NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for crude humor and references to drug abuse.
Introduction
As I’ve
blogged before, there’s a benefit to bike race coverage that doesn’t try to be
unbiased or fair. Sports fans have their
favorites and so should commentators. So
read on if you want a blow-by-blow account of the last real stage of the Tour
de France before tomorrow’s parade around Paris.
Biased blow-by-blow – Tour de France Stage
20
As I join
the race, the peloton has about 60 km to go, which puts them at the base of
Mont Revard, which, at 16 km long with an average grade of 5.6%, is a Category
1.
There’s a
breakaway about a minute ahead of the peloton.
A couple of polka-dot jersey contenders in there: Europcar’s Pierre Rolland (who, going into
today, only needed one point to overtake Froomestrong in the KOM classification, so I’m really rooting
for him) and also Igor Anton Hernandez (Euskaltel) who, if he outscores Rolland
in the KOM sprints and wins the
stage, will win the mountains competition.
Igor must be praying to St. Jude, the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.
Speaking of
lost causes, Jens Voigt has dropped the breakaway! I think desperate solo breakaways must be
written into his Radio Shack contract.
It’s tempting to mock him for this, except that every so often he does
win this way. He’s 1:38 ahead of the
peloton, with the rest of the break only 52 seconds ahead.
If I’m not
mistaken, Tejay Van Garderen is going off the back with Phillipe Gilbert...
wait, I’m wrong! They’re going off the
front of the peloton, chasing after the breakaway. That’s kind of bizarre. I guess somebody told the riders something
silly like “anything can happen!” and they’re so tired they believed it. It’s refreshing to see such an attitude, when
compared to my own towering cynicism of this race and this sport.
Speaking of
Tejay, I did catch the final 10 km of the “dueling Alpe d’Huez assaults”
stage. That was some truly thrilling
bike racing. It was a shame to see Tejay
overhauled at the end, but Christophe Riblon (AG2R La Mondiale) looked to have
earned it, and his delighted grins were pleasing to behold (especially after
all the closed-lip Dubya-like smirking we’ve had to see from Froomestrong).
It’s early
and I’m doing this report without caffeine, so I was a bit slow to understand
why Gilbert and Tejay were chasing the breakaway. Tejay made sense, of course, but this isn’t
exactly Gilbert’s kind of course. But
then, I’d forgotten (due to Gilbert’s white world champion jersey) that he’s
Gilbert’s BMC teammate, so he’s earning his salary by getting Tejay in position
for a stage win.
Anton is
going after Voigt and is about 35 seconds behind. If the two of them were to connect and stay
away, Anton’s KOM ambition would be nicely served. Well, really nicely served would mean a side
salad, but you get my point.
Gilbert is
dropped. There’s another BMC rider
helping Tejay chase but I can’t figure out who it is.
Speaking of
Tejay, he’s becoming a minor celebrity around the Albert house. Not because anybody here besides me really
cares about the Tour de France, but because I’ve nicknamed our grocery store
after him. My wife likes to go to Trader
Joe’s, and I never liked that name. That
doesn’t mean I’ll call it Traitor Joe’s, because that’s too obvious (and surely
some over-ideological group actually calls it that). Some people call it “TJ’s” and I just cannot
abide that either. So I call it Van
Garderen’s. So far this name hasn’t
stuck, but then my kids are highly impressionable so I’m holding out hope.
There are a
bunch of commercials on Eurosport now and only one of them has featured women
in bikinis, so while I wait for the coverage to resume I’m ruminating on
whether anything can really happen this late in the Tour. Of course the answer is no, but it’s fun to
dream. For example, what if Froomestrong
got a bad blood bag, like Tyler Hamilton did in 2004? That could open things up. Stranger things have happened. After all, I really didn’t expect Greg LeMond
to take 58 seconds out of Laurent Fignon in the final stage of the 1989 Tour to win the whole thing by 8 seconds.
Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking a lot about that stage, bringing my new bitterness and doubt to the picture. Specifically, could Fignon really have lost all that time merely due to saddle sores? That never made any sense. I’ve often had terrible saddle sores for the second stage of the Everest Challenge, which is a five- or six-hour race, and given all the suffering of the route and the pace, the saddle sores just didn’t figure in. How could they have been more than an annoyance to Fignon over a mere half-hour effort? This morning it finally hit me: Fignon didn’t have saddle sores, he had hemorrhoids. As a proud man, he didn’t want to admit it. Now, I know what you’re thinking: could hemorrhoids really slow a guy down? Sure! Think of all that blood leaving your body! Hemorrhoids lower your hematocrit!
Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking a lot about that stage, bringing my new bitterness and doubt to the picture. Specifically, could Fignon really have lost all that time merely due to saddle sores? That never made any sense. I’ve often had terrible saddle sores for the second stage of the Everest Challenge, which is a five- or six-hour race, and given all the suffering of the route and the pace, the saddle sores just didn’t figure in. How could they have been more than an annoyance to Fignon over a mere half-hour effort? This morning it finally hit me: Fignon didn’t have saddle sores, he had hemorrhoids. As a proud man, he didn’t want to admit it. Now, I know what you’re thinking: could hemorrhoids really slow a guy down? Sure! Think of all that blood leaving your body! Hemorrhoids lower your hematocrit!
Voigt now
has 3:20 on the peloton. He looks pretty
miserable. I got a good look at his face
(a rare moment of good screen resolution) and though many would find his
expression inscrutable, I’m pretty good at scruting. Here’s what I think is going through his
head: he’s an older guy, like me, and as
a kid may well have heard the song “You’re Every Woman in the World to Me” by
Air Supply. (He’d have been listening to
an 8-band radio to try to learn English, you see. ) So now he’s got that song stuck in his head
like a thorn in his paw, and he’s realizing how utterly stupid the lyrics
are. Every woman in the world? Yeah.
You’re Gisele Bundchen, but also Kathy Bates, and also an octogenarian
in a nursing home drooling on herself, and unfortunately “every woman in the
world” also includes a third-world mother whose kids are starving. You’re all these things, and how? And why?
No doubt, Jens is hating life right now.
Everybody is
tired in this Tour, including (apparently) Sean Kelly, who has finally spoken
for the first time since I joined the coverage 45 minutes ago. He’s forecasting Voigt’s downfall: “When you’re a rider like Jensie, you need a
lot more than three minutes, and he’s going to pay dearly for being out there
alone.” Voigt is getting close to the
top of this penultimate climb ... maybe Igor will catch him, and at least they
can extend their lead on the descent and the 20 km of roughly flat terrain
before that final brutal climb to Semnoz.
Gilbert is
back with Tejay, and the other BMC rider is Marcus Burghardt. Three out of nine riders is pretty good,
especially for these guys whose Tour has been pretty lousy. The other riders in the break are Rolland,
yesterday’s stage victor Christophe Riblon (AG2R La Mondiale), Pavel Brutt
(Katusha), Cyril Gautier (Europcar), Simon Clarke (Orica Greenedge), and Alexis
Vuillermoz (Sojasun). You may accuse me
of making that last name up, along with the name of the team. I didn’t, actually ... I only wish I were
that clever.
Geez, more commercials
now. The same Festina ad I’ve been
seeing during Tour coverage for the last 10-15 years. So, I guess I’ll rap a bit about this climb
to Semnoz. One of the reasons I decided
to watch this stage at all is that I’ve actually done that climb up to Semnoz,
ten years ago when I was in nearby Annecy training for La Marmotte. Some local recommended it, and amazingly I
was able to follow his directions and find the climb. (Those who know me well are quite aware how navigationally
challenged I am; it almost didn’t matter that these directions were in
French.) I don’t think I realized until
I got to the top that I’d be staying at a big hotel there, the Hotel Rochers
Blancs, the next night. Man, it’s an
awful, glorious climb. It’s an Hors Categorie beast of almost 11 km at
8.5%. It’s also very scenic, and good
scenery is almost the only reason to watch a mountain or time trial stage of
this Tour, given the Postalesque dominance of Team Sky (motto: “Ha ha, you’ll never figure out our scheme of
total global doping domination!”). Here’s
a photo of the Rochers Blancs; key things to note are the big window shutters,
which are not ornamental (that would be twee in the extreme) but actually keep
out the chill; the fact that this environment is so Euro it made my
all-American daughter look Euro; and the charmingly half-assed exposed
electrical cord leading to this weird bucking donkey.
Dang, Voigt
just overcooked a curve and almost stacked!
His rear tire definitely slid and he was right at the edge of the road. He rode it out, though. Balls like King Kong! That’s probably good for an extra jolt of
much-needed adrenaline.
Behind,
Gilbert needs a bike change. His bike
shat itself somehow. These modern bikes
... so temperamental.
Cripes,
another round of commercials! I hate to
see the American influence spoil other countries’ industries. I haven’t had to sit through this many commercials
since “ABC Saturday Night At The Movies” back in the ‘80s. Remember that? How they’d drag a James Bond movie out to
like three hours? That’s the kind of
horror story I tell my kids when they’re being ungrateful. “It was brutal,” I’ll tell them. “Maybe that’s why life spans were so much
shorter then.” (Full disclosure: I based this quip on a Sunday comic
strip. I don’t know how or why I came to
look at “Pickles,” but I was richly rewarded.)
There’s
Froomestrong surrounded by three Sky lackeys.
The peloton is still sitting about three minutes behind the breakaway.
Wow,
Eurosport is doing a little travelogue bit about the climb to Semnoz. I guess it’s the video footage that all the
networks buy, actually, because it’s in French.
Declan is doing a fine job translating, but the cheesy script isn’t
worth translating and certainly not worth me typing up for you. Instead, here’s a little blurb from a Los Angeles Times travel story from
2003:
Les Rochers Blancs, a cozy inn, sits high atop a wooded mountain ridge known as Le Semnoz. At its restaurant we dined on fondue and la petite friture (literally “small fry” from the lake). And we slept like babies, awakened by the gentle tinkle of cowbells in the morning. One day we followed a herd of goats to a lone farmhouse where cheese was made and sold. On a clear day, they say, from the top of Le Semnoz you can spot the most recognized summit of the western Alps, Mont Blanc.
Can you
believe it? I actually did some homework
for this blow-by-blow report. I hope you’re
happy.
Voigt has
this really weird aerodynamic tuck where he hangs off one side of the bike,
like a motorcycle racer going through a turn.
It really doesn’t look very safe or elegant. I think the sport needs to regain its
elegance. The Coors Classic actually had a daily Most Elegant Rider award.
It was sponsored by Lola Ascore, which I think is a French clothier. I think the president of the company just
wanted to have his photo taken with the racer of his choice once a day. The race promoters, of course, could use all
the sponsorship they could get. This is
surely why they had a daily award for Best Handwriting, based on the racers’
sign-in. This was sponsored, of course,
by Bic.
Modern bike
racers make too much money, and are too coddled in general, to participate in
such things. So to restore elegance to
the sport the race promoters would need to invoke penalties. Forget to zip up your jersey for a solo
victory salute? That’ll cost you 20
seconds. Shorts come down too far,
and/or socks come up too high, like Lance’s?
That’s 10 seconds per day.
Polka-dot shorts on the KOM leader?
Five KOM points per day. Total
lack of grace, like you don’t even belong on a bike, like if you were a
marathon runner you’d run like a toddler with a full diaper (i.e., you ride
like Froome)? That’s two minutes a day
penalty. We’d see this sport shape up in
a hurry!
It’s 20 km
to go. Wow, really crazy, narrow, twisty
road with a rock embankment on one side and a concrete barrier on the
other. Glorious.
Anton has
failed to catch Voigt, so the poor guy has to go it alone for this flat
section. And it’s not that flat even—there
are some painful-looking rollers.
Burghardt
heads back to the car to fetch some food for Tejay. Whatever happened to Cadel Evans in this
Tour? Poor guy. He hasn’t been good in the Tour since
2011. But then, he’s been disappointing
his fans on and off for many years, which is one of the things I like about
him. And just when you’re ready to write
him off, he does something awesome like winning Worlds. I was pleasantly surprised by his podium
finish in this year’s Giro.
Cyril
Gautier is doing a nice job setting tempo for Rolland. He’s doing that silly thing with his tongue,
though, like I do when I’m trying to play basketball. I can’t fault him for it; if I were in this
race I’d be slobbering all over myself and probably crying as well.
Voigt’s bike
is a strange light blue, kind of similar to those Bianchis of yore but not as
green. If Bianchi were an American
company they’d have trademarked that color, like how Harley Davidson
trademarked the growl of their engines.
(Note: there is no albertnet fact
checker. That trademark thing could be
some BS my big brother told me twenty years ago.)
One nice
thing about Froome is that he sucks so much wheel you seldom have to look at
his elbows-out, inexplicably awkward, Bernie-Kosar-esque riding style. Generally his rail-thin self is totally
eclipsed by his Sky henchmen. It’s like
a lead-out train that lasts for the whole day.
(You didn’t actually expect me to say something genuinely nice about Froome,
did you?)
Oh, Sky is
drilling it at the front now as the hit the bottom of the final climb to
Semnoz. Up ahead, Tejay has attacked,
and the chase group is in tatters! Tejay
has got just two guys with him: Rolland
and Vuillermoz.
Wow, now
Movistar is lighting it up at the front.
They’ve been really amazing in this year’s Tour. I hope they’re not learning little tricks
from their Evil Uncle Allejandro (i.e., Valverde). I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt I
guess....
And just
like that, it’s all together but for Voigt making his doomed way up the mountain. He’s under the 10K banner but only 45 seconds
ahead of the lead group now. Funny,
though, the peloton has shrunk so much it looks more like a breakaway now.
Since the
Belkin uniforms came out, I’ve had a hard time telling the riders apart. Maybe it’s not the jerseys so much as the
fact that I have no idea what Bauke Mollema even looks like. I’d never heard of him before this Tour but I’m
sure he’ll be a household name from now on.
Roman
Kreuziger (Saxo-Tinkoff) looks to have cracked and is falling off the
back. His leader, Contador, is right in
there, drilling it alongside Nairo Alexander Quintana Rojas (Movistar) in the white jersey of Best Young Rider. Quintana has an awfully long name for such a little man. They’re a few guys back, with Movistar pounding the pace at the front
of this small group. And now they’ve
caught Voigt.
Oh my
goodness. Froomestrong has just lanched
an Armstrongian attack! Absolutely
blistering. In the process he overhauled
Quintana and Joaquim Rodriguez (Katusha) who somehow had sneaked off ahead. So they’re on his wheel now and I’m guessing
the winner will be from this trio. “And
Contador takes a shower,” Declan says. I’m
not familiar with that expression, but suffice to say Contador is in great
danger of losing his second place overall.
Rodriguez,
because he’s also coked to the gills, is driving the pace ahead of Froome. He looks extremely fresh and powerful, which
I guess is the whole point of the oxygen drugs.
J-Rod started the day only 47 seconds behind Contador, so if he does
well enough today he’ll take over third place, behind Quintana (who needs only
21 seconds to pass up Contador). It
looks like Kreuziger got a tongue-lashing through his radio or something
because he’s found some strength to rally and move up to help out
Contador. Either that or Contador is
hurting so bad he fell back.
Only 5 km to
go for the three leaders, who now have about 40 seconds on Contador and 25
seconds on Valvarde. It’s all J-Rod at
the front; I guess he has the most to gain today.
Contador is
either sniffing his armpit for inspiration, or talking into his race
radio. What could he be saying? “I hate myself and want to die.” Or perhaps, “Maybe it’s worth going back to
the dope and risking that lifetime ban....”
Richie Porte
is just sitting on Kreuziger, cruising along, perhaps deciding whether to
launch a what-the-hell attack and blow by everybody but Froome, who will be
solo before long. Not much point in such
a thing, given how far back Porte is on the GC, but then these two seem to
enjoy rubbing our noses in it.
Quintana
looks mighty comfortable, I must say.
You never know, he might go off-script and get the victory. Of course if it comes to a sprint among these
three J-Rod will get it, despite dragging these guys along the whole time.
Here’s some
trivia. Based on the Cyrillic spelling
of Katusha, it should actually be pronounced “Kat-YOU-shka,” which sounds even
more like a sneeze. You just can’t find
nuggets like this on cyclingnews.
Riblon is
all by himself, dropped by the Contador group.
Riding solo is a lot less fun when you’re off the back instead of the
front.
It’s kind of
amazing how fast these guys are going.
Their jerseys are flapping around a lot even though it’s a 9-percent
grade.
Wow, Froome
just dealt a d’bag fan a vicious backhand blow!
I can’t blame him—the guy was too close—but it’s interesting to consider
that Froome just committed felony assault, on camera, and yet will be in no way
penalized by the law. Kind of a nice
allegory in there somewhere.
Declan is
imagining what Froome was thinking when he socked that guy: “Get out of the way, we’ve got a smurf
involved.” I cannot have heard that
correctly. But what else could he have
said?
Kelly is
talking about how much Froome’s shoulders rock.
“It makes it look like he’s in difficulty, but actually he never is.”
The leaders
are past the 2 km to go mark so there are barriers up now. I’m curiously unexcited by the finale here
because I can’t bring myself to root for any of these three. I guess I’ll root for Quintana, except that
beating these other two super-juiced guys would cast serious doubts on his
blood chemistry.
There goes
Froome. He instantly distanced the other
two, but amazingly Quintana has chased him down. It was a vicious attack and surely the only
reason Quintana could neutralize it is that Froome’s form is so plug-ugly; Quintana couldn’t stand to be dropped by such a mutant.
Now Quintana
attacks! He’s doing a really good job
... Froome’s head is down ... Rodriguez is blown ... I reckon Quintana will get
this! Wow, he’s just a tiny thing. No wonder he goes uphill so fast.
Quintana
looks like he’s got it! Cool as a
cucumber. He’s not even looking back
with paranoia like every other racer I’ve watched solo. He gives a basic blowing-kisses victory salute. This performance brings him up to second
overall in the race, and he may even end up with the KOM jersey.
J-Rod
crosses next, and then the Froome slithers in.
Valverde is about a minute and a half behind, grinding his way to the
finish. As always, his mouth is set in
the “white man’s overbite” style (which is how I once heard a black pal
describe white men dancing).
Porte comes
in next, looking barely winded.
J-Rod has
made it to the final podium. I think
that’s a first for him, and a testament to how far ahead the doping practices
are over the enforcement of the rules.
Quintana is
being interviewed. There is not the
slightest suggestion of happiness on his face.
He makes Nadia Comăneci look like Mary Lou Retton. If it weren’t for Declan’s translation, I
would think he’s saying, “I last saw my dog at the dog park. I had gone over to throw out my paper coffee
cup, and when I turned around I didn’t see him.
I figured he’d only run off a short distance, but it’s been two weeks
now and my kids are beside themselves with grief.” The actual translation, I’ve just realized,
is far less compelling than this. “I
thought the attacks would never stop coming,” he says. Etc.
Now my video
feed has collapsed and I’m utterly failing in my attempt to get something else
ginned up. But this ad is probably more
fun to look at than the final yellow jersey presentation:
Okay, my
feed is back. Now Sean Kelly is being
interviewed. His eyebrows, which are
like big furry caterpillars, are the most expressive thing about his, or
anybody’s, face. “Cycling is
unpredictable—we thought Wiggins could win another Tour—but Froome is
different, and we should see him around for the next number of years.” Ugh.
Maybe I’ll take up watching a different sport, like Synchronized Diving
(or, as my brother calls it, Same Sex Diving).
I don’t think I can handle cycling anymore.
But
wait! Peter Sagan just did a big wheelie
over the line, and then executed a glorious fishtail sliding stop, surely
destroying a $100 tire in the process! And
now, on the podium, Quintana has managed something approaching a smile (though
it could just be gas pains). There may
yet be some basic spectacle left in this sport.
Keep an eye on these pages, because I just might return for the Vuelta d’Espagna...