Andrew Hood wrote an insightful piece for Velonews about Garmin-Cervelo’s biggest win, Vaughters and the tactics that made it happen at Paris-Roubaix. It’s really worth a read. The part where he quotes l’Equipe is hilarious:

Hushovd honored the unwritten code of not attacking a teammate up the road, something that lesser riders might not have done, but L’Equipe — the respected French sports daily — didn’t quite see it that way. In Monday’s edition, the paper gave Hushovd a one-star rating out of 10, writing: “Hushovd didn’t respect the rainbow jersey. He wanted to play hide-and-seek with Cancellara. Luckily for him, Van Summeren (won). He earns one point. One.”

I’m not quite sure how to read this. To get 10 stars, you need to betray your teammate? Of course, all sorts of jokes related to the country l’Equipe hails from spring to mind, but let’s not forget that it is France that gave us this most beautiful of races to begin with so “Vive la France, Vive le pavé.”

On Saturday, Garmin-Cervelo’s Spring Classics season was dubbed a failure, 24h later they appear one of the big winners. What a difference a day makes.

So, does this mean the results are now the only thing that matter (which I had answered negatively in this blog)? Of course during a race the result is what matters, but afterwards, it makes more sense to evaluate the process. Even if you win.

Personally, I think the team rode the strongest race tactically in Flanders, but that wasn’t very visible. In Roubaix the tactics were very complicated (they usually are because there are so many small groups and the situation is so fluid). It’s impossible to get all the calls right, but as long as the majority of the tactical calls are correct you’ll be OK. And the one crucial call that had to be made was made and Johan jumped clear of his group while Thor demoralized the group of the big favorites. If Johan had finished second instead of first, would the evaluation of the team’s tactics have to be diametrically opposite of what it is now? Of course not.

Speaking with Thor, Gabba and a few of the other riders afterwards, you realize just how strong they all were and how much they sacrificed their own chances for the team’s success. In fact, hearing from them how strong they felt really increased my admiration for them even more. In a way, the winner has it easy.

“Cycling is finishing everybody else’s plate before your own”

Watching yesterday’s Tour of Flanders and the post-race discussions, I started to wonder; who do you want to win cycling races? The strongest rider or the smartest rider?

To me, if cycling was all about the strongest rider, it would be rather predictable and boring. We should reserve that for the 100m dash or ergometer rowing championships.

The rouse of cycling is that while there are no tactics to turn MY legs into winners, the strongest legs can certainly be slayed by slightly weaker legs with superior tactics. Not always, but the fact that the chance exist makes cycling exciting. This concept has really nothing to do with yesterday, if Cancellara drinks enough he goes on to win on one leg. Let’s not have the outliers interfere with the principle.

However, those saying Nuyens isn’t a big winner because he wasn’t the strongest are really not doing his effort justice. He knew he didn’t have a big chance to win (witness the dejection in the Saxo car after the Koppenberg), but he never gave up and was able to maximize what small chance he had and his legs certainly weren’t bad. He saw Cancellara’s move at 3k was the his only chance and he turned himself inside-out for 500m to get on the wheel. Then he perfectly executed my favorite Hennie Kuiper quote (see at the top) by not working in that final breakaway and gambling on Cancellara’s desire to keep driving that 3-man break away from Boonen.

This also applies to Vaughters’ much discussed order to not help in the chase on Cancellara and Chavanel leading up to the Muur. He knew their chance to win was small, everything would have to come back together for a sprint. So why not work to make the chance of a sprint bigger? Because the work effort would have made the chance to hang on to that group over the Muur even smaller. No point working for a mass sprint if that effort means you can’t be in it. The only chance, no matter how small, for Garmin-Cervelo was to conserve energy by finishing BMC’s plates before their own, which were virtually finished already anyway.

Some people don’t like that, they think riders should always “do their share”, a sort of communist-ideal cycling philosophy. But again, that’s ergometer racing. Even Chavanel afterwards said he should have helped Cancellara in the break. Aside from the issue that he probably would have slowed down their escape every time he would have come to the front, it’s hard to see how their chase could have survived any longer. He didn’t appear to have the legs to go on the Muur either. I thought he rode a great race, he had no obligation to do any work with Boonen behind and tried to finish Cancellara’s plate. Aside from sprinting straight for the finish line instead of going through the impossible gap, chapeau!

Let’s hope Paris-Roubaix will be equally exciting.

So, who do you want to win?

Yesterday I commented on a cyclingnews.com article. There was another snippet that caught my eye:

“The bar was set high when the team signed Haussler,
Hushovd, Klier and co from Cervélo TestTeam to
create a Classics dream team”

Of course, the 2011 Garmin-Cervelo men’s team has great strength and depth for the Classics. On top of that, they are also some of the finest riders to work with, so there is not a single rider I would like to change out for any other (no, not for him either). But the whole dream team thing seems to be a little hyperbolic, which I understand sells magazines, banner ads and can also trap the occasional team fan or partner.

But let’s put it into perspective a little. This classics team is probably the strongest team ever to never have won a Classic. That’s right, despite the incredible strength of these riders, none of them has ever won a Classic. I am pretty sure that will change shortly, as the talent, desire and especially team spirit is there to make it happen, but expectations may need to be a bit more reasonable. By comparison, Leopard has four Classics winners on its roster if I counted correctly.

So a great team, yes, and without a shadow of a doubt the world’s best group to work with as an equipment partner. But let’s give them some time to win their first Classic (like a day or two, or nine :-)). Let me know if you agree or disagree (I have a hunch a good few will disagree) in the comments below or via Twitter (@gerardvroomen).

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After E3 and Gent-Wevelgem, cyclingnews.com wrote an article on the winners and losers of the weekend criticizing Team Garmin-Cervelo among others. It writes:

“The team’s tactics in E3 were spot on but
they were steam rolled by Cancellara.”

So let me get this straight. If a team’s tactics are spot on but there is another rider simply stronger on the day, that’s considered a failure? That means that no matter what, any race has one winner, seven team mates and 192 losers. I fully understand that many will proclaim that “this is how the world works”, “this is sport”, etc, but I humbly disagree. Not because I have an affiliation with this team, but on the principle.

In many sports, and particularly in cycling, there are a lot of things you don’t control. Therefore, making the win the only thing that counts is a dangerous approach (in many ways). All you can really do, and I believe all you SHOULD really do as a team, is focus on creating the best possible environment (training, equipment, nutrition, strategy, tactics, communication) for the riders to achieve their optimal performance and for the riders to execute to the best of their ability. If that happens and nobody does it better, you win. If nine other guys are stronger, you come tenth. Either way, your quality of execution is the same.

So to the team I would say, congrats on gelling so quickly and delivering what cyclingnews.com considers the perfect race. That’s all we can ask for. Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments below or via Twitter (@gerardvroomen).

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I can’t remember a race with a clearer favorite than this weekend’s Tour of Flanders for a long, long time. It sounds like all Cancellara has to do is show up, avoid the snipers and pick up the award. So let me make this prediction: Cancellara will not win on Sunday.

Before I get into this, I’d like to remind everybody of Tim Krabbé’s truism in The Rider: “Joop Zoetemelk will never win the Tour de France, and the quality of the prediction is independent of the outcome. It is therefore still a great prediction, despite the fact that Zoetemelk won the Tour in 1980.”

Normally speaking, Cancellara cannot win Flanders this year. With 192 riders against 1+7, the one has no chance. Not even Cancellara. And when you ride as he has, there is no reason for the 192 riders not to race against the one. So when the first group of 40 riders breaks away, there are two options:

1. Cancellara is part of it, and nobody will want to ride, and so the break is caught and the next one goes.
2. Cancellara is not part of it, in which case everybody will want to ride and behind nobody will, except a few Leopards. I’d like to see one team race a breakaway of 40 for 260k and come out on top.

This of course presumes one critical element: 24 teams making the right decisions. This has nothing to do with collusion, race radios or the like, every team independently can come to the conclusion that the only chance for them to win is to not help Leopard at any stage of the race. There’s also nothing unfair about beating up on Cancellara, the goal is to win the race, and you have to deploy the strategy that leads to success. Anything less would be unfair. If the purpose was to give away the win to the strongest rider, then we didn’t need the race or at the very least, we could just do power measurements on ergometers.

Whether or not every team WILL make such a decision is another story.

Then there are of course also other factors that can derail even a rider as strong as Cancellara:

1. Mechanicals (he had two flats and a bike change last weekend, that’s a bit much)
2. Sickness
3. Pressure (he was a big favorite at Paris-Roubaix in 2007 and finished 18th, though the Cancellara of 2011 is a different beast altogether)

Before the other teams start popping champagne bottles, there is however a second part to the riddle they have to solve: How do they prevent a Leopard like Stuart O’Grady from winning? When the break of 40 goes away, he’ll be in it. He won’t have to work (waiting for Cancellara) and although all eyes are on his master, Stuart has the legs and the head to survive anybody in that breakaway and go for glory. That’s of course what happened at Paris-Roubaix in 2007. I remember that race quite well as I was there and of course he was riding a Cervelo, and it was one of the most exciting and surprising races I have ever seen (watch it here).

We’ll see what happens on Sunday but remember, it’s still a great prediction regardless!

Last week was the first meeting of the new Garmin-Cervelo team. It also meant a last time to see some of these riders in their beautiful Cervelo TestTeam outfits. A sad moment for me, realizing that this venture was over, but I think that given the options, we made the most of it.

1. As of this moment, 81 of 85 people on the Cervelo TestTeam have found new opportunities. That includes all 14 riders who were under contract for 2011, plus most of the riders and staff not under contract. I’m quite happy with that, as many were worried that this would be very difficult. The riders, staff and management have done a great job to help each other find something for next year. Of course the work isn’t done until the final 4 have also found something.
2. Most of the sponsors have also found homes elsewhere. Some at Garmin, some elsewhere. There we tried to also help as much as possible, of course for those who were under contract with CTT for next year as we were obliged to, but also for those who were not as we really get along well with our industry partners and want them to be successful, with or without Cervelo.
3. While the CTT pro team stops, I am hopeful that we made a tiny difference in pro cycling and that some of our ideas will live on. Certainly, some of our ideas regarding fan access have been picked up by other teams and by our riders. It was amazing to see that Appollonio, Bos, Tondo and Reimer – all riders not riding on a Cervelo next year – were present at our dealer training weeks in November. They could have easily said no, but they all said more or less the same thing: We joined this team because it was different, and we enjoy spending some time with regular people who enjoy these bikes just as much as we do.
4. Obviously product testing will live on at Garmin-Cervelo. We started this at Team CSC, when we looked at a team much more as an R&D support than a “victory-machine”. When that aspect of the team equation got really hard to continue, we went to the next level with CTT. And now with Garmin, a team that already had an interest in innovation, we’ll be able to continue using the pros to make better bikes for all our customers.
5. Maybe most importantly, our spirit will live on. It was amazing to see that the Garmin team, without any prompting from us, suggested to honor some of the things initiated by Cervelo. Obviously we are happy when any team does that, whether we are associated with them or not. After all we weren’t looking to protect any of our ideas in the past two years; we wanted them to spread. It’s nice to see when that actually happens. More on this in a later blog.

So on the one hand it certainly feels as a failure – after all, our goal was to find a secondary sponsor so we could continue and although it looked good, it didn’t happen in the end. On the other hand, there is a silver lining and I feel very positive about the future. Not only with regards to our participation in pro cycling, but also regarding our new R-series, our distribution, the simplification of our operations, everything is pointing in the right direction now. But I’ll get back to that later as well.

First off, I love cycling’s unwritten rules, they’re part of what makes the sport so great. But they are also somewhat irrelevant. I mean, nobody ever bothered to even write them down! So riders have the option to ignore them and if we think they exist to instill some sort of honor and nobility into the sport, then surely it should be coming from within the rider to follow them, not imposed from the outside (or whatever other baloney high-minded concept you want to insert here).

Next up, what does the unwritten rule say anyway? That’s pretty tough to figure out, thanks to this pesky “unwritten” bit. But as I see it, cycling is a mechanical sport and mechanical problems are an integral part of the outcome. A flat tire may be considered bad luck, but there are also plenty of people who think you can influence it by hanging your tubulars for seven years in a dark, Belgian room and sprinkling them twice weekly with Westmalle Triple beer.

So should the rider who religiously goes through this rigmarole have to wait for the opponent who just wraps any cheap tire around his wheels? I don’t think so. Should the teams who pick suppliers based on product quality have to wait for teams who pick suppliers solely based on the maximum sponsorship fee? Again I don’t think so. Lastly, should the rider who studiously avoids crossing his chain from smallest ring to smallest cog in order to avoid chain suck have to wait for the guy who doesn’t pay attention to that sort of detail? Once more I don’t think so. Contador certainly doesn’t HAVE TO attack, but he doesn’t HAVE TO wait either.

How about “not atacking the yellow”? What’s so special about him anyway? Why not treat everybody with the same level of respect? Surely you can attack him at some point. If he’s taken down by a spectator, I would agree it’s really bad form (but even then, still allowed). But if he plays a real part in his own demise as was the case here, then maybe it’s not great form but it’s not really that bad either. We’ve got to draw the line somewhere in order to get a bit of racing squeezed into these three weeks.

Wait a second, I hear you think, didn’t you tweet that Contador should have waited? Actually no, I didn’t, I tweeted that he “gained a great chance to win, but lost a chance to win greatly”. And I think that brings us to the purpose of the unwritten rules. We have already established you don’t have to follow them, you won’t be DQ’d for ignoring them. But you can give your victories some extra shine by winning them in grand style, and by appearing magnanimous towards your opponents. So if you can win while waiting for your opponents a few times, so much the better. Of course there is some technique on how to best exploit this, but maybe that’s food for a later thought.

That said, I don’t think there are many riders who would give up a chance to win the Tour in order to appear magnanimous. Contador had no problem waiting for Schleck on stage 2, as he was probably 100% convinced he would drop him in the mountains later on anyway. Now that this didn’t happen, he’s probably feeling he may actually lose this Tour, so the “winning in grand style” concept had to be sacrificed in order to win for sure, regardless of style. And the way the written rules of the sport are, there’s nothing wrong with that. For us spectators, it probably means fireworks tomorrow, seeing an angry Schleck against a Contador who is not so sure of himself anymore.

It happens every year, without fail. We’re in the second week of the Tour, and the number of candidates for the final yellow jersey has whittled to a few. More likely than not, none of these candidates will have ridden the Giro. And so the pundits proclaim you cannot win the Giro and Tour in the same year anymore, in “modern cycling”. Frankly, that conclusion makes no sense to me because they are looking at it the wrong way round.

Let’s flip it around. Think back to January 2010 and ask yourself who you thought would win the Tour. Chances are you thought it would be Contador, Schleck or Armstrong. Guess what? None of them participated in the Giro. So while it is true that Basso, Evans and cohorts rode the Giro and now won’t win the Tour, truth is they wouldn’t have won the Tour if they hadn’t ridden the Giro either. It’s not because of the Giro that they won’t win, it’s because they don’t have what it takes to beat Contador, Schleck and Armstrong (at least not what it takes to beat all three of them).

I love the “remember how strong Basso was on the climbs in the Giro, and now look at him” argument. Last time I checked, he wasn’t dropping Schleck and Contador on the Mortirolo. He was climbing strongly, as he is at the Tour, but the riders around him are different. “How about Menchov then?”, I hear people protest. He won the Giro last year, then finished 51st in the Tour. Yes, but he spent more time on the pavement than on the saddle in the first week of that Tour, he was out of it before he got in. And don’t forget he finished 5th in the Giro and then 3rd in the Tour in 2008.

No doubt the Giro has an effect on a rider’s performance at the Tour, but to make a general statement that the effect is negative goes too far. Depending on how tough the Giro is (obviously this year’s was VERY tough, as is this Tour), on the weather and on the rider, I am convinced the effect can be both positive and negative. If we want to see a double, all it takes is to see Contador at the start of both. If he wants to, he can win both. The question is does he want to? I hope he does, this sport needs riders with the ambition to become legends, not “just” Tour de France winners.