It’s that time of year again, the kiss-of-death predictions.

Of course the top favorite is Sagan, but me mentioning him here pretty much ruins his chances, as history has shown. So it should be a very open race!

Of course, if you exclude Sagan, it becomes almost impossible to predict the winner. Some mention Hushovd because of the predicted foul weather, but very long races aren’t always his strength and coming back from a year of inactivity, 300k looks even longer.

I really like Cancellara, and he can climb the Poggio better than most and descend it better than anybody, but will it be enough to shake off all the riders who can expertly sit on his wheel and outsprint him?

Gilbert with or without cortisones? Or Rodriguez, who can attack the Poggio in similar fashion? But what to do on the other end? Nibali, another one who can really fly up the Poggio (and also down it, although I don’t rate him as that good a descender since he regularly seems to kiss the pavement). Regardless, the only rider Nibali could outsprint would be Andy Schleck, and I’m not sure he’s spotted in any Milan hotel lately.

This shouldn’t be the race for Cavendish anymore, the way the last three climbs are ridden nowadays. But I actually think he has been targeting this race, and that we’ll see a better climbing Cav than ever. Enough to stay connected to the front? Possibly, though maybe not in this weather. He will be a very interesting guy to watch though, and there is no doubt he has his team’s support.

His old team may have a real ace in its hand. Boasson Hagen can climb much better than you would think (remember the Tour) and on a good day, he can outsprint anybody (remember his field sprint wins?) And when the weather turns bad, Boasson Hagen’s legs seem to turn well.

Greenedge has two irons in the fire with Gerrans and Goss, and if both make it over the Poggio (which they have numerous times), their combo may be a credible threat to Sagan. Even if Sagan has support from Moser, it may spell trouble for Sagan as he may have to control the race after a Moser + ?? attack rather than win himself.

Not mentioned as often but somebody who is ready for his biggest win so far is Degenkolb. He rides for a team I really like, and they deserve the boost. Plus Degenkolb’s performances last year in San Remo and Worlds show this type of course – and the race distance – suit him well. And Last year’s Vuelta showed his speed and nose for the victory is now at full strength.

So here we go, the kiss-of-death Milan-San Remo predictions:

(Sagan)
Degenkolb
Boasson Hagen
Cancellara

And my sentimental favorite? Haussler of course.

And here we go, the last of the Traits of Champions. Seems as appropriate a moment as any to discuss these. I hope you liked them.

An eleventh attribute that is harder to define in a single word is probably as important as any. Ultimately, a bicycle race is just a bicycle race, lives are not saved, the homeless are not housed. Champions seem to realize this as well, and realized that the lessons of racing and training are really only valid when applied to our life as a whole.

And that concludes the 11 traits of being a champion as used by Toby Stanton (@hottubes). If you want to see what a team based on instilling these traits in young athletes looks like, follow the amazing Hottubes Junior team.

It’s a small team always struggling to continue year after year. Nobody is getting rich off of it, quite the contrary. But it’s done for all the right reasons. Check out the team here, although you will quickly see that Toby is too busy running the team to do a great job of marketing – the site is slightly out-of-date.

There are some really nice people who support behind the scenes. If you would like to join them, contact Toby. Or why not offer a small token of your appreciation and have your frame repainted by Toby, as he does an amazing job with that.

Cyclists are amazing creatures. They risk life and limb for their sport, flying down mountains at speeds in exces of 100kmh protected only by 0.3mm of lycra on their bodies and 200g of foam on their heads.

Some even risk their lives with blood transfusions, experimental drugs and amateur voodoo.

So why don’t they have the balls to be honest about their tactics when they step off their bikes?

• We all remember Contador claiming he never saw Schleck had a mechanical in the 2010 Tour (Sure, it’s normal that your opponent is 50m ahead of you and suddenly slows down to a “Gerard Vroomen-pace”)
• Yesterday we had Sky claiming they never knew Valverde had crashed (Is it really that tough to pick out the only guy to wear the race leader’s jersey)?

These are only two examples but there are dozens. I love the unwritten rules about when to wait and when not, and I love it when they are broken or don’t apply and I love how they are then discussed endlessly.

I would say there was no reason to wait for Valverde, the pace had already picked up, the race was on and echelon riding is a skill that some haven’t mastered and which regularly involves crashes. It’s as fair to lose time there as it is in the mountains or in time trials.

But whatever you decide to do, just freakin own up to it afterwards. Don’t insult the fans by coming up with some idiotic story that you didn’t know what was happening*. Insult your rider-colleagues all you want, but take the fans seriously.

Just get off your bike and say:

We saw Valverde crash and yes, he’s the race leader, but he’s also an whiner** and a doper***. And remember how Movistar didn’t wait for Levi at Paris-Nice? Not that we minded, because that was good for us and we don’t like Levi either. But anyway, when we saw him crash we thought “payback time” and so we hit it.

But I have to say, those Movistars were bloody strong, I mean they had been on the front already for hours but they still managed to pull back from 1min15 to 30 seconds. So we made a quick call to BMC, they agreed on the price and helped us get the gap back to close to a minute. Good thing too, because after all that effort Valverde didn’t lose anything on that last climb, so he’s super-strong and a real threat and we need some cushioning.

Wouldn’t that be amazing to hear? It won’t matter on the road, whether they say it or not, the people in the peloton know the real story anyway. But it would surely be nicer for the fans.

* The irony here is that by Sky saying they didn’t know Valverde had crashed, they suggest they would have acted differently had they known. Presumably that means they would have waited for Valverde had they known he’d crashed. That’s even MORE unbelievable, as in effect that would mean there IS an unwritten rule to stop when the race leader crashes.

** By all accounts, Valverde is a pretty nice guy, as are Froome and Contador.

*** OK, we don’t know he was a customer of Fuentes. But we do know his dog was a customer.

How can Cav not win? That seems to be the question, very similar to last year’s worlds. So naturally, a lot of the same logic applies, see in particular the piece “Cyclists are losers“, it’s worth another read in my humble opinion.

So what will happen? I’m looking closely for four things:

1. Even though many more teams speak of following the “chaos therapy” I described in ”Cyclists are losers“, I am afraid that when push comes to shove, not many will follow through.
2. The key to a successful break-away will be size (you need to be considerably bigger than the team of four GB time trialers trying to catch you). This however goes against the other key, which is a very fast decision to go for it once you have gapped Cav the tiniest bit, as you won’t get much more. So is it possible for a group of 20 riders of 15 different countries to look around quickly and determine to work together and go for it? Given that most riders haven’t taken independent racing decisions in years due to the ear pieces, I am skeptical.
3. If there is a break, I think GB should send a rider along. Catching 20 riders back with a team of 4 won’t be easy, whereas Wiggins sitting in a group of 20 without doing any work (waiting for Cav) and then placing a jump in the last 10k, I’m not sure who would catch him. I somehow suspect that’s also GB’s plan, I can’t imagine that their plan is really as was spelled out by Brailsford (“Plan A is Cav, and the rest of the alphabet too”).
4. Crashes could have a big influence on the outcome, I don’t hear that much about this possibility but how many teams have a plan for what to do in a crash?

So my picks would be Cancellara for the pure chaos strategy, Wiggins for chaos if GB does have a different plan Z, and Cav if all else fails.

One of the most endearing oddities about cycling is how a few race results can turn into a truism in no time. When Indurain won Giro and Tour in the same year, the Giro was “the perfect preparation” for the Tour. When he stopped riding the Giro and still won, “cycling was too hard ‘in the modern era’ to do both”.

Then Lance proved that you can only win if you have the entire team focused on winning the GC, that you cannot combine GC and sprints in one team. This was further proven by HTC, whose GC riders never got very far. Never mind that their GC riders were always on the second tier to begin with. I’ve said many times I thought this was silly, but it’s been one of the most persistent truisms of the past decade.

Anyway, I would like to propose the following new truism:

To do well on GC, you need a top sprinter on your team.

You see, there are three sprinters who have won three stages each this Tour; Cavendish, Sagan and Greipel. They ride for Sky, Liquigas and Lotto, who occupied positions 1, 2, 3 and 4 on GC in Paris. Therefore, irrefutably, you need guys who win sprints to score on GC. Also note BMC, whose sprinter Hushovd could not participate this year, and we all know what happened to Evans.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to finish my part 2 on the Schleck case, so that will come next week (subscribe here). In the meantime, here is Trait 10 of champions:

Willingness to suffer: Great champions do not wish to suffer any more than you or I, but seem to accept the pain of athletic suffering as part of thei endeavor. They seem to force more out of their bodies than other riders do, especially when the going gets tough. Much of this sport, at all levels, is decided by a mental commitment that allows the body to react accordingly.

I promised to several people I would finish this series of 11 Traits of champtions (see them all here), so here we go with number 9. Thanks again to Toby Stanton (@hottubes on twitter) for these:

Inward focus: The really great champions seem unconcerned about whom they are competing against. The riders in a particular event only provide a standard by which they will apply and measure themselves. The champion competes against their own abilities and limitations. The champion does not look outward, blaming others for a loss, but rather inward to those areas that can be improved for the future.

Still two more traits of champions to come in the next few weeks, so if you don’t want to miss them, subscribe to this blog here.

The always excellen Inner Ring posted a story with this title. I have five answers:

1. Yes, it is boring. At least usually. Remember the Indurain years? A month of magazines explaining why this year, Bugno, Chiapucci or Rominger would challenge for the win. Then the start, one week of sprints, a time trial, and the race was over. Or the Lance years? A month of magazines explaining why this year, Zuelle, Ullrich or Beloki would challenge for the win. Then the start, one week of sprints, a time trial, and the race was over. Sometimes that first time trial was instead the first up-hill finish, and one year the race was even exciting until the last weekend. I think.
2. No, this is cycling. It’s hard to create a course that keeps the GC up for grabs until the last days. Sometimes a race organizer is lucky, often they’re not. Somehow the Giro seems to be decided later than the Tour, at least in recent history (and by later I mean towards the end of the three weeks of racing, not 18 months later once CAS has ruled). So the course has something to do with it, but as they say, “the riders make the race”.
3. That said, if it is difficult to keep GC interesting, it should be possible to make the stage wins exciting. Flat stages with predictable sprint finishes are part of the race, but we don’t need 10. I’m sure race organizers started adding uphill finishes to the flat stages to prevent Cavendish from winning everything, but of course the problem is that Gilbert (last year) or Sagan (this year) win all of those. I think the best stages in the first week would have a 3rd or 4th category climb at 5-10km from the finish. It makes it hard to calculate catching the early escape, it allows some riders to jump away and maybe stay away, it will allow some sprinters but not others to pace themselves over the top and catch back on.
4. Focus on the other classifications. Especially the best climber classification, it rarely provides the entertainment it should. I would really like to see time bonuses at the top of each climb, so the favorites are forced to sprint at the top of each climb. That would shake things up, reveal weaknesses earlier in the stages and maybe entice some riders to stretch their sprints out on the way down and create some opportunities.
5. Change how the race is broadcasted. Nowadays, when the broadcast starts, we see a couple of riders “who were allowed to ride away”. Usually nothing could be further from the truth, getting into the break is incredibly hard work and very exciting to watch. Those who saw the stage to Lourdes last year will remember that Hesjedal was all out for the better part of an hour, one break after another, never gaining more than 15 seconds, until finally the break stuck. It would be much better to show the first (tape-delayed) and the last hour of a race, rather than the final two hours.

The approach displayed by Sky and Wiggins in the run-up to the Tour has been the target of much criticism. Too calculated, too robotic, etc. And to be sure, Sky’s approach of “marginal gains” involves leaving no stone unturned. But to pooh-pooh the approach and say Wiggins is boring and should be attacking in the mountains as if he’s a Colombian climber is misplaced.

Let’s first look at the race strategy of having your teammates set a steady pace while you follow. Maybe it’s not as exciting as attacking the climbs and trying to drop everybody, but that’s not Wiggins’ fault. It’s quite simple, the climbers yo-yo up  the climbs with one main objective; to crack riders like Wiggins.

So it would be rather dumb to ask of Wiggins to crack himself. He, like Evans, is at his best when he rides a steady pace. Maybe that’s “boring”, but it’s how he makes the most of his abilities and to do anything else makes no sense.

Looking at Sky’s approach as a whole, much has been made of their preparation, their incessant testing and their team of coaches, psychologists, course investigators and tire sniffers. But I would make two comments on that:

1. It’s not that different from the approach that several teams take.
2. If you had an ex-pursuiter as your main ace to win the Tour, what approach would you take? Just wing it, or try to control everything you can? Preparing a rider for the Tour is not about what “the best absolute approach” is. Rather, it’s about what the best approach for a specific rider is. And for Wiggins, it is very well possible that he derives comfort and confidence from a very structured approach. Does this mean Wiggins will win? No, but it probably means he’s got a better chance this way than by just winging it.

That said, I think these over-structured approaches do backfire spectacularly from time to time, as the structure can also drive somebody crazy. And of course, when you try to do things a bit differently (or at least talk about them more than other teams), you’re bound to be criticized.

It also means that when it goes wrong, we’ll certainly see a lot of ridicule (“that aero helmet didn’t save him from crashing into that cow”). Sky knows like no other that you cannot control everything (just think back 12 months), but should you therefore give up on controlling anything? Given the rider they have, I think the answer is no.