Variation #3: Andy Schleck

"What though the field be lost? / All is not lost; th'unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield." -John Milton, Paradise Lost

Cadel Evans won the Tour de France; Andy Schleck lost it. He lost it in the Pyrenees, where he and his brother Fränk, teammates and among the best pure climbers of the current generation, sat back and raced defensively. He lost it on stage 16, when he couldn't stay with Contador's attack on a climb and then rode his brakes right into a huge time gap on the downhill. And, finally and decisively, he lost it in the individual time trial, where he lost an enormous 2:31 to Cadel Evans. And for all that, with a single brash, majestic ride he came within two kilometers of winning it all.

To understand Andy's ride, you have to go back two days, to his utter failure on the Col de Manse.¹ Not that he couldn't hold Contador's wheel-- there's only a little shame in that. The Schlecks are best suited to longer climbs, and Contador's sheer acceleration on the steeps is his greatest weapon. Only Sammy Sanchez and Cadel Evans managed to hold on that day. But that gap expanded on the slick descent, where an early scare rattled Andy into outright caution. “Boof – 1:06 to Andy. I thought we’d take 20 seconds at the most,” said Contador afterwards. Most damning of all, though, were Any's own words: "I don’t think people want to see a race decided on the downhill. We don’t want to see riders crashes. A finish like that shouldn’t be allowed." Is there a worse sort of talent than a talented coward?

1: Really, you should go back to last year's Tour where he placed second by under a minute, but we have to have some boundaries here.

On stage 17, Contador attacked again, and again got some separation. He was caught up within the last kilometer, which was spectacularly dramatic. With Paris approaching, a resurgent Contador, and time slipping away in the mountains of all places, Andy was on his heels. Which brings us to stage 18.



It was a monster of a stage. After 40 flat kilometers to warm up, it went straight up the 9,000' Col Agnel, then the 7,740' Col d'Izoard, and from there to the finish atop the 8,678' Col du Galibier.² A breakaway of 14 riders, including two from the Schlecks' Leopard-Trek squad, attacked at the base of the Col Agnel, but with no threats to any jersey among them, they were given free rein by the peloton. 37 miles from the finish, on the Col d'Izoard, Andy attacked. Contador was too tired to reel him back; if Cadel Evans countered with Fränk perched on his wheel, he would drain himself just to see a counter-attack that could break him. "This is a brave move, an iconic move!" Paul Sherwin cried. By the summit, Andy had a full two minutes on the field.



His descent was startlingly adrenal. He leaned hard, took aggressive lines, and left himself little margin for error. He caught up to his first teammate Joost Posthuma³ on the blank khaki crags of La Casse Deserte, tear-assing like a man with something to prove, and then he passed him. Posthuma just didn't have the juice to lead him out fast enough.⁴ Andy caught up Maxime Montfort, who set quick lines for Andy, who despite his stock market impersonation was still not a particularly talented descender, to follow, then put his head down and dragged Andy to the head of the breakaway. As they approached the base of the Galibier, Andy was working at the front of the break himself, ratcheting the pace beyond what the others could. He lead the yellow jersey group by over 4 minutes; on the road, he had the overall lead of the Tour by more than 2 minutes.

2: Every time I try to imagine actually riding over that route, something goes wrong. I just don't have any useful referents. I've ridden myself stupid. I ran until I puked one time. Neither one was even hard enough to extrapolate from, let alone compare.
3: This is a perfect name for a fictional character, like a morbid inversion of Oedipa Maas.
4: By this point, Andy had already fully redeemed himself. Everything further was just extra credit. And I'm not apologizing for that pun.

He attacked the breakaway and rode the winding road up the Galibier alone. As he approached the top, his smooth pedaling had grown ragged and an uncharacteristic grimace flashed over his face. An official UCI⁵ car pulled up behind him, and through the sun roof stood none other than Eddie Merckx, swinging his arms and roaring encouragement. The closest analogue here would be if, while LeBron was dropping 25 straight on the Pistons in the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals, Michael Jordan had pushed his way to courtside and started screaming and pumping his fists because GODDAMN RIGHT THAT IS HOW YOU DO IT. It gave a body goosebumps.⁶

5: Union Cycliste Internationale, the ruling body of professional cycling.
6: Which makes it all the more astounding that it is nowhere to be found on YouTube or Google image search. Really, the internet? I guess the good Dr. Pangloss was wrong.

Below, the other contenders were a disorganized mess. Rather than working together to catch Andy, they played chicken, waiting for someone else to take it on themselves up front, while Fränk bode his time in the pack. Finally, Cadel Evans and Contador started to push the group, cutting into Andy's lead. Contador, though, simply had no legs under him. He cracked, losing nearly four minutes and watching his hopes of winning blown to pieces. Evans put on his grownup pants, leading a sweltering chase all by himself. Two kilometers from the summit, Andy was still in the virtual lead, but he was hemorrhaging time. Four minutes became three. Three winnowed down towards two, towards Andy's gap in the standings. He crossed the finish, while Cadel rolled inexorably up, straining at his pedals and occasionally swearing at his companions, who could barely manage to keep up, let alone move to the front.

Fränk, who had spent the entire day chilling in Evans' slipstream, attacked at the top for an easy second place. Thomas Voeckler, who looked about ready to collapse and/or vomit blood, survived Evans' pace to the finish, keeping the Maillot Jaune by a mere 15 seconds. Cadel's strength put him a full head above the field, but he was now a minute behind Andy and fully on the defensive.


The trouble is, I don't think I've managed to do any sort of justice to that ride so far. The bare facts matter, but for those you can just read around some. What's missing is the thrill of it and the doubt. The slow unfurling of the last three hours of the ride: the distance and the mountain yet to go, the sheer energy Andy was expending, and the number and talent of the men chasing him on one hand; the tactical perfection of the move and the tremendous form Andy was showing on the other.⁷ Not to mention how well it fit into the overall narratives of the race: Voeckler hanging onto the maillot jaune by one final shred before losing it on the Alpe d'Huez; Andy setting himself up to win the yellow only to lose it the next day; Cadel being just a fucking horse. And how an hours-long move could have such tight margins as Andy started to fall apart approaching the finish: 2k fewer and he wins by a big enough margin to win the whole Tour; 2k further and he might not have won the stage. That kind of extended tension is incredibly rare, and almost never happens without some kind of tied-game stasis-- a basketball team coming back from 30 points down to win in double overtime, or a pitcher taking a perfect bid into the 13th, say⁸-- the closest analogy I can come up with is a one-day cricket match where the team batting second chases an immense score into the final over.



So no. Andy Schleck did not win the Tour de France. But he injected more drama, more intrigue, more humiliation and inspiration and redemption and bravery than the whole rest of the contenders combined. And just as no one reads "Paradise Lost" to wallow in the poetry of the Almighty, when I look back on this edition of the Tour, my first thought will not be for Cadel Evans. Satan is so much more compelling.

7: But then, Andy's always been one to smile, no matter the pain.
8: I don't mean to say either one is worse. Each has its own particular flavor of amazing.

Variation #2: Johnny Hoogerland

"When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real being - dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior. Since the spectacle's job is to use various specialized mediations in order to show us a world that can no longer be directly grasped, it naturally elevates the sense of sight to the special pre-eminence once occupied by touch: the most abstract and easily deceived sense is the most readily adaptable to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not merely a matter of images, nor even of images plus sounds. It is whatever escapes people's activity, whatever eludes their practical reconsideration and correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation becomes independent, the spectacle regenerates itself."

Thesis 18, "Society of the Spectacle", by Guy DeBord

There is one thing I've been avoiding in all my discussion of heroism, and that is other people. To be a hero, you don't just have to go through hell, you also have to go through Sartre's hell.

Johnny Hoogerland had heroism thrust upon him, which is to say he is very unlucky indeed. When he and Juan Antonio Flecha were sideswiped by a mishandled car, he was flung upside down at about 30 mph through a barbed wire fence. Not for the squeamish:



He untangled himself, replaced his tattered bib and jersey, and was given some gauze and a functional bike, which he pedaled another 36.5 km to the finish line on shredded legs. From the finish line he went to the podium: in the course of the breakaway leading up to the crash, he had earned enough points to take the lead in the king of the mountains classification. From the podium he went to the hospital, where he was given 33 stitches and quite a lot of painkillers. He hardly slept. As Red Kite Prayer so nicely put it, "Not that climbing out of barbed wire and riding our bike even five miles is impossible—no, the point is that to most of us such an act is unthinkable.... no bike race I might conceivably win has the power to redefine me so completely as a person that getting back on the bike becomes a reasonable sacrifice. After all, that’s what we’re talking about. Getting back on the bike is a sacrifice; in doing so, you are giving up a level of wound care and pain relief that are the first priority to the rest of us."



This disconnect and the striking image of Hoogerland falling over a startling horizontal distance into the barbed wire are what turned Johnny Hoogerland into an icon, and thus into a hero. Heroism is socially mediated: without press, a hero is only another brave person. Ultimately, it's not about what they do, it's about what we do with what they do. Though two men were struck by that car and both continued the race, no one wrote "it doesn’t matter whether you are you – average, anonymous you – or Juan Antonio Fucking Flecha"; cycling websites didn't publish hospital photos of Flecha. I'm not ignoring the gap in the severity of their injuries, but if that were the only metric, Flecha would be getting at least some coverage too. The dude got hit by a car too, after all, and landed hard on the road. But Hoogerland fucking flew into that fence, and where the practical impact their respective injuries had on their joints and muscles is unknowable, the blood dripping down Johnny's calves was unmistakable. The tearful podium presentation to cap it off was so dramatic and so neat a conclusion that even the slightest whiff of artifice would have spoiled it. But who could be so crass? There's nothing cheesy about a real person getting really hurt.



And this is where Johnny Hoogerland's story eludes DeBord's broader critiques. There is certainly an element of the consumerist spectacle in the crash and its conceptual fallout: the passive, entranced crowd on "Society of the Spectacle's" cover, their goggles united in a flat, single angle of perspective could easily be watching that crash footage. But for all its mesmeric imagistic power, there is some buffer for social reality underlying this particular spectacle. Because this isn't about his cycling style, or anything anyone said or wrote or planned. This is about getting hurt and that is the most universal thing of all. In that sense, the crux of Johnny Hoogerland's story is the simple, irreducible fact that he is a man.

Variations on a Theme

Fourty-three nineteen. My gear lever feels like a scab on a wound. During our reconnaissance ride I was using forty-three twenty here. Now I’m sticking to the nineteen, a matter of willpower. My twenty was still as clean as a whistle. Shifting is a kind of painkiller, and therefore the same as giving up. After all, if I wanted to kill my pain, why not choose the most effective method? Road racing is all about generating pain.¹

Le Tour idéal serait un Tour où un seul coureur réussirait à terminer l'epreuve.²

Heroism is a word that gets thrown around a lot in reference to athletes. Timely plays, modest philanthropy, hanging out with a terminally ill fan and avoiding getting caught with weed will all get you casually labeled "a hero". But this is facile pulp journalism, a lazy elision of physical and moral feats. I'm not suggesting there's no overlap, and I don't mean to deride the character of top athletes: skill-based sports often demand ascetic, life-consuming amounts of work as a basic prerequisite to a professional career, after all. But for all the hustle and heartbreak games scatter in their wake, how often do we see athletes not merely accept risk, but actually choose to suffer for the sake of an abstract principle? That is: how often do we see heroism?³

1: From The Rider, by Tim Krabbé,a lyrical, digressive telling of the one-day Tour de Mont Aigoual. It is the most beautiful sports book I've yet read, and since in four tries I can't match Donald Antrim, I might as well quote him: "The Rider is a great read—a great ride. Krabbé's half-day race, delivered kilometer by kilometer onto the page, shows the sport for what it is: painful, exhilarating, tactical, relational, fast, slow, dangerous, consuming, prone to mechanical failure, heroic, futile. The race—and the book about the race—becomes a raining and cold history of the rider's life. But to say that the race is the metaphor for the life is to miss the point. The race is everything. It obliterates whatever isn't racing. Life is the metaphor for the race."

2: "The ideal Tour would be a Tour where only a single rider would manage to finish the race." -Henri Desgrange, inventor of the Tour de France

3: There are lots and lots of variously valid definitions of heroism kicking around. Henri-Frederic Amiel, in his Journal of 1849, defined it as "the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh—that is to say, over fear.... Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage." (When did it go out of fashion to be so rousingly earnest about ideals? World War I?) It seems to me that, in diagnosing heroism, the two important bits are facing the prospect of material or spiritual suffering and choosing to accept it teleologically. Suffering disappointment at a loss is not heroic. Getting hurt is not heroic, though playing hurt might well be, and so on. I should also probably acknowledge that by the terms I'm setting here, heroism is, strictly speaking, very common in sports, but I'm interested in what is extraordinary; nothing reducible to professionalism qualifies.

Let's take a philological detour here. A lot of the vocabulary of sports actually stands in opposition to heroism: "makes the game easy"; "lets the game come to him/her"; "a natural"; or "the genetic lottery", which reduces elite performance to a function of luck.⁴ Nearly all sports are games, and quite explicitly designed to be fun. But there's a reason you don't see too many cyclists nicknamed "Kid". Cycling is all about generating pain. Take, for example, the 1910 account of Victor Breyer, as he stood at the top of the Aubisque with his colleague Alphonse Steinès:

His body heaved at the pedals, like an automaton, on two wheels. He wasn't going fast but he was at least moving. I trotted alongside him and asked 'Who are you? What's going on? Where are the others?' Bent over his handlebars, his eyes riveted on the road, the man never turned his head nor uttered one sole word. He continued and disappeared round a turn. Steinès had read his number and consulted the riders' list. Steinès was dumfounded. 'The man is François Lafourcade, a nobody. He has caught and passed all the cracks' ... Another quarter-hour passed before the second rider appeared, whom we immediately recognized as Octave Lapize. Unlike Lafourcade, Lapize was walking, half leaning on, half pushing his machine. But unlike his predecessor, Lapize spoke, and in abundance. 'You are assassins, yes, assassins!' To discuss matters with a man in this condition would have been cruel and stupid.

Breyer was the assistant organizer of the Tour de France; Steinès, the man who had proposed racing over the Pyrenees. The next year, not only did they return, they decided to include the fucking Alps. The hundredth anniversary of that second decision wrapped up Sunday on the Champs-Elysées. Fittingly, it was a race designed for climbers, featuring seven days in the mountains, with four hors-catégorie summit finishes (including the highest finish in race history atop the 8,678' Col du Galibier), and just a single, hilly individual time trial.⁵ For only the second time since 1967, the Tour began with a mass start instead of a prologue.⁶ Something to bear in mind: when two riders of equal talent race up a mountain, the one who can suffer more without his or her legs giving out will be the first to the summit. Barring a mechanical failure, it is exactly that simple.

4: And there's truth to that. Do you really believe that with a body as large, athletic, coordinated and durable as Shaquille O'Neill's, you couldn't make an NBA roster? A Turkish league one? One in Australia's NBL? Bet I could.

5: Since riders who finish in a group all receive the same time and since, with a constantly revolving set of fresh legs to break the air up front, a group can nearly always catch outliers given enough flat distance, the two main opportunities for riders to set some distance between themselves in the overall standings are in the climbs, where small differences in how fresh your legs are and how deep you're willing to dig can quickly balloon into hard-to-close gaps, and time trials, where everyone races against the clock and drafting isn't allowed. Those shots of riders in teardrop helmets and skinsuits that make them look like aliens? That's time trialing. But where climbing is typically ruled by whippets of men with gaudy power-to-weight ratios, the greater pure power output of a large rider will often translate into very quick time trials. Some, like Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador, are very good at both; some, like the Schleck brothers or Fabian Cancellara, only one. It is not coincidence that, while all three stand 6'1", Spartacus is listed at a full 30 lbs heavier than the Schlecks.

6: A Prologue is a short individual time trial at the very start of a stage race. It provides a level of pageantry with its dramatic starting gate and individual aero jerseys for every standing national and world champion, as well as, for the Tour anyway, the defending race champion. It also provides a pecking order of sorts, as contenders get a chance to establish a time gap in the standings from the very start.

The Tour is comprised of perhaps the 21 most high-profile bike races in the world; four individual jersey competitions, each contested by a different set of riders over the three weeks; an award for the most aggressive rider; and a team competition. To try to encompass the narrative density and sprawl that follows from all that in a single recap would be such an oversimplification as to be disingenuous: I could no more pull that off than play part of the Brandenburg Concertos on the harmonica. Over the next several days, there will be a series of posts giving the story of the Tour for a single rider. Hopefully, taken together, they will give some approximation of the spirit of the greatest single sporting event there is.