter. Because I don't think Wolff cares. He merely wants to prove his thesis. Wolff discusses that the European peloton is a medieval guild, with rules and customs, and you have to know someone to get in. For Wolff, doping is what the Euros do for their jobs, while for Americans it isn't what they do because in America, cycling is a middle-class sport.

Of course there are differences between regional groupthinks. But both Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis fit in to the Euro mold better than the American mold. Lance had a tough childhood. Floyd had a strict rural childhood where he had to go to school and then go to work before he could get on his bike at night. Both guys treated cycling as if it were the escape plan. Lance's Tour success is very much tied to his relationship with Johan Bruyneel, a Belgian who made most of the management decisions--which reflected a strong Euro bias.

While it's nice to pretend that doping was something Americans didn't do and weren't tempted by until the mid 90s or later, that simply isn't the case. In 1984, some of the the US Cycling team blood-boosted at the Olympics (story in Sports Illustrated), a precursor to today's blood-doping. One of the top American women, Cindy Olivarri, was busted for doping before the Olympics, but it was passed off as mononucleosis. Alexi Grewal, the 1984 Olympic champ recently admitted to dabbling with drugs throughout his career. In the print article that goes with Alexi's online essay, he also names Steve Speaks and Doug Shapiro (third American to ride the Tour) as guys who got busted for doping in the 1980s. Busted in the US.

He also strives to show how the Euro world is corrupt in other ways as well. "The guild also permits sundry corruptions and collusions, which (Joe) Parkin (author of A Dog In A Hat) would discover in Belgian kermis races that were fixed on the fly, and Dutch criteriums that involved more aforethought: 'All the riders would dress in the same room and a list would get passed around,' he recalls. 'At the top was the time the winning breakaway would go. There'd be a check mark next to the names of the riders in the winning break. And the name of the winner would be underlined.'"

What Wolff fails to mention or know or understand is what Parkin wrote in his book, that for pros, Kermis' were seen as unimportant races and they were carnivals, entertainment, for the locals and that when the races were "fixed on the fly" it was because, as Parkin explained, "Think of this as Homecoming for bike racers. As such, the local cafe might offer him a small bonus for winning in front of his people." Pro baseball pitchers have been known to give away home runs in league play. I'm sure there are plenty of basketball games where people let their buddy on the opposing team make a good show for his girlfriend. While I'm not sure about all the Dutch races Parkin refers to, there is a well-established tradition in Europe after the Tour de France where the criteriums aren't really races but exhibitions where the stars of the Tour always win. Everyone knows it's going on, it's just like a dinger-fest or slam-dunk contest or the Pro Bowl; the viewers are in on the score and they're happy to see the Tour champ flash across the line first in his yellow jersey--as any student of racing knows, wearing the yellow jersey from the Tour in another race is a no-no, so there is another tell that the race is a show.

Wolff writes, "And so, like innocents abroad in a Henry James novel, American riders reached a moment of reckoning. You can leave Colorado or California with your water bottles and Clif Bars, but eventually you'll discover, as Mart Smeets of NOS Dutch TV puts it, "If you want to dance, you put on your dancing shoes." Poetic, nice reference to James, but not true. I'm sure back then, some riders went over not knowing, but many did. Pretending otherwise is nice for stories but bad for gaining understanding or truth-telling.

And what of our American Sports? Our beloved Big Three. Do they have guilds? Do they have codes they live by? Are they colluding, are they giving signals to each other, are they living by a code where doping is part of the game? That matters not to Wolff. We're talking bike racing here. European bike racing. I think if Wolff bothered to train the same lens, he'd find variations on the same thing. If he watched Bigger, Stronger, Faster, he'd know that a doctor formerly employed by the US Olympic Committee to take charge of drug controls claimed in the movie that the USOC wanted testing, but testing that wouldn't burn US Athletes. Exum eventually gave documents to Sports Illustrated that showed "some 100 American athletes who failed drug tests and should have been prevented from competing in the Olympics were nevertheless cleared to compete." (wikipedia)

And to help hammer home his thesis, he reminds us of the famed antipathy between Armstrong and the French, "Today the relationship between Armstrong and the French has deteriorated into schoolyard namecalling." From where I sit, it's mostly Armstrong doing the name-calling. The French have been a convenient foil for him, one that he takes full advantage of, though other than some writers at L'Equipe, a leading sports newspaper in France, I see little evidence that the French people or press is anti-Armstrong.

These days, when Americans go abroad for bike racing, they know about the doping because it goes on at home. Not only have top, mid-level, and bottom-level pros in the been caught in the US, but amateurs with jobs have been busted as well. The hypocrisy American racers see isn't in cycling, where people who get caught sometimes pay with their careers, but it's in the rest of sport, a world where Manny Ramirez gets busted with Clomid in his system and serves a 50-day suspension. Cyclists have tested positive for Clomid, and have gotten two year suspensions. These days, American bike racers are the knowing sophisticates giving a crooked grin when people express surprise that our Big Three Superstars dope.

In the end, Wolff writes, "In the States we're not much for shades of gray in our heroes. But in Europe people take their riders as they are: Wan and haggard, "for us." If doctors and drugs can help a fellow human being survive cancer, Europeans dare ask, why shouldn't doctors and drugs help one contest the world's most difficult bike race? As its most dominant rider contests the Tour de France once more, it's worth pondering not just whether we Americans want the truth, but whether we can handle the truth."

Wolff fails to mention or know or understand that several European nations are doing more to combat doping than we are here in the US. They don't appreciate the shades of grey or doping. German state television networks pulled TV coverage of the Tour de France in 2007 after a German cyclist was revealed to have failed a drug test earlier in the year. Can you imagine any American network pulling football coverage after a positive drug test? Operacion Puerto was a Spanish government operation to bust dopers. So far, only cyclists have been named, though allegedly over 200 athletes were fingered, including soccer and tennis players.

Wolff asks if Americans can handle the truth? So far, at least to me, when it comes to our Sports, we're acting very European. We handle it by saying that when our guy does it, it's ok, but its wrong when the other guy does it, particularly other guys in other sports. This is culture clash?

Some Fluff on Team Columbia-High Road

The best racing team in the world and they have trouble getting press. Between the Astana soap opera and Garmin "clean" story, these guys get missed. They've won more than any other team in 2008 and thusfar in 2009, and they do it with a clean program that rivals Garmin.

In honor of them, I share this video fluff. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfEJvZlXYZ0

Can the Lance Effect Save the Tour of Missouri?

Lance Armstrong's presence kept the Tour of Georgia alive for many years. Now, the recently-established Tour of Missouri might need a visit from a certain Tour winner,or the promise thereof to keep this race alive. As you can imagine, a state that is facing an economic crunch might see an investment in a bike race as a great way to boost name recognition and then tourism and then see the state's coffers fill up.

Power: Not A Lot

Power Junkies out there: as written earlier, you can find power files of Tour riders online.

Garmin offers up power files of the Garmin-Slipstream riders daily. I just took a look at Dave Zabriskie's power for the Stage four Team Time Trial and there are two things to notice. First, it doesn't look like he used much power. 224w for 1:38. But the TTT was 24 miles. Have to find the right program so I can download his data and then do some data pulling to see how much he really used.

Mass Market Bagels and Lance Armstrong

I thought about those cruddy round-shaped pieces of bread that are passed off as bagels when I got an email from Livestrong.com with the the title "Lance Ranked 2nd Overall After Stage 6."

Ranked? Yes, in the general classification (or gc or classment if you prefer the French), on which Lance has the second lowest overall elapsed time, Lance is indeed in second place, I couldn't help but be disappointed in the word "ranked." I would have preferred "Second Place" or even "2nd Place." I think Lance fans have enough sophistication in the ways of bike racing to understand Lance's position in the race.

I think of the bagel because it appears that many bagel makers decided to make their offerings taste more like traditional bread in an effort to gain a wider following. It hurt the bagel. Lance is big enough that his minions at Livestrong should use cycling terminology.

The picnic in the middle of each stage

Since there are no time-outs during a Tour stage, the guys eat on the go. No surprise there. But even a long time racer might be surprised by how much food the Garmin-Slipstream team says they pack per rider. I'm guessing that the guys don't eat everything. Six bars, five gels, four packs of bloks per rider is a prodigious meal even if the riders were much, much bigger.

Still, it's not the funniest part of hte packing list. Here are the items of greatest amusement:

.10 ml sun lotion/start oil depending on the weather
8 safety pins
.10 ml chamois cream

4 pages newspaper each long descent or/and wet day to pack in shoes.
0.5 caps laundry detergent
1 large bath towel for shower in bus
20 ml shower gel
0.5 cups massage cream
0.25 rolls of plastic tape to attach earplugs from race radio to their ears so it doesn’t fall out.

And now for the Question you've been too polite to ask

How Clean Is The 2009 Tour? The Associated Press answers.

On the one hand, the UCI anti-doping chief says it's cleaner. On the other, anti-doping expert Michael Ashenden says, “It’s clear that riders have learned to dope within the passport...I could write it down on a post-it note.” Apparently, micro-dosing of blood or EPO could work.

If it can be done within cycling, it makes you wonder about other sports, where they're not looking so closely.

What say you?

From far afield, a TdF Tea Party

While I think The San Jose Tea Examiner was struggling to come up with a Tour topic, she succeeded at doing something nobody else has. Design a tea party menu for those days when you're watching an epic stage with friends. Or in her case, a menu for when she's hosting Tour Fiends on her sofa. Know that the chef isn't a cyclist, but a foodie, so there are no variations on electrolyte drinks or jersey pocket food and no pasta plates to celebrate post-race binges.

The Fever is in flavor

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Does the Bike Give It Away?

Andreas Kloden has some impressive palmares. He's even finished second in the Tour and has good form this year. But despite all that, Astana must not think much of his Tour chances. As you'll see from this picture, he's riding the old Trek TT bike, and not the new one that Lance, Levi, and Alberto have. Ouch. Look at the black bike next to Kloden's. You can see from the front which one is supposed to be faster. Klodi even beat Lance and Levi in the stage one time trial, and was only four seconds behind Contador.

The Telltale (racer) Heart

Polar, a big name in heart rate monitoring, has hooked up a number of their sponsored riders to transponders and is broadcasting their real-time heart rate data to the world. All you need to do is go to Polar Cycling and click through to "live race data." Click around and y0u can enter yourself to win stuff, too.

There's a Lance Documentary being shot

Alex Gibney, the guy behind Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side, is directing. Here's the easy takeaway from the article, "Hollywood loves beat-the-odds stories, and Sony hopes that Armstrong's return to racing after a 3 1/2 -year absence could prove as enthralling as any make-believe film." Looking for the easy way out? Never thought Hollywood would do that.

Sometimes it's hard being an expert

I don't think I'm alone when I write that the more I know on a subject the more I despair when journalists get things wrong. What about those stories where I'm not expert? Could they be as wrong, too?

Here's a story from Popular Mechanics on Tour Tech that will be at a shop near you. The images on the second page are the disturbing ones. They show an old pic of David Zabriskie on a time trial bike with mechanical shifting. They write, "Zabriskie’s time-trial bike (at top of page) doesn’t yet have new electronic shifting, but his road bike soon will." Only his TT bike at the Tour had electronic shifting on it. He's the guy in the Captain America getup; notice the battery pack on his left chainstay. I guess this is forgivable as the story and pictures appeared in the June, 2009 print edition of the mag, though Z's certainly been playing with electronic shifting at least as far back as February.

But then, they try to pass off titanium cogs as new. They try to pass off aero water bottles as a new thing. They show a conventional Shimano Ultegra brake and caption it with "Pro bike manufacturers mount rear brakes down toward the bottom bracket to declutter the frame. Front brakes are being moved inside or behind the bike’s front fork." So far, this is only true of some time trial bikes. And they show a Zipp 808 wheelset and describe it as a "solid core rear wheel." The 808 is hollow--the only solid core is a disc, which they don't show.

I guess one right out of seven isn't bad.

3,000 Water Bottles for Team Milram...and they'll probably run out

Michael Zellmann of SRAM somehow is penning a column for Chicago Now. It's not like he'll be giving press to SRAM-sponsored teams or anything.

OK, this story has to do with team Milram, a SRAM-sponsored team. And what goes into having a team at the tour. He lists the gear needs of the team in this article. Milram is the milk product name of Nordmilch, which specialized in "curds" among other things.

The Tour can be on your iPhone or Pod Touch

This is what our weary, over-busy world needs. The Tour Live on their iPhone!

I received this headline, but so far, the link isn't working. The tech is via NOS, the Dutch public broadcaster.

Power Junkies, your site is ready

If you live and die by your data download and your powermeter, then you'll get a kick out of seeing power files from Tour riders. Training Peaks, a power data intrepretive program, sponsors a number of teams and will be giving the world some peeks at Training Peaks files of sponsored riders. TP sponsors the Saxo Bank team as well as Team Columbia. Every day, they'll be putting up a few power files, so you can see what the big boys are actually doing during each stage. After reading the files, you'll know exactly watt's up when the racers throw down.

http://home.trainingpeaks.com/races/2009-tour-de-france-files.aspx

Trainspotting at the Tour

To me, the Tour is, among other things, the biggest product launch for the bike world. And with countless company flacks and thousands of journalists, they should be uncovering every last bit of gear. If a team is riding re-labeled stuff, we should be hearing of it. If Lance has special handlebar tape, it is big news to bike sites.

So, it is a surprise to me that no one has thusfar commented on Astana's wheels. Bontrager, a Trek label, supplies the wheels. However, the team has been rolling on conventionally-spoked deep-dish wheels this Tour. It appears that Bontrager/Trek has abandoned the paired spoke technology that Trek has utilized since it was selling Rolf wheels in the 90s. So far, there's no explanation anywhere.

The second oddity is Fabian Cancellara's Specialized S-Works Shoes. Specialized has been making hay about how their pro riders don't get custom shoes, they get what the public can get. But a close look at Fabian's slippers reveals that he's running two Boa knobs and no Velcro strap at the bottom, unlike the rest of the team or public. Does Spartacus pull out unless he's got a second line of fishing wire holding his feet in place?