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Like a Spider, Like an Angel

Oholycow

The found poetry — I didn’t say good poetry — in today’s Tour de France Stage 9 race call by Phil Liggett. Someone has actually put together a book of Liggett found poetry, but I think the genre was actually created with the publication of “O Holy Cow,” a book that captures some of the Homer-meets-James Joyce flights of Yankee Hall of Fame shortstop and former broadcaster Phil Rizzuto. But that’s baseball. Let’s get back to the bicycle race.

The recap: It was a tough mountain stage, the last day in the Alps for this year’s tour. A five-man breakaway, driven largely by Discovery’s Yaroslav Popovych, led over the early climbs and stayed a couple minutes ahead of the group including yellow jersey Michael Rasmussen heading onto the lower slopes of the Col du Galibier, a brutal 18-kilometer climb that tops out at about 8,000 feet above sea level. Between the leaders and the Rasmussen group was a single rider, Mauricio Soler, of Colombia. If you heard of him before today, you’re either his mother or father, his coach, or you’ve read the Tour de France guidebook cover to cover. Soler — Liggett lisps his first name, More-RITH-ee-oh — caught the breakaways on the 8 or 9 percent slope of the Galibier and blew by them. Only Popovych and his teammate, Alberto Contador, were able to respond, but Soler shot across the pass more than a minute ahead of them. He stayed away all the way to the end, a beautiful solo effort that concluded with a sharp climb on the race’s final kilometer.

Now, let’s turn it over to Phil:

As Soler caught the breakaway: “These guys must be saying, ‘Who is this man with the long, thin legs?’ ”

As Soler pulled away from Popovych: “Look at this boy now! He’s itching to get on with the race and he’s only 24 years of age.”

As Soler neared the top of the col: “He climbs like a spider, but he also climbs like an angel as he races up this climb.”

As Soler neared the final descent and climb in the finishing town: “These are desperate moments. We are into Briançon. It is dangerous now. These corners duck and dive and they switch back; they descend very steeply, and then it’s a horrible sight when they come ’round a corner and the road just goes up to the heavens to the finishing line.”

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‘Beauty and Cruelty’

If Thursday’s Tour de France stage is remembered after this year’s race is over, it will be recalled as the day the great Kazakh rider Alexandre Vinokourov crashed hard and lost his chance to win the yellow jersey. All we know for now, though, is that he crashed; whether he’s able to get on his bike and mount the sort of reckless, slashing attacks he’s known for remains to be seen.

It’s always interesting to see how Tour television covers crashes, which are as much a staple of the Tour as they are of the NASCAR experience. With notable exceptions, the on-the-road cameras, carried by photographers on the back of motorcycles, are rarely present when a crash occurs. But they’re always there for the immediate aftermath: a rider sprawled on the road, on a traffic island, or in a ditch, tangled up in his bicycle or thrown across the road from it. How he got that way is almost always a mystery. And so it was today with Vinokourov: When the camera caught up to him, he was already on his feet; a teammate was pulling his bicycle from the center of the road; and Vino, as he’s familiarly known, was in obvious pain. He’d hit hard on his right side; his shorts were shredded, exposing an expanse of raw, abraded buttock.

Still: He had 26 kilometers to go to the finish line. He’s the leader of his team, Astana (Astana is the capital of Kazakhstan and actually sponsors the team) and until the moment he hit the pavement he was considered one of the riders with a better than even chance of winning the 2007 Tour. So there was nothing for him to do but get on his bike and try to catch up to the main field, which had sped into the distance as he stood by the side of the road.

His team manager ordered all the nearby Astana riders — six of the eight members, not including Vinokourov — to stop and form a chase group for their leader. In short, their job was to ride in front of him, as hard and as long as they could, to try to get him close to the stage leaders. Today was a tough stage, and soon the Astana squad started to overtake riders who had already been dropped. One, a sprinter for Robbie McEwen’s Lotto team, appeared not to believe his luck as the Vinokourov rescue team passed him. He sped up and got on Vinokourov’s wheel to get a free ride as far as he could. The pace was so high that soon the Astana domestiques, the riders whose job it is to sacrifice their own chances for the team leader, began to fall away. In just a few kilometers, Vinokourov was riding all by himself. Eventually, he caught and passed a group long discarded by the lead bunch; the exhausted riders, who included sprint leader Tom Boonen of Belgium, fell in behind their bruised and bloody opponent and let him set the pace up the day’s last climb.

It was a stirring charge, and a courageous one. Most people — people who think of bicycles as a form of recreation and who have something like normal thresholds for unbearable pain — would have been in the emergency room. In the end, though, Vinokourov couldn’t catch up; he lost more than a minute to his rivals, and did, in fact, wind up in the hospital. He’s a tough guy — it would be a shock if he isn’t at the starting line tomorrow.

Astana’s team manager summed up the situation after the stage simply and eloquently:

“We gave [Vinokourov] six riders and they did an extraordinary job and went full-gas for kilometers to try to bring him back. Then Vino’ was left on his own. What do you want me to say? It’s the beauty and cruelty of this sport. We must not overdramatize the situation. If we don’t win the Tour – there’s 2008. We haven’t given up hope … if Vino’ is in good health and he wants to win the Tour, we have no choice but to attack.”

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The Sprint Finish

Today’s Liggett/Sherwen call of the final 1,000 meters of today’s fourth stage in the Tour de France:

Liggett: Here comes the run by [team] Lampre now! As they try to bring Napolitano through! This is the first big sprint at the Tour and it is a free-for-all!

Sherwen: Julian Dean is there in the black and white and you can be certain that right on his wheel will be Thor Hushovd, one thousand meters to go, there is the flamme rouge, Quick Step [team] have got control now, they’re on the front but where is Tom Boonen? He’s not on the wheel of his teammates, there’s a line of [team] Milram, they’re looking after Zabel, there’s a lot of pink jerseys in there for T-Mobile, there’s a little bit of a switch, they’re going to start lining up for the finish line, they’re looking now at about 550 meters to go, Gerolsteiner [team] pulls off, still Quick Step in control. …

Liggett: Well, watch out for this little switch at 250 meters, it might disrupt the move here now, and still Robbie McEwen has not got through. I can see Robbie Hunter trying to get through, but they’re still not going to make a big sprint. And Julian Dean’s on the front now! Dean has found his man Thor Hushovd! Dean the champion of New Zealand! Hunter coming on Dean’s wheel! Hushovd opens the sprint in the center now! Förster trying to get through on the right here as now Thor Hushovd hits the line at last.

Sherwen: Thor Hushovd was perfectly set up for the win by Julian Dean, I just saw the black and white jersey, the Kiwi national champion was right in the right place, he sacrificed himself completely. You need a sprinter to lead out a sprinter. Big Thor has not been superb over the last couple of days but at the end of the day when you’re set up like that by Julian Dean you have to say thanks very much, mate, and you have to finish it off.

Comment: My reaction to these guys’ work usually ranges from mild annoyance to outright disgust — yeah, I ought to just chill; this is just a bike race on TV — but I’ll say something nice here. The end of a sprint stage is beyond hectic. The racers accelerate from 35 to 45 mph, there’s a mass of bodies flying around, and everyone’s madly jockeying for position. What impressed me here is that Sherwen picked Julian Dean out of the crowd a kilometer before the finish line; he knows the players well enough that he correctly predicted that Thor Hushovd would be on Dean’s wheel. That turned out to be the crucial moment in the sprint. To exit slack-cutting mode, though: Both Sherwen and Liggett missed the real drama of the last 100 meters, when Hunter, the South African sprinter, jumped from Dean’s wheel to Hushovd’s in a desperate attempt for the stage win. He timed his finishing charge about a half-second too late and lost by half a wheel. Hunter crossed the line shaking his head and fist in frustration.

Anyway: The point is that the Versus Boys do this part of the race pretty well. Things are moving at light speed compared to the normal baseball, football, or soccer game, and somehow they manage to keep up with it.

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The Tour, on Xanax

Something’s up with the Tour this morning. The live telecast shows 188 cyclists who look like they’re out on a recreational ride. They’re actually going, well, slow. But there’s no explanation for it. The Versus Boys have noted the casualness of the day’s race; however, they’re only offering guesses about the cause: the pace has been dialed down because of a massive crash yesterday that left many riders battered, bruised and abraded; or maybe it’s the length of today’s stage, nearly 150 miles. Those reasons don’t quite wash, though: The one constant about the Tour for years, especially during the first week, is the furious pace no matter what the circumstances. (One more interesting observation about today’s pace, by way of journalist Martin Dugard’s blog: “But for some reason this morning, the riders displayed unusual reluctance to begin the roll-out, as the initial phase of riding is known. They lingered in the village, sipping water and coffee right up to the last minute. And then when it came time to begin, they clipped in and began pedaling casually, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this was an actual bike race.”)

My theory: This is a protest of some kind. After the crash yesterday, a couple kilometers from the finish in Ghent (Belgium), some riders complained about how narrow and dangerous they found the final portion of the course. Today’s stage features an alarmingly hazardous finish: within 2,000 meters of the finish, when the sprinters’ teams are usually driving at a high if not frantic pace, the field will be forced to negotiate two 90-degree bends in rapid succession. Then, just as they raise their speed again on the finishing straight, they’ll hit a section of bad cobblestones (pavé), followed by a couple hundred meters of what I see described elsewhere as “lumpy” asphalt. So maybe the message behind the lazy pace today is enough is enough — if you want us to put on a show at the finish line, don’t force us to risk life and limb to do it.

That’s today’s Berkeley-based Tour speculation … (and as I write, the pace in today’s stage has jumped as one rider makes a dash to try to grab the King of the Mountains jersey on the day’s lone climb. It’ll still be interesting to see how the finish develops, though.)

[Update: From the Tour’s daily race coverage: “17:53 – Well Behind Schedule: This is one of the slowest stages in the last 10 years of the Tour. The average after five hours was just 33.5km/h. It will be the first time that a stage has finished after 6.00pm since the neutralized stage to Aix-les-Bains in 1998.”]

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The Tour: The Versus Boys Are Back

We’re having our traditional Tour de France first stage party this morning: Usually we get up when the live broadcast starts (5 a.m. here in PDT), have a few neighbors over, and watch the peloton race toward the usual sprint finish. Today we overslept, so the festivities didn’t begin until after 7.

Phil Liggett, MBE, is doing his usual charmingly hackneyed, loopy race call. Just now he said, “The peloton are being led by the boys in blue.” It’s always “the boys.” His best moments today:

“The Tour’s Yellow Peril.” Referring to prologue winner and race leader Fabian Cancellara, who of course is wearing the yellow jersey (and using yellow pedals and a yellow helmet as long as he’s Number One). Yellow Peril: I’m sure that one popped into his head without any idea of its origin.

“The sprinters have their bird teeth out.” Bird teeth? It’s a mystery what he meant, and my early online research is no help. If you come across this and know what the heck he’s talking about, please help interpret Phil for me. [Hmmm: The insightful Kate speculates that Phil meant “egg teeth,” which embryonic birds use to break through their shells.”

“The team domestiques are out of the kitchen and working hard.”

And from Phil’s “analyst” partner, Paul Sherwen, on Robbie McEwen, who rode from the back of the pack to win: “He never panicked. He kept his calm like a magical poker player.”

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Heart

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Today, Floyd Landis had to face the Tour de France cameras again. Yesterday, he ran out of gas on the stage’s last climb, hit the wall hard, and lost the Tour’s yellow jersey. Then he gathered himself, told reporters that even though he didn’t expect to win the Tour anymore he’d still give it a shot, and went to bed.

Today? Well, I may have disappeared so far into cycling-race geekdom (along with immediate family members and close friends, some neighbors, and assorted bicycling compatriots) that I underestimate the difficulty in conveying how amazing today was. Landis came out and attacked the field on the last big mountain-climbing stage of the Tour, and this time, he broke everyone else. Talk about heart.

He did not capture the overall race lead, but because of the nature of the last three stages — a relatively flat one tomorrow with limited apparent tactical opportunity for big moves by the race leaders, a time trial on Saturday in which Landis will be a favorite to win, and the short, flat finish on Sunday in Paris — he’s got a real chance to win the Tour. Of course, the thing about this Tour, unlike nearly every Tour for the past 25 years, is that you never know what tomorrow will bring.

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Ready for Your Closeup?

If you’re watching the Tour de France every day on OLN — a bad habit in our household driven by the fact it’s the only place to see the race here in America — you’re well acquainted with the astounding caravan that moves along with the race. Motorcycles carrying TV, video and still photographers and course marshalls and timekeepers. Cars carrying race officials. Team cars — at least one for every starting squad of nine riders — carrying the team directors (the overall race strategists) and sundry VIPs and journalists. Neutral cars to support riders up and down the course regardless of which team they’re on. Overhead, at least one helicopter shadowing the progress of the daily race leaders. One of the more demanding and stressful factors for Tour riders must be the constant din of honking cars, revving engines and churning helicopter rotors.

For fans, though, the presence of cameras rolling along with the riders means that you’re right in the middle of the action. For riders, it means there’s no place to hide when something goes wrong. That’s what happened today for Floyd Landis, the former Lance Armstrong lieutenant who had managed to take the race leader’s yellow jersey this year. After a strong finish yesterday on one of the Tour’s classic tough mountain stages, lots of people had started to feel Landis would go on to win the race. But today — today was another brutally hard day, and on the stage’s last climb, Landis blew up. When one of his rivals accelerated sharply and the group around him chased, Landis simply couldn’t make his legs go any faster or harder. It was stunning to see — at least for Tour geeks who are used to seeing a single rider impose his will on the race.

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Of course, Landis had one faithful companion as he found himself wallowing up the climb, his closest rivals vanishing up the road ahead of him: as usual, a Tour cameraman was there to capture every moment of suffering. All Landis could do was keep turning over the pedals until he got to the top, no matter how long it took.

[Later: Landis avoided the media at the finish, but later gave what Velonews termed an “impromptu press conference” during which he showed a lot of class. One exchange:

Q: Did you know when you were dropped that the yellow jersey was gone?

FL: I knew I felt very, very bad. I didn’t expect to stay close to the leaders. I did what I could. I kept fighting, but I didn’t have much left. I did everything in my power to stay close, but you saw what happened. ]

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Road Sign

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Maybe Floyd Landis, until his disastrous showing today a U.S. favorite to succeed Lance Armstrong as Tour de France champion, should have known trouble was coming when he saw this sign on the first big climb of the day, the Col du Galibier: “Galibier 12%, Jack Daniels 40%.” Someone who’s over there could probably do a pretty decent feature-length article on all the stuff that gets painted on the roads of the Tour route and on the people out there doing the painting.

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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.

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Calling the Tour

Amid profound popular ennui, I will cease my mean-spirited critiques of OLN’s sterling Tour de France race coverage. Though — one last thing — you start to wonder if play-by-play man extraordinaire Phil Liggett will ever, ever get the difference between kilometers per hour and miles per hour. On practically every big descent on the tour so far, he’s taken a look at some picture of riders hurtling down the road, sized up the situation, then announced: “These boys are going ’round about 50 kilometers an hour here.” No, Phil, that’s 50 miles an hour. There’s actually quite a difference. Sometimes Paul Sherwen, the anointed OLN analyst, corrects him.

But my bashing aside, here’s the point: It’s not that Liggett and Sherwen are so rotten. It’s just that they seem to have a lock on the job no matter how well or badly they do — and much of the time they’re really mediocre. It’s hard to believe that there’s not a single English-speaking sports guy out there who’s deeply knowledgeable about competitive cycling and the Tour and who could sound half-way smart on the tube. Say (Kate’s suggestion) Greg LeMond (though Greg is on the outs with the whole “We Love Lance Armstrong” movement, so he’d never get the job. OK, then. Tyler Hamilton. Wait — he’s an accused doper.

Well, there’s got to be someone.