2012 Tour de France: Stages Four and Five

Every sport stakes out its own balance of action and potential. Basketball is mostly action, while complaints about baseball’s inherent “boringness” stem from its nature as a sport in which something could happen at any moment, but mostly doesn’t. The only true shock in a flat sprint stage is when the breakaway succeeds. The plucky few who dance away from the peloton at the beginning of the stage are the other whom the main group needs to define itself, or at least choose its pace. The goal is to pedal as languidly as possible but still catch the breakaway when things ramp up at the end for the final sprint. Whether because of weather, crashes, or miscalculation, every so often a breakaway beats the odds and succeeds.

Neither stage four nor stage five was such a day. So let’s talk a little about Jens Voigt.



Jens Voigt is my favorite cyclist, and I’m hardly alone in that. It’s not because he’s particularly great at cycling; if we’re talking palmares, he’s won the Criterium International five times, a grip of other small races, and put in a few days in the maillot jaune, but he’s hardly a world-beater. At not quite 41, he’s the oldest cyclist in this year’s Tour, but that’s not particularly noteworthy. Jens Voigt’s charm stems from the duality of persona: he is the most affable quote in the peloton, a German Barkleyesque figure who will always tell you what is on his mind. He’s a good bit more housetrained than Sir Charles, but he has the same shooting-from-the-hip style of avoiding cliché in favor of telling you how it is. At the same time, when he’s on the bike he’s happiest when he’s at the front, putting up a pace high enough that he knows it’s hurting everyone else to hold his speed. His most famous quote is his motto “Shut up, legs,” but the most revealing of his bon mots is “Between you and me, we get paid to hurt other people. How much better can it get?”



Jens is one of the last products of the East German cycling program. The eastern bloc in general produced a lot of hard men cyclists, forged by countless hours of crushing training to perform like athletic machines, but because cycling is primarily a Western European sport, East Germany had more than its share. Voigt never reached the heights of his contemporaries Andreas Klöden and Jan Ullrich, but his bubbly, accented no-bullshit act turned him into a beloved figure in a way that the others never managed. Klöden has remained, at least outwardly, a closed book; Ullrich partied too hard once the wall came down. Voigt tweets about his children and domestic hilarity, in between bouts of doing his damndest to inflict suffering on his coworkers. He’s equally at home telling the internet about goldfish troubles, riding a children’s bike for 40 km because he wrecked his in a crash during a race, or spending 20km putting the rest of a race in a bad place.

Jens has gotten a lot of camera time so far this Tour. He and Yaroslav Popovich, another old eastern bloc warhorse on the Radioshack team, have been doing the bulk of the pace-setting for teammate Fabian Cancellara to protect his yellow jersey. He’s easy to pick out, with his colorfully mirrored shades and lanky frame, cheerfully spinning away at the front of the pack. He doesn’t get to cause any pain until the roads turn uphill in the Pyranees and Alps in a week or two, but it’s always nice to see him. You never quite know what he’s going to do, but you can count on him doing it as hard as he can, and then saying insightfully odd things about it afterwards.

What’s that? You want to know what actually happened in stages four and five? Oh, right. Both breakaways were caught, so both stages were field sprints. In stage four, Andre Greipel’s Lotto-Belisol teammates led him out perfectly, and he sling-shotted his way to the stage victory. In stage five, a crash near the front with 2.7 kilometers left cut down the leadout teams, so the top sprinters who weren’t cleared out by the crash had to jockey with each other for position. Greipel timed his move there perfectly too, and won again. He trails our dancing friend Peter Sagan and Matt Goss for the green sprinter’s jersey, but is ahead of Mark Cavendish, who is still the odds-on favorite to wear that jersey on the Champs-Elysee. The sprinting race is shaping up to be a brawl between the expected heavyweights, unless Sagan can continue to buck the established pecking order.

Photo via Getty Images

Due to 4^th of July celebrations, I'll recap stages four and five tomorrow. In the meantime, here are three photos from stage four:

Andre Greipel wins the sprint for the stage; his leadout team celebrates in the background.

Fans along the route often dress up in kooky ways, hoping to catch the helicopter camera's attention as it passes over. I have genuinely no idea what these people are up to.

There are a gajillion versions of this shot.

Photos via AP and Reuters

2012 Tour de France: Stage Three

Some days in the Tour everything seems easy. The boulevards for the sprints are expansive. The countryside across which the peloton churns en route to the finish is paved with broad, pleasant roads. The descents are sweeping, the route wide open. The riders can relax, and worry only about their legs and the rest of the field. On other days, today very much included, everything seems just a little too small. The roads are narrow, packing the peloton into each other and increasing the risk of two riders bumping tires and touching off a pileup. The sprints are interrupted by curves, bunching the riders at the least opportune moment, when the speed is highest and the margin for error is smallest. When such a day falls in the first week of the Tour, before the pack has settled into itself, the claustrophobia lends to a skittishness that, perversely, causes the crashes the riders are worried about.

On a narrow lane like those of stage three, any rider in the peloton going down immediately creates a clusterfuck behind him. Those immediately following can’t help but hit him and go down, and a shockwave spreads behind and out through the riders coming upon him. At low speeds, it’s a traffic jam. At high speeds, it can become a meat grinder. Today there were four crashes on the road, and the first dropouts of the Tour were forced. A fractured tibia and collarbone knocked two riders out, and a third broke his hip and, though he finished the stage, seems likely to be done. Some poor anonymous bastard was ejected off of the road and rolled hard into a wire fence. Countless riders went down protected only by their helmets and lycra. It’s not a contact sport, but when it goes wrong it goes wrong hard.

But, of course, the race continues unabated amid crashes. If a true contender goes down in or is held up behind a crash, etiquette dictates the pack wait for him, but otherwise the race is ruthless, and anyone caught in an accident gets to follow it with a frenzied ride to reattach himself to the back of the peloton, hopefully with the aid of others also caught out by the crash.

So on the race went. Things are still early, and the heavyweights are still feeling out this year’s version of the Tour, more concerned with not making a mistake than with trying anything. The peloton caught the breakaway on one of the several climbs near the finishing climb of the race, and then wound up to race to the finish.

On the downhill after the climb, with four kilometers left, Sylvain Chavanel broke from the head of the race to try to go it alone. It wasn’t an impossible move, but it was a desperate one. Chavanel is a French racer, which is currently a romantically doomed lot in cycling. France loves cycling, and would explode if a Frenchman were to win the Tour, but they haven’t produced a champion since the 80s. When Thomas Voeckler held onto the maillot jaune for 10 days last year he became a national hero. Chavanel’s move off the front was ill-advised, but he isn’t a strong enough rider to contest the sprint on the final climb, and today was the day the Tour was back on French soil, so of course he had to make a move. He held them off until the penultimate climb, but then he faded. It was valiant, it was a bold strategic play, but it was never going to work.

And so, instead of a world-beating French victory, we have a phenom. Twenty-two year-old Peter Sagan, who you might remember from his fine double teapot-to-chicken victory celebration in stage one, outkicked the field on the final uphill to win his second stage. If this is all he does in this year’s Tour, he is a young rider with a bright future. If he can win a handful more times this convincingly, he will have forcefully inserted himself into the conversation for who can win the green jersey for best sprinter. Either way, he has the best victory celebrations going right now. As he crossed the line at the end of stage three, he pumped his arms like a runner. (I'm sorry I can't embed videos of these, but ASO seems to treat YouTube much like MLB does.) Most riders appeal to god like home run hitters touching the plate or throw their arms wide; Sagan is just trying to entertain. He termed today’s the Gump, saying that like Forrest Gump ran when he was told to run, he will win when he is told to win. We’ll see if that remains true, but so far his results are unassailable.

Photos via Reuters

2012 Tour de France: Stage Two

Topology is destiny in any bike race, and stage two today was as pure a sprint stage as you’re likely to find. Such things when they play to form, and they nearly always do, are an act in two parts.

The first act is the leisurely day out. A small breakaway escapes the peloton, and has a day on the lam. Once they’ve established an adequate gap over the peloton, everyone settles in. Today, three riders won themselves a day away from the pack, galavanting off the front to poach climb and intermediate sprint points, three riders too young or marginal for anyone to worry about their lead on the field sticking over the course of the day. They cruise along, working hard but getting to spend their few stolen hours on television, while the rest of the riders have an easy day on flat terrain. Those of us following along at home are treated to some UNESCO World Heritage Site and a few top-notch chateaus. Everything goes smoothly for all parties.

The second act is the chase and gathering storm. As the distance remaining dwindles, the truly fast men move to the front of the peloton and raise the speed. The break riders may bury themselves trying to stay free, but they’re doomed. The peloton surges down the road like a wave, riders revolving onto the front while all try to move to the front of the pack. Today Cadel Evans’ BMC teammates set the pace for him for a good stretch, not to position him for the sprint but to keep him in front of any trouble. At some point near but not actually close to the finish, the peloton subsumes the break riders, tired from their day, and just as quickly ejects them from its rear. The teams vying for the spring victory peel through their riders like a car accelerates upwards through its gears, with each rider leapfrogged by his faster peer until the team’s true alpha speedster is delivered at the front, a few hundred meters from the finish line.

There is a pleasant opacity to the mechanics of who wins a field sprint victory. The leadout trains that carry the top dogs to the finish line are perfectly evident, but the proportions in the mixture of physical form, tactical savvy, and luck that dictate victory are totally unknowable. The concreteness that a settled result lends to circumstance sets the winner in amber, makes all successful moves feel predestined. Today World Champion Mark Cavendish burnished his reputation as the best sprinter in the sport, freelancing onto his rival Andre Greipel’s rear wheel in the last stretch, and then timed his passing move perfectly to earn the win. Did he play his legs perfectly? Did Greipel just not have quite as much in him today? It doesn’t matter, because the day is his now.

Photo via Reuters

2012 Tour de France: Prologue and Stage One

Prologue:

The Tour de France starts with a short time trial, because it has to start somehow. It also starts in Belgium this year, because its organizers like to spread the wealth around a bit and don’t worry too much about the literal truth of the names of things. It’s always a short course, 6.4 km this year, and no significant time is gained or lost. The riders race the course alone, staggered by a large enough time gap that they don’t meet each other on the course. This year the prologue had several tight turns but no climbs, so it favored the time trialists who have good bike handling skills and can quickly accelerate up to speed out of a turn over the pure horsepower riders who can churn a large gear endlessly. Not much of import is decided in the prologue, but it’s always fun to see the riders decked out in their TT gear, looking like neon insectoid aliens in the skinsuits and teardrop helmets, crouched in their wind-tunnel positions on their aero bikes, and the winner gets to wear the first maillot jaune of the year.

Because the course is so short, every rider gets the luxury of riding for himself, for glory. In a longer time trial the riders with no chance of noteworthy result are obligated to ride hard enough to beat the time cutoff but otherwise conserve energy, but in the prologue every man is straining against his limits. Some because they could win, but all because it’s the first day of the new Tour de France, whether it’s their first or seventeenth¹, so you give it what you’ve got.

1: Apparently the seventeenth Tour is the golden carbon bike anniversary?

On such a course, Fabian Cancellara wins. It’s nice that they compete, that everyone gets a chance, but of course he wins. The man is nicknamed Spartacus, and no one thinks it’s ironic or funny. There was a kerfuffle a couple years ago in which he was accused of using a secret electric motor in his bike to win two spring classics in decisive fashion. He doesn’t have the top speed of the drag race sprinters, but over any real distance, he’s unstoppable, and this year's prologue was no exception. It's the fifth year he's won the first yellow jersey, tying him with Bernard Hinault for the all-time lead. If there’s a secret Swiss lab pumping out polite, discrete, dominant athletes, he’s the other showpiece next to Federer, and it’s closer than you might imagine.²

2: I imagine those scientists shake their head when Thabo comes up, but they might be too busy trying to make a Swiss soccer player who doesn't suck.

Stage One:

The prologue is the credit roll, the reintroduction of your favorite characters, but there isn’t much meat to it. Cancellara spent all of seven minutes and thirteen seconds on the course. The last-place finisher, Roy Curvers, added barely more than a minute to that time. There’s a reason it doesn’t garner a stage number. Stage one is the first full episode, when the season kicks in in earnest. The stage was 207.5 km this year, with a handful of moderate climbs to punch things up. Unlike the individual spurts of effort in the prologue, this is five hours of full-on peloton racing, full of all your favorite racers and new up-and-comers. There are Jens Voigt and Yaroslav Popovich, setting the pace at the front for Radioshack. There’s Cancellara in yellow. There's Vladimir Karpets, who's not that good but has the best name in the game. There’s Cadel Evans, whose Tour victory last year let him enjoy the same sort of reputation level-up Dirk's title earned him. There are some lovely helicopter shots of chateaus, for which the ever-prepped announcers will be happy to give you the elevator pitch history. (Five hours is a lot of airtime to fill, ok? They are alway legitimately gorgeous.)

The thing about the first stage is that nothing really happens except accidents. The hills aren’t major, so no time losses are really in play, and this year there was an uphill finish, so the sprinters don’t get to wind things up for a frenzied field sprint finish. There was a six man breakaway, because there’s always a breakaway, but it was just young nobodies, trying to steal the first King of the Mountains jersey. The sprinters contested the intermediate sprint, but they were just feeling each other out for this year with nothing real on the line yet. The general classification contenders sit near the front of the pack so that they won’t lose time in a crash³, but don’t make any serious moves beyond that.

3: This is not a hypothetical. The (now-disgraced) Alberto Contador, who started last year's Tour as reigning champion, lost significant time behind a crash in Stage One and never completely recovered from that time loss.

There were a couple small crashes toward the back of the peloton heading toward the end of the stage. Nothing too dramatic, but it did seem to spook the riders. The sprinters teams would normally lift the pace towards any finish with a sprint final, but they were legitimately hauling ass at the end of today's stage. They sustained about forty miles per hour on the run-in to the final climb, which is crazy. Forty. On bikes. At the climb, the more powerful riders jumped off the front of the field. Cancellara made a strong move to gain a little time on the field to pad the margin by which he’s holding the yellow jersey, but he couldn’t make it stick, and young Slovakian Peter Sagan sprinted past him to win the stage. If you don’t watch bike racing, you probably don’t know about the delightful oddity that is the cycling victory celebration. Riders try to look exultant, or cocky, or whatever else they want, but it is pretty much impossible to look athletically majestic when you’re clad in neon and can’t gesticulate too much without upsetting the bike you’re riding hands-free. Your jersey is too tight to pop, your legs are clipped to the pedals, and nobody is really willing to risk eating shit right after winning. Sagan decided to baptize this year’s first stage with a combination double teapot and then chicken dance flexing, maybe? I’m not totally sure what to call it, but it was fine work, and a great way to cap the first stage.

Photos via AP and Getty Images.

Ulysses and the Siren

¹

Siren. Come, worthy Greek! Ulysses, come,
Possess these shores with me:
The winds and seas are troublesome,
And here we may be free.
Here may we sit and view their toil 5
That travail in the deep,
And joy the day in mirth the while,
And spend the night in sleep.

Ulysses. Fair Nymph, if fame or honour were
To be attain'd with ease, 10
Then would I come and rest me there,
And leave such toils as these.
But here it dwells, and here must I
With danger seek it forth:
To spend the time luxuriously 15
Becomes not men of worth.

Siren. Ulysses, O be not deceived
With that unreal name;
This honour is a thing conceived,
And rests on others' fame: 20
Begotten only to molest
Our peace, and to beguile
The best thing of our life—our rest,
And give us up to toil.

Ulysses. Delicious Nymph, suppose there were 25
No honour nor report,
Yet manliness would scorn to wear
The time in idle sport:
For toil doth give a better touch
To make us feel our joy, 30
And ease finds tediousness as much
As labour yields annoy.
—Samuel Daniel

1: As always, best practice with cycling YouTube videos is to not listen to the soundtrack. Generic pounding electronica must be a byproduct of carbon fiber and lycra, I'm afraid.

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.

Chapeau

The Atlantic's In Focus blog has two posts up of photos from the Tour de France that I can only describe as lush. Whatever your opinion of the competition, there are few sporting events that can hold a candle to the scenery of the TdF. Do you like bike racing? Do you like beautiful pictures? You won't regret clicking through.

Part I:

Part II: