My club's current standings

As you might have gleaned from my review, I’m a pretty big fan of Strava. But I’ve always been a little disappointed in the Clubs pages.

After all, since I’m already following most of the people in my clubs, a listing of the club rides seems awfully redundant. And while a comments section for smack talk and general announcements is a cool feature, it’s still going to take a back seat to the club listerv as a means of information exchange. While the Strava ride pages have been the continual recipients of cool new features, the club pages have remained rather barren.

What I think would give me a lot more reason to use or visit the club pages is a little friendly competition, and with that in mind, I’ve cooked up a web app that generates and updates standings for Strava clubs. It totals up the ride data for each rider in a given club, and then ranks everyone based on elevation gained, miles traveled, or time spent.

The site also creates RSS feeds for each competition (to keep you abreast of changes or deliver you data to play with) along with some embeddable widgets so you can put the competition up on your site (see sidebar). They’re only available at a width of 252px right now, but that might change soon.

Currently, there are only a handful of the hundreds of Strava clubs on the site, but if you submit yours, the site will give you a permalink for your club standings, and the page should be live in about an hour. I’m still working out a bug or two, but it should be more or less ready for public consumption.

Related posts:

1. Strava – Review
2. The Wiwi Fan Club
3. Welcome to Flanders Club, Hoste Can Take DaPanne

I was on Vuelta podium...for like a week. / Rafael Uñach, cc-nd-nc

20% unemployment. Massive cutbacks in public funding. A looming credit downgrade. There’s no question that “La Crisis” marks a major threat to the fortunes of the Spanish peloton. But if recent history is any indication, the increasing internationalization of cycling will force a near-total collapse of the Spanish peloton in the next few years, if the nation can’t take the management of its doping cases more seriously.

Let’s start in Germany in 2010: after some 14 years at the forefront of the sport—reference Erik Zabel’s 6 green jerseys, Team Telekom’s two Tour wins, and the perpetual candidacy of Jan Ullrich—the most powerful nation in Europe found itself without a single top-level squad. There are plenty of fingers to point, but the German economy, having recovered smartly from the Crisis of ’08, seems an unlikely culprit.

Let’s go back a few years further, across the Atlantic to the United States, where an inflated housing sector and over-leveraged credit markets were plunging the nation into the worst financial crisis in 80 years. Surrounded by this economic wailing and gnashing of teeth, Bob Stapleton reinvented the old T-Mobile squad, bringing it to the US with new objectives and sponsors, while Jon Vaughters floated an even more improbable proposition—an American-based, American-populated team dedicated to the idea that bike races could be won without the aid of performance enhancing drugs.

Returning to 2012, we find a Germany economically strong enough to essentially carry a continent, yet that still lacks a single top-tier squad. Meanwhile, while recovery has continued to be frustratingly slow in the US, the nation’s collection of international cycling teams continues to blossom, refuting the notion that economic conditions are a reliable predictor of ProTour presence. Indeed, the management of high-profile doping cases seems a much more reliable bellwether of a country’s ability to support WorldTour cycling squads.

The collapse of Germany’s cycling teams was brought about by a two-fold crunch—the bubble initially opened by Ullrich’s win in 1997 began to deflate just as a new generation of German cyclists and teams came up and found themselves immersed in doping scandals, while promising new talents like Gerard Ciolek and Linus Gerdemann failed to deliver big wins. Compounding the issue, those caught up in doping either admitted their charges outright by saying that cycling was impossible without doping, or dodged prosecution by dancing between national federations or paying a simple fine.

In the US, anti-doping authorities have proven far less ham-handed. While the White Whale still eludes them, they’ve been sensationally effective at putting a harpoon through nearly any drug cheat unfortunate enough to drift their way. Forget Tyler Hamilton and Floyd Landis—cereal box names like Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin, and Barry Bonds are now notches on the USADA bedpost. Meanwhile, neither USATF nor MLB have put together anything close to the “it’s ok not to win so long as we don’t cheat” operation run by Slipstream Sports.

While I’ve found the specific efforts at transparency occasionally disappointing, there’s a general air of openness with the post-Lance generation of American cyclists. Fully illustrated, long-form blog posts, occasionally embarrassing honesty on Twitter, and a generally open stance toward fans and the press are all refreshing changes from the boilerplate patter proffered by the pharmaceutically-prepared generation. Combine this with the stubborn (if wrong-headed) meme that Lance Armstrong has “never failed a drug test”—and you’ve got an atmosphere in which American companies take some cautious comfort in the cleanliness of the riders they sponsor.

To sum it up, German cycling came out of the 00′s on a deflating bubble, with good riders that were dirty, clean riders that couldn’t win, and supporting infrastructure that utterly failed to convince fans and sponsors that they could wait out the trend. At the same time, the sport in the US had a boom of interest generated by Lance, a slew of successful, high-profile dope prosecutions, and new teams and riders willing to cater to the concerns of dope-weary fans and supporters. It’s the salability of the product, not the prevailing economic winds, that are the biggest factor in getting sponsors to sign.

So where does that put Spain in 2012? Nationally, there’s no shortage of success—in the past five years, Spanish riders have notched nine Grand Tour wins. The audience and homefront support is certainly there as well—the Contador Saga has given a podium for every even remotely significant Spaniard to pronounce him either completely innocent, or getting a raw deal.

But there’s a saying that when your cousin and your brother-in-law start climbing onto the bandwagon, it’s time for you to hop off. I have no doubt that the vast majority of Spanish fans (if not Spanish teams and governing bodies) would be happy to glibly play along as dosed-up Spaniards roll to victory after victory. But Spanish companies, I feel, have already realized that a Spanish cycling jersey is a very dangerous place to print a logo.

As cycling’s focus becomes more and more international—and as Spain’s public funding crisis makes Spanish races fewer and farther between—much of the advertising reward reaped from cycling Spanish teams will have to come from outside of Spain. And, call me cynical, but in the shoes of an event organizer, I just couldn’t get exciting about tossing a Spanish wildcard or two into my event knowing how business gets done on the Iberian peninsula.

Indeed, Team Geox’s sponsorship failure this past winter may have been pre-ordained in large part by its inability to land invites to major international events—the Tour and Giro, most notably—despite a star studded roster. Is it any wonder then that Oscar Freire and Juan-Antonio Flecha—two of the most “credible” Spaniards in recent memory—have raced on foreign teams for the bulk of their careers?

While the (hopefully) final outcome of the Contador case may provide the nation with some much-needed motivation later this month, if Spain can’t create at least a facade of transparency and enforcement, its squads will slowly find themselves going the way of Gerolsteiner and Milram, with their rides and staff unable to find work.

Related posts:

1. Pro Cycling News – Rogers Takes World TT Title
2. Pro Cycling News – Ullrich takes Stage, Ferrar takes USPRO
3. The Brad Wiggins Bubble

“[T]hey wouldn’t even do that to a criminal. None of what they did was legal”
-Alejandro Valverde

It’s tough to imagine a doping scandal more fraught with irony than Operacion Puerto. Even before it had a name, the fantastic contradictions were there; Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes ran a doping ring where he saw his job as ensuring “that riders could put up with the physical demands being made of them”, but a client alleging his health had been ruined by the treatments was what finally blew the lid.

Two years later, when the scandal finally broke, the investigation proved itself an embarrassment to nearly everyone involved—Fuentes, who could have better concealed his clients’ names with a cereal box decoder ring; the Guardia Civil, who revealed their investigative skills outstripped in ineptitude only by their inability to prevent leaks; the riders themselves, caught red-handed; and the Spanish courts and anti-doping officials, for being unable to drive home a slam-dunk case.

Is that 50,000 EUR in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? / pd, wikimedia commons

Most embarrassed of all were the ASO, organizers of the Tour de France, who now had to host a race where everyone even remotely considered a favorite had run on the front page of every sport daily from Lisbon to Kiev in a photo collage of blood bags and syringes.

The Tour’s response to Operacion Puerto was blunt and idiotic: cajole any TdF teams with riders implicated in the scandal to voluntarily withdraw them before the race. I’ve scattered ample pixels already on the inequity of this—let’s just say I found it wonderfully poetic when Floyd Landis’ late-race urine sample came up positive a few days after the Tour finish, giving the ASO the very “Tour Winner Was Actually On Drugs” headlines their pre-race purges had been conducted to avoid.

Strangely enough, Valverde could have saved the Tour organization from this embarrassment. While no one can say for certain what would have happend if the Spaniard hadn’t broken his collarbone in a mundane crash on Stage 3, Valverde had long gotten the better of Landis in the mountains, and his 5th place finish in the dead flat ’06 prologue was as brilliant as it was suspicious. It’s the opinion of this humble commentator that the 2006 Tour was Valverde’s race to lose.

Still, I hesitate to call Valverde’s crash “bad luck”. While Puerto left entire teams fluttering in the wind, Valverde healed up and battled gamely for the Vuelta title—holding the leaders jersey and taking a stage win in the process—before making the podium at the World Championships later that year. Puerto fallout continued into 2007, as investigations pinned Ullrich to hijo rudico and retirement, while Basso, accorded no other option by investigations in Italy, made the ludicrous claim that he didn’t inhale—but Valverde kept right on riding.

In fact, from the day some Spanish cop found a bag labelled “val.(piti)” to 2009, Valverde’s right-to-ride encountered only one major challenge: the Germans attempting to keep him from riding at the ’07 Worlds in Stuttgart, a prohibition summarily overturned by the CAS. When you’re riding dirty, it sure doesn’t hurt to have your national cycling federation, and indeed, your country’s entire judicial system willing to bend the rules on your behalf

For all of McQuaid’s flack about “mafia nations” it was the Italians who finally clipped Valverde’s wings, matching DNA taken from a rest day sample at the 2008 Tour to DNA in the EPO-laced Bag 18 seized at Operation Puerto. After another year of trial and appeal, the CAS concurred with the Italians, and slapped a two year ban on Valverde, backdated to the beginning of 2010.

To recap: Valverde, for a bag of blood that showed he’d been cheating in 2006, got 18 months off racing, a few results scratched from the records books, and four years of otherwise unencumbered competition, during which he amassed palmares including—but hardly limited to—a Vuelta, a Liege-Bastogne-Liege, a San Sebastien, and two Tour stages. And somehow, this is his idea of rough justice.

There have been a few interesting reactions to Valverde’s unrepentant stance. Joe Lindsey respects the blunt, twisted honesty of it, while @inrng sees holding the Armstrong line as a media management mistake and a bad example. But for me, the biggest problem of Valverde’s response is the delusional excoriation of the very system whose assumptions of innocence let him continue to ride.

Valverde’s sanction wasn’t the result of nefarious forces arrayed against him—it was the product of being extended the benefit of every doubt available. For anyone who missed Tyler Hamilton’s appearance on 60 Minutes, Valverde’s continued sense of persecution might be the best example of the insidious self-deception that is so often the byproduct of an artificially high hematocrit.

Related posts:

1. Pro Cycling News – Boonen Loses at Qatar, Valverde Quicker, Bode Cheats?
2. Not Earning His Billables
3. Basso “Confessed”, Valverde Accused, Dekker Victorious

I’m hardly one to bugger flies on the finer points of the UCI or USAC rulebooks, but I’m also of the opinion that the exhilaration of cyclocross stems mainly from the competitive aspects of the discipline.

It’s not that hurdling barriers in a dog suit or executing a clockwork-perfect beer handup isn’t freakin’ awesome; it’s that tightroping against your lactate threshold while trading elbows for a clean line through half-frozen, off-camber bends is much more so. And rules—specific, unfeeling, inflexible rules—are critical for the integrity of the competition that provides this thrill.

That’s not to say there aren’t rules with gray areas, or that there shouldn’t be races with costumes, smoke grenades, and shaving cream, but having a few arbitrary, black-and-white dictums along the lines of “no flat bars” or “no triple barriers” lets the participants know—like a dress code that bars hoodies and sneakers—exactly what kind of party this is going to be.

This is important because no one flies halfway across the country to the frozen tundra of Wisconsin in the few precious weeks most cyclists reserve for dark beers and second helpings for a catch-as-catch-can goat rodeo. They do it to race a serious, well-organized, tightly-run, national-level competition, and to test their mettle against other freds on the same course that the pros use.

As innovation crushing and counter-productive as the standards of the sport’s governing bodies might be, they are also what makes a top-level ‘cross race top-level—as integral to the experience as immaculately prepped course tape, a well-ordered starting grid, and 1970s boxing analogies from Richard Fries.

While he may have been teasing just a bit when he said it, Cycleboredom pretty much hit the nail on the head:

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – Rules of the Group Sprint
2. It’s Good Not To Be The King
3. “A Sprint that will be Talked About”

No, actually—not even close. Not since a third-generation Yalie picked up a Texas accent and ran for President as a Washington Outsider has a brand been so obviously out of sync with its own reality. Cyclocross, while thrilling and fantastically enjoyable, is also the most expensive cycling discipline for those with an actual desire to be competitive, and the least friendly to the common racer stepping up to give it a shot.

On the road, race-able bikes start at around $1000 and, without swapping a single part, can be trained on and raced competitively for at least one season. That’s certainly how I got started, and I remember the winning selections of collegiate B and C races stocked with Dura-Ace and Sora in roughly equal proportions. All due respect to the high-gloss fields I currently run with, but thanks to some impressive raw talents and a general lack of any tactical know-how, those collegiate events remain some of the fastest, hardest-fought races I’ve ever had the pleasure of contesting.

Manufacturers can wage nerd war til the cows come home, but road races aren’t won and lost at the bike shop. Zipp and Cervelo will remind you of Cancellara’s amazing charge at the ’07 Tour, but his on-the-hoods, out-of-the-saddle position on that particular rampage more than negated any aerodynamic advantage of his wheelset. Road cycling isn’t contested by torso-less robots on trainers in wind tunnels; it’s a game of canny, back-biting, and subterfuge, and 99 times out of 100, you’ll do better to poach another rider’s aerodynamic advantage than to invest in your own.

By comparison, gear in cyclocross actually matters—specifically, tires. While entry-level CX bikes often offer a lower price, what you get for the money is also drastically reduced. I’ll overlook the downgrade from Ultegra to Tiagra (as I mentioned above, if the gears shift, you’re good to go); I’m complaining about the “cyclocross” tube and tire setup that has no place on any respectable race course.

After a few seasons of attempting to race ‘cross on clinchers, I’ve arrived at the conclusion—one that ought to be plastered in bold-face at the beginning of any article on cyclocross—that attempting to actually race cyclocross with clinchers and innerubes is an often pointless endeavor. Maybe if you’ve got the mad handling skillz and mimized downforce of, say, Rudy, you can venture out past the fringe of the greens on your local golf course. Otherwise, the tire pressures you need to run come with a DNF rate (via pinch flat) of about 1 in 4.

Tubulars fix this problem, of course, but they’re astronomically expensive. The tires start at 70 dollars, and even Williams Cycling’s much heralded “affordable” $369 cross wheelset represents an outlay as large as I’ve ever made on a pair of road wheels. To me, “affordable” applies to <$150 wheelsets, like the Maddux F20 I put 6000 miles into over the past two years.

Another reason competitive cyclocross all but requires tubulars is that, without free laps or follow trucks, you’ve got to be able to get to the pit on your own—much tougher on a flat clincher than a flat tubular. And once you get to the pit, you’ll need something to put on your bike; tack on another $470 for a second wheelset. And patching that tubular tire back up after the race…let’s just hope your puncture solution is a simple as an injection of Caffelatex.

But as anyone who’s been to a muddy Verge Series race knows, the only really competitive support is to have a second cyclocross bike at the ready in the pits. ($800 + $470) x 2 = $2,540, or better than twice the up-front investment of a raceable road bike. And keep in mind, these ‘cross figures are still for Tiagra level parts, while a similar road rig ships with Ultegra gear that’s good for at least few seasons to come. Much as I appreciate the functionality of Shimano’s low end parts, an ill-timed spill in the sand pit might be all she wrote for that budget shifter.

And of course, no detonation of this populist facade would be complete without pointing out how thoroughly cyclocross kowtows to the elite. A sponsored rider has to worry about almost none of the things I’ve listed above—no entry fees, a guaranteed spot on the line, free pit bikes, boatloads of swag, and a retirement account’s worth of wheelsets, making an unexpected snowstorm as manageable as a wheel swap.

I hasten to add that there’s nothing “wrong” with this—good riders are fantastic marketing exposure, and with the salaries (or lack thereof) offered to the pros, the people who are actually good at ‘cross need as much help as they can get (see #livingthedream).

At the end of the day, though, what road racing does that cyclocross doesn’t is routinely turn out Frederick Vuechelens, Bobbie Traksels, Frederic Guesdons and host of other one-off winners who saw an opening, read a race, or were otherwise crazy enough to pull off the unlikeliest of upsets over the most elite of fields.

In road racing, there’s a sense that any rider with the skills to hold position, the watts the get free, and the stones to give it shot is guaranteed an opportunity to make a race-winning move. Most times, it doesn’t work—heck, sometimes it doesn’t even get attempted—but the option is there for any rider who would lay claim to it. Drop Zdneck Stybar into the first lottery spot at a World Cup and I don’t think he’d enjoy that same opportunity.

The point of all this isn’t that cyclocross needs to be somehow “fixed”. Obviously, I wouldn’t mind if the industry turned out more ~$1000 CX bikes that weren’t built to sit in the garage, but ‘cross racing is just fine in its current incarnation. Adam Myerson’s fantastic piece on CX racing rings as true for the guy in first as it does for the guy in 101st—I would know, having found myself riding in both positions at various moments over the past three years.

What bothers me is this position cyclocross seems to enjoy in the popular imagination of cycling fans as a, blue-collar, working (wo)man’s sport, as if mud, beer, tents, and Belgian country music were proof positive that it’s a somehow purer competition, geared to the common rider. Make no mistake about it, cyclocross rewards privilege—both in terms of income and talent—above almost anything else.

Related posts:

1. On “Cyclocross” Clinchers
2. Tubeless For Cyclocross – The Complete Saga
3. Why George Hincapie Will Never Win Paris-Roubaix

Now that allegations have surfaced that Vino’ may have bought the win, I’ve gotten a few messages asking me how I feel about it. And after re-watching the video, I don’t feel all that different. Certainly, as far as the racing goes, I stand by everything I said—especially the parts about Vino’ intentionally waiting up for Kolobnev, and about how Vino’s final separation from the Russian seemed “downright pedestrian”.

In cycling, the realities of the sport make the occasional negotiated outcome a near-inevitability. Grand Tours simply wouldn’t be possible if every so often, the pack didn’t roll in at a snail’s pace behind a small breakaway—and you’re crazy if you think the makeup of that lucky group isn’t the result of some pretty intense discussion within the pack and between team cars. And it’s almost expected that stage race leaders will “gift” stages to teammates and competitors alike, once their position at the head of the GC is secure.

While the UCI’s rules set out that collusion is explicitly illegal, this sort of “acceptable collusion” makes the unacceptable kind very difficult to define. Compounding the problem, groups of riders in every race collude to give one of their number a disproportionate chance of winning—they’re called “teammates”. Even between teams, there’s a tremendous ebb and flow of politicking, posturing, support and payment.

For example, if Team A takes the promise of future support from Team B to help chase down a breakaway, have they cheated? What if Team A agrees to help for a share of the prize money if Team B wins? What if Team B wires them a bank transfer mid-race? What if there’s no payment, but some Team A gains some advantage that Team B is unaware of? In all four cases, the outcome is the same—the only ethical distinctions between the cases lie in what motivates Team A’s efforts.

Granted, the ethics of the Vino’/Kolobnev case are a bit more cut and dry, but there’s still the question of proving that any illicit cooperation took place. If it weren’t for the enterprising muckrakers at l’Illustre we might not be having this discussion. For an insider’s view of payment and cooperation, you’re not likely to better than Mike Creed—though I suspect that in the highest level of the sport, the money, prestige, potential damage to reputation, and future income stemming from a major win outweigh the offer to lie down.

If anything, the biggest question here isn’t how could this happen, but how could Kolobnev sell so cheap? Joe Lindsey has a great breakdown of the longer-term costs to Kolobnev, but even in the short term, the deal didn’t make a lot of sense for the Russian. Sure, 100,000 Euros is a lot of money—especially when a win is only 20,000, split eight ways—but keep in mind, too, that in all likelihood, the bribe was only roughly equal to a year’s pay.

After winning Liege in 2003, Tyler Hamilton was rumored to have landed a contract with Phonak for over 800,000 euros. Though the American brought a GC threat that Kolobnev simply doesn’t have, it seems more than probable that Kolobnev could have garnered a salary boost well beyond the 100,000 EUR of Vino’s payoff.

And Kolobnev and Vino’ aren’t exactly strangers. In the recently-published emails, Kolobnev claims that Vino’s nationality (non-Belgian) and the bad press surrounding the Kazakh’s doping affair (apparently it was a raw deal) made his offer of collusion slightly more palatable.

So Kolobnev must have also known that Vinokourov is a very well-known man in an very corrupt country—honorary colonel in the army, Peoples’ Hero First Class, aspiring politician, and pasta spokesman. If Vino’ wanted to buy a bike race—Liege, of all things!—Kolobnev should known to bleed him for retirement money.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that Kolobnev’s legs must have been pretty well fried. If I were in Kolobnev’s pedals, and was as confident in my sprint as the Russian seems to have been, even Vino’ probably couldn’t have named me a price high enough—especially given the potential difficulty in collecting on the offer. But if I were on the rivet and clinging to my last reserves of strength, it’d be like getting paid 100k to lose a race I would have lost anyway. And where’s the fraud in that?

If there’s anything I feel bad about about in this affair, it’s the fortunes of Alexandr Kolobnev. His recent doping positive—and the soon-to-be-overturned slap on the wrist his national federation handed out—not withstanding, I found both his aggressive riding style and tenuous grasp of written English refreshing and entertaining. Even if he never seemed to have it in him to win the biggest races, it was always fun to watch him try.

But reading through the recently published emails between the two, I find him a startlingly sympathetic character. He clearly had a lot to gain from a win, and his emails reveal a recurring internal conflict, ineffectively placated by promises from Vinokourov. Before, Kolobnev was waiting for his bronze medal, now, having sought out seedier means of compensation, he’s waiting for his 100,000 euros. Thankfully, it hasn’t seemed to impact the quality of his tweets.

Vino’, of course, has been his usual, inscrutable self. First panning the “gutter press”, then claiming that it’s his personal life and he loans money to people all the time, and then—like Bettini before him—launching the inevitable lawsuit. The UCI has addressed that the case exists with its usual gibberish, though with Vino’ finally retiring after 2012, and Kolobnev facing the CAS, any resolution that comes for the alleged crimes in this case is likely to be purely symbolic.

Related posts:

1. How The Race Was Won – 2010 Tour de France, Stage 11
2. “This Is Not A Mickey Mouse Race”
3. No More-Ov Vinokourov

What, you thought I was just blowing hot air? For all its *ahem* foibles, Velonews.com is one of the oldest and richest cycling resources on the Internet. The Wayback Machine has snapshots dating from late 1997, and the current incarnation of the site contains at least a few stories that are over a decade old.

However, the interceding years have not been kind to this article collection—buyouts, a series of redesigns, and staff cutbacks have created an accumulated dead-link problem that’s made accessing old content almost impossible. It’s not that the books are missing—it’s just that someone’s burned the card catalogue.

Because Cyclocosm likely has more dead links heading back to the Journal of Competitive Cycling than any other single website, I decided I might as well cook up a solution. When you encounter the dreaded “Not Found” page, just copy the bad Velonews URL, come to this page, and then paste it into the text box above. You should be magically transported to the content you wanted to find.

I know of a few things that won’t work—including most of the third-party video player content, so “What Game Play” remains lost to the ages it’s back! —but if you come across anything else that doesn’t work or find something other than what you were looking for, let me know about it. There’s a chance I could track it down manually, and the info will help me improve this solution / build a better one in the future.

Related posts:

1. Velonews’ Boo-boo, Racing News
2. VeloNews Strikes Again!
3. Velonews Freakin’ Loves Me

As someone who’s watched a lot of road sprints, it seemed like a pretty obvious case of Nys closing the gate on Pauwels—and I certainly wasn’t the only one who thought so. On the road, Nys would have been relegated to second at best, and likely full-on disqualified, but after a protest and some deliberation (“a sprint that will be talked about” was how Nys’ Sporza interviewer styled it in English) the result was left unchanged.

The UCI’s official explanation of the decision—that Pauwels wouldn’t have been strong enough to get by—is…well, the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from the UCI over the years. Aside from the fact that it’s essentially impossible to assess exactly how strong a blocked rider might be, it also makes the counterproductive implication that it’s totally OK to cut people off, so long as they wouldn’t have beaten you anyway.

But as nonsensical as the “official” announcements of race directors can be, they also tend to reveal certain implied rules of the sport. When Mark Renshaw was kicked out of the 2010 Tour for headbutting (generally just a relegation) it wasn’t his actions that got him bounced—it was the fact that his teammate, Mark Cavendish, went on to win the stage. The officials couldn’t punish Cavendish–he’d done nothing wrong—but relegating the Australian would be essentially no punishment, since he hadn’t been riding for a result anyway. The message: don’t use dodgy riding to give your teammate an advantage.

So assuming the UCI officials aren’t crazy—or, as Mario De Clerq gamely suggests, swayed by Sven Nys’ position as one of the greatest ‘cross racers of all time, and a member of the UCI cyclocross commission to boot—what’s the major difference between road and cyclocross sprinting that sees Nys keep his result while, say, Giuseppe Calcaterra gets relegated?

First of all, the final sprint in cyclocross just an entirely different animal than what we’ve become accustomed to seeing from the modern road peloton. In flat stages at the Tour de France, the final kilometers are the battle ground of some dozen sprinters who’ve been keeping themselves rested and fresh all day long, before slingshotting off megawatt trains of domestiques to top speed for a final, all-out, all-or-nothing burst.

Behind them, nearly 200 others, often exhausted and essentially blind, cling desperately to the wheels in front of them just hoping to make it to the next day of racing without losing time. The bunches are huge, the speeds are incredible, and the collateral damage from a split-second mistake can be enormous.

A cyclocross sprint, on the other hand, comes following an hour-long, non-stop, full-on effort, punctuated by dozens of unsustainable surges as riders try to put daylight behind their rear wheel or draw back their rivals. Technical course features open gaps, and it’s rare to see more than a handful of riders contest a final charge. When they do, it’s a low-speed, nearly-cooked effort, on a short, straight-line finishing stretch. There’s room to manoever, plenty of road for everyone, and in the event that disaster does strike, the fallout is limited.

But I think it’s the very reality of a cyclocross race, rather than any consideration for safety, that plays the largest role in sustaining a result like yesterday’s. While position and line selection is important in road racing, in cyclocross it’s a constant consideration—as soon as you exit one corner, you’ve got to be mentally assembling your approach to the next.

The focus on where you’re putting your bike is relentless—it is as important as wattage in preserving your position, closing the gap to the riders ahead of you, and—most relevantly—denying the riders behind you an opportunity to pass. To suddenly apply the stricter (if somewhat more capriciously enforced) rules of the road sprint to cyclocross would be to suddenly alter this equation, turning the tables away from the very unique set of skills that are the essence of ‘cross.

In his post-race interview (or at least the English portion of it) Nys was unambiguous about saying he’d gone to the opposite of the road specifically to get in Pauwels’ way. What made it legal, Nys contends, is that Pauwels wasn’t yet alongside him.

The implication seems to be that Pauwels’ attempt to ride though a not-quite-wide-enough opening along the barriers was the Sunweb rider’s own poorly-calculated decision, same as if he’d tried to dive for the inside line through a corner earlier on the course, and gotten stuffed by riders ahead of him who’d set up more sensibly.

Of course, Pauwels had a different story, claiming that Nys’s knee banged into his front wheel and handlebars as the Landbouwkredit rider drove him from one side of the road to the other, before pinning him against the barrier. And if that’s true, by Nys’ own admission, he ought to be punished.

Sadly, without the all-determining helicopter camera shot, there’s no way to determine exactly how the barrier-to-barrier dance between Nys and Pauwels went down. Pauwels’ body English certainly suggests contact, but there isn’t anything definitive in the photos and videos I’ve seen. If nothing else, the last few seconds of the race are a great example of how, in cyclocross, leading out a sprint early can actually play to your advantage.

Related posts:

1. Pro Cycling News – Worlds ’05: To Sprint or Not to Sprint
2. The First Sprint Stage
3. How The Race Was Won – Rules of the Group Sprint

Burble, burble, burble… / by Ben Freeman cc-by-nc

Wonderful for most cycling applications, the humble clincher tire does not perform well under the rigors of cyclocross racing. While I’ve discussed this before, there are a few things I didn’t bring up in the previous piece that definitely deserve mention.

The first thing that ought to come up in this discussion—as readers have noted—is pump gauge accuracy. I get the sense that most floor pumps are built to conveniently air up the volumes needed for fat MTB tires, and the high pressures needed for road tires, with the gauge itself being more of an afterthought.

I checked my pump’s readings against an automotive gauge last fall and found them more or less identical, but many other pumps are widely reported to over-estimate pressures in the CX range. Tiny changes make a huge difference in cross, so a digital gauge, or one of those cool cordless compressors is definitely the way to go if you’re going to be picky about it.

The second thing I’d like to cover is the massive variety of innertube types available. I generally ride on standard CX-width 700c butyl tubes, but I’ve still found time to play around with a variety of different innertube types this season. Here are my experiences:

Road tubes: I don’t know why people do this. The only time I’ve had road (18-23mm) tubes inside CX tires is when I have no CX-sized tubes on hand and really, really, really need to ride. They are lighter, but flat almost on a whim. I’m all for kludges and shoe-horning, but this is one shortcut you want to avoid.

Latex tubes: most riders seem to take an interest in latex for its lighter weight and improvements in suppleness. My main interest was in alleged puncture resistance. The lighter weight is indisputable, and I guess I noticed a slightly better ride (though not better enough to be outside the range of the placebo effect). What I did not experience, however, was a reduced number of flats. The problem might be the size (I used 25-28mm, the largest I could find), but short of tearing up old tubulars, I can’t seem to find a source of latex tubes in a ‘cross appropriate size.

Sealant/removable-core butyl tube: this would seem to be a great solution, as most tubular tires are readily repaired/nearly flat-proofed by a quick shot of Stan’s or CaffeLatex. But alas, in my experience it’s proven worthless at fighting off/repairing the dreaded pinch flat in standard butyl tubes. My guess is that the way in which butyl fails—breaking in half-inch-long tears against the rim—is just not the same sort of tubeless tire puncture that sealant is able to close up.

Sealant/removable-core latex tube: there may be some hope here. Unlike butyl, latex seems to pinch flat with tiny, non-tearing holes, and I’ve successfully repaired them with a post-flat application of Stan’s. That said, I’ve still managed to pinch-flat two sealant-filled latex tubes: one by casing a marble curb post-race at Providence (which I consider forgivable), and one by riding easy, afterthought gravel at on the bell lap at Gloucester (which I do not).

Thornproof tube: I readily concede it is pretty much impossible to pinch a thorn-proof tube. However, it’s damn near impossible to race ‘cross on one as well. There’s a significant decrease in suppleness from the extra material, but that probably won’t come into play because at CX race pressures (≤40psi) the tube doesn’t inflate fully enough to press against a 32mm tire with the appropriate amount of force. Best case scenario, the tube wobbles around inside the tire, and you finish the race before the rim hole tears the valve free from the rest of the tube, flatting you out. Worst case, the tire unseats from the rim under hard cornering pressure. Either way—avoid.

Pre-sealed tube: In a commendable mea culpa for last season’s bead-breaking tubeless fiascos, Hutchinson sent me some of their pre-sealed tubes this fall. There’s a noticeable-but-not-awful weight penalty, and through a month of racing—including some not particularly well-chosen lines over the roots at Northampton, they seemed to hold up great.

Even after a pinch-flat on an unlucky rock at the Connecticut State Championships, the pre-sealed tube still held air long enough to see me over a fairly tough off-camber section before deflating. But the very next time I attempted to ride one of them, a pinhole puncture—the sort of thing sealant should have no problem fixing—flatted me out of a ride before I could even leave the parking lot. For the weight, I’d like something a little more reliable.

Related posts:

1. On “Cyclocross” Clinchers
2. Tubeless For Cyclocross – The Complete Saga
3. Top Tube Pads: The Future of CX?

Don't worry, Nibs—plenty of bubbly left / Jacinto Vidarte, nc-by-sa

Seventeen months after testing positive for clenbuterol during the 2010 Tour de France, Alberto Contador—or rather, those who seek to have him punished—will finally have their day in court. After a provisional suspension, a one-year suspension recommendation, a surprising clearing of all charges, and more delays than I care to Google, the sport will get a final answer on whether or not all the wins Contador has collected since last July will actually count.

Previous CAS decisions strongly suggest the outcome will not be favorable for Contador. Alessandro Petacchi had been cleared to compete by his national federation when the CAS restored a one-year sentence agaisnt him for turning up too much of a substance for which he already had a TUE. Even more forebodingly, the panel actually extended a suspension against Danilo Hondo when he appealed a one-year national federation sentence.

Despite the looming gallows, fan opinion and professional punditry seems to be that regardless of the outcome, the case has been a mess, and a black eye for the sport. “Cycling has already lost” Cycling Weekly’s Nigel Wynn declared last week. Even the generally cool-headed John Leicester admits that “A satisfying ending that ties up the loose ends looks unlikely”.

I hate to speak for the establishment here, but “satisfying endings” are not and should not be the end goal of the anti-doping efforts. The system exists to create an environment where athletes can compete fairly; by definition, such a system should protect against capricious enforcers as readily as unscrupulous competitors.

Sadly, drug testing in cycling has a long history of being inconsistent and outright unfair. In 1977, Joop Zoetemelk received a 10 minute penalty for a positive dope test; the next year, Michael Pollentier was ejected and suspended for 2 months trying to evade a similar control. In the 1979 edition, Zoetemelk tested positive again and indeed, admitted the offense—but was still allowed to keep his stage win and second place overall finish.

In more recent memory, the 2006 Tour saw riders “voluntarily” withdrawn from the TDF on rumors of involvement in a drug scandal. This extrajudicial exclusion had the deliciously poetic conclusion of seeing Floyd Landis become only the second rider in a century of Tours to be stripped of his title post-race. While Michael Rasmussen’s expulsion the following year for whereabouts violations was at least in passing accord with previously-agreed-upon rules, its sudden, rumor-fueled emergence two weeks into the event smacked of a witch hunt.

Contador’s case, on the other hand, has proceeded with the mind-numbing plod of bureaucratic pedantry. This isn’t to say that the sport’s governing bodies have been meticulous in discharging their duties—the UCI was woefully slow in reporting the test results to Contador, and it allegedly took the threat of reporters breaking the (not-legally-relevant) plasticizers case to put the story public.

But the layers of appeal and recourse laid about before both Contador and his accusers like so many red carpets is a refreshing sight in contrast with that autocracy of years past. This otherwise even-handed treatment of the case highlights the current system’s more ludicrous elements—foremost among them, leaving nation sport federations (as opposed to nation anti-doping organizations) with final responsibility over athlete sanctions.

It may be frustrating to watch suspected riders continue to tear up the opposition as their cases progress, but it’s a lot easier to strike a name out of the record books than to pencil one back in. Returning to the example of 2006, Oscar Pereiro did eventually receive his trophy, but I still don’t see any mention of Allan Davis contending for wins on that year’s sprint stages. And while Alejandro Valverde’s denials may have won him a few seasons of freedom following Operacion Puerto, he found out last year that the sport has developed a rather long memory both for sanctioning dopers and annulling their results.

Indeed, for all the past (and current) ineptitude of those running it, cycling should be credited for allowing its false champions to be unmasked (and unpaid) in the lab. While parallels to professional baseball’s steroid era have abounded over the past decade, most of the discussion in MLB now revolves around asterisks in record books, not vacating World Series titles.

There was a time not so long ago when this impressive judicial leeway sent clean riders into panic attacks at the mere appearance of mail from the UCI. If 18 months of appeal and proper deference to preceding judgements is what it takes to make due process as important as punishing the offenders, then it’s a wait that I’m more than willing to endure.

Related posts:

1. Tour de France ’07 – Contador and The Chicken Fly The Coop
2. Arekeev fools Eisel; Contador Wins at P-N; Silly Law Tricks
3. Contador, Criteriums, and Clenbuterol