Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2020 Tour of Sweden Stage 4

Introduction

Well, it’s been a long time since I got to watch a bike race, what with the Covid-19 pandemic. Virtually the entire pro racing season has been canceled, though the Tour de France has been tentatively scheduled to start in late August. The first road race of note this year was the Slovenian National Championship, which quietly took place last weekend (as Slovenia, months ago, was the first country in Europe to declare they’ve eradicated the coronavirus). Because the Slovenian Championship lacked an international field, there was no TV coverage of the event.

But suddenly Sweden, the only European country not to have any shelter-in-place restrictions whatsoever, decided to revive their five-day Tour of Sweden stage race, formerly known as the Postgirot Open, which hasn’t been held in over 18 years. They found an eager sponsor, the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi, makers of hydroxychloroquine. (If this seems cynical, ponder for a moment the fact of Amgen, makers of EPO, sponsoring the Tour of California.) At long last, I was able to tune in this morning to watch Stage 4, the queen and penultimate stage.

(Why do I call this a “biased” blow-by-blow report? Well, I don’t have to bite my tongue when I think a rider is doped, a dope, or just being dopey. Or sneezy.)

Sanofi Tour of Sweden Stage 4 – Skövde to Huskvarna

As I join the action, Tao Geoghegan Hart (Team Ineos) has accidently rolled off the front of the peloton on the third of six categorized climbs. He doesn’t look very excited. That’s kind of the way this team rolls; sometimes the riders are so lubed they don’t know their own strength. Consider how Froome has so often accidently dropped everybody, and then, when alerted to his position, he’d kind of shrug and either solo to victory or hang back for a bit to keep up appearances. 

Based on Geoghegan Hart’s faint suntan, I’d guess he’s actually made it outside for some training this year, which of course gives him a leg up on some of his competitors (such as the Spaniards and Italians who were forbidden to ride outdoors).

It’s a long climb and the peloton isn’t doing much about this accidental attack, so I’ll take a moment to fill you in on what’s happened in this Tour of Sweden so far. The two favorites going in, at least from my perspective, were Primoz Roglic (Jumbo-Visma) and Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates), because not only do they have actual road racing miles in their legs, they finished first and second, respectively, in the Slovenian National Championship a week ago. Not to mention they’ve been ascendant in the sport anyway, with Roglic winning last year’s Vuelta a Espana and Pogacor taking three stages.

Back in the race, Geoghegan Hart has stretched out his lead. Marc Soler (Movistar Team) is giving chase but he’s not gaining significant ground. I’m not getting much info from the announcers, who are lame. Eurosport’s best commentator, the Irish champ Sean Kelly, gave up on the sport this spring with so many cancelled races, and (as described in this great article) has gone back home to Ireland to work full time on his family’s dairy farm.

So who’s not here at the Tour of Sweden? Notably, Team Ineos is missing all their heavy hitters. Geraint Thomas, Egan Bernal, and Richard Carapaz, along with six others initially slated for the race, have all been quarantined after Carapaz visited his home in Ecuador and subsequently showed Covid-19 symptoms. Following a team time trial practice, others developed fevers and the whole team had to sit this race out.

Now Miguel Angelo Lopez (aka “Superman”), of Astana Team, has attacked the peloton! Lopez is having a great Tour of Sweden, having won a stage and picked up the white point’s leader jersey.

Getting back to my discussion of who is at this race, Team Arkéa–Samsic failed to register in time and isn’t fielding a team, so their leader Nairo Quintana isn’t here. Movistar Team decided their star, Alejandro Valverde, is just too old to risk sharing a cramped peloton with so many other athletes from so many parts of Europe. Many French riders, including Thibault Pinot, Julian Alaphilippe, and Romain Bardet simply declined to participate, citing their lack of real training. Perhaps the most bizarre exclusion from the race is Tom Dumoulin, who was all set to lead Team Sunweb but was suddenly sidelined with a persistent and advanced case of dandruff.

Wow, Superman already has over a minute and a half on the GC group! Not sure how far ahead Soler is … I’m surprised he hasn’t been caught already.

Surely by now you know why Chris Froome isn’t in this race, but in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, I’ll tell you: in early May, while being interviewed by an American journalist (for this article), he was suddenly struck by lightning. The story, a puff piece about how Froome and his Sky/Ineos team never doped, ended with Froome explaining their unprecedented and uncanny success: “The sport is now a hundred times cleaner, but we climb faster than [the dopers] did at the time. The best way to explain that is that we have evolved a lot in the areas of technology, nutrition, and training. We are better as athletes.” At this moment the lightning bolt struck the cheating, lying scumbag right through the head. Oddly, the so-called journalist didn’t mention this in his article. Odder still, when mentioning Froome’s positive test for salbutamol, the journalist breezily recounted how Froome “was later cleared of doping” without mentioning what a complete travesty that was, with absolutely no explanation given for the charges being unexpectedly dropped.

And now Lopez has caught Soler, who looks pretty beat.

Sure enough, Lopez motors right on by. I think Soler has given up.

Roglic attacks! He started off this race very well, handily winning the individual time trial and taking the leader’s green jersey in the process. He faded in yesterday’s stage, though, losing enough time to Pogacar to fall to second on GC. He needs at least 30 seconds to move back into the lead, and can’t afford to lose more than 18 seconds to Lopez.

Roglic doesn’t look nearly as strong now as he had in last year’s Vuelta, and I’m reminded of how he cracked in last year’s Giro d’Italia after winning both time trials. Ah, and here it appears he’s getting caught. Wow, he’s really going backwards. The GC group is hauling ass now, seeming to have been awakened by Roglic’s attack! It’s all coming apart!

A teammate gives Roglic his wheel, but it’s no use. Roglic just cannot hang. The teammate looks over his shoulder. He’s saying something … probably encouragement.

Pogacar sits comfortably in the group. This kid is pretty amazing … he almost always looks fresh as a daisy. Huh, it looks like the pace settled back down. I think this race caught a lot of these guys off guard … there’s only so much training you can do by yourself, some of it indoors, and no races to motivate you. There aren’t very many spectators either, and nobody looks that excited. In fact, check this gal out. She doesn’t look happy at all. Or is she sneezing into her elbow like we’ve all been taught?

The GC group is growing as more riders catch back on. Sunweb takes to the front and picks up the pace. Honestly, I don’t even know whom they’re working for … without Dumoulin, I don’t even know if this team has any stage racers.

There’s an attack from the bunch! It’s Pierre LaTour (AG2R La Mondiale), attempting to bridge up to Lopez!

The racers are on the lumpy section heading toward the fourth of six summits today. As the field hits a flat stretch, Team Ineos takes to the front and starts loafing, obviously hampering the chase so Geoghegan Hart can stay off. Toward the back of this group, Geoffrey Bouchard (AG2R La Mondiale) sits up and … what’s he doing? Texting? Ah, I just got a tweet from him. “Pierre’s off the front, my work here is done lol” he’s quipped. They really shouldn’t let riders tweet during races. It’s dangerous.

As they hit the next uphill, the field starts to speed up again. Oddly, it’s Astana on the front, drilling it. What about Lopez? Did he get caught?

Farther up the road, LaTour is still looking great. I don’t think this spectator is six feet away, though. Fricking Sweden. Five times the death rate of the rest of Scandinavia (click here for details), and they’re still pretending everything is okay.

Speak of the devil: Eurosport is showing footage of Huskvarna, a town near the stage finish. Look at all these weekenders, all crowded together with not a mask among them!

See the big sign there? Google translates the second sentence as “But now we need to keep our distance.” Not a very obedient populace, eh?

On the penultimate descent, Astana continues to drill it for Superman, who I assume is in there somewhere.

Ah, there’s Lopez. As this ever-growing GC group starts the monster Berg av Kleideniden, Superman is tucked neatly into his Astana train. Geoghegan Hart still has almost two minutes but it’s a long climb. You can see Pogacar, in his green leader’s jersey, behind a teammate on the right.

Up ahead, Geoghegan Hart’s lead is starting to erode. Now we’re back looking at LaTour who is visibly struggling. The peloton, still lead by Astana, is hauling ass and starting to break up again. And whoa, what’s this?

That’s like the third Sanofi ad since I started watching. Pretty cheeky … clearly the suggestion is that this race can proceed because Plaquenil, their brand of hydroxychloroquine, is so effective against Covid-19. Totally absurd. But hey, I guess if they’re paying for the ad, who am I to protest. It couldn’t be any less effective than, say, McDonald’s.

The GC group has caught LaTour.

It’s a long slog up this Category 1 climb, the dreaded Berg av Kleideniden, rising to over 1,900 meters (6,000 feet), the highest summit of the stage. Now, one by one, the Astana train starts to falter and pretty soon there’s not a single one of them at the front. Either that or they’re being told to stand down because Lopez is hurting so bad. Superman, indeed! At this rate it’s only a matter of time before the attacks start.

Whoa, did I call it or what? Pogacar decides he’s had enough sitting around and totally attacks!

This is really pretty crazy. With Geoghegan Hart’s lead dwindling all the time, all Pogacar really needs to worry about is Roglic, who has been yo-yo’ing off the back all day … and yet Pogacar attacks, due to sheer youthful exuberance I guess. It’s tempting to assume he’s just testing the waters but I’ve never seen him do that. And sure enough, he’s taking time out of the group with every pedal stroke.

And now he’s got Geoghegan Hart! The tall Englishman grabs Pogacar’s wheel and hangs on for dear life. It's just as well because I was getting sick of typing “Geoghegan Hart” which is the keyboard equivalent of a tongue-twister.

Geoghegan Hart cannot hang. Pogacar solos over the summit of the Kleideniden and starts the final descent toward the short, Cat 3 climb to the summit finish. He’s demonstrated before that he can fly on the descents. I just hope he doesn’t hit a bump and rack his nuts!

With 1K to go to the summit, the chase group begins to splinter! Superman falters! Geoghegan Hart has been caught and now struggles to keep up! Roglic is nowhere to be seen!

Pogacar is in the final stretch, having knocked out the final Cat 3 climb like it was nothing!

Pogacar takes the stage, extending his GC lead needlessly! He’s got the Tour of Sweden in the bag!

It’s a fairly modest victory salute for somebody who has just schooled the entire peloton.

The chase group having completely exploded, a few lone riders cross the line. I don’t know who they are but it scarcely matters at this point.

Unbelievable … another ad for Sanofi.

Pogacar stands alone on the podium. The announcer is saying they're not allowing more than one rider at a time on the podium, and no podium girls or other dignitaries, but at least Pogacar doesn’t have to wear a mask.

Pogacar is being interviewed. “I wasn’t that worried about Roglic. At the start line he said he was having a bad race and wasn't used to going so hard day after day. I was mostly worried about Superman but as we went along I couldn’t figure out how he got that nickname. I feel bad for his team, they all looked stronger but were so loyal to him. Hey, wait a second ... I think I hear my mom calling me. She was worried sick about me racing here and drove all the way up here, 2,000 kilometers in her crappy little Renault, to be close by. She is so nervous, she wanted me to race in a mask! Yes, that is my mom calling. I gotta go!”

Damn, I just sat through like my fifth Sanofi ad and now they just keep showing helicopter footage of the Kleideniden, high above the little lakeside town of Huskvarna. I’m waiting to see the leaderboard for the stage and the new GC.

What the hell? Suddenly the footage vanishes and I’m plunged into some other program altogether, some weird sporting event already well underway. What the hell is it?

What are all those people carrying? It’s bizarre. And they’re really not maintaining any social distance to speak of. Oh, I get it—those are maps. I’ve stumbled onto an orienteering event. These are apparently quite popular in Sweden. But I can’t handle the sight of all those people clustered together … I’m out of here. By the way, tomorrow’s final stage of the Tour of Sweden is a flat circuit race favoring the sprinters, so the final GC will clearly go to Pogacar. Nothing more to see, folks … move along, move along.

Postscript

I guess I should point out, since a few people have apparently not realized it, that this entire report is pure fiction. There has not been a Tour of Sweden since 2002.

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Cycling Commentary - Why I Believe Chris Froome Is a Doper - Part II

Introduction

In my last post, I laid out the first half of my case against Chris Froome: that is, why I think (and have long thought) he’s a doper. My aim isn’t to change anybody’s mind on this—I doubt that’s possible, and actually I don’t really care—but rather to explain my position, lest any Froome fans read my biased blow-by-blow race reports and decide I’m a jerk. (I’m not actually out to inflame anybody with this blog.) So in this second and final post on the topic, I finish the effort of humbly explaining my position. I hope you’ll conclude I’m a more or less reasonable person, even if you don’t happen to agree with me about Froome.

In my previous post I countered the following two challenges to my position, taken from a debate I had with a friend: 

• Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?
• Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?

In this post, I take on my friend’s other two challenges:

• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and use Froome’s essentially clean slate as the basis for our own assessment?
• How would a positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

Before we dive in, let me be clear: of course I cannot prove that Froome is a doper. If nothing less than a giant body of irrefutable evidence is what you’re after, don’t even bother with this—go read something else.

The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and use Froome’s essentially clean slate as the basis for our own assessment?

First of all, the Lance era wasn’t the result of one guy (and his team) getting away with murder. The rampant doping throughout those years demonstrated a fundamentally flawed system of enforcement. The last Tour title to be stripped (retroactively) was 2010 … not that long ago, and three years after Postal/Discovery released its grip on the Tour. The sport has a deep, deep hole to dig out of.

How deep a hole? To make the math easy, let’s round down and say that 10 dopers were exposed by the USADA investigation without ever having tested positive. Let’s say each rider was tested 10 times a year for 10 years. That’s 1,000 false negative samples. When you consider all the different substances riders were tested for, across these 1,000 samples, and when you factor in the wide variety of PEDs these riders ultimately admitted to having used, the number of false negatives snowballs even further. And yet when’s the last time you heard of a bona-fide false positive?

Clearly, the drug testing system has been woefully ineffective, erring radically on the side of false negative tests. For us to believe Froome’s salbutamol test was a false positive flies in the face of this reality. (Frankly, there isn’t a single rider in the peloton today whom I’d give the benefit of the doubt if he tested positive for anything. I’d say, “What a shame, I’d hoped he was clean.”)

So why should we trust the UCI’s decision regarding Froome? After all, they based their ruling on WADA’s findings, and there are plenty of signs that WADA is still not doing a good job of policing the sport (click here and here). The UCI’s refusal to share WADA’s reasoning in clearing Froome is making things worse. What we need is transparency but what we’re getting is, “We got a lot of documents from Sky … it’s all good, trust us.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the whole peloton is doped, and I’ll allow that perhaps things have improved a bit, but I reserve the right to be suspicious of this or that rider whose performance looks a little too good to be true. When the rider in question is Froome, the suspicious signs start to pile up, as I discussed in my last post.

Note that even if we decide to accept the veracity of the UCI’s recent decision on Froome’s positive test, this shouldn’t put our every suspicion to rest. If we conclude Froome is a clean rider just because the UCI cleared him for salbutamol, we would be committing the logical fallacy of “denying the antecedent.” The fallacy goes like this: 

• Premise: If A then B
• Premise: Not A
• Conclusion: Not B

It is easier to see how this is a fallacy if we consider a simple example:

• Premise: If it rains, I will bring an umbrella
• Premise: It is not raining
• Conclusion: I am not bringing an umbrella

Of course this conclusion does not necessarily follow. Even if it’s not raining, I could bring an umbrella for another reason, such as rain being forecast. For the second premise to be true is not a necessary condition.

Broken down into its simplest form the “Froome must be clean because the UCI dismissed his case” argument would run like this:

• Premise: If the UCI finds Froome guilty of doping, he is a doper. 
• Premise: The UCI did not find Froome guilty of doping. 
• Conclusion: Therefore, Froome is not a doper. 

Denying the antecedent is a universally recognized fallacy. That is, arguments of this form are automatically classified as invalid. To put it more bluntly, just because Froome found his way out of this salbutamol mess doesn’t mean he never doped. Plenty of riders have cheated and gotten away with it. (In like fashion, we don’t conclude Al Capone wasn’t a murderer just because he was convicted only of tax evasion.)

Lance Armstrong employed this fallacy for years, defending himself on the basis of being “the most tested athlete on the planet.” Arnaud Démare used it as well after hanging on to the side of his team car up a key climb in the 2016 Milan-San Remo race, stating afterward, “‘There are judges in cycling. If I had done something forbidden, I would have been disqualified.’” I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my friend stumbled into this fallacious argumentative form in defending Froome, and perhaps other Froome fans are also falling prey to it as well.

How does the positive test for salbutamol prove anything? How does it suggest a years-long sophisticated doping program? How would salbutamol help Froome win four Tours? Why would he deliberately use more than he needed if it doesn’t enhance performance?

Here I will lay out, in clear logical terms, the reason I think Froome’s positive test suggests a wider doping program. 

• Premise #1: Willingness to cheat via one substance indicates a willingness to cheat via others
• Premise #2: You cannot accidently go over the legal limit on salbutamol, because the legal limit is so high; i.e., a positive test indicates abuse, typically through oral or injected dosing
• Premise #3: In sufficient quantities salbutamol will enhance performance, so a rider can gain an advantage from abusing it
• Premise #4: Froome went over the legal limit
• Conclusion #1: Froome didn’t accidentally inhale an amount of salbutamol that exceeded the legal limit (i.e., he lied about how he took it)
• Conclusion #2: Froome deliberately abused salbutamol to gain an advantage
• Conclusion #3: By abusing salbutamol, Froome has demonstrated a willingness to abuse other substances; i.e., this positive test gives us valid reason to be suspicious of him generally

The conclusions above proceed naturally from the premises; that is, the argument is logically valid by the prepositional form modus ponens, which goes like this:

• Premise: If A then B
• Premise: A
• Conclusion: Therefore, B

In other words, if we assume that a positive test for salbutamol automatically indicates abuse (Premise #2), and that abusing salbutamol can provide an advantage (Premise #3), and that Froome did test positive (Premise #4), then we can logically conclude that Froome abused salbutamol to gain an advantage (Conclusions #1 and #2). If we assume that abusing one drug indicates a willingness to abuse others (Premise #1), and that Froome abused salbutamol (Conclusion #2), then Froome can be reasonably suspected of abusing other drugs.

Because the reasoning is valid (i.e., follows the standard logical rule modus ponens), you can only attack the argument by showing that it is not sound; i.e., you’d have to declare that one or more premises is/are untrue. So let’s look at each premise in turn.

Premise #1 is something I happen to believe, even if I can’t prove it. A rider may decide to be clean because he’s afraid of being caught, or he’s afraid of side effects, or he is a moral person and/or his ambitions in the sport are noble. If a rider has no moral problem with doping, and isn’t afraid of the drugs, and thinks he can get away with taking them, he’ll generally do it, and will not restrict himself to one substance. I mean, why would he? Look at the all the USADA-snared American dopers who confessed (along with other admitted dopers like Michael Rasmussen, David Millar, Frank Vandenbroucke, and Marco Pantani): none of them stuck to a single PED. They all took a variety.

(It is certainly the case that a rider might eschew a particular PED or practice on the grounds of safety; for example, a rider might use testosterone because it’s common, but avoid blood boosting because hotel-room blood transfusions are dangerous. A drug like salbutamol is probably less scary than a lot of PEDs and I wouldn’t be surprised if taking a variety of more commonplace drugs like clenbuterol, triamsinolone, salbutamol, and/or corticoids in combination is a popular alignment with the “marginal gains” ethos that seems to define the modern sport.)

(By the way, here’s Froome’s therapeutic use exemption for prednisolone, a corticosteroid.)

Premise #2, about it being impossible to go over the legal limit of salbutamol via an inhaler, I believe based on my firsthand experience with salbumatol, and from having discussed the matter with a pulmonary M.D. who also happens to be a former professional road racer. You don’t get any performance benefit by inhaling salbutamol because that doesn’t deliver a high enough dose. For the same reason, you won’t test positive by inhaling the drug—you’d have to take a ridiculous number of puffs (18 to be precise). I have a blog post dedicated to this topic, where I’ve done the math. To get the benefit, and to test positive, require either orally ingesting or injecting the drug.

Premise #3 is widely established: using high quantities of salbutamol can give you a performance advantage (click here and here). The fact that this substance is regulated strongly supports the notion that it can confer performance benefits in sufficient quantities. “We have an upper limit because we have multiple publications showing that systemic use of beta-2 agonists, including salbutamol, can be performance enhancing,” WADA senior director of science Olivier Rabin explains here. 

Premise #4 (the positive test for salbutamol) is not disputed by anybody.

If you don’t agree with one or more of these premises, that’s fine, but don’t conclude that I’m a knee-jerk blowhard who bases his conclusion on nothing at all. I hope that, whether you agree with these premises or not, you can see why I’d put stock in them. On the other hand, if you agree with these premises but not the conclusions they produce, then you are not a logical thinker and are reading the wrong blog. Please, go somewhere else.

In case you’re thinking of dismissing one or more of my premises out of hand simply because you can’t imagine Froome cheating, consider this: when asthma is poorly controlled, the sufferer cannot perform as an athlete. I know this from experience. (If you have asthma, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, take my word for it because I’m an asthma sufferer and a cycling coach, or go ask an asthmatic athlete or a coach.) To win a grand tour, you have to not only be a top rider, you have to be functioning at close to 100%. An insufficiently mitigated asthma attack takes you way below 100%. By the time I start wheezing, I’m crippled. Any athlete is. And when you get to that point, it’s really too late to try to correct with salbutamol: your race is ruined. My doctor cautioned that for exercise-induced asthma, salbutamol is a prophylactic measure—you take it before the exercise, you don’t wait until you have a problem. Thus you wouldn’t wait until after the grand tour stage, during which you padded your GC lead, to take more of the drug. Froome breathed well enough to put time into his GC rivals on that day at the Vuelta, so he should not have needed extra salbutamol post-race.

It’s also worth noting that a therapeutic use exemption (TUE), such as Froome has for salbutamol (and has had for prednisolone), is not universally acknowledged as an automatically legitimate justification for an ongoing regimen of a prescribed drug. The British House of Commons did a deep investigation into TUEs leveraged by Team Sky, and concluded, “The use of triamcinolone at Team Sky during the period under investigation … does not constitute a violation of the WADA code [because a TUE was in place], but it does cross the ethical line that David Brailsford says he himself drew for Team Sky. In this case, and contrary to the testimony of David Brailsford in front of the Committee, we believe that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need.” Froome himself has acknowledged the slippery nature of TUEs: according to this article, “In 2015 at the Tour de France, Froome explained that during the race he had a medical condition which could have been treated with a TUE. However, he objected to using a TUE, explaining in January 2017 that, ‘I didn’t feel having a TUE in the last week of the Tour was something I was prepared to do. It did not sit well morally with me.’” (Obviously his TUE for sulbutamol during the Veulta did extend through the last week, as his positive test was after stage 18.)

To reiterate, this salbutamol positive is not the cornerstone of my belief that Froome is a doper. What it does do is increase my skepticism that WADA has turned the tide and is now able to enforce their rules.

A final note

Again, this two-part post came about because a reader suggested it’s unfair or at least unbecoming to bag on a rider on my blog just because I think he’s a doper. I’m not too concerned about that ideologically. If I advertise my race coverage as biased, and acknowledge that my aspersions are speculation, and in light of the fact that this guy put himself in the public eye through his choice of career, why should I spare him my public indictment? My blog is a medium that anybody can choose to ignore as he pleases (and most do). I don’t get enough pageviews to make a tiny blip in Froome’s reputation, nor will Froome’s fans be moved to change their minds. Plenty of more mainstream media, along with countless cycling fans, are denouncing him already.

And for the record, I bag on Froome in particular, while going easier on other suspect riders, because he is ungracious even in victory, as I described here and here.

If you don’t agree, at least I’ve explained the rationale behind my bias against Froome. I know I can’t please everybody, but at least I’ve tried…

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Cycling Commentary - Why I Believe Chris Froome Is a Doper

Introduction

I have been doing “biased blow-by-blow” bike race reports on this blog for over five years now. My gimmick is that, not being a professional journalist, I don’t have to hold my tongue. If I suspect a rider is doping, I’ll say so. And I don’t couch my aspersions carefully, like “Chris Froome is a rider I’m a bit suspicious of though I hasten to point out he’s never had an adverse analytical finding that was upheld in the final analysis by the UCI.” My blow-by-blow reports are written in real-time as I watch the race ... I don’t have time for lots of qualifications or to make my case as I go.

And who wants to read a lot of mealy-mouthed, timid, caveat-littered prose, anyway? If 90% of my readers think this or that rider is doping, they should have no problem with shorthand like “filthy doping scumbag.” And if they don’t like my flippant style and/or think a rider is clean whom I say is doped, they probably won’t (and shouldn’t) spend much time on my post anyway. This is all according to design. I laid out my overall biased blow-by-blow format at length in my first report and have included the “biased” caveat in every subsequent report. I have never claimed to be fair or responsible.

But as a friend asked recently in an email, what about those who do disagree with me? I’m tempted to dismiss them; after all, a blogger could drive himself crazy trying to please an audience that may be almost entirely hypothetical (and which in any case provides almost zero feedback). So my guiding principle with this blog is “screw the reader.”

All this being said, my recent Tour de France Stage 1 blow-by-blow report seems to have really struck a nerve and offended my friend, and he cautions me against writing stuff on my blog that could adversely affect people’s opinion of me. Meanwhile, I got an email from another friend saying how strange it was reading my Stage 1 post while hanging out at his brother’s house, because his brother still thinks Chris Froome is legit. My first thought was to get these people together to form a support group—maybe they could invite Ross Perot, and after the Tour they could all set out together to find out who really killed Nicole Brown Simpson.

But then I figured, why not write a post carefully laying out my case against Froome in a non-flippant manner, so that at least an inflamed reader might come to understand that my position is not just a wild hunch or totally unfounded character assassination? Sure, I might still get a few stubborn readers experiencing actual indignation at my position, but hopefully the more common reaction among those who still disagree would be more like, “I beg to differ, but I guess I can see how he’d think that.”

(Perhaps even Froome himself would shrug off this indictment; after all, he has been philosophical about this kind of thing before. Cyclingnews reported, “For those who expressed skepticism, Froome says he has empathy. ‘Cycling has its troubled history,’ [he says], ‘and being a multiple Tour winner comes with a level of suspicion and questions that need to be asked.’”)

A two-sided argument

In formal rhetoric, a one-sided argument only puts forth one’s own position, with no regard for opposing views. This can sometimes be a useful approach, such as when your audience already agrees with you and you’re trying to whip them into a lather, like at a political rally. My blow-by-blow reports are obviously one-sided. My goal with them isn’t to convince, but to entertain.

In contrast, this post will present a two-sided argument, which is where you anticipate your opponent’s view. In actuality I don’t have to guess, given the protracted email debate I had with my friend on this topic, running more than 10,000 words. I have attempted to consolidate his argument into four salient challenges to my position:

• Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?
• Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?
• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and base our assessment on Froome’s essentially clean slate?
• How would a positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

I will address each point in turn. And because most of the dialogue out there in chat rooms and website reader comments is pure drivel, driven by a lot of emotion and aggression and not much reason, I aim with this post do be as logical and dispassionate as possible. I hope you find that refreshing.

So here I go. Before we dive in, let me be clear: of course I cannot prove that Froome is a doper. If nothing less than a giant body of irrefutable evidence is what you’re after, don’t even bother with this—go read something else. Second, Froome’s positive test for salbutamol is not the cornerstone of my case, though I will address it; as longtime readers know, I have believed Froome to be a doper all along, way before he got popped.

Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?

Much of the Froome-bashing in the cycling community centers around the notion that when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. The way Froome dominates the sport is, all by itself, somewhat suspect. But is it fair to accuse somebody of doping just because he wins a lot? This “he’s too good” innuendo, my friend contends, “besmirches Kobe [Bryant] and Mohammad [Ali] and Michael J [Fox] and [Michael] Phelps.”

Okay, first off, “[Fox]” above was just a joke. I know my friend meant Michael Jordan. I was just testing you … did you jump up and say, “Aha! Dana is deliberately misconstruing his friend’s argument so he can readily refute it! Classic straw man fallacy!”? Good, then … you passed!

My assessment of Froome is not just based on how much he wins, but on how he wins. Nothing about his grand tour victories looks convincing to me. Why? Simply because Froome, who is built like a climber and out-climbs the entire peloton, also has this uncanny ability to win individual time trials. This does not make sense. I raced for a good many years, and have watched bike races for decades, and most racers I know have always believed that you could be a good climber and a good time trialist, but no single human could be both the best climber and the best time trialist. Climbers thrive in the mountains due to their high power-to-weight ratio. This doesn’t help on the flats where you need more raw power and your mass actually helps you push through the wind. (If you wanted to prove this you could put me and pocket-climber Domenico Pozzovivo atop the Col du Lautaret and watch me roll away from him.)

(Here’s Pozzovivo being sawed off a small group on a flat road during the Tour last week, BTW.)

Then look at your best apparently clean time trialists: Fabian Cancellara, Tony Martin, Tom Dumoulin. Why do I say “apparently clean”? Not just because they haven’t tested positive, but because their performances are realistic. They win some TTs, they lose some, but moreover they’re almost never the best climbers in a race. The grand tour winners who have particularly excelled at time trials—Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain, and Greg LeMond among them—usually just held their own in the mountains (or got dropped). So it is with Dumoulin, which is why I have so far given him the benefit of the doubt.

Here’s a tidbit: of the World Championships time trial winners throughout history, only three were of below-average height (i.e., less than 5’10”). All three of these were 5’9”. Two of the three, Serhiy Honchar and Santiago Botero, were subsequently caught doping. The third, Chris Boardman, was no climber—his race weight was 10 pounds higher than Froome’s, even though he’s shorter. Look here at Dumoulin: he’s got the build of a time trialist. And look at Froome: he so doesn’t.

Body type matters, and historically climbers and time trialists have been at opposite ends of the physique spectrum. This can make stage racing exciting. It’s unsurprising when a great climber like Nairo Quintana finishes outside the top 50 in a grand tour ITT. That’s what clean racing looks like. On the flip side, when a twiggy pocket climber like Froome can beat a time trial specialist like Cancellara or Tony Martin in a time trial, and also beat a pure climber like Mikel Landa or Pozzovivo in the mountains, that looks suspicious. What other riders could crush it in both disciplines? Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, Bobby Julich, Levi Leipheimer, and Tyler Hamilton. Doper, doper, doper, doper, and doper. For Froome to lose the TT in this year’s Tour by only a second just doesn’t look right. It looks like he had some “help.”

Now, both of the friends who commented on my Stage 1 blow-by-blow have brought up Peter Sagan specifically. One wrote, “You built a perfect case for Sagan being, by your criteria, a doper. Too consistent. No one can win the green jersey that many times.” The other wrote, “I still like Sagan. If he ever has an irregular test or a non-standard test or a not-quite-normal-but-we’ll-allow-it test, I’ll be super bummed.” I like Sagan too, and I like to think he’s clean. So let’s look at his case to see how a very successful rider doesn’t automatically trigger my doper-alert response.

Certainly Sagan has won a lot of races. That said, he’s a great sprinter, and sprinters end up with a lot more opportunities and thus a lot more wins than stage racers, for the obvious reason that it takes three weeks to notch a single stage race victory.

But Sagan has also lost a lot, when you are counting the number of races he tried to win vs. the number he actually did. (That is to say, a stage racer might target two or three races a year, whereas a sprinter targets dozens.) I can’t be bothered tabulating Sagan’s win/lose ratio, but he doesn’t completely dominate in his métier, like Froome does. Sagan has failed seven times to win Milan-San Remo. He failed to win a single stage in the 2014 and 2015 Tours. He does appear to be human.

As for the green jersey, not all sprinters prioritize it over getting Tour stage wins. Once a sprinter falls sufficiently far behind in points, he’s probably going to focus on a few key stages he’s really confident he can win, and not worry so much about the green jersey. Meanwhile, a fair number of sprint specialists miss the time cuts on mountain stages and never make it to Paris. So Sagan’s string of six victories in that category is not unbelievable.

Meanwhile, Sagan is a very clever rider, and winning sprints takes a lot of tactical savvy. My best-effort assessment is that doping doesn’t make as much difference in one-day races as in stage races, so I’m less suspicious of sprinters in general. (Okay, I guess you could suspect Sagan of abusing Adderrall.) (Yes, that was a joke.)

Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?

It’s easy to confuse consistency with believability. Yes, a rider whose performances are totally erratic and unpredictable may arouse reasonable suspicion. But unusual dominance should not be confused with consistency.

Any rider who can win a grand tour is consistent—that’s what a GC victory indicates. To get there requires massive preparation and sacrifice. For a rider to win a single grand tour in a single season—indeed, in his whole career—is a remarkable feat. But for a rider to absolutely dominate in the grand tours is incredibly difficult. Since joining Team Sky team in 2010, Froome has finished 12 grand tours. He won half of them, and finished on the podium in 11 of them. Not even Eddy Merckx had such an amazing run. Even if you gave Lance Armstrong back his victories, he wouldn’t have that astounding a track record. Froome’s achievement is all the more incredible when you consider that modern riders often build an entire season around a single grand tour, vs. the era Merckx, Hinault, and LeMond raced in, when riders were expected to get results throughout the season.

And what other riders, besides Froome, have won all three grand tours consecutively? Only Merckx and Hinault. Last year Quintana tried to do the Giro/Tour double (i.e. win both in the same season), but was so tired coming into the Tour he ultimately lost 15 minutes to Froome. In 2011 Contador tried to do the Giro/Tour double and (possibly due to riding clean, though this is only conjecture) managed only 5th at that Tour.

Froome hasn’t managed the Giro/Tour double yet, but last year he handily pulled off the Tour/Vuelta double which is exceedingly rare. (The last rider to do it was Hinault in 1978.) Froome’s unusual ability to recover from one grand tour in time to win the next is indeed suspicious, because recovery is exactly the challenge that EPO and blood bags help with. Again, Froome’s unprecedented consistency, in the absence of any other suspicious factors, doesn’t automatically suggest cheating … but combined with his improbable dominance in both climbing and time trialing, and his positive drug test, it doesn’t look good.

Now let’s look at whom Froome has beaten in some of these grand tours: Alberto Contador, Alejandro Valverde, Andres Kloden, and Denis Menchov, all of whom are convicted dopers. Since EPO hit the scene, what ostensibly clean rider (by which I mean a rider who hasn’t tested positive) has won the Tour de France with any regularity? Until Froome, no clean rider since Miguel Indurain (23 years ago) won more than a single Tour. This isn’t because Froome’s competitors are weak, and this isn’t “erratic” performance on their part. In the modern era, to win even one grand tour requires perfect preparation, great health, a solid team, and some luck. I can believe in Cadel Evans’s Tour win because he was so good for so long, and had so many near misses until finally all the planets lined up and he managed to win.

Froome, on the other hand, won last year’s Vuelta despite (by his account) suffering major asthma problems. And he won this year’s Giro with a crazy 80-kilometer solo breakaway that erased over two weeks of relatively poor riding that hadn’t even put him on the virtual podium. So he can be erratic, too.

See my next post for part two of this polemic, when I’ll cover the last two arguments my friend presented:

• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and base our assessment on Froome’s essentially clean slate?
• How would the positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2018 Tour de France Stage 16

Introduction

Of course there are many ways for you to enjoy the Tour de France, or at least try. My blog has the distinction of whimsy: if I feel like casting aspersions on this or that rider, I will. Professional announcers and sportswriters obviously aren’t allowed to do that. I’m sure they bite their tongues a lot because of a certain team that likes to dope. So read on for my biased blow-by-blow of Stage 16, Carcasonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon, which includes two Category 4 climbs, a Cat 2, and two Cat 1s toward the end. It’s not a summit finish, but the last descent is steep and only 10 kilometers. An important stage!

Tour de France 2018 Stage 16, Carcasonne to Bagnères-de-Luchon

As I join the action, Philippe Gilbert (Quick-Step Floors) has just stacked! I missed the actual footage because I am making pour-over coffee. What a bitch that is. Anyway, Gilbert looks like he’s okay—while getting back on his bike he actually gave the camera a thumbs-up. Oh, cool, an instant replay. Check it out!

Now, for you bike racing newbs, it’s not “GIL-bert.” It’s “zhil-BEAR.” So just stop it with the Gilbert Grape jokes. He gets some attention from his team car. Looks like some pretty painful road rash.

So there was some strange action earlier: a bunch of farmers went on strike and blocked the race. I’m not making this up. The police were nailing the protestors with pepper spray, and several riders were accidently sprayed, including the yellow jersey (Geraint Thomas, Team Sky) and current second place overall rider Chris Froome (also Sky). Tom Brailsford, ever vigilant, has cried foul and accused the farmers of conspiring to hamper his Sky team. Yes, I made that up, though Brailsford is just the kind of tool who would do such a thing. Hey Brailsford, you and me, let’s go! I’ll meet you at the flagpole!

The leaders have 53 kilometers to go and are climbing the Cat 1 Col de Menté (which translates Cool Mint). (No it doesn’t.) We’ve got three leaders, including George Hincapie. LOL! Just kidding! I’m not that old … I can still keep the names straight, though my footage is all in French. So the three leaders are Warren Barguil (Team Fortuneo-Samsic), Robert Gesink (Lotto NL-Jumbo), and Damiano Caruso (BMC Racing). They’ve got 17 seconds over current King of the Mountains Julian Alaphilippe (Quick-Step Floors) and some other dudes. There is a breakaway of more than 40 guys a bit behind them. At what point do you call that the peloton, and declare that the GC leaders are off the back?

I think the leaders are pretty tired from the Giro d’Italia. They keep letting these giant breakaways get waaaaay up the road.

Here’s Gesink. I’ve always liked him. He doesn’t win much, but he once broke his femur. That means if we ever met I could say, “Hey, I broke my femur too!” and we’d have something to talk about. We could compare physical therapy stories, etc.

Now, before we get too far into the action, I do want to pause here for a moment and apologize to Team Sky. I  have dealt with them unfairly. In my report of the last stage, I wrote that …

Okay, Barguil is dropped. Gesink and Caruso are just too strong for him.

Anyway, I wrote in my last report, “Team Sky has the weirdest, ugliest costumes ever for this Tour.” Actually, I didn’t write that, I just realized, looking back. I only thought it. But I’ll apologize now for even thinking it. The jerseys are ugly, but it turns out it’s for a good reason: there’s some sea creature depicted on their jerseys as part of some nature conservation species protection thing. I am totally in support of such philanthropy, even if it’s just a way for the filthiest, most dishonest team in the sport (perhaps in all of sports) to try to placate the public and burnish their image.

Gesink and Caruso are 1 kilometer from the submit of this minty penultimate climb. They’ve got only 25 seconds over the chasing group, though, so they’re probably doomed. It’s a long way (over 47 kilometers) from the finish.

Out of nowhere, Alaphillipe catches Caruso and Gesink and takes the KOM points at the summit, and then totally dusts everybody on the descent. Balls like King Kong, that guy! NOOICE!

So, in case you’ve been ignoring this Tour, maybe nursing a World Cup hangover, let me fill you in on the race thus far. Froome enters the rice totally fried from his extraterrestrial performance in the Giro d’Italia, where he rode poorly for the first couple weeks of the race and then did like a 50-kilometer solo breakaway and destroyed everybody. So yeah, he’s super tired now.

Did you catch that, just now? That sophisticated literary technique I employed, that you’ll never get from mainstream sportswriters? Yes, it was irony. I stated that Froome was totally fried, which is of course absurd. He’s never fried, really. He’s far, far too lubed for that. Only bad luck can keep him from winning his fifth Tour.

He’s actually had some bad luck in this year’s race, crashing a couple times and losing time on the flatter stages. He sits 1:39 back from his teammate Thomas, a track pursuit rider who reinvented himself as a stage racer (with a little help from the Sky doctor) and then reinvented himself again as a climber, winning the brutal stage over the Hors-Categorie Col de la Croix de Fer and Alpe d’Huez climbs. The media is pretending there is a rivalry between Thomas and Froome, a tug-of-war over team leadership, but that’s all nonsense. Froome is slated to win this Tour. It’s practically written into his contract.

Third on GC is Tom Dumoulin (Sunweb), eleven seconds behind Froomestrong. On paper it looks like Dumoulin could be a strong contender, because there’s still a time trial coming up and he’s the reigning world champ in that discipline. That being said, Froome—a reedy, willowy, ghastly, gaunt, ungainly climber—has the uncanny ability to beat time trial specialists at their own game when required. Also, Dumoulin—whom I suppose is clean—is probably going to crack at some point. Fate does not jam. Sky and Froome do not lose.

The rest of the GC is in tatters. Vincenzo Nibali (Bahrain-Merida) crashed out with a broken vertebra, having stacked four kilometers from the summit of Alpe d’Huez and then having valiantly chased back to limit his losses. Man, that guy has a high pain threshold. Riche Porte (BMC Racing) also crashed out, on Stage 9 (the same stage he crashed out last year). Rigoberto Uran (EF Education First – Drapac), last year’s Tour runner-up, also crashed out. Nairo Quintana (Movistar Team) has lost a bunch of time, maybe due to crashes or maybe just being at the wrong end of a split or two. So despite not having the yellow jersey yet, Froome has caught a lot of lucky breaks in this Tour.

The GC group is on the descent. There are still five Sky riders in this group, notwithstanding the four categorized climbs the race has gone over and this being the third week of the Tour. This is simply because Sky management is really good at recruiting, according to one of my online correspondents. It really has nothing to do with doping. This is not US Postal all over again. Don’t worry, we’re all good!

Everybody is doing a really long descent so there’s not that much to report, other than my dismay at some of the French TV ads I’m watching. It appears that, notwithstanding the success of the self-help book French Women Don’t Get Fat, there does now seem to be a market in France for weight-loss products such as ready-made frozen lite dinners and, bizarrely, this vibrating fat-melter:

There are also lots of ads for over-the-counter pharmaceuticals whose purpose I cannot grasp, my French being too poor. And there appear to be purpose-specific shaving creams. One is apparently for shaving your chest. Another ad shows this guy with the Don Johnson stubble admiring his reflection, then squirting the shaving gel into his hand, and then—incongruously—admiring his reflection again with the stubble still intact. So … what did he shave? His palms? Hmmmmm.

So the two leaders have extended their gap to over a minute on the chase group. Very impressive! The GC group is hovering at a little under 12 minutes back, Sky lined out on the front tirelessly. A bunch of dudes who fell off the breakaway are now absorbed like the disgusting fluids that collect in that spongy little pad in a Styrofoam pack of Tyson chicken parts.

Movistar comes to the front, perhaps looking to set up Mikel Landa or Quintana for an attack.

The scenery footage has gotten a lot better in recent years. I think they have multiple helicopters now. Or maybe as I age I’m just more receptive to the sublimity of nature and so forth.

The leaders have 20 kilometers to go. They’re at the base of the Cul du Portillon, a fairly beastly Category 1 climb. The gap to the GC group has dropped to about 10 minutes. At some point Caruso and Gesink were caught by the chasers, probably during one of the commercials. Man, there are a lot of them. Here’s the profile of the climb:

Barguil detonates! He’s going backward now. So is Mathias Frank (AG2R La Mondiale), who has surely done a lot of work today for team leader Romain Bardet, who sits 5th on GC, 3:21 back. When a domestique works hard for a teammate and then blows up and gets dropped, that looks clean to me. Just sayin’.

Man, Gesink is really drilling it on the front!

He’s got a gap now with Domenico Pozzovivo (Bahrain-Merida). Back in the field, Astana and Movistar are moving their guys up into position. Maybe we’ll get some good attacks here.

OMG, my brother, who is visiting, just clocked his head on this jutting-out ceiling bit above the stairs down into the home office! My dad once said, “If this were my house I would put foam rubber there.” I replied, “It’s my house and I just watch where I’m going.” No, I didn’t say that. I wanted to. Anyway, my brother’s head is fine apparently. Still, I’m going to outfit him with a helmet for the rest of his visit. I’m taking the time to explain all this because my Internet race feed has gone away so there’s really nothing else I can report on at the moment. Dang, it’s not coming back! I’m starting to get worried.

There’s some ad that requires the Flash player, which I don’t have, which stops my feed cold. When I re-launch the page I have to watch American commercials, which are even worse than French ones.

My feed is back, and Adam Yates (Mitchelton-Scott) is off the front solo!

Behind him, Alaphilippe dukes it out with Bauke Mollema (Trek-Segafredo). The giant earlier breakaway has mostly exploded, with maybe six guys left in it.  

Yates is rocking black socks with white shoes. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Actually, I am: I don’t like it. It’s completely backwards. But he’s really haulin’ ass, and I like that!

Now it’s another American commercial, this time for a Star Wars themed Disney Cruise Line cruise. The end of civilization is officially here. The center cannot hold.

So, Yates has only 22 seconds over Alaphilippe as he crosses the summit, but it’s downhill all the way to the finish. It’s gonna be a nail-biter because Alaphilippe is a great descender. If Alaphilippe catches Yates, who’s the better sprinter?

Imagine the pressure on these guys. Alaphilippe cuts a perfect line through a sharp curve, meaning he comes this close to grazing a rock guardrail.

OMG! Yates stacks!

Alaphilippe is in the lead now, tucking in a way that presents maximum risk to his giant testicles.

Yates isn’t that far behind Alaphilippe, considering. I’m amazed he (apparently) wasn’t hurt, crashing at that speed. Presumably he has a massive amount of adrenaline to work with now, anyway. He’s 10 seconds behind, and 16 seconds ahead of the chasers. These guys are flying down this thing, 80 kph (almost 50 mph).

Jon Izagirre Insausti (Bahrain-Merida) has caught Yates. Alaphilippe is only 1.7 kilometers from the finish and is hammering along the flats now.

He flashes the camera a grin. He’s under the 1K banner now and looks to have this in the bag! He hammers toward the line and starts waving to the crowd. Big old grin. Keeps looking over his shoulder like they always do—“Is this for real, do I really have this?” He does! He’s got the win!

A few others come across, and then a bit behind them is Yates. He must be sooooo bummed. I wonder if this is mixed with relief that he wasn’t hurt. Probably not … that’s just me being a parent. I don’t enjoy watching the descents like I used to. I used to watch and think, “I could do that. I could hang with those guys on that downhill.” Now I think, “Oh, be careful you guys!”

A fellow rider congratulates Alaphilippe. I wonder if they mind the armpit stench.

It looks like the GC group is over the summit without any fireworks. There’s a guy whose job it is to decide what footage is worth showing. (I know this because I once had that job, for ESPN covering the Coors Classic.) Evidently nobody in the GC group was doing any attacking, so this person decided to use the footage of the stage leaders on the descent. Good call, since that really was riveting.

So, a cycling fan who hasn’t raced, or a commentator who is going senile, might fault riders like Dumoulin and Bardet for not attacking Team Sky on the final climb. “They’re not taking enough initiative and they’re just letting Sky win,” this untutored rube or age-addled pundit might say. This is completely false. It’s one thing to know what you have to do, but quite another to actually do it. How can you attack Sky when they’re setting such a high pace you’re almost going out the back?

The GC group comes through. It’s down to 14 guys, and four of them are Sky riders. That’s not suspicious or anything, though. I’m sure Team Sky just tries harder, eh? They just have more heart. They care more. They’re not as lazy as the other teams. Uh-huh. Anyhow, needless to say there is no change in the GC from today’s stage.

They’re interviewing Alaphilippe. “I almost didn’t start today,” he explains. “My wife called from home, and it seems our cat was lost this morning. She’s having her folks stay with her while I’m gone, and the cat got a little spooked. She was a stray, you see, and very skittish. So my wife was biking all over the neighborhood yelling ‘Freya, Freya!’ Neighbors would ask, ‘Did you lose a pet?’ And she’d reply, ‘No, I’m just talking to myself.’ Anyway, I was all set to fly home to help in the search, but then the cat turned up. She was hiding under the stairs. I’m so glad I stayed and raced because this is a beautiful victory.”

To be honest, I’m not at all sure I translated that correctly. In fact, I guessed quite a bit. Okay, full disclosure: I couldn’t understand a word he said. As I said before, my French is poor, and Alaphilippe was mumbling a bit and I have the volume turned low because the family is sleeping. That thing with the cat? That actually happened to me. It’s as close as I’ll ever get to riding the Tour.

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