GLOBADOM

It’s all over but the shouting. Lance managed to win yet another stage today (his third in a row, if you’re counting), and has a four-minute lead over Ivan Basso.

There’s only one stage left where there’s a reasonable chance for anyone to lose time: Saturday’s ITT. Like the hillclimb on Wednesday, it’s a race against the clock, but this time on a basically flat course. But Armstrong is a very strong time trial rider: Ullrich might gain a minute on him on a good day, and it’s possible Armstrong won’t win the stage outright (though he could; except Ullrich, it appears that almost all of the serious time-trial specialists are out of the Tour now. A guy named David Millar might have challenged, but he missed the Tour after admitting he had taken performance-enhancing drugs), but no major time losses are likely.

The final stage of the Tour is Sunday, and this one is largely ceremonial. By tradition, with the yellow jersey essentially settled, no riders will try to break away and attack until they get to the end of the stage, the 8 laps of the Champs-Elysees. There’s a good chance the race for the green jersey won’t be finished, so that should produce some interesting sprinting at the end.

There are still the usual hazards of bike racing (the most dangerous of which would be some sort of crash), but at this point in the race Lance doesn’t have to attack his rivals, he just has to hold his position and ride to the finish line.

Indeed, the end of the race is bereft of drama. I won’t be making any special effort to watch the TT, though if convenient I’ll try to catch parts of Sunday’s stage. The pack is usually up for a bit of fun on the last day (you might get to see Lance rolling through the countryside, drinking champagne with his teammates), and the awards ceremony is very nice.

Don’t forget that there’s quite a few cycling events coming up in the Olympics next month. You’ll be watching, right?

Corrections: I somehow brain-faded and didn’t realize Friday was a road stage, and the tour doesn’t end until Sunday. But everything else is still true!

One more thing: Cycling News has a pretty goodsummary of the Tour route, stage by stage.

Oh, me? Wedding on Saturday in Yarrow (in a turkey barn!), and this week I made sour plum preserves and syrup with my mother-in-law, and built up a wheel that needed building.

Oh, and Susan at work asked me a question today about how the teams decide who the leader is. I gave her a few answers: the rider has a history of big performances, the rider shows strength early in the tour, et cetera.

I also gave her the historical examples of where there were two strong riders on a team, and what happened: Greg LeMond and Bernard Huinault (who were on the same team during LeMond’s first Tour victory, in which Huinault was pretty much competing with LeMond) and this year in the Giro d’Italia (that’s the second most important big bike race), when the Saeco team had last year’s Giro winner (Simoni), who proved not quite strong enough to achieve victory again, and a young protege (Cunego) who, in the decisive mountains stages, was strong enough.

This may happen to Jan Ullrich’s team (T-Mobile) this year: Ullrich was the third T-Mobile rider across the line today, which is not a good sign. He may have been holding back for Saturday’s stage (which is so awesome that Armstrong jokingly described it as “a violation of our human rights” in one interview), but he may also be showing a lack of form. It may be that T-Mobile decides that other riders are better threats for the GC, and Armstrong could be riding for them! And if all else fails, T-Mobile also has a sprinter (Erik Zabel) who is competing for the green jersey in the “points” competition.

Watch the stage on Saturday though. Today’s was a surprise show of force, but everybody will be ready to go all-out tomorrow. It may be the most important stage of the tour.

And yet, it may not. Looking ahead, there are still two different time trials, one up Alpe D’Huez, and the other flat, which will cause big time advantages, and more mountain stages. Any of those is big enough that a favourite having a good day (or a bad day) could make a huge difference in the standings.

This year’s Tour really has a lot of action crowded into the last several days.

First of all, let me note something that I was surprised by: Lance went for it today!

Today featured a flat start to the stage, but at the end it it two Category 1 (very hard, but not quite the hardest class) climbs right at the end of the stage, ending atop the second mountain.

Most pundits expected that this would be a stage where the climbers would challenge each other but stay together. That didn’t happen. On the first climb, the USPS team went out to the front of the pack to set a fast pace, and it was clear they were setting up a pack-breaking move.

What was a big surprise to me was how decisively it worked. Every pre-tour favourite lost a lot of time to Armstrong. He has hardly put the tour out of reach yet (there are just too many hard stages, TTs, and opportunities for bad luck to say that), but I didn’t think he would be able to hammer away at great riders like Ullrich and Hamilton with such ease. He took over 2:30 out of Ullrich.

Of course, Ivan Basso actually beat Armstrong to the line. Unlike Voeckler (who showed his true form today by losing over 4 minutes), he’s a potential GC threat. And he gained time on Armstrong.

This weekend, I rode a team-issue Cannondale Six13, duly provided to me by the factory, and wearing my team uniform proudly displaying my Cannondale sponsorship. It’s about time my recent achievements were recognized.

The bike is sweet. This machine has a listed weight a little shy of 15 pounds (by comparison, my quite nice Pinarello comes in around 22 pounds in racing trim). That is a difference you can feel.

Campagnolo Record 10? With the Ti and Carbon Fibre bits? Oh yes. It’s a sensuous delight to shift. I had no trouble acclimating despite my long experience with Shimano shifters.

Alas, I deceive without lying: the bike, straight from the factory, was part of the Cannondale demo fleet, stopping by Bicycle Sports Pacific for some show-and-ride.

That said, they were tremendously generous. I expected some sort of parade-led cruise for 20 minutes, like a typical motorcycle demo ride. Nope. They moved my pedals onto the bike, matched my seat height, and encouraged me to take it out for 30 or 45 minutes if I liked. All that for a driver’s license.

Well, BSP is downtown, so I rode over to Stanley Park. The perimeter road is a really nice ride with no stops on it, and the traffic isn’t too bad.

I rode like a madman. I passed horse-drawn carriages, I passed buses, I passed two triathletes rolling up the one steep climb, I passed most of the cars. That bike was a bad influence on me, and I just tried to keep up.

I did two very rapid laps of the park. The bike was a lot of fun, but I felt obligated to keep up. I wasn’t going to ride slowly on this thing! It was hilarious.

So, what’s really different on a light bike? Having a bike this light is like suddenly losing 7 pounds. Sorry, that’s about it. It’s still really good: when I first stepped on, I was surprised by how much less momentum it had than the Pinarello which carried me to the shop. It seemed to shoot out from under me as I pushed the pedals.

The exoticism continued as I rode. The K-wing carbon fibre handlebar was neat-o, since it had an aero top profile that was comfortable to grab, and internally routed cables (a weird feature for a handlebar). The Campagnolo drivetrain and shifters worked very nicely. No complaints there. I wanted to hug this bike, it was so pretty and gorgeous and fast and I think I could win any race on that bike. I could cat up just by riding that bike. I could be the rider of my dreams!

Except, no, I couldn’t. The bike may have given me wings, but I needed legs. I nearly blew a gasket chasing that bike around the park, mainly because I pushed too hard. Hey, how often was I going to get to ride the best bike in the world as hard as I wanted? (Save your letters: there are several candidates for “best road bike, cost no object.” But the awful truth is all the UCI-legal ones (or in the case of the Six13, almost-legal) are very similar, and the Six13 certainly could not be left out of such a discussion.)

The real test was how the Pinarello would feel after. I got on it and it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t feel as if I had suddenly mounted a gas-pipe pig. It felt pretty good, and it took me home happily, and next time I go racing, it will work just fine. Can’t ask for more.

But I have upgrade lust now. Maybe I can afford that used Marinoni I have a line on. Maybe my bike team’s sponsor discount will be enough this year for me to buy a Cannondale R800 with the Shimano 105 group. Yeah. That could hold off the bike-lust demons for a while. Maybe. Until the Cervelo demo van comes to town….

Judging from the questions my friends and co-workers ask me about the Tour, there’s a little confusion about how the Tour de France works as a sporting event, and how Lance is doing. Let me see if I can give you a quick guide to the Tour so far:

I heard Lance lost the yellow jersey today. Can he still win?

Yes. In fact, he probably didn’t want to keep it all that much at this point!

The thing about the tour is that it isn’t a monolithic competition for the yellow jersey, which is the prize for the leader of the “general classification” (GC), which, with some caveats, is the lowest aggregate time on all stages. Nearly 200 riders started the Tour, nine per team. Most of those are riding in support of their team leaders, but even most of the teams are not trying to win the GC prize.

There’s a series of races and goals within the race: winning just one stage is a key goal for many teams. There’s a special green jersey for the “points leader,” a convoluted contest which is normally won by sprint specialists: they are good at riding with the pack for the entire stage, then sprinting free at the last second to take the win at the finish. There’s more to both the points competition and sprinting tactics than I’m explaining here, but you can e-mail me if you care. There are two other jerseys: the polka-dot jersey for the “King of the Mountains”, and a white one for best young (born after January 1, 1979) rider; and there is the “combativity” prize, with points awarded by a race jury each day to the rider who is most aggressive (this means participating in breakaways and other actions that tend to drive the race). The most aggressive rider just gets red numbers on his jersey instead of the usual black numbers.

For some of the minor teams in the race, the Tour is a success if they simply manage to participate in a few attention-getting breakaways, which mean lots of TV time even if they get caught before the finish.

But all these other jerseys and suicidal breakaways are so much fuzz to the riders trying to wear the yellow jersey in Paris, where the Tour traditionally finishes. When you hear about other riders wearing the yellow jersey in the first week of the tour (and again, wearing yellow for even one day is a huge achievement for any racer), note that the riders trying to win GC (including Lance Armstrong) are perfectly content with this. The leaders at this point are typically taking the jersey by mere seconds, or else they are riders who will not be a factor in the later time trials and (especially) in the mountains. If you can’t climb very well, every mountainous stage (and there’s lots of those coming up) is a struggle in which you are trying to stay close enough to the stage winners to make that day’s time cut. It is normal for many riders to finish dozens of minutes behind the winners and GC riders.

That said, today’s events, in which Thomas Voeckler won the yellow jersey in a huge breakaway, were interesting. On one hand, Voeckler isn’t considered a serious threat in the mountains. He rides for a relatively weak team, the French “Brioches La Boulangere” (yep, he’s sponsored by a bakery). But thanks to a very aggressive 5-man breakaway aided by bad weather which caused a lot of crashes in the main pack, and a US Postal team that wasn’t very interested in working hard today (because defending the yellow jersey can be very difficult, and it isn’t part of their plan to have to do so until the big mountain stages), he finished the day over 9 minutes ahead of Armstrong in the GC. This is probably more time than the big riders wanted to give up, and Voeckler may not be a complete pushover in the mountains. The race will be a little more interesting because of today’s stage.

Why are the mountains so important?

Because of drafting.

When bike racing on more-or-less flat roads, a rider who drafts another rider uses about 30-40% less energy than the lead rider. This means that two riders working together and taking turns leading and drafting can normally catch a similarly strong solo rider. And with more riders sharing the work, the advantage over one rider or a small group is even greater.

The upshot is that it is very hard to get away on a flat stage because the main pack of riders can usually bear down, work together, and catch back up to your break. Even if only one or two teams, say 8-15 riders, are working hard and taking turns setting the pace at the front of the pack, the rest can draft them as a big bunch, and enjoy a relatively easy ride to the finish. And on most flat stages, that’s exactly what happens: a break goes out, a break gets caught. Sometimes, like today, the break survives, but that is rarer than a pack finish.

In the mountains, drafting stops mattering. The steeper the climb, and the slower the riders are going, the less the aerodynamic effects of drafting matter. While the pack can average over 50 km/h on a fast day on the flats, the steepest hills are taken far, far slower. 15-20 km/h even for fast riders is quite possible. If you watch the steep mountain stages, you’ll be able to see fans occasionally running alongside the top contenders for a few hundred feet. Note that over those short distances, they can keep up with the cyclists! It gets that slow.

With virtually no drafting, finishing times in the mountains are much more about having strong legs, not being too heavy, and a willingness to endure massive amounts of pain. The pack will split up on each climb, riders will form into many small bunches, and solo finishes become the norm. This is where the riders will finish with minutes separating them.

So Lance is going to win once it gets to the mountains?

Were that it were so simple! Aside from the simple bad luck of possible crashes, illness, or the other bad things that can happen, Armstrong has serious rivals in this race, including Tyler Hamilton and Jan Ullrich. Ullrich is an especially serious rival: he won the last Tour before Lance’s run of five, and has never finished lower than second place. In other words, he’s lost to Lance a couple of times, but just barely. This could be his year, it could be that Lance is just too old and too tired, or it could be that some rising star (Voeckler?) comes out of nowhere and ends the streak. Five riders have won five tours, including Lance. The four previous winners all attempted to win a sixth tour, and none did.

If Lance does win, then, will he be the best cyclist ever?

Cross-generation comparisons of athletes are always hard. For some critics, Lance’s single-minded focus on the Tour de France means he isn’t even the best rider right now, though that is the minority opinion.

The Tour de France has become a much more important race than it used to be. Years ago, the other two major grand tours (Vuelta Espana and Giro d’Italia; I’ll let you guess which countries) were of nearly equal prominence. But the Tour was still the big race, if only by a little bit, and the Spanish and Italian riders generally wanted to win their home tours as much as they wanted to win the Tour de France.

In some ways, Lance changed that: he is part of a series of riders who have focused more and more sharply on the Tour as an exclusive goal. Although Armstrong races several other events each year, they are generally treated as training and testing for the big event. He also aims exclusively at the yellow jersey, and so does his whole team: no team in the Tour will be as focused on one goal as US Postal. Even rival Ullrich’s team, T-Mobile, has a sprint specialist (Erik Zabel) who expects team support for his own goals.

This is in sharp contrast to riders of yore, who would ride many more events with victory in mind, and would even skip the Tour to concentrate on the other two grand tours.

No rider brings up this contrast more than Eddy Merckx. He’s one of the five-time Tour winners. In his prime, he actually skipped the event altogether once or twice because he was riding the other two tours that year.

Merckx also contested all of the “Spring classics”, races you hardly hear of on this continent, but these are one-day races, mostly in Belgium and the Netherlands, which are prestigious cycling events on their own. Armstrong rarely participates and almost never seriously competes in these early-season events, though some US Postal riders do make these races a major goal.

Merckx was the most dominant rider of his era. He always wanted to win, he always attacked, and he was most amazing cycling machine of his generation. Remember how I talked about all the separate jerseys a few paragraphs back, and how each is contested by a different group of riders? In 1969, Merckx won his first Tour. He also won the points and mountains contests at the same time, the only three-jersey winner ever. In fact, if the young-rider jersey had existed, he would have won that too. He won all three grand tours. He won the Giro d’Italia five times. He won just about everything.

How do you know Eddy was the best? Well, Lance’s nickname is “Lance,” or maybe “Mellow Johnny” or “Daddy Yo-Yo.” Eddy’s nickname was “The Cannibal.”

Okay, so I can’t get up at 6AM PDT every morning. Which stage should I skip work and sleep to watch live?

First, I want to say something in favour of the 500-channel universe and OLN TV’s coverage of the Tour. Not so long ago, watching the Tour on TV meant an hour of highlights once a week narrated by college basketball experts. OLN practically becomse the Tour de France network, including hours of live broadcasting, repeats, follow-ups, and a mid-afternoon roadside travelogue show. Some of this is very stupid. Sometimes the commentators say stupid things, and they have a few commentators who don’t really know much about cycling. It’s still amazing, and the pictures speak for themselves.

That said, here’s the deal: the race will probably be decided in the mountains, and even if it gets decided by the time trial on July 24, TTs are boring to watch on TV unless you’re a real bike nerd.

The first really interesting mountain stage is on Bastille Day, July 14. There are eight classified climbs on this longest stage. It probably won’t be decisive, but this will be the first hard mountain test for all the big teams and riders.

Stage 13, though, that’s where the fun begins. Seven climbs, including a mountaintop finish, which means there will be big time gaps. Get up early on Saturday, July 17.

Those are the early, hard mountain stages coming up next week. The week after that features more suffering still, and I’ll focus on those stages then.

It was a wonderful night at the races, Vancouver’s ever-popular World Tuesday Night Championships.

As usual, and without much expectation, I started as a Cat 5/Novice with the other has-beens, never-wases, and novices. To my shame, I have never placed in this or any other categorized race (I won the citizen’s race at the 2003 UBC Stadium Criterium, but it was a hollow victory against frat boys).

I didn’t even feel very good today. I was overcooked and a little under-watered, a result of losing my water bottle somewhere at work, and then pushing fairly hard to get to the race. The ride started with my legs feeling like wood, so I took it easy, and played it smart. I also remembered the words of my mentor, Peter, who has told me in the past to be more patient with my attacks and more stingy with my work, and also suggested that I spend time watching the form of the other riders, to see what their strengths and weaknesses were. Good advice!

Thanks to my wooden legs, I took Peter’s advice, and spent the first few laps sitting in the draft near the front of the race. I was helped by a truly lazy peloton, and some riders (one in particular) who were willing to take suicidally long early pulls at the front of the pack for no obvious benefit. Okay, that’s great!

There weren’t even any early breaks, and this year the novice WTNC races have seen the pack crack early and often. So I sat in, second, third wheel, letting everyone else take long pulls while I took very short pulls as rarely as possible.

Finally after a few laps of this (the race is 35 minutes, which amounts to maybe 10-12 laps for us), the breaks started. I let the first, rather weak looking rider go without worrying. He got caught quite quickly. A second pretty inoffensive rider took off shortly after. I then watched a rider in black take off, thought to myself, “hey, he’s strong” and stupidly declined to follow him, partly because I was feeling patient (wood-legged) and partly because I didn’t believe a solo break could survive for so long. But I like the look of the third guy to go off the front, on the hill. I grabbed the wheel, followed it up, and to my good fortune, nobody else came with us. I let him tow me all the way up to the next rider, since he was going there anyways.

And then there were three of us. The rider in black was still up ahead, but catchable. The pack was behind us, and seemed to be fading. Actually, they were really fading.

We kept up a credible chase, but we were either all tired or all too wary to do the necessary work. At one point I yelled to the others, “1-2-3 is way better than 2-3-nothing!” It didn’t work, though we seemed to grudgingly pull hard enough to keep the pack away. I still don’t know how; my computer says we managed a mediocre 36 km/h; the novice races routinely run at 39 km/h. The pack was very lazy. Lucky me.

So with the Man in Black nothing but a distant tease, we conspired to stab each other’s backs in classic bike-racer fashion. It is how it always ends with breakaway groups: you work for a common goal, the common goal being to get far away enough from everyone else that you only have to out-ride the other riders in your break. For me, this was a winning strategy, because as of this year I can hammer up that hill on the course way better than I can outsprint the field. Thus followed a few uneventful laps, punctuated only by the time I lightly scraped one pedal in a corner, and another time when I tried to drink the last of my little bottle of President’s Choice water, and nearly choked to death on it. Dumb, but I think I entertained my break-mates.

For my part, I studied the other riders, and decided they were feeling pain going up the hill, and I was not, and I was doing as little work as possible, and I didn’t think they were being as careful. For something to do, I decided to work on loud, painful-sounding breathing at appropriate moments. I don’t know if they noticed, but both riders seemed content to let me suck as much wheel as I wanted to. Okay, I can do that.

Then the lap board showed “02”, and we started getting ready for the sprint. Some of us were more ready than the others, since when the next lap came around, I started sprinting. Because I was an idiot. So I come steaming up towards a puzzled looking race director, as he rang the bell for the penultimate lap. My air-deprived brain figured out the meaning of “01” and that ringing sound, and I pulled up. Dumb.

Maybe it helped. The other two caught me at the top of the climb (I backed off quite a bit, since I had no hope of making a break stick for the whole lap; they’d catch me on the descent). But I had lots of juice to stick on their wheels, so I did. and I stayed on, as we rode out the classic dilemma: nobody wanted to lead. But lead one person did (not me). I just waited. Finally, the other guy broke past the leader, and I took his wheel. We left the third guy (known only seconds earlier as the leader; this is why nobody wanted to lead) for dead.

The other rider made a game sprint, and I was scared. But as soon as I pulled out of his draft and clicked up a gear, a wonderful thing happened. Every time I stomped on the pedals, my bike moved up beside him a little more. This was really encouraging, so I kept on stomping pedals like there was no tomorrow. I stomped those pedals all the way to the line, and even threw in a bike throw just to finish it off. Sure, the man in black won in a walk, but second place, by half a wheel, belonged to me.

It was a victory (well, okay, not a victory per se, but you know) in which my little mistakes didn’t overcome the big things I did right: I showed patience, I worked when I had to, and I sprinted just well enough. In short, I made them suffer.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wired Cola is pleased to announce that after a corporate restructuring, the wiredcola.com domain has been reacquired, and will be used to launch its flagship publicity engine, the world’s only Cybermorphic™ Weblog, into the new millennium.

“This new internet domain will launch our flagship publicity engine, the world’s only Cybermorphic™ Weblog, into the new millennium,” said Wired Cola’s Vice President of Marketing, Ryan Cousineau. “I know some doubters and nay-sayers out there think that’s an odd thing to say in the year 2004, but I ran it by some of the smarter mathematicians around here, and they said we could claim that meant our millennium project was either less than 1% off target, or 996 years ahead of schedule. Either way, pretty good, huh?”

Mr. Cousineau went on to say that this “new millennium” plan would be an integral part of Wired Cola’s Y10k consulting program, under the slogan “we’re ten percent there, and only one percent late! Or 996 years ahead of schedule.”

From now on, the Wired Cola weblog will be directly accessible at http://www.wiredcola.com/.

“We’re very proud of the fact that our web designers figured out how to use our site registrar’s domain forwarding function. This will allow us to leverage the synergy of our new domain without a substantial new financial outlay.”

Mr. Cousineau continued with news that even more synergy will be leveraged in the future: “we plan to integrate the nascent Wired Cola merchandising operation with the weblog, and will re-integrate the original Wired Cola content at the old domain under the “Wired Cola Classic™” banner. You know, Archimedes had a lot to say about levers, but this will be a leverage of synergy Archimedes could only imagine. We’re talking a whole continent of leveraged synergy. Maybe more! It’s pretty cool.”

In the future, Wired Cola plans to get its favicon.ico file working too, which would be neat.

Wired Cola, Inc. ignited the soft drink industry in the early 90’s with the world’s first CyberMorphic beverage, and reinvented the computer game with Mogelfoci and Mogelfoci II. Wired Cola also leads the IT industry with the world’s only comprehensive Y10K consulting package. Wired Cola is now recommitted to its original mission — total world domination.

© 2004 Wired Cola, Inc. All rights reserved. Wired Cola, the Wired Cola logo, the Wired Cola iMerchandise Store, and CyberMorphic are registered trademarks of Wired Cola, Inc. Y10K, CyberMug, Mogelfoci and Mogelfoci II are trademarks of Wired Cola, Inc. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are disrespectfully ignored.

[Is “wrongest” a word? I just watched part of a Walter Winchell bio-flick. I’m making the language my own now!]

The column in question appeared in one of my community’s community newspapers. You be the judge.

Hints to get you started: Ron and Nancy Reagan weren’t Catholic. Global population growth rates have stabilized and are falling. Have fun with the rest.

It’s getting to the point where I need to do things so I have something to write about here. That’s not terrible: Wired Cola thus acts as an index of whether Ryan Cousineau has been doing anything worthwhile with his life lately.

Lately? I’d say RjC is at best a “hold,” to use stock terminology.

So, I’m badly allergic to the poor dog, so he’s not staying. Which is quite sad. Darned guy has a great disposition. But there’s an important lesson here about giving pets as gifts: only if you know the recipient wants a pet.

In a farewell tour, me and John The Dog will go down to the big festival at Rocky Point today, mostly so we can eat mini-donuts. In other doughnut news, they’re putting in a Tim Horton’s 10 minutes by bicycle from my house. That could be bad.

Tonight, I plan to do the Thursday night race in Richmond. Because I didn’t do the Tuesday nighter or the Yaletown Grand Prix.

I did spend most of yesterday installing a new stereo in the car, so I can be proud of that. If any of you need a good-quality cassette unit with a removable faceplate and slightly flaky (but probably repairable) display illumination, let me know. The radio is in perfect condition except that the screen’s backlight doesn’t work (the LCD is fine) and it’s a tape deck, not a CD player. It even has the inputs for an outboard CD changer.

Less type, more do stuff. So I can type in here later that I did it.

Oh right! The election. Short summary: mild disappointment, but somewhat pleased that the Liberals and NDP do not have a working majority in combination. I made the prediction that it would last 36 months, but that’s probably longer than is reasonable. My smarter friend Marc figures there will be an election late next year.

And in case you didn’t read it, Colby Cosh has a conspiracy theory that Ralph Klein’s sabotage of the Conservative campaign by health care announcement was deliberate. Nice overview of current Alberta politics.