Whither pro cycling?

It's not looking good for professional cycling when the team that won eight of the last nine Tours de France can't find a new sponsor.

In the good new column, T-Mobile is staying in the game. And rumor has it that's where George Hincapie will wind up.

How the mighty have fallen...

I don't even know what to say about the Tour de France.

Seems the new strategy for winning is to ride clean enough to be the last man standing in Paris.

Language week #2: Tour de Suisse

Today's Language Week entry is short but sweet. English translation follows.

Es wird kurz heute - der Small Boy schlaft nachmittags immer noch nur mit mir im "MamaDada Bett." Das heisst, keine Zeit für die Mama!

Sonntag schauten R und ich der Tour de Suisse Einzel Zeitfahren. "Lokal Matador" Fabian Cancellara konnte ihn für sich entscheiden. (Im letzten Bilder kann man Cancellara's Regenbogen färbig Helm sehen, der zeigt dass er Zeitfahren Weltmeister ist. Leider habe ich kein Photo vom Weltmeister-Trikot. Er ist einfach zu schnell vorbei gefahren.)

Für die, die Bern kennen, das ist ja die Matte.

English translation

It'll be short today - Small Boy is still taking his afternoon naps in the MamaDada Bed with me. That means no time for the Mama!

On Sunday R and I watched the Tour de Suisse (Tour of Switzerland) individual time trial. Local hero Fabian Cancellara won. (In the third picture you can see the rainbow colors on his helmet, which indicate that he's the World Champion in Time Trial. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of his World Champion jersey. He simply went by too fast.)

For those of you who know Bern, yes that's the Matte.

A chip off the old blockette

I turned on the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy bicycle race) the other day, and when Small Boy saw the peloton he pointed to the screen and said "ello doosey!" (yellow jersey) with a huge grin on his face.

I couldn't be more proud.

(I didn't have the heart to tell him that in the Giro the leader wears the Maglia Rosa [the pink jersey]. We'll cover that next year.)

Maps? I don't need no stinkin' maps

I decided to drag Small Boy off to see a stage of the Tour de Romandie today. (The Romandie is the French-speaking part of Switzerland.) I don't ride much anymore, but I'm a bit of a fanatic about watching cycling; if a race is within a few hundred kilometers of me, I try to see a stage. I've seen six stages of various Tours de France reaching back to the reign of Indurain; seven stages of various Tours de Suisse; three Tour de Romandie stages; a handful of day races back in the States; surely others I'm forgetting. I guess it could seem pretty boring but if the weather is nice (or even if it isn't) and you're in good company, it's a really good way to pass a day. You find a pretty stretch of road; stake out your spot in the sun or shade as you prefer; pull out the picnic, playing cards and books; and just hang until some professional cyclists go grinding (ascent), zipping (flat stretch) or blazing (descent) by. It is not, however, necessarily something an energetic Small Boy is going to stand for, so today was a bit of an experiment. After examining the route I decided to watch the race as it passed through the small town of Saint-Blaise. It seemed the perfect choice: I could get there either by train or car, the riders were expected to arrive there at a time that would allow Small Boy to nap on the way there, it's on the lake so if Small Boy decided waiting along the side of the road for 45 minutes just to see a peloton fly by at about 38 kilometers an hour was the most boring thing ever we could bail and head for the lake, and best of all it gave me the perfect opportunity to meet Jessica.

I drove; taking the train would have involved two transfers during what would ideally be Small Boy's nap whereas in the car he'd sleep the whole time for sure.* I headed off into new territory - it's not an area R and I visit often, and when we do he's generally doing the driving - with my faithful GPS to guide me. After leading me three-quarters of the way there, however, my faithful GPS decided to abandon me in the Romande countryside outside the small town of Ins without so much as a fare-thee-well. One minute she's** all like "leave the traffice circle at the third exit" and the next minute she's gone mute and my display panel reads "No Route." What, no route? There's a road, right? It keeps going, right? And off there in the distance there are...why, could those be more roads? So of course there is a route. It might be indirect and sub-optimal, but unless I'm about to drive off the edge of the world there is without a doubt a route. So route me.*** But she stubbornly refused. She didn't even tell me to "make a u-turn," which is invariably her advice when she thinks we're headed off into the wild. Nothing. Nada. Just silence. Fortunately I had also printed out a map and directions; unfortunately the directions I'd printed differed from the route my feckless GPS had selected and she'd abandoned me someplace I couldn't quite find on my other directions; fortunatley road signage in Switzerland is excellent- at every intersection of any import each direction is marked with signs telling you the names of the towns off in that direction; not just the big cities but little villages, too. So after driving around aimlessly some sophisticated orienteering I arrived someplace where my actual location on the planet Earth corresponded to something on the map I'd printed out.**** Just a few kilometers later I started seeing the police detail for the Tour de Romandie and I just followed the trail of flourescent green vested men into Saint-Blaise. And as I was pulling into a parking lot in Saint-Blaise, the GPS suddenly pipes up to inform me, "you have arrived at your destination!" I might have said "F--- you" "Thank you," I can't remember.

The stage went more or less as these things go: wait on the side of the road for a while, then try to recognize a single cyclist as the peloton passes by, then it's over. Afterwards Jessica and I went to her favorite local cafe where Small Boy behaved like a prince and let us have a conversation for forty-five minutes while he tried to recreate Carhenge and generally amused himself for far longer than I would have expected given the long car ride and then the sitting in the stroller on the side of the road and then the request for "restaurant behavior".***** And I'm not going to blog the conversation, because what's chatted over cappucino stays over cappucino and all that, but like I said at the beginning, if you're in good company a bike race a great way to pass a day.

* Strangely enough, he woke up about half-way there and didn't go back to sleep, but neither did he cry or even fuss.

** Our GPS has a female voice, so I refer to it as she.

*** When we lose contact with a satellite our display says "seeking satellite," so I don't think that was the problem. She just up and abandoned me.

**** We do also have an atlas in the car but I didn't feel like pulling over and unfolding it and breaking the Small Boy spell of good car behavior if I didn't have to.

***** Thanks, Small Boy for letting me pass such a pleasant afternoon with Jessica!

Over before it started

Remember this "match made in heaven?" Didn't last long.

Why I'd rather be a work-horse than a Wunderkind

I have a friend who used to live in the heart of the Old Town. (She's since moved back to California - one of the pitfalls of expat life.) She and her husband lived on the second floor (that's the American third) and their living room and bedroom windows looked down onto the cobblestones of Gerechtigkeitsgasse (justice street). They had front row seats to all the interesting goings-on in Bern - everything worth mentioning comes up Gerechtigkeitsgasse: Fasnacht parades, the Grand Prix, the victory parade when our hockey team won the national championship, demonstrations, they all made their way beneath my friend's window.

Last year the final stage of the Tour de Suisse - a time trial - ended in the Old Town. From my friend's living room we could look down on the riders as they made their way to the finish line just two blocks west of us; if we looked right we could watch live coverage on the large screen and keep track of the action on other parts of the course and see the times and rankings as riders crossed the finish line without ever having to leave the window. If we leaned out far enough and looked left, we could see the finish line itself. We leaned perilously far out the window when home-town boy Fabian Cancellara passed by, taking, but not holding, the best time. I leaned even further out to cheer on Jan Ullrich as he powered up the slight incline to the finish. He did hold the best time and the overall victory.

It turns out that was Ullrich's final professional performance.

Jan Ullrich always frustrated the hell out of the cyclist in me. He could have been, he should have been, the best cyclist of his generation, Lance Armstrong notwithstanding. At least one of Lance's seven Tours should have been Ullrich's - 2003, at least, should have been Ullrich's. Ullrich was brilliant, the real deal; but he was the guy who seemed to think that being the real deal was enough. In a world where guys like Lance Armstrong go on training rides on Christmas day and count their calories in the off-season, where Ivan Basso spends the winter in a wind tunnel breaking down his time-trial form and putting it back together again, being the real deal wasn't enough. Natural talent was never going to be enough when you have Lance Armstrong redesigning his water bottles to shave off an extra ounce. Ullrich was a Wunderkind, he really was. He could time trial like nobody's business. He could climb, he could tear mountains apart. (And as the Tour de France wore on and he popped out in freckles across the bridge of his nose and into his sun- and wind-reddened cheeks he was cute as a button, to boot.) When he won the Tour de France in 1997 everybody - including Lance Armstrong - assumed it was just the first of many Tours in Ullrich's future. But it didn't work out that way. Partly because Lance Armstrong recovered from his cancer and Lance is, well, Lance. But also because Ullrich had been a Wunderkind and it took him too long to catch on to the fact that that just wasn't going to cut it in the new world forged by Lance Armstrong's iron will.

When I cycled in college, I was quite good. I had a certain level of athletic ability, but nobody would have confused me with a natural talent. But I was stubborn. I put in the hours and the miles. I rearranged my academic schedule to maximize track time. I took every tip my coach ever gave me, did everything he said, and he won me races that I wouldn't have won on strength alone. I was never great, but I was really good. And I got as good as I did precisely because I was willing to accept how very far from great I was. Had I been better naturally, I suspect that I would have turned out marginally less successful. But the gap between me and the top girls was just visible enough to me to drive home the need for a little extra effort on my part. And the link between my effort and my results was clear; we kept training logs, after all. In autumn we'd do a ten mile time trial out on Flat Bottom Road to get a base-line and then in the spring we'd do a few more. I got faster. AJ would teach us about rolling through our gears, how to make a U-turn in the fastest possible way while still staying upright, how to dole out our energy. I got faster still. It was exhilarating, getting faster. More exhilarating was the knowlege that I was making myself faster, that all the tools for my success or failure were in my hands. I was never the very best, but the women who could beat me made up a small crowd; two of them were my own teammates who knew my tricks. For the specific event I trained for, I was top-tier. I did not start out top-tier, but I ended there. I forced my way into that circle by sheer will. And I was never the very best, but I was proud to have gotten so close.

Jan Ullrich. He stood on the very edge of greatness, of once-in-a-generation, once-in-a-lifetime larger than life greatness. Season after season he frustrated the cyclist in me so. So close, so very close, just a few calories, a few more hours on the road away from blinding greatness. But the gap between him and the small handful of guys who could beat him was too small for him to see. He was too good, far far too good, to see for himself how much harder he still needed to work and the people around him failed him by not driving home the point. For a person like me to be a step away from great (within my little universe, of course) was a tremendous success. For a person like Jan Ullrich to be a step away from great was a profound failure. He could have been, he should have been so great. Just an ounce, just an hour more effort. But Ullrich had been a Wunderkind and it took him too long to catch on to the fact that that just wasn't going to cut it in a world filled with work-horses.

Because no matter how good you are, somewhere out there lives somebody just as good. But she's trying just a little bit harder.

(Phantom blogs the academic aspects of being the Wunderkind v. the hard worker here)

Off-season cycling update

Coffee in the morning with some girlfriends and a visit to the pediatrician with Small Boy leaves me with little time or energy, but since I've blown NaNoWriMo to the four winds I'm trying to at least NaMoBloPo; thank goodness for interesting news in the cycling world: Ivan Basso is signing with Discovery Channel. Interesting. Interesting, interesting, interesting. An interesting, Tour de France-winning match made in heaven.

And did you all catch Lance running the NYC marathon in a shade under three hours? Stud, I tell you. The man is a total stud.

Link-a-licious

When Profgrrrrl posted that a magazine had a "headliner about your girlfriend's sneaky pregnancy trap," I confess I clicked the link. And I'm so glad I did, because what what should greet me but a luscious lovely picture of the extraordinary Lance Armstrong. Yummy. Yes, the man beats cancer and goes on to win seven consecutive Tours de France and I say "yummy." What can I say, everything about the man from his special aerodynamic time-trial water bottles to his RPMs, oh especially his RMPs!, to his beautiful smile to the fact that he wrote openly about building his family through in-vitro fertilization turns me on. Seriously on. Cancer beating, L'Alpe d'Huez crushing, Tour de France winning, under three-hour NYC marathon running IVF daddies rock my world.

Thanks, Profgrrrrl! And thank you to my baser instincts that made me click that link

Tour de France Update: Phoenix from the ashes

Floyd Landis may not wear yellow into Paris on Sunday, but he acquited himself like an absolute champion today. Astounding.

Cycling Update Tour de France Stage 13, or Five Guys Showed up Ready to Race Today

The entire peloton missed the cutoff time today, and, in theory, could all be eliminated from the Tour. They let an escape group of five get away to the tune of 29 minutes 57 seconds! Good thing there’s that little clause in the rules stating “If the percentage of eliminated riders rises above 20% of starters in the stage, permitted finishing times may be increased upon the decision of the stewards committee, with the agreement of the race management.” Somehow I think race management will agree.

This happened in 2001 as well; in that stage the break group was 18 riders (I think) and finished a whopping thirty five minutes and fifty four seconds ahead of the main group.

Each stage has a permitted finishing time calculated according to that day’s stage difficulty and average speed. For the 13th stage the formula was the winner’s actual finishing time plus:
4% if the average speed is less than or equal to 34km/h
5% between 34 km/h and 36 km/h
6% between 36 km/h and 38 km/h
7% between 38 km/h and 40 km/h
8% between 40 km/h and 42 km/h
9% between 42 km/h and 44 km/h
10% between 44 km/h and 46 km/h
11% between 46 km/h and 48 km/h
12% over 48 km/h

Jens Voigt of CSC won the stage at 5h24m36sec with an average speed of 42.51 km/h, so if I’ve got my math right the cutoff time was 5h53m36sec. The peloton came in a minute too slow at 5h54m33sec.

Cycling Update: Tour de France Stage 6

Oh why why why is my least favorite cyclist in the world so mind-blowingly good? It is a torment to me, a torment I tell you.

Cycling Update: Le Tour

This one's for Expat, who's doing a better job updating than me, but who asked if I'm following Le Tour. But of course. Although, with Ulrich, Basso, Mancebo, Sevilla and Beloki among those banned under doping suspicions and Vinokourov unable to ride because Astana-Wurth couldn't field a team, not to mention the gaping hole left by Armstrong's retirement, it's an odd sort of Tour.

Hincapie, for years the loyal leutenant, finally got a brief taste of yellow. Hushovd got it back. McEwen, perhaps my least favorite of riders, won stage two and wears the green points jersey. Discovery apparantly doesn't have a team leader yet; they're waiting until the first long time trial to see how things shake out. Seems like a recipe for disaster - whoever they want in yellow on the Champs-Elysee should already be conserving his energy - but what do I know? I love Hincapie, but I don't think he has the personality to stamp his will on the team the way Lance did. Let's face it - Postal/Discovery's purpose in life was to help Lance win the Tour de France and if you didn't like it, you found yourself another team. Lance was the team leader and everybody knew it. Right now I don't see anybody on Discovery who can command that kind of obediance. Then again, with all the doping violations the field is wide open and maybe that kind of iron discipline isn't required this year. But if Basso were riding, Discovery would already be screwed.

Cycling update: SCANDAL

Blood-doping is as icky a concept as I can think of; but as long as it's your own blood, it remains undetectable to UCI drug testers so it appears to be making a comeback. If it ever went away. Personally, I hate reading about stuff like this. I prefer to remain in my blissfully, willfully ignorant world in which hurculean feats are acheived by hurculean effort. And sadly, this is nothing but bad news for Alexandre Vinokourov, who I admire tremendously as a cyclist, and who left Telkom - sorry, T-Mobile - for Liberty to have a crack at being the team leader, because only the team leader has a crack at the Tour de France. Now Ullrich is looking shaky over at T-Mobile and Liberty has pulled their sponsorship out from under Vino's feet.

I'm all for open windows, but some days ignorance is bliss.

Cycling update: Giro d'Italia has one of those days

It was cold. It rained. At elevation, it snowed. The riders were rerouted around the Passo Delle Erbe, made unsafe by the weather. The finish line atop the Plan de Corones was shrouded in clouds; wet, heavy snow hit the ground. Down below, it rained on the riders, who raced in their winter gear. It rained on them in Caldaro, it rained on them in Bressanone, it rained on them in Longega. Race organizers lopped off the final 5.2 kilometers - the 5.2 kilometers everybody had come to see - to move the finish below the snow line. But it rained still. Oh how it rained. Every year, it seems, the Giro d'Italia has one of those days. Yesterday was that day.

Leonardo Piepoli won his second stage of the Giro but remains over 18 minutes behind the man in pink. Paolo Savoldelli got into trouble. Jan Ullrich has a long way to go to find his Tour de France form. Gilberto Simoni's best days appear to be behind him. Ivan Basso's best days appear to stretch endlessly before him to the horizon.

And the mountains reminded us that they are mountains, not to be trifled with.

Just another day at the Giro d'Italia.

Cycling update: Giro d'Italia

Basso twists the knife.

Today's stage 17 is the one I want to see: "more than 3,000 meters of ascent before a summit finish on the Plan de Corones, a new site in the Giro. The final 17-kilometer climb has a grade averaging 5.25 percent, with the last 5.2 kilometers including a section that mounts 24 percent. To make it more difficult, those last 5.2 kilometers were to have been on a dirt road. As of last week, it was being paved after complaints by the riders." (Samuel Abt in the IHT)

Cycling Update: Giro d'Italia Individual Time Trial

Now that's the kind of thing I expect from Jan Ullrich. Meanwhile Basso used the time trial to put some distance between himself and his main rivals. He looks good in pink, Basso does.

Cycling Update: Giro d'Italia

D'oh! My coach used to tell us repeatedly to race five meters through the finish line. This is why.

Basso wears pink. I know his ultimate goal is to become the first cyclist since Marco Pantani to win the Giro and the Tour in the same season. Can he possibly be thinking this season?

And in non-Giro news, because he is my new favorite Swissy, Cancellara takes the first stage of the Volta à Catalunya.

Cycling update: Tour de Romandie

On the strength of his final day time trial, Cadel Evans won the six-day Tour de Romandie on Sunday, denying Alejandro Valverde another victory this spring. Jan Ullrich finished 115th out of 120 riders; he's typically off his form in the early season, and he's been fighting a knee injury, but that can't be a reassuring result. He's confirmed for the Giro d'Italia, so that should help whip him into shape. But right now I have to say Ivan Basso is looking like a much better candidate for the yellow jersey than Ullrich. Floyd Landis is looking tough too.

Cycling Update: Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Tour of Georgia

Alejandro Valverde wins Liege-Bastogne-Liege; Damiano Cunego is showing good form ahead of the Giro d'Italia with a third place and Ivan Basso is a respectable tenth. Basso seems to be following the Armstrong strategy and gearing everything towards France, so a tenth in Liege is a good finish for him.

Meanwhile, Stateside, Floyd Landis defends his Tour of Georgia title. Add that to his Paris-Nice title, and the Phonak rider is having a good early season. Phonak seems to have a wee Tour de France curse, but Landis is looking ready.

Jan Ullrich has confirmed for the Tour of Romandie, which runs from Tuesday to Sunday, so we'll be getting a peak at his spring form soon.