By all accounts, a miserable cold, wet, windy day (what Lance Armstrong said about it, via Twitter, when it was all over: “Holy hell. That was terrible. Maybe one of the toughest days I’ve had on a bike, purely based on the conditions. I’m still freezing”). Svein Tuft finished 31st overall today, toward the front of a large group that finished about five minutes behind the stage winner, Francisco Mancebo, and four minutes behind the main chase group led by Armstrong, Leipheimer, Voigt, et al. Svein’s general classification placing after today: 24th, 5:04 off the lead.
The Giant Killer, Facing More Giants
A nice piece from The New York Times on David Wiens, the man who took on and beat both Floyd Landis and Lance Armstrong in the Leadville 100:
Beating Lance Armstrong, Then Gettng Back to Life
Wiens says he is glad for the attention and hopes he inspires people, but he knows next year’s Leadville race will be even more challenging.
After a bike industry convention last month in Las Vegas, he ran into a top pro mountain biker who told him, “I was talking to my manager and saying, ‘Someone’s got to beat Wiens.’ ”
“So, I know they’re coming,” Wiens said. “These are the guys I retired from, because I was tired of getting whupped up by them. I’m going to be a year older, but I’m not going to shy away from them. I’m going to give it a go.”
Cyclers in the Sky
The Vail Daily News calls Lance Armstrong “arguably the best cycler of all time.” The occasion: the former maillot jaune‘s performance in the Leadville 100 on Sunday, where he finished second (by 1:56) to defending champion Dave Wiens. The winner broke his old record in the 100-mile tour of the Colorado Rockies (AKA “The Race Across the Sky”) by 13 minutes; the second-place Armstrong broke the old record by 11 minutes. Meantime, the third place finisher was 33 minutes back. Among our responses: Holy crap.
(Lest we forget: This is the second year in a row Wiens has schooled a Tour de France champion. Last August, he beat the bloodied, bowed, but not forgotten Floyd Landis. )
Beyond yesterday’s results, the Vail Daily News story makes it sound like Wiens and Armstrong were having some fun out there:
For the first half of the race, a herd of competitors remained close as well. But as the lead pack, which included both Armstrong and Wiens, was nearing the half way point, in which competitors faced a steep ascent up to the highest elevation of the course at Columbine Mine (12,600 ft.), the two cycling champions began to separate themselves from everyone else.
“It seemed the pace was slow. So, I just accelerated a little, and no one stayed with us,” Armstrong said.
Wiens and Armstrong were separated by a mere two feet coming down the descent, nearly five minutes ahead of the herd they left behind.
“It was probably about 35 miles just the two of us,” Wiens said.
The two took turns drafting and pushed each other to a quick pace.
There was no let up in either rider as Wiens and Armstrong both chose to stay on their bikes through a steep, technical ascent in an area towards the end of the race that competitors normally push their bikes up.
“I would have never have done that,” Wiens said of scaling the area called Power Lines. “ … That was Lance’s idea.”
It was soon after that ascent that Wiens felt that his hope for winning was slowly vanishing the longer that Armstrong stayed with him.
“If Lance and I come into town together, there is no way I win that race,” he said.
Fortunately for Wiens, he soon didn’t have to worry about that, as Armstrong’s seemingly endless stamina finally ran out.
After a crash by Armstrong a few miles later, the race was all but over.
“Just not thinking,” Armstrong said of the crash, “too much speed going into a corner.”
Even after accomplishing an Armstrong-like feet of consecutive wins, Wiens was careful about comparing himself to arguably the best cycler of all time.
“The guy I raced today isn’t the same guy that won the Tours,” Wiens said, acknowledging that Armstrong has been retired since 2005. “So, I don’t put myself in that category.”
OK–the mountain “cyclers” are now finished with Leadville. Next weekend, the runners do the trail. We know one person whom we could imagine giving that a try.
Technorati Tags: floyd landis, lance armstrong, landis, leadville 100
Greg Lemond on the New Tour
Versus, the jock cable TV network that promotes its Tour de France coverage as part of its “Red, White, Black and Blue Summer” (the network also presents bull riding and some form of fighting in which heavily muscled males punch and kick the crap out of each other), has another mission. With the consensus view now apparently settling on the belief that professional cycling before now was unspeakably shabby and riddled with drug cheaters, Versus is bending over backward to emphasize cycling’s New Really Clean Era.
OK, great. The Tour blew itself apart the last two years by stripping the 2006 champion, Floyd Landis, of his title, and then seeing its 2007 champion in the making, Michael Rasmussen, fired by his team a few days before the end of the race. Unspeakably dirty or not, the Tour was reduced to a shambles and came to represent not only the greatest feats in athletics but the worst of the doping believed to afflict cycling and elite sports in general. However, it’s more than a little disingenuous for Versus, which made built a good audience and raked in good money promoting the legend of Lance Armstrong, to turn around and strike the pose that those days were the bad old days.
As part of its New Clean Era coverage, Versus produced Greg Lemond for an interview on Sunday. Lemond, a great champion in his own right who has made a second career out of trying to undermine Armstrong’s accomplishments, is a spokesman for the Righteous Really Clean New Cycling. Lemond was odd in the interview, a little disjointed and tongue-tied and inarticulate. One of the Versus personalities, Bob Roll, tried to set him up with a question on the new age in the sport: “You have a huge legacy in this race. How do you see the evolution of the sport as it is right now?”
Lemond’s answer:
“I’m more excited about the cycling than I have been in years, and I think there’s a big change, there’s good people in it. Bob Stapleton and Jonathan Vaughters [the men behind the newly sponsored Garmin-Chipotle and Columbia teams] are really making a big effort. I think there’s a desire I’ve never seen before. It’s good. I’m positive.”
Translation: Now that Armstrong and the disgraced Landis have departed the scene, Lemond can get into the sport again. And there are classy people involved, not the scumbags who helped Armstrong eclipse Lemond as America’s greatest racer.
Roll’s cohost, Craig Hummer, asked an interminable question about the meaning of two big name U.S.companies signing on as team sponsors in the last month or so. Lemond seemed to come unhooked from any thread the interview might have had.
“Yeah — you know — cycling is — I’m actually very bullish on just the sport in general. When you look about — look at congestion, you look at the diabetes problem in America, um, it’s probably the best sport to do in terms of low impact but high cardiovascular output. And so I’m really bullish on the sport in general as a leisure activity in America. It is a sport of people past 40, but we need to get those kids in high school, and I’m very optimistic, and the Tour de France, you can’t duplicate this, this is magic, and, uh, I saw it last year, and, I mean, when Rasmussen and Vinokourov, it was quite depressing to my sons, but they still watch cycling, they watched the Tour of Flanders this year. It’s a great sport.”
(Congestion? My co-watcher theorizes he meant asthma.)
Technorati Tags: cycling, floyd landis, greg lemond, lance armstrong, tour de france, versus, vinokourov
Greg Lemond on the New Tour
Versus, the jock cable TV network that promotes its Tour de France coverage as part of its “Red, White, Black and Blue Summer” (the network also presents bull riding and some form of fighting in which heavily muscled males punch and kick the crap out of each other), has another mission. With the consensus view now apparently settling on the belief that professional cycling before now was unspeakably shabby and riddled with drug cheaters, Versus is bending over backward to emphasize cycling’s New Really Clean Era.
OK, great. The Tour blew itself apart the last two years by stripping the 2006 champion, Floyd Landis, of his title, and then seeing its 2007 champion in the making, Michael Rasmussen, fired by his team a few days before the end of the race. Unspeakably dirty or not, the Tour was reduced to a shambles and came to represent not only the greatest feats in athletics but the worst of the doping believed to afflict cycling and elite sports in general. However, it’s more than a little disingenuous for Versus, which made built a good audience and raked in good money promoting the legend of Lance Armstrong, to turn around and strike the pose that those days were the bad old days.
As part of its New Clean Era coverage, Versus produced Greg Lemond for an interview on Sunday. Lemond, a great champion in his own right who has made a second career out of trying to undermine Armstrong’s accomplishments, is a spokesman for the Righteous Really Clean New Cycling. Lemond was odd in the interview, a little disjointed and tongue-tied and inarticulate. One of the Versus personalities, Bob Roll, tried to set him up with a question on the new age in the sport: “You have a huge legacy in this race. How do you see the evolution of the sport as it is right now?”
Lemond’s answer:
“I’m more excited about the cycling than I have been in years, and I think there’s a big change, there’s good people in it. Bob Stapleton and Jonathan Vaughters [the men behind the newly sponsored Garmin-Chipotle and Columbia teams] are really making a big effort. I think there’s a desire I’ve never seen before. It’s good. I’m positive.”
Translation: Now that Armstrong and the disgraced Landis have departed the scene, Lemond can get into the sport again. And there are classy people involved, not the scumbags who helped Armstrong eclipse Lemond as America’s greatest racer.
Roll’s cohost, Craig Hummer, asked an interminable question about the meaning of two big name U.S.companies signing on as team sponsors in the last month or so. Lemond seemed to come unhooked from any thread the interview might have had.
“Yeah — you know — cycling is — I’m actually very bullish on just the sport in general. When you look about — look at congestion, you look at the diabetes problem in America, um, it’s probably the best sport to do in terms of low impact but high cardiovascular output. And so I’m really bullish on the sport in general as a leisure activity in America. It is a sport of people past 40, but we need to get those kids in high school, and I’m very optimistic, and the Tour de France, you can’t duplicate this, this is magic, and, uh, I saw it last year, and, I mean, when Rasmussen and Vinokourov, it was quite depressing to my sons, but they still watch cycling, they watched the Tour of Flanders this year. It’s a great sport.”
(Congestion? My co-watcher theorizes he meant asthma.)
Technorati Tags: cycling, floyd landis, greg lemond, lance armstrong, tour de france, versus, vinokourov
Today’s Top News
OK–it’s a story in The Onion, so remember: It’s not real. But it is pretty funny:
“Over-Competitive Lance Armstrong Challenges Cancer to Rematch”
“I can’t deny that cancer got a piece of me last time,” Armstrong said. “A big piece of me. I think about it every day. But once I got done with cancer, it was nowhere to be found. It disappeared. Well, cancer, you know where to find me. I can beat you again in six—no, in three months.”
“I want cancer,” Armstrong added. “I want cancer so bad I can almost taste it.”
Cancer, the much-feared disease that has defeated legendary athletes such as Floyd Patterson, Lyle Alzado, and Walter Payton, is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, and is 0-1 when battling Lance Armstrong.
Technorati Tags: lance armstrong
The Wistfulness of Victory
Lance Armstrong just did what everyone who followed the Tour de France this year saw he would do: He won for the seventh time in a row. Now the race is over and he’s going into retirement. Which makes me feel lost on a couple of counts.
First: No more Tour. For the last three weeks — as for the past several years during Tour time — we’ve gotten up every morning and stumbled straight to the TV to turn on OLN’s live race coverage. I know I’ve whined about the incumbent announcers (it’s only a matter of time before someone gives Phil Liggett the Phil Rizzutto treatment and turns transcripts of his play-by-play into a book of “poetry. No, wait: Someone already has), but the anticipation of the unknown drama to unfold in the next morning’s stage has been wonderful. Would we wake up to a big breakaway? To Lance finally collapsing under relentless attack or having the Tour-ending mishap he always managed to avoid? (No way.) With the tube on, I’d fire up my laptop and keep track of the time gaps from the official Tour site. Every day: a coffee-powered multimedia frenzy. Now, it’ll back to the sports page and box scores when I get up (hey, the serious stuff can wait till I’m really awake).
Second: No more Lance. Paddling free of the hype-and-glitz whirlpool for a second — the cancer miracle, the celebrity girlfriend and all the rest — as an athlete the guy is really in a class by himself not just in cycling but in all sports. It’s astounding: his ability to plan and train the way he has all this time, and the combination of strength, guts and genius to perform when the moment demands it and resist the daily efforts of scores of people who have dedicated themselves to beating you. That has been thrilling to watch year in and year out; and — I probably have lots of company — I’m just a little sad to see it come to an end.
OLN and the Tour: The Little Things
It’s a small thing I want to complain about — a very small thing in a world where dozens of people are killed in terror attacks every week, where our nation is sending young people into an ill-defined and badly executed war, where so many of us struggle with personal challenges large and small just to get by from day to with our sanity intact. With that preamble spoken, the further piece I want to say is: It’s a damned shame, and very strange, that the race announcers on the Outdoor Life Networks Tour de France coverage are so bad at their jobs.
I’m hooked on the race, and I’ll watch every day, the daily cascade of meaningless froth from the two play-by-play guys (Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen) notwithstanding. Granted, they have a tough job. They’re sitting in a booth at the finish line every day and trying to cobble together some meaning from the live TV pictures they’re seeing and radio reports they’re hearing. But having conceded the task is difficult, it’s still sort of shocking how shallow, careless and sometimes flat-out wrong the duo is.
Just one case in point that won’t mean anything to anyone but a dedicated watcher/follower of the Tour: During Saturday’s stage, Lance Armstrong’s team collapsed. Everyone knows that now, because both Lance and smart commentators have been talking about it ever since the stage was over (Lance’s take in a post-race interview: “It was a bad day for the team.”).
But while the saga was unfolding — when the OLN guys had this amazing drama right in front of them — they apparently had no idea what was going on. What a viewer saw was Armstrong alone in a large group of riders from other teams who freely took turns attacking him (trying to get away from Armstrong by making sudden rapid accelerations ahead of his group); he was left to respond himself to every challenge, which involved “covering” the attack, or matching the quick accelerations of his rivals to make sure they didn’t get away. The disappearance of all of Armstrong’s teammates, who ordinarily would play a role in covering the moves from other teams, was stunning and recalled his very tough 2003 Tour, when he was repeatedly left by himself to deal with a rather large and very hostile group of competitors.
Sherwen and Liggett picked up on the attacks, because that’s what the pictures showed. But about the more important development that wasn’t on camera, they said nothing. The equivalent in baseball announcing terms would be if the announcer decided to tell you only what he saw happening at home plate. A lot of what’s important in a game happens right there. But you only see the game if you take in the rest of the field.
That’s all. That’s the end of this OLN complaint and this broadcasting day.