Biased Blow-By-Blow - 2024 Critérium du Dauphiné Stage 8

Introduction

Bike races are becoming hard to watch, in every way. First, you have to subscribe to a different streaming service for practically every event. Second, so many races seem to be dominated by a single rider, it’s getting super boring (e.g., Tadej Pogacar winning the Giro d’Italia by almost ten minutes, picking up six stage wins in the process). Finally, our eyes are getting bad … at least, mine are. And the Critérium du Dauphiné is particularly hard because the coverage starts at 4:00 a.m. Pacific time. So if you’re looking at all the text on this page and thinking, “Oh, it’s so long, and there are so many photos, I’m not sure I can commit,” consider that it could be much, much worse.

(The good news is, as I’m adding this particular paragraph after the fact, I can tell you today was not boring! Read on!)

Critérium du Dauphiné Stage 8 - Thônes > Plateau des Glières

As I join the action I’m pleased to hear Christian Vande Velde and Bob Roll announcing. The guy Peacock has narrating the replays sounds lugubrious, and of course Phil Liggett has become nonsensical. Not that Bob’s commentary is always scintillating. “That is the peloton,” he now says emphatically. Not sure whether his emphasis is this French term, or he just really wants us to understand what’s going on.

As early as I arose this morning (4:40 to be precise), the riders have just 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) to go. Fortunately it’s all uphill as they approach the Category 1 Plateau des Glières.

Michal Kwiatkowski (Ineos Grenadiers) is taking like six bottles from the team car. Not sure why on earth he’d do that so close to the finish, except maybe these bottles contain PEDs. (This is Ineos, after all.) It’s also puzzling that he’s even being allowed to take bottles because the supposed rule is no feeding after the 20-kilometer-to-go mark. Maybe Kwiatowski ran afoul of team management and is being made to haul these up the mountain as ballast. Kind of the equivalent of dropping and doing twenty pushups, which protocol they’d have to modify because as everyone knows, most pro cyclists are incapable of doing pushups.

There’s a breakaway of nine riders with just over a minute on the peloton. They’ll probably get overwhelmed. I don’t think the term “overwhelmed” has been used for describing a break being caught but it’s actually the perfect word. Let’s see if it catches on.

Wow, the gap is plummeting. I’m not even going to learn the breakaway riders’ names. They’re like temps in an office. Do companies still hire temps? Like the Kelly Girls of old? Let’s revisit that later.

The peloton is still pretty huge. I guess race leader Primoz Roglic’s Bora-Hansgrohe team hasn’t decided to lay down a fast tempo yet. The GC favorites are waiting until the last minute, totally ignoring their moms’ perennial warning. These guys!

As usual for France, the towns and countryside are gorgeous.

Marc Soler (UAE Team Emirates) is in the breakaway. I guess he didn’t learn his lesson yesterday when he soloed from like 40 km out and then got caught with just a couple kilometers to go. He lost like seven minutes on the last climb. D’oh!

The breakaway is dissolving like animal crackers in hot soup. I don’t believe that metaphor has been employed before. Fellow race commentators take note.

Sean Quinn, an American on EF Education First Easy Post Whatever, is leading the breakaway, wearing some kind of stars-and-stripes jersey. Either he won a national title or he’s just hella patriotic.

Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek) attacks! He sits ninth on GC so we can presume he’s just looking for a stage win.

I’m kind of rooting for Ciccone right now because he seems to be such a good sport about riding with the equipment he’s given, which includes in this case these totally goofy handlebars and levers that stick out at a crazy angle, bringing to mind fallen arches. I would refuse to ride with such silly equipment but he’s not only getting on with it, but trying to solo!

Looks like all the breakaway riders have been stubbed out in the race ashtray. Ciccone has 22 seconds on the GC group which has maybe 15 riders left.

Here’s what’s gone on in this Dauphiné this past week. Nothing major happened on GC until the time trial which Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick Step) won handily. Then there was a massive crash in Stage 5 following which they neutralized the race. The yellow jersey changed hands in Stage 6 which Primoz Roglic (Bora-Hansgrohe) won (typically enough), and then the GC got really boring when Roglic won Stage 7 as well. I’m only deigning to watch today because Roglic does have a knack for losing stage races on the final day.

This is interesting: David Gaudu (Groupama-FDJ) is going out the back. He was kind of considered a GC contender this year and was his team’s protected rider. He’s one of many promising racers who just fizzle out. Also of note is that he’s cooling himself off … this might be the first hot day of the race. The only interesting thing Roglic said in his post-race interview yesterday was, “When will summer be here?” I’ve been wondering the same thing.

Laurens de Plus (Ineos Granadiers) is leading the GC group and they catch Ciccone. Ciccone’s brake levers were just scooping up too much wind for him to be able to stay off. I hope he learns his lesson and switches to more aerodynamic equipment after this.

Whoa, this is interesting! Carlos Rodriguez (Ineos Granadiers) is driving the pace on the front, and Roglic has let a gap open up! Best yet, the American Matteo Jorgenson (Team Visma – Lease A Bike), who sits second on GC just 1:02 behind Roglic, is right on Rodriguez’s wheel! This could actually get interesting!

(Jorgenson is a baller, by the way. He won this year’s Paris-Nice stage race, as well as the Dwars door Vlaanderen. He was born in Walnut Creek, right here in the Bay Area. He’s young enough to be my son, and  he stands 6’2” which is pretty rare for a dude who can climb so well. Amer’ca!)

Cicconi tries to close the gap, with Roglic sucking his wheel. Where are Roglic’s Bora-Hansgrohe teammates?

Derek Gee, the Israel-Premier Tech rider on the front, has been riding a great Dauphiné, having won Stage 3. Moreover, he’s sitting third overall, just 11 seconds behind  Jorgenson and 1:13 behind Roglic. He flicks his elbow but nobody pulls through. By “nobody” I mean Jorgenson and Rodriguez (who is very hard to see … probably part of his strategy). All the others are gone.

The break now has 15 seconds. That’s a quarter of what Jorgenson needs, but there are only 3.6 kilometers to go. It’d be a long shot for him to unseat Roglic but you never know. Now Jorgenson comes to the front and you can see Gee is really suffering.

Roglic, who takes over from Ciccone, is going pretty well but his socks are the wrong color and they’re too tall. They’re kind of a lemon yellow and the jersey is more canary. I can’t root for a rider with such poor aesthetic taste. Maybe he’s colorblind? But then, why hasn’t a teammate or staffer jumped in with sartorial advice? Are they afraid of him? Is he a tyrant? Probably.

Evenepoel, who was evidently dropped at some point, starts to close the gap to Roglic. Evenepoel got totally shelled yesterday. He’s like that … he does a huge effort and then pays dearly the next day. Roglic’s heroic domestique, Aleksandr Vlasov, is on Evenepoel’s wheel and if they catch up, maybe he could help Roglic. Vlasov was amazing yesterday.

There’s still a chasing duo behind the leaders. It’s De Plus and Santiago Buitrago (Bahrain Victorious), but they won’t catch back up. As if to prove my point, Buitrago chooses a very poor time to engage in literal naval-gazing, which is not only annoying but non-aerodynamic.

Up in the break, Jorgenson attacks!

Gee is dropped but Rodriguez manages to close the gap.

The two leaders are under the 1-kilometer kite! They’ve got almost 40 seconds, and there’s a 10-second bonus! Jorgenson needs only another 11 seconds to take the GC win!

Heading for the line, Rodriguez is stronger and Jorgenson can’t come around! Rodriguez takes the win!

He almost forgets his victory salute, but pulls it out! Look how dejected Jorgenson is … he needed that first-place time bonus, and of course a stage win would’ve been nice, particularly if he doesn’t manage to steal the GC.

Roglic drills it, knowing full well he could totally lose this Dauphiné!

He’s gotta be shitting bricks. He lost the 2020 Dauphiné on the last day, remember, by crashing like two or three times. And then he famously lost the 2020 Tour de France on the final stage, with his silly time trial helmet creeping off his head. To lose this second-rate stage race on the last day simply by not managing to ride fast enough … that would be just too humiliating.

Roglic crosses the line and it looks like he made it just in time to hang on to his GC. Note the silly piece of tape Ciccone has on his nose, which is somehow supposed to improve his breathing. I’ll bet he has a really dorky tan line there (which I find just as interesting as Roglic winning another stage race).

Here’s the stage result.

They’re interviewing Rodriguez.

INTERVIEWER: You picked up the stage win. So I guess your parents were wrong about you.

RODRIGUEZ: I felt really good. As hard as the team worked, we had a plan, yeah, get in a breakaway, try to go for the stage win.

INTERVIEWER: That’s not really a plan, per se, that’s just a goal.

RODRIGUEZ: After that I just raced as hard as possible in the finale, on the last climb. I couldn’t do enough to get on the podium so I wanted the stage win.

INTERVIEWER: You kind of ignored my last comment. That really hurts my feelings.

RODRIGUEZ: The legs feel good. This result was for my teammates. See you at the Tour.

What the interviewer evidently doesn’t realize is that nobody is translating the questions for Rodriguez, so he’s just saying whatever he feels like. Also, I’m just typing whatever I feel like. So it’s a win-win.

Here’s the final GC result. I’m tempted to say it was a nail-biter, but I refuse to normalize that disgusting behavior. Let’s just say it was a close one (in fact the closest in Dauphiné history).

Now they’re Interviewing Roglic.

INTERVIEWER: Yesterday you said something interesting about the weather. Do you think you can do similarly well today, or will we be back to your mind-numbingly boring, anodyne statements like “my team did great”?

ROGLIC: No, not really, it was quite crazy actually, I’m happy to be able to win the Dauphiné, with everything happening in between, it’s beautiful.

INTERVIEWER: Did they tell you [Jorgenson] was gaining time?

ROGLIC: Yeah, exactly. Both dudes in the car were spouting off, like, “Primoz, you fool, he’s destroying you!” and I was like, “Shut your pie-holes ye bleedin’ pricks!”

INTERVIEWER: Were you suffering?

ROGLIC: Did you really just ask me that? [Note: the interviewer actually did.]

INTERVIEWER: Are you confident for the Tour de France?

ROGLIC: Definitely. But, one is Dauphine, other is Tour. One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish.

INTERVIEWER: What does that even mean?

ROGLIC: I have no idea. They switched to a teleprompter this year and I think someone is screwing with me. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have got to take out these contact lenses. My eyes are getting really dry as I age.

David Gaudu smiles incessantly as his fans pose with him for photos. What’s he so happy about? He’s supposed to be a GC favorite and he didn’t even crack the top ten today. He finished all the way down in 30th, over four minutes behind. Still, that’s better than his teammate, the hapless Chris Froome, who was third-to-last almost 27 minutes down.

They’ve just announced that the team director of Bora-Hansgrohe suffered a fatal heart attack while watching Roglic almost lose the GC. Okay, I made that up. It was just a joke. Was that in poor taste? Perhaps. Could I delete this paragraph? Yes. Will I? Obviously not.

The camera loves Roglic. They just keep zooming in on his face, trying to get some footage with actual emotion in it. Here’s perhaps the best they could do.

Not a bad shot, really. In fact, when he sees this post perhaps he’ll download that picture. He could use it as his new profile photo.

Rodriguez mounts the podium to celebrate his stage win. After eschewing podium girls entirely, the race organizers are gradually bringing back approximately half of the tradition. The new UCI rules dictate that there can only be one female; there must also be a dumpy man; the female must be called a “podium woman”; and, she must look like Taylor Swift.

Jorgenson takes the podium having sealed his victory in the best young rider competition. Will he lead Visma-Lease A Bike for the Tour? Who knows. I haven’t been following the sport too closely now that cyclingnews.com put up a paywall, the bastards. All I know about Visma’s prospects is that last year’s Tour winner Jonas Vingegaard may not even race it this year as he continues to recover from a bad crash in the spring, and last year’s Vuelta winner Sepp Kuss was sick during this Dauphiné (and didn’t even start today), so it’s impossible to know how his form is.

And now, Roglic steps on to the podium for his final yellow jersey presentation. As he likes to do, he drags his kids up there, little realizing how confusing and upsetting this surely is for them. His younger son nervously bites his fingernails. How sad to be taking up this disgusting practice at such a very tender age. Roglic tries to intervene, but it’s surely too late for this kid. Oh well. At least the Slovenian champ has another stage race victory to add to his palmarès.

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Biased Blow-By-Blow - Giro d’Italia 2014, Stage 8

Introduction

The 2014 Giro d’Italia might be the most exciting grand tour of the year.  Clearly the Tour de France is going to be boring again, and you never know about the Vuelta a España.  Last year’s Giro winner, Vicenzo Nibali, is skipping this year’s Giro, kidding himself that he can top the über-doper, Christopher Froome, in the Tour.  Meanwhile, the BMC Racing Team kicked its most celebrated rider, Cadel Evans, down to the Giro, having become fed up with his tendency to lose the Tour de France.  So we’ve got Evans—a rider who very well may be clean—going up against last year’s second-place finisher, the uncannily strong Rigoberto Uran (then riding for the uncannily, suspiciously invincible Team Sky, now on Omega-Pharma-Quick Step), and Nairo Alexander Quintana Rojas, winner of the Young Rider classification in last year’s Tour de France, riding for the perennially lubed Movistar Team.

As you’ve gathered from that previous paragraph, I do not adhere to any standard of journalistic integrity in my race reports.  I figure if the racers can play fast and loose with Truth, why can’t I?  Besides, you’re probably tired of race commentators biting their tongues.  So in this report I’ll be calling a spade a spade, or sometimes “a filthy doping spade.”

Biased Blow-By-Blow – Giro d’Italia Stage 8

As I tune in to the coverage (via postcard-size Internet feed), I can’t tell what’s happening and am hanging on the announcer’s every word.  “The way he’s waving, it almost looks like a bird!” the announcer says delightedly.  I have no idea what he’s talking about until they show the super-slo-mo of a guy in the breakaway waving away the camera bike.  I can’t decide who’s sillier:  the racer with his flowery, effete waving, or the announcer with his bizarre simile.

So at the front of the race are three guys I’ve never heard of, attacking each other about 3K from the summit of a brutal climb, the Category 1 Cipo di Carpegna.  Going for KOM points.  It’s 38K to go with a gap of a few minutes, so they probably won’t stay away to the finish.

Okay, after a brief interlude I’m back.  You know, watching racers on climbs like this really moves me.  Not in any sentimental way, but it affects my bodily functions.  So strong is my empathy with these guys, watching them on a brutal climb makes me have to go to the bathroom.  As in, #2.  That’s when it’s great when there’s a breakaway, because their split time back to the peloton tells me how much time I have to take care of my business before the GC riders hit the climb.  I don’t want to miss any of the really important action but I also don’t want to soil myself.

One of the Eurosport announcers (I can’t keep track of their names because they always seem to change around, except Sean Kelly), just said, “I’m sorry to repeat the cliché, but it has to be said:  you can’t win the Giro on this stage, but you can lose it.”  This is somewhat remarkable because it’s the same thing said by another commentator, Christian Vande Velde, announcing the Tour of California.  Not just the “can’t win but can lose” bit, but also the apology for repeating a cliché.  I think this is an important step forward.  At least some of these clichés have now been recognized (though there are many others).  Surely there’s another way to put it that’s a bit fresher.  For example, “The final winner won’t be decided today, but the number of hopefuls will be whittled down.”

The leaders are over the climb.  It’s about 30K to go.  The peloton is about two minutes back.  One guy, Julian Arredondo of Trek Factory Racing, has distanced the rest of the break, with Perrig Quemeneur (Team Europcar) and Stefano Pirazzi (Bardiani-CSF) struggling behind him.  I know what you’re thinking:  I just made those names up.  Well, “Perrig” does sound like something I made out of an unhelpful tray of Scrabble tiles, and “Pirazzi” is absurdly generic, but those are real rider names.

Pierre Rolland (Team Europcar) has attacked the peloton.  I remember him riding so well for his teammate Thomas Voeckler in a recent Tour de France stage that he ended up beating him.  I thought that was pretty great because for various reasons, I think Voeckler is a tool.

The peloton has passed over the summit of the Carpegna, and now Cadel Evans has attacked!  He’s been really good in this Giro so far, picking up handfuls of seconds wherever he can.  Being a good descender may be a help here because this is a pretty technical descent.

The non-Kelly announcer (or are there more than one of them?) just called this “the Tour d’Italia.”  That’s a new one.  Dude, pick a language and go with it.

So that looked like the hardest climb, on paper, of the day—but of course the final climb will be harder because it’s a mountaintop finish so nobody will be holding anything back.  The final climb, coming up soon, is the Eremo Madonna del Faggio, the name of which would make any NASCAR fan giggle if he were watching this, which I guarantee he isn’t, unless the batteries in his remote control have died and he has no choice.

So how hard is a Category 1 climb?  They can be pretty brutal.  For the Faggio to be a Cat 1 means it must be insanely steep, because it’s pretty short.  It comes right after the Category 2 Villaggio del Lago.  If Category 2 doesn’t sound bad, consider that the Col du Télégraphe in the Tour de France is only a Cat 2, and it’s plenty brutal enough.

While I have some time, before the GC contenders start climbing again, I’m going to fill you in on a strong bias that I will have throughout this Giro:  I’m really gunning for Cadel Evans.

Wait, what’s “gunning for” mean?  I thought everybody knew it meant “rooting for,” but I was embarrassed to discover this isn’t universally understood.  My embarrassment came at a Coors Classic reunion party in 2011, shortly after Evans won that year’s Tour, and I was chatting with BMC Team manager Jim Ochowicz.  I told Ochowicz I’d been gunning for Evans in the Tour, and he got really riled up.  “Why!?” he snapped.  I explained what I meant by “gunning for,” but this didn’t compeletely dispel the awkwardness.  Maybe Ochowicz thought I was just backpedaling.

So anyway, yeah, I hope Evans wins.  Why?  Well, in my book he’s the only credible Tour de France winner since, well, since Greg LeMond, actually.  Everybody else since then looked totally lubed.  Can I back this up with any facts, in the short time I have until the GC boys hit this next climb?

Suffice to say, if you look at the Tour winners’ rate of vertical gain on big climbs—that is, the data showing how fast these guys have been going—Evans had the worst numbers since, like, LeMond.  Evans was a fair bit slower than Contador had been, and Andy Schleck, and Lance, and all the rest.  The logic goes like this:  if we know Contador was doping, and Contador was setting a Lance-like pace on these climbs, and Schleck could keep up with him, than Schleck was doping.  Meanwhile, if Contador’s times were similar to Lance’s, which were similar to Pantani’s, than Contador’s positive test wasn’t tainted beef from Spain.

Evans won a Tour in which Contador was fried from riding the Giro (which he rode because he wasn’t sure he’d be riding the Tour due to his pending doping case), and Andy Schleck had already started his descent into psychological incompetence, perhaps spooked by his brother’s positive test.  (Maybe he’d been scared straight.)  Team Sky’s Bradley Wiggins, meanwhile, had crashed out. The 2011 Tour was a rare opportunity for a clean rider to win, and Evans did it (after falling short several times before and since).  Plus, Evans so often looks like he’s suffering, unlike, say, all of Team Sky’s riders, who never do.

No, of course I’m not sure Evans is clean.  But he loses so often—despite his form being fairly consistent, his tactical acumen being great, his bike handling superb, and his psyche very tough—that he really does seem possibly human (vs. the dope-fueled superhuman mutants he’s usually up against).  Either I take this leap of faith in him, or lose interest in grand tours altogether.

Several of my pals don’t like Evans because he seems to whine a lot.  Some of that is just his high-pitched voice.  Look, guys, with so many dopers in the peloton, we can’t afford to be too choosy about a rider’s freaking voice.  What, they gotta be D.J.-caliber now?  Should the guy who does movie preview voice-overs be recruited to the pro peloton?  And yes, it’s true that Evans has complained a lot after bike races, but so do my biking pals, after and during (hell, even before) training rides, and about a lot more trivial matters than you see in a three-week tour.

But then there’s the matter of Liongate.  This is the incident in which some journalist or spectator tried to take away Evans’ lion—the stuffed lion a Tour de France leader is awarded.  Evans angrily slapped the guy's hand away.  Given Evans’ reputation for whining, I guess this struck many as a comical instance of childishness, like he really loved the stuffed lion.

(Rolland has overhauled Pirazzi, by the way.  They’re over the Villaggio.  Rolland is 1:15 behind Arredondo, with the peloton at 2:40.)

Getting back to Evans, I respect his defense of the lion.  He probably promised a niece or nephew or godson that he’d win a lion for him.  His wife probably said, “Don’t you come back here without one of those lions!”  I know I’ve bent over backwards to get swag for my kids—swag nowhere nearly as rare and cool as a Tour de France stuffed lion.

Pirazzi is going backward.  Poor guy.  Oh well, at least we’ve heard his name now.  He’s only 27; I’m sure we’ll see more from him as his career goes on.

Remarkably, Julian Arredondo, finishing the penultimate climb, is only 8K from the finish and still has two minutes.  He’s got the KOM jersey in the bag, and might just hold on for the stage win.

The peloton is strung out in a line even though they’re not on a very steep section.  They must be hammering.

Pierre Rolland is about 1:10 back from Arredondo.  His form is a bit jerky—not nearly as smooth as that of Wiggins, whom I’ve been watching in the Tour of California, and who I’m pretty sure is actually a robot.

Speaking of “not normal” performers, Michele Scarponi (Astana Pro Team) must have screwed up his pharma, because he’s way off the back today.  So we don’t have to worry about seeing him succeed here at the expense of riders who possibly deserve a fair, fighting chance.

Now Pirazzi crosses the summit, looking pretty fried and bobbing quite a bit.

Now Rolland is only 52 seconds behind Arredondo.  That’s what happens when the guy you’ve been chasing is descending while you’re still climbing.  This gap will shrink even more once Arredondo hits the Faggio (i.e., when Rolland is still descending), but that too will be an illusion.

I know nothing about Arredondo except that he’s Colombian and his name is kind of hard to type.  If he ends up replacing Andy Schleck as the Trek GC guy, maybe I’ll set up a macro or give him a nickname, to spare my hands.

Rolland is now only 37 seconds behind Arredondo and they’re both on the final climb.  This could be a real nail-biter, for those who bite their nails, which is a really disgusting habit and they should quit.  Find another nervous-energy tic, like drumming your fingers on the table, or drumming them on a keyboard like I am.

It’s 5K to go and Arredondo looks pretty beat.  He’s really straining.  Behind him, Rolland also looks pretty bad, his shoulders still rocking and his legs not quite turning over his gear.  To downshift might do more damage psychologically than struggling in too big a gear.  Man, how refreshing to see actual, visible suffering after seeing Wiggo spinning the pedals like his drivetrain was a desk fan plugged into a wall socket.  Someone needs to inflate that dude’s tires with water or something.

Arredondo is really grimacing.  He just spat, and it wasn’t blood, but I wouldn’t have been surprised.  Rolland is now 30 seconds back with 3.9K to go. 

Arredondo is now making a grimace that looks a lot like “the white man’s overbite”—the expression white men make while dancing.  That can’t be good.  He’s really, really suffering and he just shot a look over his shoulder.  I wish he could see how bad Rolland looks—that would buck him up a bit.

Back in the peloton, some BMC rider is hammering on the front.  Too big to be Evans, though I think I see Evans on the big dude’s wheel.

Oh man, 3.4K and Rolland is only 17 seconds behind Arredondo.  But Rolland looks so, so awful!  His butt is bouncing a bit on his saddle.  His legs look so jerky, like the longer, higher-compression pistons of a high-torque engine used for hauling big loads.  (Note to fellow race announcers:  you see how elegantly I avoided the cliché of calling him a “big diesel”?)

An ad for Bet 365 is obscuring my view but it looks like BMC is well placed at the front of the peloton.

Rolland has caught Arredondo!  Rolland still looks awful, his bike visibly wobbling even though he’s in the saddle.  Arredondo is sitting on his wheel.  Arredondo’s expression is that of a boarding school kid being paddled.  I’d say the peloton is within a minute of this leading duo.

Ivan Basso (Cannondale) is near the front of the peloton, right on Evans’ wheel.  Either he’s been training in the winter like Christopher Froome, or he’s back on the lube after a number of very lean years.

Oh my, the peloton is only 24 seconds back.  Who says “oh my” anymore?  I think these British announcers are influencing me.  Whoah, Arredondo just blew sky-high!

This peloton is too large.  They need to step it up to better entertain me.  Don’t they know I’m trying to write a really exciting report?  What’s wrong with these people?

Rolland is hanging on very impressively.  With 1.2K to go he’s holding the gap at 19 seconds.

Some Astana guy just attacked.  He was quickly caught so I don’t have to bother learning his name.  Looks like Evans himself is right on the front.  He’ll be in pink today because the current race leader, Michael Matthews (Orica-GreedEdge), is off the back.

It looks like Rolland is going to hang on!  He’s 450 meters from the finish.  The peloton is in sight!  But man, it’s a very steep finish stretch.  Danny Moreno (Katusha) is going after him—and he’s got him!  But the pack is right there, too.  It’s amazing!  The deck of cards has been scattered, like at the end of “Alice in Wonderland”!  I can’t tell who’s coming up on Moreno, it’s some Lampre guy, Fellici or something. 

Man, it’s all over and I never got that guy’s name!  The Lampre dude passed Moreno just before the line.  But it wasn’t even Moreno, it was some other guy who was shot from the front of the exploding peloton like a bit of shrapnel!  Total chaos and I’m just not quick enough to have made any sense of it.

Okay, the winner is Diego Ulissi, snatching the victory away from Trek’s Roberto Kiserlovski who came out of nowhere in that finale.

Wilco Kelderman (Belkin) materialized out of thin air for third.

Cadel Evans has got the pink jersey because Matthews was dropped today, as had been predicted.  Evans was just interviewed but it wasn’t that interesting.  He didn’t whine or anything, and there was no stuffed animal to clutch.  He did have a towel around his shoulders ... I wonder if the haters will mock him for that.

I love these super-slo-mos.  Here’s Ulissi giving Kiserlovski “the look” in the final meters of the race, as if to say, “Too late, bub, I got this!”

The announcer is saying this is Evans’ first pink jersey since 2002.  That’s simply not true.  He wore it briefly in 2010.  The bar is set pretty low for accuracy in covering this sport; just look at how many guys said Lance Armstrong was the first cyclist to appear on the Wheaties box, when that honor actually went to Doug Smith many years before.

Man, it looks like the coverage is over.  For some reason, Eurosport doesn’t allot any time for the podium celebrations anymore.  It’s a shame, because while I don’t want to go on record as saying I approve of the barbaric practice of having pretty women kissing the winners, I will admit that, due to irrepressible characteristics of my brain stem, I do enjoy watching the ceremony.  It can be pretty funny, like if the winner is some tiny Colombian and the podium girls have to stoop way down, or if the winner is a tall and gangly Dutchman and has to work very hard not to accidentally elbow one of the podium girls in the face. 

After an endless series of ads, after which I hoped maybe they’d return to Giro coverage, Eurosport has gone into a top-10 “Obstacles on the Road” countdown, showing massive crashes caused by—wow, here’s one with a cow!  I’m not joking!  Now there’s that T-Mobile guy piling into a spectator during his final run for a Tour stage—I remember that.  And now some spectator getting nailed on a descent at like 40 or more.  Man, this is grisly!  I know I should be posting my Giro report to my blog, but I can’t help watching!  Another guy just hit something furry—a badger?  Oh, man, a low road sign on a median and this dude flips over it at like 30.  And there’s Hoogerland getting run into a barbed wire fence by a pace car.  We’re down to number one.  Ah, yes, a final sprint in a Tour stage and a sprinter has his head down and piles into a referee.  Geez, after all that my pulse is racing.  These Eurosport broadcasters—they’re crazy!  Maybe somebody complained about podium girls and this was their idea of a joke.  (“Is this civilized enough for you?!”)  Anyway, it’s 8:26 a.m. and I am TOTALLY WIRED.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this Giro stage coverage.

Victory Salutes

NOTE: This post is rated PG-13 for a crude gesture.

Introduction

Check it out:

Is this a little man trapped in my smartphone, trying to bust his way out? No, it’s a large man, the Norwegian sprinting ace Thor Hushovd, who has just won Stage 3 of this year’s Tour de France. Alas, his exuberant—and I must say, macho—victory salute got a little too close to the screen there.

In this post I’ll discuss bike race victory salutes, including my own (albeit limited) history with them, and catalog some of the more interesting ones. I’m well aware I’m not the first person to have blogged about this, but I think I can apply a fairly unique spin. And if you don’t like it, you can just leave.

Why victory salutes?

The victory salute actually serves a very humdrum purpose: it makes a bike racer’s sponsor highly visible in photos. A racer is usually bent pretty far over the bars and if he didn’t sit up and show the logos, his sponsors would feel cheated. Some clothing makers are even clever enough to put their logo on the palms of cycling gloves so they show up in these photos.

Of course that’s not the only reason for victory salutes. It’s also a show of exuberance, like a football player spiking the football on the ground after a touchdown (though I’m led to believe this has for some reason been outlawed). For ages the victory salute was a pretty simple, rote thing, but in the last couple of decades racers have evidently felt the need to constantly innovate with their salutes. They bring in new elements all the time: pointing at the heavens with a reverent look; stabbing their chests with their fingers as if to say, “See? Me! Me! Me!”; or even, in the case of a Tour de France stage win by Carlos Sastre in 2003, crossing the line with a pacifier in his mouth as a way to dedicate the win to his two-year-old daughter. (There’s a much better way to honor a baby, as you shall see later.)

First-hand experience

Alas, most of my own victory salutes have been done in practice. After my brothers and I signed up for our first race, the 1981 Red Zinger Mini Classic, we spent the weeks leading up to the race practicing our victory salutes, just in case. Up and down our street we’d ride, a finish line imagined in front of the house, and we’d throw our arms up in various ways, critiquing one another’s efforts. Occasionally we’d stage a sprint, taking turns “winning” so we could better approximate the feeling of doing a real salute. It didn’t occur to us to actually train for the race, nor did we realize that our chances of needing a victory salute were way down there with winning Lotto.

My brothers and I were forbidden to ride no-handed, of course. Max got chewed out at the dinner table because my dad had seen him riding down a nearby street, Howard Place, with his arms folded across his chest. My dad tried out sarcasm: “Oh, here’s the big … macho stud riding with his arms folded!” Bryan, Geoff, and I laughed and laughed. I think our dad’s awkward phrase was as funny to us as Max being bawled out. (We were also forbidden to race: “You boys are too stupid to race bicycles. You’ll get yourselves killed.” Lack of supervision was a real blessing in that household.)

The first race I can remember winning was the citizen’s edition of the Buckeye Road Race in Colorado in 1985. There wasn’t much of a field there, and I’ll confess that my victory salute—after all those years of dreaming!—was just a bit sheepish. I’d debated about even doing one, and finally decided I’d better, as there were several categories on the road at once, I’d dropped the second-place rider by a huge margin, and I wanted to make sure the referees saw me go by and registered that I was a winner. (This strategy served me well in my 1990 world championship victory as well.)

In the 1985 Red Zinger Mini Classic, I was second in most of the stages. There was one guy I couldn’t beat, Peter Stubenrauch, who won every single stage leading up to the final one, a criterium. I managed to beat him in a couple of primes during that last stage, almost certainly because he threw them (not being a particularly greedy guy). I didn’t realize this at the time; I just figured I was having a great day. On bell lap, I really psyched myself up, told myself I could beat Pete, just like I'd beaten my own brother on this course earlier in the year. I launched my sprint early, and—amazingly enough—managed to hold Pete off all the way to the line. I threw my arms up, shook my fists, and roared with satisfaction—“YEEAAAH! YEAAAAH! YEAAAH!” As victory salutes go, it was way, way over the top. Finally I looked back at Pete, whose reaction was simply, “Dude, we have another lap.” Which we did—I’d sprinted a lap early and hadn’t won after all! I was completely mortified. In fact, I just about died of embarrassment. (The race director evidently didn’t know you’re not supposed to have a prime on the penultimate lap.) To assuage my humiliation afterward, a friend said disingenuously, “I just figured you really, really liked primes!” If there’s a moral to this story (besides “Check the lap counter!”) it’s “Don’t overdo the victory salute!”

Among my handful of victories in mass-start races, the most satisfying was the 1986 Boulder Cup criterium, around the Pearl Street mall in downtown Boulder. It was a pretty big race, though the junior category I was in was missing the top local team, Dale Stetina’s 7-Eleven junior team (who were doing a big race elsewhere in the country). The problem was, the finish line was too close to the first corner of the course, and I really felt like I didn’t have enough road for a victory salute. (It was a close sprint so this would have been an after-the-line deal.) Also, I couldn’t believe I’d actually won. In fact, it wasn’t until the end of the fifteen minute period during which riders could register protests that I really believed I had. Not that I’d done anything worth protesting; it’s just that a) racers in those days always seemed to be protesting every finish, and b) as I said, it seemed too good to be true. Later in the day my friend Bill won his category of the race, did throw his arms up, and just about stacked in that first corner.

Once I joined the collegiate racing circuit, I never won another race, except team time trials. It would be the height of conceited absurdity to throw your arms up at the end of a TTT, of course. The only time I’ve seen a victory salute work for a time trial is with the modern Tour de France, where the overall race leader starts last and knows, from his director yelling in his earphone, that he’s done well enough in the TT to defend his yellow jersey going into the last day’s race (which is little more than a parade and a last chance for the sprinters to have stage-winning glory). A couple of racers I can think of (Lance Armstrong and Carlos Sastre) have finished the last Tour time trial with modest one-armed fist-pumps that were, I think, tasteful.

A brief catalog of victory salutes

Of course I can’t categorize every type of victory salute, as new ones are being created all the time, but there are some classics worth describing. I also won’t position myself as an arbiter of taste as far as these are concerned; that’s what the teeming masses of fans are for. Another disclaimer is that I had to use amateur models for my photos, as I can’t afford professionals and don’t dare post copyrighted photos from race coverage websites. Thus, these won’t be perfect examples of the various salutes, but they should get the point across.

The Classic

The most basic victory salute, of course, is just throwing your arms up. The palms can face forward, or you can make fists, whatever. This was Davis Phinney’s standard victory salute; no matter how much he won, he kept it pretty simple. Nothing wrong with that!

Note that if your eyes are closed and/or your chin in way up, this becomes the “fireballs to heaven” salute most famously used by Alexi Grewal when he won the Olympic road race in 1984.

The Fist-Pump

The simple fist-pump victory salute is useful in a variety of situations. If you’ve sealed your Tour de France general classification victory with a solid ride in the final time trial, this is appropriate (whereas anything else wouldn’t be). The fist-pump is also good if you don’t have much maneuvering room after the finish line, or if conditions are otherwise sketchy. It can also, oddly enough, be the opposite of modest: Sean Kelly won so many races, sometimes he just couldn’t be bothered with a more extravagant gesture.

The fist-pump is often used in conjunction with other victory salutes. When a rider manages a solo breakaway, you’ll often see a combination platter of salutes as he approaches the line, and this is a very common one in such cases.

The Awkward

I don’t think anybody ever does this one intentionally. Sometimes a rider is so wasted at the end that his victory salute is just kind of off. Maybe one arm is higher than the other, or neither is raised high enough. Most often the awkward salute comes from somebody who doesn’t win a lot of mass-start events, so the victory salute is anything but old hat. I’m reminded of Christian Vande Velde’s victory salute when he won a stage of last year’s Paris-Nice. It wasn’t a bad victory salute, but his legs were kind of going one direction and the rest of him another.

Really, I kind of like the awkward victory salute; it’s sort of sweet, like the guy never expected to win and didn’t spend a lot of time practicing how to throw his arms up. (The exception is the guy who forgets to zip up his jersey. That’s just downright unprofessional, and generally unsightly.)

The “I can’t believe it”

This is another charming victory salute. Sometimes it comes right on the heels of a standard or awkward victory salute; the racer suddenly can’t believe it’s really true he won, and clasps his head (or these days his helmet) with his hands. The expression of joy that accompanies this particular salute can bring a tear to the eye. It’s hard to simulate in a photo shoot but I think young Lindsay has done a pretty good job here.

The Rock-the-baby

I first saw this one from Alexandre Vinokourov, though several riders have done it. It’s a tribute to the racer’s infant offspring, though I suspect it’s really more of a peace offering to the spouse left behind at home changing diapers and cleaning spit-up while the pro racer is off pursuing glory. I don’t think you’ll ever see this one after a bunch-sprint, where the guy is going like forty miles per hour and has to worry about being run into from behind. It’s perfect for solo victories, so long as you have an infant child at home. For a non-parent to do this salute would be just plain weird.

Joy from the heart

I’d be surprised if anybody recognized this one; its heyday was in the eighties when cyclists were still very Euro and hadn’t adopted the brutish American no-neck aura of NHL and NFL players. I can’t remember the last cyclist I saw do this one—it’s been a while—but I remember practicing it. I think any racer would earn extra style points for bringing it back.

The Second Place

My friend John used this once. He’d been finishing second to our friend Nico a lot, and though I don’t think John invented this salute, he managed to put it to use. It’s not likely to ever become popular because it takes real presence of mind to remember it, and has to be done just right or the crowd won’t understand it. I once got second in a collegiate criterium and it never occurred to me to pull this one out; I was too busy sprinting and frankly hadn’t really counted on losing. Good for a guy who is dropped from a two-man break just before the line, I guess.

(By the way, my model, Alexa, had no idea that this was a pantomime of a guy shooting himself in the head. She just followed my instructions and chalked the oddity up to another inexplicable cycling behavior.)

The Tyson

Obviously this one is a bit dated. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it used, but I practiced it plenty and did get to use it once, in a collegiate team selection race. (We had a series of intra-club races to determine who rode in what categories.) I well remember the joyous cackling of Trevor, our coach, team president, and star rider, watching me from the sidelines.

For years I tried to get my friends Bill and Pete to use this one in competition, but as often as they won they couldn’t be bothered to do the Tyson. It’s a pity. Lindsay does a wonderful job here; her missing teeth lend an extra air of verisimilitude.

The Contador

Alberto Contador wins all the time, and invariably does the pistol-shot victory salute. He’s even taken to doing it while up on the podium, and I once saw him pause beforehand to make sure all the photographers were ready. It has a scripted quality to it, almost like he’s a careful custodian of the Contador brand, but it’s not a bad salute. I wonder if somebody besides Contador will ever dare try it. Surely someone out there has the chutzpah to bite Contador’s style, just to make it fresher….

The Cav

No catalog of victory salutes would be complete without the outrageous victory salute that got the brash road sprinter Mark Cavendish ejected from the Tour de Romandie this year. It ranks up there (down there?) with Alexi Grewal throwing his bike over the finish line at the Morgul Bismark stage of the Coors Classic, or Grewal ripping his 7-Eleven jersey down the middle before a victory salute at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado springs (which antic got him thrown off the team). As irresponsible acts go, this salute beats doping, anyway. (Speaking of responsibility, rest assured that although Lindsay does a great job with this one, she has no idea what the gesture means. Heck, not being Italian, I don’t know exactly what means either. I do have a strong sense that this photo wouldn’t’ be a good one to post in Lindsay’s“My Book About Me” for school.)

And there you have it: a brief catalog of victory salutes. It's never too early to start practicing these, though for many of us it may be too late.

dana albert blog