Words by Colin Statley

Thursday May 17, 2012

No, your television isn’t broken, nor is Eurosport isn’t playing a repeat of the same stage over and over. Peter Sagan just keeps winning stages at the Tour of California. Again, again and S-again, you might say.

While his Groundhog Day-style domination is rather destroying interest in the USA’s biggest race, his four stage wins have proven excellent news for cycling stat fans. It provided the perfect excuse to trawl through the archives. And that’s our joint-favourite activity, along with shopping for snazzy sweater-vests.

Which other riders have had four consecutive stage wins in the same race? The last man to achieve it before Sagan was a rider of similar silence and precocity: Edvald Boasson Hagen.

The Norwegian turned the Tour of Britain turgid in 2009 with his four-on-the-trot down the Tees-Exe line, going on to win the overall for good measure.

Five in a row
As for five consecutive wins in a race? Even rarer. Everyone’s favourite ruddy-faced Italian sprinter Alessandro Petacchi, who once spent an entire interview with Cycle Sport fiddling with his sunglasses, was the last to achieve that in 2006 at sh*t small race, the Oddset-Rundfahrt.

Why are strings of wins like this so rare? First and foremost, the vast majority of stage races are populated with a spicy variety of stages: flat, time-trials, hills and mountains. (Ignore the recent Giro del Trentino, which had three summit finishes in four days – at least they had the decency to put in a TTT on the first day).

Then there’s the fact that there are 180 other riders who all really want to win, most of whom are specialised in one role, be it climber, leader, domestique or sprinter.

In a modern Grand Tour at least, four stage wins in a row is virtually impossible. Mario Cipollini was the last man to achieve it, with his back-to-back quartet at the 1999 Tour, although even then, the third was thanks to a disqualification for Tom Steels.

There are so many variables in cycling. A rider needs to be on top of his game every day to win – and that requires a fair slice of luck and a team dedicated to chasing rather than let a breakaway go.

Sagan joins exclusive company
Versatility and sheer talent are the most crucial components. At 22, the only thing missing from Sagan’s armoury is ability in the high mountains and time-trials.

He now joins a very exclusive club, with the likes of Rik Van Looy, Freddy Maertens and Philippe Gilbert, who did it with one-day races, the show-off.

The Slovak champion has now had twenty-six wins in two and a half years. He’s no longer a starlet or a phenomenal talent or the future of cycling: he’s a bona fide star in the present, the first of the 1990s-born generation.

That’s a very depressing fact for an office which fondly remembers eight-tracks, brick phones and Bananarama.

Lastly, spare a thought for poor Heinrich Haussler who, with bizarre serendipity, has finished second four times in a row to Sagan in California.

At least, with today’s fifth stage time-trial, barring an unforeseen miracle, his and Sagan’s winning and losing streaks ought to come to an end.

Four or more wins in a row: 21st century riders to do it
Alessandro Petacchi 5 – Oddset Rundfahrt, stages one, two, three, four and five, 2006
Alessandro Petacchi 5 – Ruta del Sol stages four and five, Trofeo Luis Puig, Tour of Valenciana stages one and two, 2005
Peter Sagan 4 – Tour of California, stages one, two, three and four, 2012
Philippe Gilbert 4 – Brabantse Pijl, Amstel Gold Race, Fleche Wallonne, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, 2011
Philippe Gilbert 4 – Coppa Sabatini, Paris-Tours, Giro del Piemonte, Lombardia, 2009
Tom Boonen 4 – Doha GP, Tour of Qatar stages one, two and three, 2006
Erik Zabel 4 – Bayern Rundfahrt stages three, four, five and six, 2001

History’s recent braces
Freddy Maertens 5, 1975 Dauphine – stages one, 2a, 2b, three and four
Freddy Maertens 5, 1977 Vuelta – stages five, six, seven, eight and nine
Mario Cipollini 4, 1999 Tour de France – stages four, five, six, seven
Eddy Planckaert 4, 1984 Etoile de Besseges – stages 1, 2a, 2b and three
Eddy Planckaert 4, 1982 Vuelta a Espana – stages 1a, 1b, two and three
Dietrich Thurau 4, 1978 Etoile de Besseges – stages two, three, four and five
Rik Van Looy 4, 1965 Tour of Sardinia – stages three, four, five and six

Grand Tour records: consecutive stage wins
Giro d’Italia: Alfredo Binda, 1929 – eight stages
Vuelta a Espana: Delio Rodriguez, 1941 – six stages
Tour de France: Francois Faber, 1909 – five stages

Words by Kenny Pryde

Tuesday May 15, 2012

We’re almost halfway through the 2012 Giro and nobody knows who is going to win. That’s good going. By this point in the race last year, Alberto Contador had already killed the race stone dead. But there’s no Contador this year, so to speak.

It’s a case of so far, so Giro. Which is to say that sprint chaos occurs when nobody is conducting a big train and that those weird transitional days inevitably turn out to be much tougher than anyone had predicted. Those ‘transitional’ days in the route book, which were studded by a multitude of tiny sharks teeth, have battered the riders and eaten into reserves. You can’t have an easy day in the Giro.

And if there has been a surprise, nobody is quite sure if it’s a pleasant one. Stage eight, which finished after the 10-kilometre Colle Molella climb above Lago Laceno saw Domenico Pozzovivo take a solo win. He’s a small guy (53kg and 1m 65cm), in a small team (Colnago-CSF Inox) but his performance was super-sized. It was one of those climbing performances that saw lots of journalists scurrying for information that would explain what they had just witnessed. The 29 year old piano-player (true!) from southern Italy put a not inconsiderable 27 seconds into the bunch which wasn’t exactly dawdling. There was nothing piano about this stage.

Impressive! But this being Italy, it seemed a bit too impressive for some observers to simply applaud and move on to the next stage. There were even some of his peers in the gruppo who smiled and pointed out that Pozzovivo’s rhyming nickname is ‘Positivo’ – although we’re sure he got that moniker on the basis of his perpetually positive outlook on life. Either that or being unlucky enough to have been in the same 2008 team as formerly-banned CERA user Emanuele Sella and supplier Matteo Priamo.

Pozzovivo has been turning in impressive performances already this season, with pre-Giro sharpener the Giro del Trentino suggesting he would show in the corsa rosa. Sure enough, on the toughest stage of Trentino, which finished on the Punta Veleno climb, Pozzovivo chipped off the front and left the rest of a good field (Cunego, Kreuziger, Basso) looking a bit slow, winning the stage and, effectively, the overall classification.

And now here comes the science. An Italian Cycling Federation physiologist, Fabrizio Tacchino, calculated that Pozzovivo’s VAM (velocita ascensionale media) [average climbing speed] on the Punta Veleno climb was close to the limit of what has been calculated for other world-class riders. Ironically the VAM equation had first been elaborated and used by Dr Michele Ferrari who used it to calculate his client riders’ form.

Essentially the calculation is done by timing the rider up a climb of known length and vertical height, to work out the VAM in metres per hour. Steeper climbs naturally result in slightly higher figures because at the lower speeds, there is less wind resistance. Power output can also be estimated based on a rider’s weight.

According to those credible Italian sources, Pozzovivo’s VAM on the Punto Veleno climb was 1,886 m/h and he managed to generate an average power output on the 8.5km climb of 329 watts or 6.1 watts/kg for the 29-25 minute duration. Not quite the 6.8watts/kg the late cycling coach Aldo Sassi estimated Marco Pantani was expressing in his heyday, or the 6.7 that Lance Armstrong’s former coach Ferrari claimed was essential to win the Tour.

But even 6.1 watts per kilo is a big number. Sassi was reported in the New York Times in 2010 to say that in the entire 2009 Giro, only one rider, winner Denis Menchov, produced more than 6.0 watts/kg on a climb. Contador and Andy Schleck were estimated on the Science of Sport website at 5.9 watts/kg on the Tourmalet at the end of the 2010 Tour, although that was a longer effort than Pozzovivo’s.

With lots of mountains to come and a relatively short time trial to finish the race off in Milan, might Pozzovivo turn out to be this year’s Contador?

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Words by Cycle Sport Staff

Wednesday May 9 2012

Our cover star this month is Tom Boonen, whose extraordinary Spring Classics campaign was one of the most impressive purple patches ever seen in cycling. Boonen started the GP E3 as one of the main favourites, but speculation about his chances was always qualified by the general feeling that his best days were some time in the past. Just a fortnight later, the cycling world was celebrating a unique quadruple victory for the Belgian: E3, Ghent-Wevelgem, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, the last of which was taken in a stunning long solo break. We wondered, is Tom Boonen the best cobbled Classics rider ever?

Well, is he? Boonen’s spring quartet made for some interesting stats. He’s now the outright or joint record-holder of wins in all four events. Boonen is the only rider to have won five E3s, one of five riders (with Eddy Merckx, Rik Van Looy, Mario Cipollini and Robert Van Eenaeme) to have won Ghent-Wevelgem three times, one of five riders (with Johan Museeuw, Eric Leman, Fiorenzo Magni and Achiel Buysse) to have won the Tour of Flanders three times, and one of only two (with De Vlaeminck) to have won Paris-Roubaix four times. He’s won 15 cobbled Classics in total, three ahead of Van Looy.

Edward Pickering looked back over the important moments of Boonen’s incredible Classics campaign, from the narrow sprint victory at E3, through the confident teamwork of Ghent-Wevelgem and the invincible tactical shutdown at the Tour of Flanders, to the crushing masterpiece of Paris-Roubaix.

ALSO IN THE MAGAZINE…

Jonathan Tiernan-Locke gives hope to overweight wasters everywhere that it’s never too late to knuckle down and make something of yourself [not sure about that, I think it’s too late for Cycle Sport’s staff - Ed]. Even after his strong showing in the Tour of Britain last year, the cycling world had Tiernan-Locke down as a strong domestic rider who’d merely timed his 2011 peak well. By the time the 27-year-old Endura Sport rider had won an incredible five European races early this spring, including the Tour du Haut Var and Tour of the Mediterranean, we realised that Great Britain had a new cycling star. Where had he been hiding all this time?

Ellis Bacon, along with photographer Simon Keitch, went to visit Tiernan-Locke at home in Devon, to find out more, and found an engaging, intelligent interviewee. Tiernan-Locke explained how illness prevented him from following up on his early promise as a racer, and recalled going to university instead, where he threw himself wholeheartedly into student life, with the attendant beer-induced weight gain. But a mid-20s comeback put him back on track. You could say his life went from Union Bar to Haut Var.

The regular column from Cycle Sport’s anonymous rider in the peloton, Our man in the bunch, looks at the common myths and misconceptions people have about professional cycling. Our writer explodes the four myths, that sprinters can’t climb, that climbers can’t ride on the flat, that the early break is an easy one to get into, and lastly, that pro riders are scientific with their training. “I’ve seen a rider come back to the hotel from a drinking session during a Grand Tour, and not only continue without a blip the next day, but also manage to run top five on the stage,” he writes.

You think that being a professional cyclist is tough? It all depends on your viewpoint, really. Sky rider Rigoberto Uran probably thinks of it as a relatively straightforward existence, compared to his upbringing in Colombia. In 2001, when Uran was 14, his father was accidentally killed during a gun battle between government paramilitaries and guerrillas, and Uran had to take over his father’s breadwinning role, at the same time as continuing with school, and training on his bike. His 14-hour-a day shift started early. “I would train from half-six to half-eight in the morning, sell lottery tickets walking the streets until one in the afternoon, go to school until seven, then sell lottery tickets again until 11 at night,” Uran tells Alasdair Fotheringham. For the rest of Uran’s incredible story, including turning professional at 19 and winning a stage of the Tour of Switzerland at just 20, read the magazine.

SPECIAL FEATURE – THE BEST GRAND TOUR RIDERS IN HISTORY

It’s Giro d’Italia time! And to celebrate, we’ve scoured the record books to find out who the best Grand Tour riders in history are. No prizes for guessing who number one is – one day we’ll work out a cycling ranking that doesn’t have Eddy Merckx at the very top, but the rest of the list makes fascinating reading.

We’ve ranked the winners and podium-placers of all three Grand Tours, counting wins first, then second places, then third places. Merckx, with 11 wins – five Tours, five Giros and a Vuelta – to his name, as well as a single second place, in the 1975 Tour, is number one. But there are some surprising names in our top 50. A certain Texan might have dominated the Tour de France, but he’s only the sixth-best Grand Tour rider in history, because he all but ignored the other two events.

The highest-ranked current rider is Alberto Contador (ahem), in 11th place with four wins (that’s after a Giro and a Tour have been taken out for his clenbuterol positive), while the great late-1980s trio of Laurent Fignon (three wins, two seconds and a third), Pedro Delgado (three wins, two seconds and three thirds) and Greg LeMond (three wins, a second and two thirds) are all between 12th and 16th place. Our history of the Grand Tour winners is a fascinating look back at the very best stage racers, with great archive photography. Will this year’s Giro see Ivan Basso move up from his current position of 34th?

We’re glad we never had to be Adam Blythe’s schoolteachers. He’s a very, very naughty boy.

Well, he’s not, these days. Andy McGrath caught up with Blythe at the Tour of Oman, and found the BMC rider willing to talk about the misdemeanours and differences in outlook which saw him part company with the British Cycling Academy. Instead of following the traditional route through the BC system, Blythe cut his own path through cycling, netting a contract with Omega Pharma, where he became one of Philippe Gilbert’s wingmen, and now BMC. Blythe is a natural cyclist – he finds his way through the bunch by instinct, and is described by Sky rider Ben Swift as a “scuttler”. The best demonstration of this was at the Tour of Qatar. When Fabian Cancellara attacked from a select lead group on the crosswind-hit stage four, only one rider was able to follow, on a strip of tarmac about two centimetres wide on the sheltered side of Cancellara: Adam Blythe.

Who is the real Peter Velits? Is it the rider who suffered poor form and came 18th in last year’s Tour? Or the rider who stormed to a spectacular third overall at the 2010 Vuelta. Andy McGrath went to find out, and discovered that paradoxically, it’s both. The Slovak is a character of contradictions – both ambitious and surprisingly laid-back about his career. Until now, he’s been a reticent interviewee. But he was open with CS about having been to see a psychologist, who helped Velits unblock the over-thinking which was, according to him, holding him back. When looking at the likely contenders for the 2012 Tour, don’t forget Velits – in that so-called disastrous 2011 event, he still came fourth on Alpe d’Huez – ahead of all the GC contenders save Contador and Sanchez. Maybe this year we’re going to see the real Peter Velits.

We sent ace photographer Richard Baybutt to Paris-Roubaix to document the story behind the race. While Tom Boonen made the headlines, a hundred more stories were being written behind him. In these stunning pictures, we’ve told some of them.

Bjarne Riis is a difficult man to like. He came from obscurity to win the 1996 Tour at a suspicious-looking canter, and lied for years about how he’d done it, in spite of the fact that he might just as well have done interviews with a big, bright neon sign, saying “Hey, everybody, I took EPO”. He built a career as a team manager on the back of his cycling success, then confessed to his sins at a time which was convenient for him. Now Riis’s autobiography, Stages of light and dark has been translated into English. While the book will probably reinforce whatever you already think of Riis, and there’s plenty that has been left out, it’s a fascinating read. The way Riis deals with the doping, both his own, and that of riders on his teams, is unsatisfactory. But his history as a cyclist is a varied one to say the least. In this exclusive extract, Riis recalls his early days as a pro on the Belgian circuit with Brian Holm.

Mark Renshaw is the best lead-out man in the world. And he could have continued being so for the next five years or more, in a comfortable niche. But the Australian came to a career crossroads midway through last year when Bob Stapleton announced that the HTC team would finish at the end of the season. Instead of following Mark Cavendish to Sky, or offering his services as a leadout man to other teams, Renshaw decided to strike out alone and develop himself as a sprinter. He told Alasdair Fotheringham about why he made that decision, and how he is thriving on the pressure and increased responsibility.

We take carbon frames for granted to such an extent these days that it’s easy to forget that the science of their construction is still in its infancy. Matt Walsh tracked down one of the real pioneers of carbon bike frame construction, Craig Calfee, who made Greg LeMond’s 1991 race bike. Calfee told Walsh his amazing story, from landing a job in 1987 at a boat-building company who were using carbon racing shells for the Olympic Games and realising that the technology could be adapted for bikes, making his own bike frame, setting up a bike-making company (“in a garage alley with a meth clinic down the street – there were heroin addicts hanging around so I got a pitbull to guard the front door”) to being contacted by Greg LeMond, who was reportedly dissatisfied with the models he had been riding previously. Along with photographs of LeMond’s original Calfee-made frame, in its classic luminous Z team colours, this is a fascinating piece of cycling archaeology.

Matt Walsh blogs at www.atwistedspoke.com

In Iconic Places we tend to focus on the mountains, but this month we’ve found one of cycling’s most famous lakes. The Lac de Vassivière, in central France, has hosted a multitude of Tour de France time trials, including one of the all-time classics in 1990, when Greg LeMond finally prised the yellow jersey from the grip of Claudio Chiappucci. Chris Sidwells has looked at the technical and challenging route of the Vassivière TT, and celebrated its rich history in cycling, which extends to as recently as a stage finish in this year’s Paris-Nice.

Plus…All our regular features – Graham Watson looks back at the Classics; Shop Window features the latest in brightly-coloured and extravagant bike kit; Broomwagon has dug out some other handwritten apologies following Denis Galimzyanov’s explanation of his EPO positive; EuroTrash; Wiggo; Q&A with Niki Terpstra (“I’m not a big wine connoisseur, I just drink what’s in the fridge.”); Classics stats overload; Fantasy team; Chris Sutton draws a marvellous self-portrait for the Write stuff; Top 10 surprising race winners; Geraint Thomas tells us all about Danny Pate; great writing, excellent photography and much, much more.

That’s 12 major features, along with all the extras, for the flagrantly reasonable and recession-busting price of just £4.35.

Cycle Sport July, featuring the very best writing and photography of professional cycling, is available now in the UK, and will be on sale in the USA shortly. It is also available electronically through Zinio.

Words by Kenny Pryde

Thursday May 10, 2012

The team time trial – it’s a discipline in search of some love and a home, cycling’s foster care case. The discipline has been long since dumped from the Olympics and World championships and rotates in and out of Tour and Giro routes on a whim of the organiser. The TTT is no longer any part of any other major races, but stuck into the programme of a Grand Tour to test the survival of the weakest.

If nothing else, this heartless and unloved affair poses team managers a selection conundrum. If you really fancy yourselves as contenders for overall honours, your aim is to not lose a lot of time on the other contenders. But to do that you need to bring along some big boys capable of horsing it along the flat. At the same time, you’ll need to protect your interests in the mountains and those TTT turbo diesels aren’t going to be much use then. There are also plenty of other tactics you need to understand.

So, as a manager, you pick a team that you hope won’t fall apart after 10 kilometres, but probably won’t win either. The main thing is that your GC man won’t lose the sort of time that requires a sundial rather than a stopwatch to calculate. The truth these days is that you don’t really need to worry too much about ruining your chances of winning the race overall if you lose time in the TTT since their distances in the Giro have been reduced to around 40 kilometres.

In recent history (the last 20 years), the team that triumphed in a TTT rarely provided the winner overall. The exceptions are just that – exceptional. US Postal and Lance Armstrong won the longer Tour de France TTTs in the early 2000s – but never by massive amounts. Happily, some might say, 2012 Giro TTT winners Garmin are not US Postal and Ryder Hesjedal is not Lance Armstrong.

More saliently, only twice in the same period has the winning TTT team contained the overall winner of the Giro – and those are special cases too. Ivan Basso’s CSC Team was way too strong for everyone else in 2006. The following year, 2007, that other paragon of the era, Danilo Di Luca, won the Giro after his Liquigas team won the TTT. It’s probably safe to say that Garmin and Hesjedal won’t mind being not being classed in the same company as either of these two gents and their physiology-defying blood chemistry.

The days when Grand Tour contender could (and often would) lose four minutes or more over the duration of a 42km team time trial are, thankfully, over. Pedro Delgado’s Spanish Reynolds team did so in the 1989 Tour de France TTT, finishing dead last out of twenty-two teams, 4-32 behind winners Super U. Even Cafe de Colombia beat them. Poor ‘Perico’ finished third overall by the time the race finished in Paris, 3-34 down on winner Greg LeMond. He can probably laugh about it now. Or maybe not.

On stage four of this Giro, the team propping up the time sheets – Euskaltel Euskadi, the Cafe De Colombia des nos jours if you like – only lost 2-22 to the stage winners Garmin, although there was a little bit of a drag on the Verona TTT course, which, presumably, helped the Basque climbers.

But enough of the history, who were the ‘winners’ in the Giro TTT? Apart from Garmin and Hesjedal, you have to see the performances of the Astana and Katusha teams as signs of things to come in the mountains. Given that those teams aren’t crammed with flat-land rouleurs, it suggests they’ve got the preparation right and that we’ll be seeing a lot more of Flèche Wallonne winner Joaquim Rodriguez (Katusha) and Roman Kreuziger (Astana) in the 2012 Giro’s mountains.

And the losers? None of the overall contenders really fell off a cliff in terms of time loss and none of them looked to be struggling to keep up – even the appalling early season form of Liquigas leader Ivan Basso (33rd at 0-47) seems to be turning around. Relatively speaking, Lampre didn’t look great – 12th at 34 seconds, which won’t help either Damiano Cunego (83rd at 1-19) or Michele Scarponi (85th at 1-22) scrape their way onto the bottom step of the podium. And what of late Giro call-up Frank Schleck? Instead of relaxing this week and planning his training to peak for July, he’s 1-09 down in 68th place. It can only get better for the RadioShack rider. Unless it gets worse.

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Words by Kenny Pryde

Wednesday May 9, 2012

On stage three of the Giro d’Italia at Horsens, a piece of spectacularly bad riding by Roberto Ferrari saw six riders hit the deck including the reigning world champion and the maglia rosa. There can’t have been too many times in history where two such prestigious jerseys have simultaneously hit the deck, so hard, so fast and for so little reason. Luckily, both Mark Cavendish and Taylor Phinney broke nothing except wheel rims.

Massed sprint finishes to flat stages are inherently dangerous. You don’t often see a wince-inducing tangle of bikes and bodies in a hill-top finish. The immutable law of cycling is that where there are sprint finishes, there will occasionally be crashes. And in the early stages of a Grand Tour, when riders are fresh and unsure how many chances they are going to get to win, crashes are more likely still.

Needless to say, there was a furore in the Giro and, although all the riders who came down got up to ride another day, it was the most surprising cycling deviation seen since Robert Millar went off course at Guzet Neige. We all gasped at just how far Ferrari leapt to his right, leaving Mark Cavendish no place to go but down. Who knew a Ferrari could handle like that?

For his pains (none, as it happened, since he crossed the line in 10th place), the 29-year-old Androni Giocattoli rider was demoted to last place on the stage, though many were left to wonder just what the UCI commisaires would judge as ‘dangerous riding’ or if they’d throw the Italian off the race. You wonder what a sprinter has to do to actually be excluded? Quite a lot actually.

When Mapei’s Tom Steels launched a bidon at fellow sprinter Fréderic Moncassin inside the final meters of a bunch sprint at Marennes during the 1997 Tour de France, most observers were simply stunned at the Belgian champion’s bike handling skills and dexterity. The UCI Jury was less impressed and Steels was thrown off the race, ‘convicted’ of dangerous riding. It seemed harsh because nobody actually crashed. When Mario Cipollini actually punched Vitalicio Seguros rider Francisco Cerezo to the ground before stage 14 of the 2000 Vuelta had even started, well, that’s a red card offence that even the most lenient UCI judge can’t ignore – and Cerezo wasn’t even a rival sprinter…

In the mid-1990s the UCI actually considered painting sprinting lanes inside the final few hundred metres of stage finishes to help work out who had switched line and who hadn’t. It never got off the page and onto the ground, however. The riders weren’t keen either since some were worried that the paint would be slippery in the wet and make sprints…more dangerous.

But sprinting is essentially chaotic, which is why the ‘safest’ sprints (forgive the oxymoron) are those in which a team succeeds in stamping some semblance of order and authority on them. If you think back to the late 1980s of SuperConfex and PDM teams when Pinball Pete, aka Jean-Paul Van Poppel, was in his prime, Jelle Nijdam, Gerrit Solleveld and John Talen could keep the pace high and make sure everyone kept in line. And if they didn’t Van Poppel was handy enough with his shoulders.

And, in Mario Cipollini’s pomp, the ultra-lean musclemen in his Saeco train – Mario Scirea, Giuseppe Calcaterra and Eros Poli among them – also made sure everyone behaved and stayed out of Super Mario’s way en route to his record 42 Giro d’Italia stage wins. Eat your heart out Alfredo Binda, you thought that your record was safe, didn’t you?

And in more recent seasons, we saw Mark Cavendish’s HTC-Highroad lead-out train maintain order to great effect. The lesson would appear to be that when there’s a dominant sprinter and a team built substantially around that rider, sprinting is safer for everyone involved, even though the stage results are more predictable. We’ve witnessed various short eras where teams and sprinters have helped keep everyone in line, but perhaps now, as Sky and Cavendish try to hone their train-driving skills, we are in for a period of sprint chaos, which increases the risk of someone coming off the rails in spectacularly messy fashion. Yes, Ferrari, the whole cycling world is looking at you. By the way, Matt Goss of Orica GreenEdge gave the team its first big win, but nobody is going to remember that now, are they?

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Words by Edward Pickering

Sunday April 22, 2011

Did Maxim Iglinskiy win Liège-Bastogne-Liège, or did Vincenzo Nibali lose it?

The Italian rider did everything but win. He detonated the race with a double attack on the Côte de la Roche aux Faucons – first smashing the front group into pieces on the climb, then again over the top and into the descent. And for 15 of 20 kilometres, his lone escape looked like a victory procession: the boldest and strongest rider laying waste to his rivals’ ambitions.

But Nibali would have been well-advised to heed the tactical plan the Astana team were concocting behind him. With three strong and in-form riders among the surviving dozen or so – Amstel winner Enrico Gasparotto, Robert Kiserlovski and Iglinskiy – their race wasn’t over. The group, mainly filled with race favourites and team leaders, was far too disparate, ambitious and disorganised to mount a coherent chase, so Astana got to work.

The trio spent a few kilometres nagging and provoking the group with all three attacking in turn, until the group finally tired of it, and allowed Iglinskiy and Flèche Wallonne winner Joaquim Rodriguez (Katusha) up the road. Away from the momentum-sucking distraction of the rest of the group, Iglinskiy dealt with Rodriguez on the penultimate climb, the steep Côte de St Nicolas, then set about closing the gap to Nibali over the bumpy setts of the streets through Liège.

The difference between the two riders was heartbreaking to watch. Iglinskiy’s gaze didn’t waver, his eyes fixed on the rider in lime green ahead of him, while Nibali’s focus intermittently switched between the road just ahead of his front wheel, occasional glances up, and increasingly frequent looks over his shoulder. His pedalling, so fluent after the Roche aux Faucons, was laboured.

Who wasn’t on Nibali’s side, during those final kilometres? It was the classic battle between the underdog and the tyranny of sporting logic, between romance and gritty reality. Where better than the grimy, shabby suburbs of Liège to watch gritty reality prevail?

Iglinskiy bore down on Nibali on the final climb in Ans, went past him, looked round once, and simply rode away from him. The Italian’s resistance had long since broken, and the race was lost.

The Kazakh continued Astana’s astonishing run of success in the hilly Classics. Gasparotto won Amstel (with Iglinskiy 11th), Kiserlovski was fifth in Flèche (with Gasparotto and Iglinskiy 11th and 13th respectively. And with Gasparotto winning the sprint for third behind Iglinskiy and Nibali, they occupied two thirds of the podium in Liège. How are they doing it?

***
The terrible weather, uninspiring environs of post-industrial Wallonia and the paucity of tactical enterprise shown by almost every team meant that this Liège-Bastogne-Liège was late in coming to life.

Just as the only plan in Amstel seemed to be to control the race and wait for the Cauberg, and the only plan in Flèche seemed to be to control the race and wait for the Mur de Huy, the plan for Liège-Bastogne-Liège seemed to be to control the race and wait for La Redoute. The only surprising thing that really happened was that, actually, not much happened on La Redoute, save for BMC riding such a hard tempo that attacking was impossible. Route one tactics.

The early break went, consisting of six optimistic souls: Dario Cataldo (Omega Pharma), Gregory Habeaux, Kevyn Ista (both Accent-Willems), Simon Geschke (Argos), Reinier Honig (Landbouwkrediet) and Alessandro Bazzana (Type 1). Their lead ballooned, then sagged.

Behind, just a few teams showed imagination: Pierre Rolland attacked for Europcar, taking Vasil Kiryienka (Movistar) and David Le Lay (Saur), with 80 kilometres to race, taking another 10 kilometres to cross the two-minute gap to the leaders. Lotto, BMC, Katusha, RadioShack and Astana were happy to ride tempo, but with Rolland and Kiryienka defending from the front for their leaders Thomas Voeckler and Alejandro Valverde, at least not everybody was sleepwalking to the final climbs.

Rolland, the winner at Alpe d’Huez in the Tour de France last year, was a dangerous rider to let up the road, and his attack demonstrated Europcar’s burgeoning confidence. Voeckler was eighth in the Tour of Flanders, fifth in Amstel and fourth in Flèche, and Europcar were the only team to try and engineer an advantage, rather than wait for a straight fight.

What the television cameras don’t show in Liège-Bastogne-Liège is the slow erosion of the peloton from the back. As Lotto and BMC chased the leaders, the peloton shrank to around a hundred riders in the approach to La Redoute. Rain hammered down, and the bunch rode through the gloom to the base of La Redoute.

GreenEdge reminded us they were in the race by putting riders on the front through the slithery streets of Remouchamps to the base of the climb, then BMC took over. It might have looked that they were showing supreme confidence in their leader, defending champion Philippe Gilbert, but it was more likely that Gilbert knew full well that he was in no fit state to win the race in anything other than a sprint up the final hill – keeping the race together was his only chance. It was a bluff, and for a while, it was a successful one, because BMC throttled the race up and over the climb, and down the other side, reducing the lead bunch to 30 or 35 riders. It suited the others for two reasons: first, they didn’t have to think, and second, Rolland and Kiryienka still needed to be chased down, and everybody was quite happy for BMC to do it. Kiryienka was more or less marooned now – Valverde, who’s had uncertain form for a few weeks now anyway, suffered a mechanical on La Redoute which put him behind the lead group: a third reason for BMC to work

BMC, with Tejay Van Garderen and Mauro Santambrogio leading the race in a single file through Sprimont all the way to the bottom of the Roche aux Faucons, were so strong that in hindsight, they might have been better off sitting back and saving all three riders for a less predictable finale. But nobody knew that at the time, and the early signs of real ambition were shown in the fight for Gilbert’s wheel before the climb: first Nibali, then Voeckler occupied the prime slot. Gilbert wasn’t going to win, that much was clear already, but the others weren’t yet bold enough to ride their own race. They were still planning their race around the defending champion.

On the climb, Nibali’s pedalling looked so easy that the balance of power away from Gilbert and towards the Italian was perceptible. On the early slopes, Nibali kept looking at the others, as if he still didn’t know what to do. But about halfway up, he unleashed an attack that only Vanendert and Gilbert could follow, as Rolland’s adventure was finally ended. Nibali went again over the top, and carried his effort through onto the descent.

Nibali was liberated – no longer looking to the others, he followed the motorbikes through the curves of the descent and engineered a lead of 15 seconds while his rivals dithered and recovered. The Italian had been a frustrated third at Milan-San Remo, having taken Simon Gerrans and Fabian Cancellara with him when he attacked on the Poggio. This time, he’d succeeded in attacking alone. It was as if a light had come on in his head, with the realisation that he was the strongest rider and the best descender, and that the win was there to be taken.

And while Nibali rode with conviction, the group behind started turning on each other. Gilbert was isolated, and in no mood for doing the chasing anyway. Even when Iglinskiy and Rodriguez started the process of bridging, Nibali looked imperious. Over the Côte de St Nicolas, he still looked in control of his destiny.

But Iglinskiy had already launched into a thrilling pursuit of the Italian through the streets of Liège, and one by one, he prised Nibali’s fingers from the winner’s trophy. The denouement was almost anticlimactic: Iglinskiy crossed the line alone, but he’d won the race the moment Nibali started looking backwards, not forwards.

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Words by Edward Pickering

Wednesday April 18, 2012

Katusha might have been forgiven for asking their riders to lie low following the announcement of Denis Galimzyanov’s positive test for EPO this week. If the positive, the third for the team in recent years, wasn’t embarrassing enough, the team somehow persuaded Galimzyanov to handwrite a letter of explanation for their website which raised more questions than answers. Such as, why did the team not provide a more supportive anti-doping culture?

But instead of skulking in the shadows, Katusha were the dominant force in Flèche Wallonne, infiltrating attacks, following moves, chasing breaks, and eventually delivering Joaquim Rodriguez into a position to win the race. The Spaniard looked in a class of his own on the Mur de Huy, launching a single devastating attack out of the 20 per cent S-bend halfway up, quickly distancing his rivals, and building enough of a lead to be able to showboat the last 50 metres. Perhaps he’ll submit a race report for the Katusha website, in flamboyant, joined-up script this time, rather than Galimzyanov’s biro scrawl.

The rest of the contenders were equally matched – Michael Albasini of GreenEdge, prominent near the front all the way up the Mur, held his nerve and ground his way over the line to finish second, while BMC’s Philippe Gilbert, the architect of an equally destructive attack to win last year, was third. The Belgian champion struggled at the Tour of Flanders and was left floundering in sixth at Amstel Gold, but seemed to have a little more zip in his legs in Huy. If Liège-Bastoge-Liège were held in a week’s time, you’d bet on him winning. But with four days left to salvage his spring, he’s left it tantalisingly late to hit top form.

***
The race organisers, ASO, perhaps mindful of the fact that Flèche Wallonne has turned into a group ride to the bottom of the Mur de Huy, followed by a slow-motion sprint up in recent years, tried their best to spice up the finale with the insertion of two climbs late in the race. Neither the Côte d’Amay, with 15 kilometres to go, nor the Côte de Villers-le-Bouillet with eight kilometres to go, were particularly difficult, although in the bad weather, the descents looked more dangerous than the climbs.

But the race still followed the now-familiar formula of escape-chase-catch. In horrible conditions – chilly hammering rain and occasional bursts of blinding sunshine, Anthony Roux of FDJ and Dirk Bellemakers of Landbouwkrediet bravely volunteered to spend the day off the front, riding to a five-minute lead. There was a brief interruption to normality when Topsport Vlaanderen’s Sander Armee inexplicably set off in pursuit just as the gap was at its largest. This kind of effort is disparagingly known as a “chasse-patate” – potato hunting. In the end, all he did was give the peloton an extra carrot to chase. Incredibly, as the bunch bore down on him with 45 kilometres to go, and the gap to the leading pair still at two minutes, he visibly made an effort to hold off his pursuers.

Andy Schleck motored off the front with 42 kilometres to ride along with Katusha’s Yuri Trofimov and Astana’s Dimitriy Fofonov. But with Lotto committed to the chase, their escape was short-lived. Movistar’s Giovanni Visconti had a go with Tom Slagter of Rabobank, chased again by Lotto, with a little help from Katusha. Each escape was allowed only enough rope to hang themselves with. The seeming futility of the attacking enterprise was best illustrated by the fact that Roux and Bellemakers, the original escapees, and Visconti and Slagter, were all shut down at the same time, over the Côte d’Amay. The peloton was merciless: with enough teams having an interest in a sprint up the Mur, escape on the terrain offered by Flèche Wallonne was impossible.

Over the penultimate climb, the Côte de Villers-le-Bouillet, there was one more try: in a brave move, Ryder Hesjedal of Garmin attacked, then managed to attack again off the counter-attack of Astana’s Maxim Iglinskiy, taking Sky’s Lars-Petter Nordhaug with him. The duo squeezed out a lead of 13 seconds by the foot of the Mur de Huy. It was nowhere near enough. Once again, the race would come down to a bunch sprint up the Mur.

Behind Hesjedal and Nordhaug, Katusha led the chase. Lotto, working for Jelle Vanendert, were also prominent. Albasini was already working hard near the front for his second place.

On the Mur de Huy, tactics are extremely simple. Riders have one bullet to use, and it has to be carefully aimed. Hesjedal and Nordhaug had already spent theirs: Hesjedal led into the S-bend, and by the time the race exited it, he was an also-ran.

Rodriguez went early. Runner-up last year, he’d had the best seat in the house to watch Gilbert’s winning attack, at about the same point on the climb. This time, it was the Spaniard who soared away. There was no question about the timing of his attack – the others were already at their limit, and he easily distanced them.

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Words by Edward Pickering

Sunday April 15, 2012

The lesson of 2012, and it’s one we should remind ourselves of every new season, is that previous performance is no indication of future results: the form of riders can go down as well as up.

This time last year, we were rubbing our eyes in disbelief as Philippe Gilbert simply rode away from the field through the Cauberg’s famous S-bend to win Amstel Gold. And there was something about the way Gilbert was marshalling his BMC team to control the final kilometres of this year’s race that might have tempted fans to think that a third consecutive win was on the cards.

But the 2012 Philippe Gilbert has looked like a shadow of his former self. The lightning acceleration and confidence of last year has been transformed into a laboured unsureness. The Belgian still attacked through the Cauberg’s bends, but while he used to leave riders floundering in his wake, he now just gives them a launchpad to overtake him. A trio of riders followed Gilbert, and just as they closed down Katusha’s Oscar Freire, whose bold solo bid for victory came to an end just 100 metres from the line, Enrico Gasparotto of Astana got his timing and technique just right to win the race.

It was a desperate, slow-motion sprint for the line, but of the three protagonists – Gasparotto, Peter Sagan (Liquigas) and Jelle Vanendert (Lotto-Belisol) – only Gasparotto was sprinting on his handlebar drops, like a sprinter. Sagan and Vanendert were on their brake hoods, sprinting like climbers. Runner-up Vanendert smacked his handlebars in frustration over the line, while Sagan looked bewildered at yet another major win escaping from his grasp: the Slovak has achieved a second, a third, a fourth and a fifth in the 2012 Classics. A win is inevitable, but losing is becoming a worrying habit for Sagan.

***

It’s ironic that the Amstel Gold organisers moved the finish of their race to the top of the Cauberg in 2003 to spice up the race after a series of small group sprints in the previous finish in Maastricht. The climb now exercises a chilling effect on the race, which more or less follows the formula for a Tour de France stage: early break gets gap, early break gets closed down, the uphill sprinters sprint up the hill, the end. The teams with strong uphill sprinters – RadioShack, BMC, Lampre and, yes, Astana, kept control of the race in no different a fashion than HTC used to for Mark Cavendish at the Tour. Katusha, with uphill sprinter Joaquim Rodriguez, one of the pre-race favourites, also contributed, but their imaginative plan B – Oscar Freire to attack in the final 10 kilometres – made the difference between it being a good race and a dull one. Freire came within seconds of winning, after BMC and Lampre misjudged the final chase.

The early break comprised nine riders. While none of them looked like a potential winner, there were a couple of interesting angles for them to explore. Garmin, who compensate for a relative lack of spending power for big names by putting a lot of thought into their tactics, got two men into it. The nine were also given a generous lead, which went out over 13 minutes. It meant that the pursuit was going to be a bit harder than it should have been.

As the break hit the penultimate climb of the Cauberg to start the final 70-kilometre lap, helpfully denoted on the official race map in nature’s warning colour of red, their lead started to melt, as did any sense that they would be co-operating much longer. On the Loorberg, climb 25 of 31, Ag2r’s Romain Bardet attacked, drawing Lampre’s Simone Stortoni, Garmin’s Alex Howes and Euskaltel’s Pello Bilbao away. Topsport Vlaanderen’s Eliot Lietar and Howes’ team-mate Raymond Kreder laboriously bridged, putting six men at the front.

From the peloton, Chris Sorensen (Saxo Bank) and Maxim Iglinskiy (Astana) tried speculative attacks, but all they did was provide the peloton with an additional carrot to chase – neither spent more than a few hundred metres off the front.

The bunch was in sight behind the leaders on the straight, narrow slopes of the Gulperberg with 27 kilometres to ride. Bardet went again, taking Howes with him, forming a two-up of first-year WorldTour riders at the front. Bardet, who only turned 21 last November, was looking better on the climbs, although it might have come down to gear selection – while he spun away over the climbs a few metres clear of Howes, the American ground a bigger gear in his wake. And while the group had been eroded almost to its basic constituents, the peloton was starting to look ragged at the rear, losing more riders with every climb.

BMC were down to two domestiques over the final climbs – Mauro Santambrogio and Greg Van Avermaet, but somehow they managed to control the race and lead the chase. Even at this point, they believed in their leader’s ability to do what he had done in 2011. They closed down an attack from Edvald Boasson Hagen that was one part aggression, one part strength, but unfortunately also one part bluff. Still, there was no more indication that anybody would be able to escape than on a flat stage of the Tour de France. Thomas Voeckler, inevitably, put in a dig, taking Peter Sagan with him. It’s not the first time in a Classic this year that Sagan has wasted energy that would be better used in a sprint following the wrong break, having also done so in Ghent-Wevelgem. Then again, maybe the experience of seeing the wrong team-mate – Vincenzo Nibali – go with the right break at Milan-San Remo has scarred him more than we think.

Bardet had dropped Howes on the penultimate climb, the Keutenberg, and his own adventure came to an end with 10 kilometres to go.

But there was only one dangerous attack in the entire race, and that was the surprising Oscar Freire, seven kilometres from the finish. At the time it looked like an obvious decoy for Joaquim Rodriguez: force rival teams to chase, giving Rodriguez a springboard up the Cauberg.

It was such an obvious decoy, however, that BMC and Lampre relaxed a little too much in the chase. As Freire hared down the descent leading into the town of Valkenburg, the gap looked frighteningly big. He took the sharp left-hander at the bottom of the Cauberg with a six-second lead over Niki Terpstra of Omega Pharma, and 14 seconds over the BMC-led pursuit. Freire’s a resourceful and self-sufficient sprinter who is actually also a decent climber. Would 14 seconds be enough?

Freire tied himself in knots up the climb, but his desperate glances back told us that the story of his race wouldn’t have a happy ending. Gilbert attacked through the S-bends, but as he passed under the footbridge near the top, Sagan attacked in pursuit of Freire, and in that moment, Gilbert’s race was lost. He was passed by Sagan, Gasparotto and former team-mate Vanendert, which must have caused some smiles in the Lotto camp. Freire held on for fourth, and Thomas Voeckler also passed Gilbert to take fifth.

Gasparotto, taking his first victory since a stage of the 2010 Tirreno-Adriatico, was the biggest winner on the day, Gilbert was the biggest loser. It’s clear that the Belgian’s lack of results since joining BMC at the end of last year is starting to look like a crisis.

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Words by Edward Pickering, portraits by Richard Baybutt

Wednesday April 11, 2012. This article first appeared in Cycle Sport April 2012

For a few days last summer, Thomas Voeckler made us dream.

Through the first week of the Tour de France, he was a nagging, prodding, irritation to the bunch – attacking, probing, a bit of grit in the oyster. In the Massif Central, he somehow battled his way into the yellow jersey, which we assumed he would be borrowing until the first Pyrenean stage found him out. Instead, he matched the pace of the favourites through the mountains, and as Paris approached, people dared to entertain an impossible thought: could Voeckler win the Tour de France?

“Non,” Voeckler tells me now.

“I never once thought of overall victory. It was never an objective, and I was extremely clear in my own mind about that.”

Voeckler pauses. “On reflection, perhaps that was a mistake,” he adds.

The dismantling of Voeckler’s defence of yellow started as the race entered the Alps. Seconds conceded on the downhill finishes into Gap and Pinerolo, where ragged descending betrayed the onset of fatigue, ballooned into minutes on the Alpe d’Huez stage following a disastrous tactical error. In the end, the combined willpower of a nation counted for nothing as Voeckler slipped off the podium, left with only fourth place and the fading memories.

***

To me, Thomas Voeckler epitomises everything that is exciting about bike racing, and I can’t help liking him. But that’s not to say that he likes me. He doesn’t dislike me either, I’m merely outside his sphere of concern.

Voeckler’s one of the most unusual characters I’ve ever interviewed. On one level, he is completely without ego and ambition. He turned down a reported 800,000 euros a year to ride for Cofidis a couple of years back, when Europcar were offering him 420,000, figuring that the family atmosphere and camaraderie which manager Jean-René Bernaudeau has built at the team was worth more than the extra 380,000 euros.

On the other hand, there’s something about him that seems to really get some people’s backs up. One prominent British rider once told me that Voeckler and his team were widely disrespected in the peloton for not doing their share of the work, for the Frenchman’s niggling attacking style. He’s portrayed, inaccurately, as publicity-hungry, a man whose ambition and media exposure is inversely proportionate to his talent as a rider, a kind of Richard Virenque for the 21st century, only without the climbers’ jerseys. Working out which of these two Thomas Voecklers is the true representation of the man is not easy.

But the most revealing comments about Voeckler won’t come from the man himself.

“Thomas is his own man,” Europcar manager Bernaudeau tells me. “He races, then he goes home to his family, and he protects that part of his life. That’s his priority.”

Voeckler is engaged in an invisible struggle, to keep his life at home as normal as possible while leading a double life as a national hero, sports star and media personality. Watching the Frenchman is as interesting as interviewing him, if only to contemplate the barriers he has built between himself and the world. Those barriers are what protect himself and his family from his success.

Before we talked, I had spent a couple of days just watching Voeckler kicking around the Europcar team’s hotel, a horribly bland Ibis on the dual carriageway out of town, the base for their pre-season training camp in Alicante. We’d set up the interview directly by text – unlike most modern cyclists, Voeckler doesn’t feel the need to shoehorn a third party into interview negotiations – and he’d responded promptly every time, while we worked out the best time and place to meet.

He was polite and accommodating at every step. No problem, I thought. But if I was under the impression that would mean hanging around with him for the whole time I was there, I would have been mistaken. For our interview, he couldn’t have been more open, talking at length, honestly and eloquently about his incredible 2011 and his self-perception. He obliged photographer Richard patiently, posing outside in the chilly late afternoon sun. But for the rest of Cycle Sport’s time at the camp, apart from a brief hello and handshake on our arrival, we didn’t exist.

At breakfast or dinner-time, he’d walk straight by our table with neither a look nor a bonjour. As the team prepared to go out riding, and we mingled with the riders and management, he’d freewheel past us, sunglasses shielding his eyes, giving us as little attention as he might a roadside tree. The barrier was up.

***

2011 was when, for the first time, Voeckler’s results matched his ambitions. The wins started early, with a stage of the Tour of the Mediterranean, and continued through the Tour du Haut Var, Paris-Nice and the Four Days of Dunkirk, which he dominated with pugnacious verve, winning solo on the most difficult stage and taking the overall. He won a race a month until June, when circumstances reinvented him as a GC rider. He was 10th in the Dauphiné, then fourth in the Tour. Fourth in the Tour!

“I had 28 top 10s last year,” Voeckler says, and he’s miscounted, because we make it 32, compared to 13 in 2010. But the surprising thing is that according to Voeckler, nothing changed last year. He didn’t enter the season any fitter or more motivated than any other year, but he explains the liberating effects of momentum.

“My condition was good, and I won early. When you’ve done the work and you win, you know that your training must have worked. So I carried on winning – I had no doubt in myself,” he says.
“I was the same rider, but the circumstances were different.”

The clearest evidence of this came on two similar days a year apart: the final stage of Paris-Nice. In 2010, Voeckler was away with Amaël Moinard on the sweeping descent into the Promenade des Anglais on the sea front in Nice. With the bunch closing rapidly, Voeckler panicked and attacked the sprint early, giving Moinard the chance to close him down and pass him before the line. But a year later, Voeckler made good the error by attacking alone above Nice to win alone.

“It wasn’t a bike race, it was war,” he recalls. “Six degrees. Rain. Dangerous roads with climbs and descents. It wasn’t so much an attack getting away as the survivors contesting the stage. I was at the front, thought carefully about it, attacked and took some risks on the descent. Paradoxically, my biggest disappointment in 2010 was turned into an exploit a year later.”

It was Voeckler’s second stage win that week. He’d been trying since 2003 to win at France’s second most prestigious stage race and perversely, two victories came along at once. He describes the first stage win as a “deliverance”.

***

Voeckler’s heroics in last year’s Tour lit up the middle portion of the race, along with Thor Hushovd’s mountain stage wins, Cavendish’s sprint victories and the FDJ team’s relentless attacking. But Voeckler had suffered a less-than-ideal run-up to the race, in spite of the good form his Dauphiné had indicated.

His wife was pregnant, with the baby due on July 10, midway through the Tour. But the baby arrived early, on the Tuesday night before the race started in Voeckler’s home region of Vendée.

“I pulled an all-nighter on Tuesday, got to the team hotel on Wednesday, and went back to the hospital on Thursday and Friday. I didn’t ride for three days, and the Tour was a long way from my thoughts,” he says.

“It was lucky that the hotel was two kilometres from my house, and seven kilometres from the hospital. I took it all as a sign of destiny.”

The 2011 Tour was also a moment of destiny for Europcar. The team, set up as an amateur squad in 1991 by Jean-Réné Bernaudeau, was celebrating its 20th anniversary, and the Tour’s Grand Départ was to take place in Vendée, the team’s base. The team had flirted with disaster at the end of 2010, with Europcar parachuting in to sponsor the team at the 11th hour, after Bernaudeau’s search for a replacement for Bouygues Telecom faltered. The late rescue was too late to prevent several strong riders, like Pierrick Fedrigo, leaving, but the team survived.

It looked like the Tour would be a hard one for an all-rounder and attacker like Voeckler to prosper in. While there was much talk of the uphill finishes in the first week breaking the race up, the sprinters’ and uphill sprinters’ teams jealously controlled the bunch, shutting down the breaks on day after day.

Voeckler made a brave attempt on the stage to Cap Fréhel, whose twisting, uphill finish he reckoned might break up the pursuit. He escaped with Jérémy Roy in the final 30 kilometres, but he was caught with two kilometres to go. The next day, at Lisieux, he escaped with Jelle Vanendert in the final three kilometres, but was caught under the flamme rouge.

All that effort, for nothing.

But Voeckler feels that without these unsuccessful forays off the front, he would never have finished fourth in the Tour.

“If I’d won there, I might not have ridden with such conviction on the St Flour stage, which would have meant I didn’t get the yellow jersey,” he says.

“At Cap Fréhel, if Jérémy Roy had had the form he was showing at the start of the Tour, we’d have stayed away. But he’d already been in a few attacks by then, and he got tired. Even then, we still got close.

“But I was finding it easy to ride at the front. It showed how good my condition was – even if I had to drop back in the bunch, I could easily find my way to the front.”

***

In 2004, Voeckler famously got into a break which earned him the yellow jersey, and the admiration of the cycling world, as he doggedly defended his lead while Lance Armstrong casually ate into it.
Seven years later, the Tour smiled on Voeckler again, when a combination of luck and circumstances gave him a second stint in the yellow jersey. On the extremely hilly stage to St Flour, Voeckler had infiltrated the perfect break, packed with strong riders and proven Tour stage winners: Sandy Casar, Juan-Antonio Flecha, Luis-Leon Sanchez and Johnny Hoogerland. Crashes in the bunch led to a truce behind, while the break forged ahead. Then the break itself suffered from a one-in-a-million piece of bad luck when a France-Television car carelessly swerved into Hoogerland and Flecha, knocking them off.

Voeckler, who was on the front, turned, assessed the situation, then put his head down and carried on riding. He’d instantaneously weighed up the pros of forging on (the yellow jersey) with the cons of sitting up to wait for two riders who would likely be unable to continue to contribute to the escape.
Voeckler was the best-placed overall out of the three survivors of the break and would gain the most from them staying away. But this meant neither Sanchez nor Casar particularly needed to contribute – the stage win was guaranteed for one of them, but the other would finish the day with nothing but tired legs. There was no reason for either to work, the better to save themselves for the finish.

“I had to do the work. Sanchez sat on me and then won the stage, but he did the right thing, and I’d have done exactly the same in his situation,” Voeckler admits.

“I’d rather there had been only two of us – that way, one of us would take the stage, the other would take yellow, and we’d both work. Instead, I had to do everything. We’d have won by more if there had been just two of us.”

At St Flour, Voeckler was presented with the yellow jersey he’d last worn on July 20, 2004, and we all wondered if he’d hang onto it at Luz Ardiden, the first Pyrenean summit finish.

But if Voeckler was concerned about saving energy for that, he didn’t show it. He followed green jersey Philippe Gilbert as he attacked the very next day on a climb with 15 kilometres to go. For a brief period, we were treated to the glorious sight of the yellow and green jerseys on the attack together, even if the bunch reasserted itself by chasing them down. Even though he wasn’t getting the stage win he craved, Voeckler looked like he was having the time of his life. Again.

“I’d be lying to you if I told you I thought I was capable of following the best riders in the mountains,” Voeckler tells me.

Voeckler was contemplating the Pyrenees in the same way as he was in 2004: a serious obstacle, but one that could be surmounted, resulting in an extra couple of days in yellow. He still wasn’t thinking like a GC rider. He calculated whether the 2-26 he held over Cadel Evans, the best of the overall favourites, would be enough to carry the yellow jersey into the Alps. After all, in 2004, he’d had 9-35 over Lance Armstrong before the mountains, and he lost all but 22 seconds of that in two summit finishes.

“When I took the jersey, there were three days to the mountains – a rest day and two flat stages. No problem, my team was strong,” he says.

“Then there was the first Pyrenean stage. I knew I had good legs from the Dauphiné, the yellow jersey gave me motivation, I didn’t think it would be a problem. The second Pyrenean stage – long downhill to the finish, no problem,” he says, counting off the days on his fingers.

“For Plateau de Beille, on the morning of the stage, I felt that I would still be in yellow that evening, but not by much.

“That climb,” he adds with understatement, “was the surprise.

Thomas Voeckler had entered the Pyrenees as a lucky chancer looking to blag a few extra days in yellow. He left them as a serious dark horse for the Tour de France.

Even as he climbed with the favourites at Luz Ardiden and Plateau de Beille, Voeckler looked nothing like a GC contender. While he was riding faster than ever before, with increasing conviction every day, his characteristic puce-faced elbows-out style made him look like the odd man out among the thoroughbred climbers. But they couldn’t drop him.

“There was one moment on the Plateau de Beille when I suddenly realised what I was capable of,” Voeckler says.

“Andy Schleck attacked, and as the yellow jersey, it was my responsibility to chase him. I was pulling him back, slowly, and just got on to his wheel. I was on the point of cracking, thinking, ‘I can’t do this.’ And then he slowed. He was no better than me. From then on, I wasn’t afraid.”

Voeckler barely gave an inch in the Pyrenees. With the other favourites riding warily and defensively, we wondered if Voeckler could do the unthinkable.

But he’d stretched himself dangerously thin over the two weeks so far, and he was exposed on the two downhill finishes into Gap and Pinerolo.

“I wasn’t managing myself well,” he admits.

“I was making efforts at the wrong time. I actually wanted to take time on the descents, but I was overcooked. I didn’t adapt to the speed and braking, and ended up going off the road.”

And then, he reprised his heroic 2004 ride up Plateau de Beille on the Col du Galibier, clawing himself up to the finish through the cold, thin air to hang on to the yellow jersey by 15 seconds.

“At that moment, it became objective: podium. I wasn’t going to win – Evans was too strong in the time trial, but I could finish on the podium.”

Unfortunately, a terrible tactical error the next day, which finished at Alpe d’Huez, cost him that ambition. He made the mistake of following the reckless, although incredibly exciting, aggression of Andy Schleck and Contador on the Col du Télégraphe. Evans and Voeckler had been the only two riders to follow, with even Frank Schleck unable to hold the pace. But Evans had to slow, appearing to suffer a mechanical, while Voeckler pressed on.

“I was caught out – I thought Evans was in physical trouble. Just at the moment he was getting dropped, a television motorbike passed Contador and gave him a little draft, while I had to close a small gap around Evans. I was already at 99 per cent, and it meant I got gapped myself. I was 20 or 30 seconds behind them all the way to the top, but I was sure the race would have exploded behind me, so I continued to chase.

“I rode on my own. Four kilometres from the top of the Galibier, I turned around and saw an organised group coming up behind me, and at that moment, I realised I had made a big mistake,” he admits.

“It was an error of judgement on my part, but also the DS in the car, who had never been in that situation before and didn’t know what to do.”

Toward the top of the Galibier, Voeckler was caught by the group, which contained team-mates Pierre Rolland, Anthony Charteau and Cyril Gautier. Rolland, his eyes on the white jersey, was allowed to go on, while Charteau and Gautier paced the faltering Voeckler up. It was heartbreaking, watching the Frenchman crack and crumble, both physically and mentally. He weaved all over the road, and as Charteau set a pace that was too fast, yet necessary if Voeckler wasn’t to lose minutes, Voeckler’s head fell off.

He hurled a water bottle to the ground, its contents exploding over the road, and shouted so loudly at Charteau that his voice audibly cracked. He shouted in pure rage, like a child having a tantrum, at Charteau, but also at himself for having fooled himself into believing he could finish on the podium of the Tour.

“I cracked,” Voeckler says.

“Tony knows me extremely well. He knew that I’d cracked, and that it was up to him to sort me out. I was incapable of doing so. Normally, when I’m done, I’m done, but he got me moving. We rode together, and he kept on at me while I was yelling at him for going too fast.

“But my team-mates got me back. I was dead, and they were dead, but if they hadn’t been there, I’d have lost 10 minutes, not three. I was telling myself, save what you can for Alpe d’Huez,” he says.

“Up Alpe d’Huez I just focused on holding on to the top. I couldn’t follow the favourites, so I rode my own race. I didn’t even know that Pierre Rolland was up ahead winning the race. As I crossed the line, the assistant DS said to me, ‘Do you know who won the stage?’ and I was thinking, ‘What are you on about?’

“I couldn’t have given a shit who’d won the stage. I’d made a mistake, lost the jersey and blown the podium, and he was about to tell me it was Contador or somebody, which would have pissed me off even more.

“Then he told me it was Pierre, and that shut me up a bit. That was good.

“But at that moment, I have to be honest, my personal disappointment was greater than my happiness for Pierre. You can’t ever be happy at losing the yellow jersey.”
Voeckler’s story of the 2011 Tour is over. Except he’s got one thing to add.

“If I’d ridden the Alpe d’Huez stage how I’d ridden the Galibier stage, I would have been second in the Tour de France. I admit I’ve found it difficult to come to terms with that.”

***

My impression is that the most important thing for Voeckler is that his success on the bike doesn’t change him, that in spite being one of the most prominent athletes in the world for 10 days last July, he can still go home to his family and be the person that they know.

“It’s important that I stay how I am,” he tells me.

“I won’t change, even if my status has changed. How I am hasn’t changed. Only the way people see me has changed. I’ve come fourth in the Tour de France, but I’m not too important to push a vacuum cleaner round the house.”

Why is he this way? We discuss the three very different cultural environs of his growing up: Alsace, Martinique and Vendée, but he professes to be influenced by all three, yet typical of none of them.
“It’s just the way I am. I’ve always been cool – no big risks in life, no bling, no big dreams. I’m happy with my team – I could earn more money elsewhere, but what if I wasn’t happy?

Voeckler is cool, even cold, to the outside world. At the same time, from a distance, I see him laughing and joking with his team-mates at dinner, and his relationship with Jean-René Bernaudeau, who has been his mentor and manager for 15 years, is as much like father and son as coach and rider. I interviewed him on the rest day of the 2009 Tour de France, where what seemed like his entire extended family had descended on Martigny, in Switzerland, to be with him. We chatted, while Voeckler played with a baby in his lap, and various relatives poked fun at him. He was a different Voeckler to the one we saw at the Tour de France this year, and that most people see at races. But the constant attention from the media and cycling fans means that he has had to protect himself.

“People do think I’m stand-offish. One of the mechanics wanted to have a jersey, and he asked one of the managers to ask me, because he was scared of asking me himself,” Voeckler laughs.

“I’m not unapproachable. I’m not like that at all, really.”

But he is. He has to be.

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Words by Cycle Sport Staff

Wednesday April 11, 2012

Cycle Sport’s Edward Pickering was at Paris-Nice to witness Bradley Wiggins’ historic victory in the race, which we’ve celebrated by making Wiggins our cover star this month. From the outside, the performance looked like classic Sky/British Cycling: it was all about the process – controlling the controllables, refusing to countenance victory until it had happened, and making it clear that this was all part of a bigger plan for July. The best that team boss David Brailsford and manager Sean Yates could do during the race was accept that things had gone very well so far.

At the post-stage press conferences, the media were limited to five questions per day, although Wiggins’ answers were, in the main, predictable. He was controlling the controllables, refusing to countenance victory until it had happened, and making it clear that this was all part of a bigger plan for July. And then, once he’d stormed up the Col d’Eze under beautiful spring sunshine to clinch the yellow jersey, the attitude was one of “job done”, although Wiggins couldn’t conceal his happiness at having won. In stealing the green jersey, he called down to a Sky cameraman from the presentation podium, “I hope Cav is watching this!”

But there was a lot more to it than that. Pickering has spoken at length to Bradley Wiggins following his victory, as well as team-mates Richie Porte and Geraint Thomas, Sean Yates and performance coach Tim Kerrison, and tells the story of the race as it unfolded, from Sky’s point of view. There are few interviewees as open and funny as Wiggins. He tells of dropping his chain and losing 25 places at the start of the climb to Mende, “emptying himself” on the climb and criticises himself for underestimating the danger of Lieuwe Westra. Then, he adds the punchline: “Then I did my warm-down on a turbo trainer, and from the reaction, you’d think I was pleasuring myself on a deckchair.”

But there’s more to Wiggins’ reaction than jokes. He explains that he has finally accepted true responsibility for leading the team at the Tour, sees this year’s Tour as a realistic target, and tells us a revealing anecdote about a quiet day recce-ing the final time trial of the Tour a couple of days before the start of Paris-Nice. “I imagined racing through those little towns and winning the Tour,” he says. “I allowed myself just a small snippet of that emotion. That feeling will be my motivation for the next few months’ training.”

WITH THIS MONTH’S MAGAZINE: OUR GIRO-STRAVAGANZA

Cycle Sport June comes with a 32-page Giro d’Italia guide, featuring all the stages, contenders and a look back at the best moments of the race’s history. With expert testimony from riders, managers and former Giro stars, this is the most in-depth guide to the race available and will be your essential companion to the first Grand Tour of the year.

There’s also a 16-page photographic supplement of the Giro: Iconic images of the race. We’ve scoured the photographic archives for some classic Giro pics: Eddy Merckx on a torrid day at Tre Cime di Lavaredo in 1968, Fignon sprinting to victory in the pink jersey in 1989 and five-time winner Fausto Coppi, among many other evocative pictures. On top of that, we’ve included three 10×8-inch retro prints on card portraying some of the race’s lighter moments.

ALSO IN THE MAGAZINE…

We’ll never know what André Greipel would have won if he’d been given the same chances as Mark Cavendish when the pair were riding for Columbia/HTC between 2008 and 2010. After his extraordinary winning streak at the 2008 Tour, the Brit was the favoured option for the team, while Greipel chafed in his shadow, riding different events, albeit with great success. Greipel feels he doesn’t have to prove his pedigree – he beat Cavendish fair and square in a straight sprint in stage 10 at last year’s Tour, and came into 2012 looking stronger and leaner than ever. Gregor Brown talked to Greipel about his character, and listened to the German talk honestly about his strengths and weaknesses. Greipel has lost sprints that a more devious sprinter might have won – rather than cut riders off when he is ahead, he refuses to cause danger by closing the door. “I’m fair in the sprint. Do I need to be more aggressive or put people into fences? No, that is not my mentality,” he says.

Our man in the bunch, Cycle Sport’s regular anonymous column from a professional rider, covers a subject of dread to much of the peloton: the travel. In Trains, planes and automobiles, our writer talks about the crafty tactics he’s developed to minimise time spent in departure lounges and tells an almost unrepeatable anecdote about the time he was missed out in the ‘airport run’ – the pick-up by a team soigneur. “’Gianni’ apologised, explaining that the traffic was terrible and that he’d arrived late. Two thoughts: ‘Gianni’ was known for having a girlfriend in almost every town in Europe, and on my taxi ride to the hotel I’d barely seen a car, let alone a traffic jam.”

Thomas Voeckler hogged the headlines in France last year for his extraordinary fourth place overall and spell in the yellow jersey. But while he got a lot of publicity, he came away not actually having won anything. On the other hand, his team-mate Pierre Rolland won the Alpe d’Huez stage and the white jersey, on his way to 10th overall. Edward Pickering interviewed Rolland earlier this year, and discovered a modest but ambitious rider, described by team boss Jean-Réné Bernaudeau as ”bien élévé” (well brought-up) and treated by the other Europcar riders as everybody’s favourite younger brother. He’s going to be good, too. At Alpe d’Huez, he worked over Alberto Contador and Samuel Sanchez, and his 10th overall (actually 11th, until Contador was stripped of his fifth overall) at the age of 24 promises further improvement. And what most people don’t realise is that Rolland lost five minutes (out of 10-43 he lost to winner Cadel Evans) getting caught behind crashes on two separate occasions in the first week. “I can finish in the top 10 of the Tour. No, I can do better than that. I can win a week-long stage race. I hope I can finish in the top five of the Tour,” he says.

Milan-San Remo is one of the most evocative races of the cycling year. Its great distance and history make it a special event. In The longest day, Andy McGrath and photographer Chris Catchpole document the day from the point of view of a single domestique, Sky’s Ian Stannard, and speak to one of the day’s breakaway riders, Michael Morkov, whose 234 kilometres off the front was longer than most races.

Our new favourite rider is Vacansoleil’s Thomas De Gendt who sheepishly explained to Gregor Brown why he’s definitely not riding the Tour de France this year. The Dutchman arranged to marry his fiancée on June 30th, the weekend before the Grand Départ, and then the start date was brought forward a week to avoid clashing with the Olympics. “The team directors told me that it might be a problem, but I said, ‘too bad,’” he explains. De Gendt is an attack-minded rider in an attack-minded team: he’s won stages in consecutive Paris-Nice races, but he’s also a strong all-rounder. He was sixth at Alpe d’Huez in last year’s Tour, then fourth in the Grenoble time trial. He professes to have no ambitions for the general classification in Grand Tours, feeling it would blunt his attacking opportunities. He won’t be in France this summer, but the Giro and Vuelta will be richer for his presence.

Mark Cavendish is currently struggling with the conundrum of how to win as many Tour stages as possible in the same team as a GC contender, and then go on to win the Olympic road race the week afterwards. His former advisor Erik Zabel could tell him how to manage it – the German often rode the Tour going for the green jersey along with Jan Ullrich going for yellow, then had to be in top form for HEW-Cyclassics, the biggest German one-day race, just after the Tour. Zabel tells Alasdair Fotheringham how he succeeded, and gives Cavendish some advice: don’t pull out of the Tour. “If he wins the green jersey then he has something in his pocket before the Games,” he says. Zabel also tells CS about his new job as sprint advisor at Katusha, and why he wishes he’d left T-Mobile sooner as a rider.

Iconic Places has an Italian flavour this month, visiting the Passo di Fedaia, better known as the Marmolada. This impossibly steep climb has become a regular Giro d’Italia fixture since its first inclusion in 1970. Chris Sidwells details the history of the climb, and recalls some of the greatest exploits on its slopes, from Stephen Roche clinching the 1987 pink jersey, to Chiappucci and Indurain’s battle of 1993.
Plus…All our regular features – Graham Watson shares his best pictures and memories of the early Classics; Shop Window puts temptation your way in the form of extraordinarily shiny bike kid; Broomwagon makes enemies of everybody, from riders, through managers to other journalists; Boonen’s brilliant spring; Any Questions with Daniele Bennati (“Everybody thinks I’ve been on the sunbed, but it’s not like that”); Fantasy team; Julian Dean: hard as nails; Top 10 hissy fits; Our man Geraint Thomas reports back from Paris-Nice; scurrilous rumours, polls, Eurotrash, Wiggo vs Evans, great writing, brilliant photography and much, much more.

That’s eight major features, plus a Giro guide, a picture book and three art prints and all our regular pieces, for £4.95. It’s barely twice the cost of the overpriced mochafrappuccino you bought from a bored barista at the railway station this morning, and it’s got none of the froth.

Cycle Sport June, featuring the very best writing and photography of professional cycling, is available from Wednesday April 11in the UK, and later in the USA. It is also available electronically through Zinio.