Patrocles with a Chainring

I meant to talk about this year's Tour de France earlier, but it's been an insane week around here, what with the grandparents coming (and then going) and my work pulled me out of the house at 4am and not returning me until after sundown.

But I'm here at work late, watching a direct shear sample consolidate, and wanted to share some thoughts about the 2011 edition of the grandest of the grand tours.

But - this is probably the fortyzillionth time someone has made this observation but it's my first, so bear with me - this year epitomized what makes bicycle stage racing such a terrific sport.Because, and we've talked about this before, if sport means anything other than mere diversion and physical exercise it is a sort of bodily morality play, a struggle between ideas; ideas of training, ideas of what the human body and mind are capable of, ideas of right, and good, and wrong, and evil, all carried out in the gross physical acts of a small group of very fit people.

Every contest, whether it's a soccer match, a chess game, a debate, a bicycle race, is in effect an argument between different ideas of what is the right sort of match, game, debate, or race. How best to prepare for it, perform it, succeed at it.This is what makes international soccer so entertaining, or matches between clubs with very differing styles of play; because the two gaffers, the two teams, are wordlessly insisting that theirs is the better notion, and the contest is a way of determining who is right, or closer to right.

Which is what makes the effect of cheating - like the doping in cycling - so pernicious. Because if you don't know whether, and you suspect the likelihood of, the cyclist who ride so heroically today was powered not by will, or stamina, or great training, or brilliant technique, or aided by a ferociously organized team, but instead was fueled by some faceless chemist or physician concocting a blood transfusion or chemical cocktail...well, it makes the entire business less than pointless. Even if you consider sport a worthless entertainment if the contest is honest at least there is the simple truth of the winning and losing, the striving and the gain.

But if the business is a sham, and the achievements and disasters painted over with a taint of cheating, well...

At any rate, this year is supposed to have been a very clean Tour, and I am pleased with that.So the other thing that makes stage racing so satisfying is that the other business of sport is to tell a story, and the great stage races can tell stories with a delicious zest that is matched by no other sport I can think of.

Imagine a soccer match - no, a string of matches - played out every day over three weeks. Only instead of just two teams there are dozens on the pitch, all playing each other, and all for different aims; some to score goals, some to win matches, some to keep a clean sheet, some for individual brilliance, some for team perfection. And those matches would be played on a different pitch every day - some perfect lawns, some muddy fields, some with huge ravines and immense hillocks within them.

That's why a grand tour is so incredible.

Because both the cast, the setting, and the process of a grand tour are perfect for a wonderful tale. Here you have a large group of actors, these cyclists, some 200 of them. But they are organized into smaller groups; the teams, the specialities - climbers, sprinters, the great heroes of the peleton - the GC contenders - and the workaday domestiques...together they present a literally colorful patchwork congeries for our enjoyment.

Different, and yet the same everyday, lining up for the start whether for 200 kilometers of flat roads in Brittany or a short, brutal afternoon's climb into the Alps; the same names, the same faces, that we come to know over three weeks.And yet, changing every day, every hour, as the roads beneath them change. Today might be a day for the speedsters, the sprinters, rocketing across the finish in a rainbow of bone and muscle. Tomorrow may be a day for the climbers, dancing on the pedals as the poor sprinters sag back, hoping merely to finish in time.

Every day is a new match, under differing skies, over changing terrain, and all moving through time towards the final day in Paris. And there they are, the Hectors and Achilles and Ajaxes of our Illiad - the GC riders. Every day they rise or fall, every moment cycling on against the clock, ticking the kilometers off as they eye each other and the pack, needing to husband their strength yet knowing that that strength may need to be sacrificed to reel in a challenger or hold onto a championship.

The Armstrong Years, as great as that champion was, were a different sort of story. It was always about the Great Hero, always about which of the Trojans would fall to Achilles' fierce attack, and when. We always knew that the horse was full of destruction, just not where and when, and on whom, it would fall. Those years were incredible in many ways, but this year was just and incredible because its story was so much unlike the earlier one.This year instead of the one colossus, we had four pit fighters;
Alberto Contador - defending champion, but worn from the Giro and bloodied from the ugly doping cotroversy still hanging over him.
The Schlecks - fierce youngsters full of promise...but how much was still promise and how much ready to hand? And
Cadel Evans - the perennial also-ran, the lonely battler over many a lost campaign, only this year with a new team that looked ready to fight for him.Well, if you followed this Tour you know what happened, and if you didn't you've already stopped reading this post. Cadel finally donned his maillot jaune, a worthy champion at the head of a tough, well-led team. I will never forget Andy Schleck, though, riding away from the peleton on the day of the Galabier, riding like a hero, riding like a man possessed, throwing down the challenge to the other GC contenders. Or Thomas Voekler, who proved yet again that that famed yellow shirt can, indeed, make a man ride like he had the strength of two. Or the old god of thunder Thor Hushovd, at 33 and ten years veteran of the Tour, roaring to stage wins and a week in yellow.And, perhaps, the most dramatic three days in recent Tour history; starting with Scheck's incredible 60 kilometer attack that culminated in victory on the slopes of the Galabier, to Evans' ferocious ride up the Alpe d'Huez - even as Schleck rode Voekler out of yellow - that preserved his chance for overall victory, and finally his destruction of the Schlecks in the penultimate time trial stage that brought him home in the golden fleece to Paris.The glory......and the pain, the drama......and the grinding days in the saddle. We watched it all and it was a great story, a great Tour, another year we were carried away in the hollow ships.Vive' le Tour!

91 hours in France.

The 97th Tour de France is over.Alberto Contador has won his third Tour, bringing him into the corona of the Greats; the equal of Philippe Thys in the Teens, Louison Bobetin the Fifties, and Greg Lemond in the Eighties and early Ninties. The next step is a fourth and fifth victory; if the Spaniard can manage that he will be assured a place in cycling history alongside Hinault, Merckx, and Big Mig Indurain. His performance in the individual time trial on Saturday was strong enough to allay most of the questions observers like myself had about the athletically acceptable but sportingly questionable attack on the Port de Balès on the 19th of July that put him in yellow.

This edition of the Tour will, sadly, probably be remembered more for the Last Tour of Lance rather than Third of Alberto.The spectacle of Armstrong struggling to keep up, his jersey ripped from crashing, is a worthwhile reminder of the incredible luck needed to even finish, much less win, this most grueling of athletic events. In the seven times the man won this event he never had a really bad day; never took a serious injury, never really fell catastrophically at speed as he did in Stage 8 this year. The pain he endured was the pain of victory, not the agony of defeat.You could make the argument that for a man of 39 twenty-third place is not a defeat. I doubt that Armstrong feels that way; he is what he must be to have won this race seven times - a predator, a man with a tremendous ego and need to win. No, regardless of his age, today must be a bitter end to his cycling career.

And, for me at least, this year asks some real tough questions about the man who was either Lance's strategic partner or his sock puppet, Johan Bruyneel. Because Team RadioShack was, in my opinion, a disaster this year. Yes, it won the "team GC" classification, traditionally a sort of booby-prize for the team with the most organization and least talent at the Tour. The very notion of building a team around a man of 39 was questionable; the notion of not having a Plan B in case that man crashed out or cracked was even more questionable. Sadly, Levi Leipheimer was exposed as merely a nice guy from Butte, Montana. He never put in a serious attack, never even looked remotely threatening. His thirteenth place was the result of grinding out decent, unspectacular, ultimately mediocre rides every day. That's not enough to become a great champion. He will have to step up his riding if he wants to step onto the podium. And at 37 he doesn't have much time.

The man who turned out to be the real GC hopeful for RadioShack, Chris Horner, was misused for three weeks carrying water for Armstrong or Leipheimer.

The question now is whether Brunyeel can find his next Armstrong or Contador. He has shown that he can't win through pure tactics. If he can't find the next Great his day may well be done.

Mark Cavendish won his fifteen sprint stage in two years.

Holy fuck, the man is fast.

Today is Contador's day in the sun on the Champs. His rival, though, will be back next year, with his brother Frank healthy, and there must be some concern in the Astana party tonight about the possibility of challenges from other of the riders that showed well this year such as Jurgen van den Broek of Lotto and Ryder Hesjedal of Garmin.

Perhaps the single biggest story is the one that has not been told about this year's Tour; the question of doping.

The UCI and the Tour organizers will tell you that the extremely low number of riders ejected for using CERA, ERO, tesosterone, HGH, or any of the many other chemical and blood products that the sport has been saturated with since the Nineties means that the testing is working, and that the dopers are being forced out, or forced to cut back or give up their craft.

And the fact is that the 2010 race was more like last year's relatively scandal-free Tour, and has not featured the horrendous doping scandals of the Tour of 2006, and the lesser but still ugly expulsions of 2007, and 2008 Tours.

But here's the thing that disturbs me.

There's no question that the Tour in the Nineties and Oughts was soaked in doping. The arrival of EPO and the EPO-derivative CERA, HGH, testosterone...these forms of cheating helped men fly up mountains and recover overnight in ways that no clean rider could match.

The patrons of the Eighties, the big men like Lemond, and the domestiques like Frankie Andreiu - who themselves knew of tricks like corticosteroids and caffeine - couldn't believe how the peleton flew along the roads at 45-55 kilometers per hour. EPO changed everything.

In the infamous "Tour de Dopage" in 1998 the winner (Marco Pantani) finished riding 3,877 km (2,409 mi) in about 93 hours.

In 2006, the even more infamous Tour of Floyd Landis, the eventual "winner", Oscar Periero, rode 3,639 km (2,261 mi) in 89 hours 40 minutes.

When Rasmussen of Rabobank was thrown out for dodging a doping test in 2007, while still in yellow, Contador's eventual winning time was 3,569.9 km (2,218 mi) in 91 hours.

You would think that if the testing had been effective in reducing the use of the blood doping, the EPO, the hormones and the drugs, that the winner's time would have begun sliding backwards from the dope-saturated Nineties and EPO-drenched Oughts.

This year's winner's time?

3,642 km (2,263 mi) in 91 hours, 58 minutes, 48 seconds.

Away in the Hollow Ships

On the final rest day of this year's Tour de France, a moment's reflection on the 97th running of perhaps the world's best known bicycle race.

1. This year's Tour seems to be more of a grinding endurance test than ever. The cobblestones didn't help. The weather didn't help. The crashes didn't help. After 16 days of racing there are five riders within eight minutes of each other, but many of the pre-race favorites; Armstrong, Cadel Evans, Ivan Basso, are far down and many minutes out of contention.2. I think we can stop wondering whether if Contador is a one- or two-year wonder, or a great champion in the Hinault and Indurain mold. If he can win this year, and not be brought low by injury or drug use I think he has established himself as a potential successor to the greats of the sport.

That said, I can't help but think less of the man for his attack on the summit of the Port de Balès. If sport is about anything it must be about the measure of the sportsman or sportswoman. The play should be fair; that's why cheating, whether it's doping or foul tackling or buying umpires is so poorly thought of. If sport is to matter anything, it is about testing one person against another to see who can go faster, higher, stronger, further. Regardless of the course of events that day, Contador lost his chance to prove that he would have beaten Schleck fairly. That isn't his job; his job is to win the Tour. But my job as a fan of the sport is to choose who I believe best honors the sport.3. I have talked a lot about this before, and there really is no point in rehashing it. The Armstrong Era of the Tour is over, and in a spectacular fashion; "Your father was no merciful man in the horror of battle.
Therefore your people are grieving for you all through their city,
Hektor, and you left for your parents mourning and sorrow
beyond words, but for me passing all others is left the bitterness
and the pain..."

4. I find that perhaps the saddest part of the Fall of Hektor is that his Patroclus, Levi Leipheimer, inherited a team in disarray. Johann Bruyneel's name has been mentioned when the great organizers and coaches in the sport are mentioned. But this year has to make one wonder; was Bruyneel a great tactician or merely the trained bear for great riders, Armstrong and Contador? He seemed unable, once Armstrong fell, to find a way to get his backup GC contender, Leipheimer, into position to threaten the podium in Paris. Leipheimer seems destined to find a place in the Hall of Near-Fame, a position in the pantheon of the Demi-Gods of Cycling.5. And, again, this year is a tale of woe for Cadel Evans. The Australian rider had suffered from atrocious team support in last year's Tour, finishing 29th, after three years where Silence-Lotto provided barely enough enough help to get him on or near the podium. But the truth is that the man had to do most of the hard work himself. His new BMC Team has done no better for him than Lotto did. But, let's face it, the man cracked on the Col de la Madeleine in Stage 9. He has not ridden like a champion this year. But it's sad to see him fall so far, and land so hard...

As always, the Tour is a pretty good reflection of people in general, with all their hopes, and fears, their greatness and the smallness. It is pain, and fear, bravery, and weakness. It is a great spectacle, and the battle promised for the Tourmalet tomorrow should not be the least of its enticements.

Update 7/21: It is beginning to look very like another Tour victory for the man from Pinto; he paced his rival Andy Schleck all the way up the Col de Tourmalet. I think that Schleck's chance was to drop the Spaniard on the big climb today by a minute or more - he couldn't. And barring disaster I suspect this means a third climb to the top of the podium for Alberto Contador.So as always...Vive' Le Tour!