The Virtual Stoa

David Millar (just signed for Slipstream) ought to be absolutely furious with Iban Mayo.

On the first day in the Pyrenees, Millar and David De La Fuente of the Saunier-Duval team drove the peloton over the Port de Pailheres at a crazy pace, in the hope that team-leader Mayo could do something on the way up to the stage-finish at Plateau de Beille. But he couldn’t, and lost nearly ten minutes on the final climb. And now we learn he was on drugs too.

Mayo had a terrible tour, finishing 16th at 27′09″. I thought the drugs were supposed to prevent that kind of thing.

I don’t think I’ll try to become a professional sports photographer any time soon. But here are three images from this afternoon’s racing, anyway.

Quite by chance I seem to have got Alberto Contador in the middle of this pic, on the second half of the first circuit of the Champs-Élysées, flanked by the rest of his Discovery Channel team.

Here comes the peloton!

The Lampre riders, on their way to set up the stage win for Daniele Bennati.

Hmm, what was I saying the other day about drugs scandals that “inject a bit of life into the cycling soap opera” but which “won’t destabilise the whole event”? Actually, I’m not sure the whole event is destabilised, even with Rasmussen chucked out, and calls for there to be no winner this year, or to scrap the event, or whatever are excessive. The Tour isn’t just bigger than any individual rider; it’s much, much bigger. And it’s far better that it ends this way, tossing the yellow jersey out before Paris, than with the way things turned out last year, in a Tour that still doesn’t have a winner. Anyway, I’ll be on the Champs-Élysées this year — for the fifth time, and the third year running — and I’m still very much looking forward to seeing them all come home. I’m just hoping that (i) Contador turns out to be clean and that (ii) he can hold off against Evans in the time trial…

Over here, or en français.

Not entirely clear why Klöden et al should be pulled from the race, too. Maybe we’ll find out in the hours to come. Anyway: this is just what we want: a drugs angle to inject a bit of life into the cycling soap opera that won’t destabilise the whole event.

While I’m on the subject, do other Stoa-readers agree with me that Vino looks funny when he rides his bike? Especially when he’s being filmed from the front on the breakaway. I can’t really describe it; he looks like some kind of comically stubborn child as the legs pump up and down. The bandaged knee has something to do with it, but I don’t think it’s just the bandage; he’s stockier than the average cyclist, and that has something to do with it, too. Maybe it is just me.

Anyway: it’s been a cracking Tour, and I can breathe easily now that it looks as if Cadel Evans won’t be winning it.

UPDATE: Good piece (as ever) by William Fotheringham in tehgraun.

I’m delighted to say that someone is letting off fireworks in North Oxford, which I am assuming is in honour of Bastille Day. Vive la République!

Today’s the fortieth anniversary of the death of Tommy Simpson, the first (and only?) really great British cyclist, who collapsed and died near the summit of Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France.

Richard Williams has a good piece in today’s Graun; and do read William Fotheringham’s Put Me Back On My Bike if you get the chance: it’s a cracking book, certainly the best book on cycling that I’ve read, but one that’s not just for the cycling nerds out there. In fact, anyone interested in the social history of postwar Britain in general and the popular culture of the 1960s in particular should enjoy it. And, look, there’s a new edition, too, so it’s bound to be in the shops.

(There’s even been speculation that Bradley Wiggins has gone on the attack in today’s stage from Semur-en-Auxois to Bourg-en-Bresse by way of symbolic tribute to the man; we’ll find out, no doubt, at the end of the day’s racing.)

Here’s a handy blog celebrating the chaps who end up right at the bottom of the CG [via].

I’m quite glad I didn’t see the TV pictures of the last hour or so of today’s stage in the Tour de France. The BBC reported that

1602: It’s race favourite Alexandre Vinokourov’s turn to hit the tarmac, apparently after colliding with a following vehicle. He shakes his fists in frustration and replays show a nasty graze to the right buttock, which looks like it will be exposed for the rest of the stage.

And the Guardian Over-By-Over commentator (or whatever it’s called when it’s cycling rather than cricket) had this:

4.23pm: With 10km to go, Vinokourov is pushing really, really hard to try and re-attach himself to the peloton, which is a minute ahead of him. He had six riders with him, but now he’s on his own and making a huge effort that’s bound to take it out of him as far as future stages are concerned. To make matters worse he has a patch of skin missing from his right buttock that looks about six inches square. He’ll be sitting gingerly at the dinner-table tonight.

Yuck. And Vino never made it back to the peloton, falling from twelfth to eighty-first in the CG. He must be very annoyed.

Thanks to this page, I’ve managed to get live pictures of the Tour de France from Serbian TV onto my computer screen, together with the audio commentary in English from Eurosport (my Serbian’s not too hot). I think this means that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Over here [via]

I mocked Stephen Pollard below for his silly opinions about petitions on the 10 Downing St website, and now I find that perhaps, just perhaps, they can make a difference. I signed the petition against the proposed changes to the Highway Code that would make it an offence not to cycle in the cycle lane, if there was a cycle lane to cycle in, and now I read that the offending sentences have been removed from the new draft code that will come into force into September, all being well.

(In fact, while we’re on the subject of Stephen Pollard and bicycles, perhaps it’s a good time to catch up on his classic column from 2004 about why the Tour de France is boring, “because the team element is missing”.)

Floyd Landis’s urine has been on everyone’s lips, on the tip of everybody’s tongue (apologies to Dan Savage for that one), and now it’s tested positive for the second time…

Follow his heroic attempts to clear his name on his blog.

“I can be satisfied with my day even if I didn’t win the stage”, said Cyril Dessel of AG2R-Prevoyance (here).

Tomorrow, yum yum:

The BBC TMS commentators are chatting away about how the Oval was once kitted out as a prisoner-of-war camp (though never actually used as one). The New Orleans Superdome and the Houston Astrodome have recently been used for disaster-relief. General Pinochet found alternative uses for the Santiago national stadium, the Taliban used to hold public executions at the Kabul football stadium, and the French police used the V�lodrome d’Hiver for the mass round-up of Jews for deportation in July 1942.

Please post other examples of historically interesting, important or disturbing uses of sports facilities in the comments.

Concentrating on being in France meant, among other things, paying even more attention than usual to the Tour de France.

Blognor Regis did a terrific job of covering the Tour, and so did the T de F blog. I’m confident all my readers were assiduous in keeping up to date with those sites, so there’s little for me to add here.

French cycling appears to be in an even worse way than usual: no Frenchman finished in the top ten in either the CG or the points competition; the only French riders to make big headlines were Christophe Moreau (above all for his pursuit of Rasmussen with Jens Voigt on the second day in the Vosges) and David Moncouti� (above all for his stage win — the only French stage win — in Dignes-les-Bains, suitably enough on Bastille Day). The Tour needs its local heroes, and it’d be good to have a few more of them, especially now Richard Virenque’s no longer around.

Tragedy is never too far away from cycling, and the saddest cycling news in July came not from the Tour itself, but from Germany, where the Australian women’s cycling team was hit by a car while training, and Amy Gillett was killed. Aussie Cadel Evans made a heroic effort to win the following stage to Pau by way of an inadequate memorial gesture, but was beaten in the final sprint by Oscar Pereiro (who rode a terrific tour, and deserved the prize for “combativit�”). This was around the time, too, that the Tour was marking the tenth anniversary of the death of poor Fabio Casartelli, who crashed on the descent from the Col de Portet d’Aspet in 1995.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s race. There’s been a bit of this kind of thing, but it doesn’t bother me. It’ll be good for the Tour to kick off without one overwhelming favourite. Potential winners include Jan Ullrich (who won the Tour in 1997), Alexandre Vinokourov (especially if he learns how to ride more consistently over three weeks), Ivan Basso (especially if he learns how to go on the attack), Alejandro Valverde (especially if he can find a way of getting to the end of the race) and Mickael Rasmussen (especially if he learns how to time-trial, if that’s a verb). Next year’s teams are beginning to take shape: Vino, for example, has just signed up with Liberty Seguros, and we’re all waiting to find out what the new line-up at Discovery is going to look like in the post-Armstrong era.

As the man said, Vive le Tour!

I’m writing from Paris, where I’ll be spending most of July.

By pure coincidence (yes, really), I travelled out here on the first day of the Tour de France, and I’ll be at the Gare du Nord to catch my train home while the riders are busy circling the Champs Elysées at its very end, and in between, I’ll be reading a lot of copies of L’Equipe.

There is an internet connection where I’m staying (as well as a magnificent panoramic view of the centre of the town from this 13th-floor apartment, which I’m told will provide splendid views of Bastille Day fireworks), but it’s a slow dial-up, and I suspect I’ll be doing and thinking about other things, so expect light-to-non-existent postings at the VS, and go and read other people’s pages instead.

Norm has a link to a splendid cricket joke, and then quotes a sceptic — “You can accuse me of having a short attention span, but I find the whole concept of playing a game for FIVE DAYS to be just the other side of lunacy” — and then comments:

“No, that is the entire secret, and the beauty, of Test match cricket; it is what makes it matchless in all sport. I could go on: speak of unfolding drama, epic quality, individual character on display.”

He might be right, and he may very well be right for Test Match cricket at its very best (which is quite rare). But “matchless” is too strong.Test Matches go on for five days. The Tour de France goes on for three weeks, with a venue even more magnificent than Lord’s — one of the greatest countries in the world, and the only one with both Alps and Pyrenees — and, in a good year (which isn’t uncommon) possesses these rightly celebrated elements of (i) unfolding drama, (ii) epic quality and (iii) individual character in whopping great truckloads. And — just like Test Match cricket — it goes on for hours and hours at a time, can’t be compressed at all adequately into a half-hour highlights show in the evening, and is utterly baffling to those who will never understand.

The World of Blogs is well-equipped for enjoying cycling these days. Blognor Regis has recently been covering the just-finished Giro d’Italia, Backword Dave is a fan, and the Tour de France blog is always useful. This year, the last mountain stage in the Tour is on 19 July; the First Test Match begins on 21 July. So cricket fans have no excuse this year for not paying attention.

A fine post on the matter, over at Blognor Regis.

With the baseball out of the way (and with me not having to say “Wait till next year!” to anyone, for once), we can turn our attention to next year’s Tour de France…

… You can study the route here…

(Critics are saying it’s a route designed to stop Lance Armstrong winning again, but (i) I’m not quite sure how you’d design a route to do that: he’s that dominant; (ii) if you did want to mess Armstrong around, you’d want to abolish the team time trial again, which US Postal always manages to win, and they haven’t tried to do that; and (iii) there still seem to be quite a lot of mountains, even if there aren’t quite so many high-altitude finishes as usual. But that’s all very first-impression-ey.)

Most of the time, I only pay attention to the world of cycling in July, and then only for the duration of the Tour de France. When the race has reached Paris, or, usually, after the final mountain stage, I stop paying attention until the next Tour comes around the following year, as it always does.

Something different is going on this year. Not only have I been keeping half an eye on the two Olympic road race events yesterday and today, but I’ve also begun reading books about professional cycling, which I’ve never done before. I mentioned Matt Rendell’s Significant Other a bit earlier; I’ve just finished William Fotheringham’s splendid book about the death of Tom Simpson in 1967 on the Ventoux, Put Me Back on My Bike; and I’ve got two more lined up on my recently-acquired-books shelf: Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s history of the Tour, and Rendell’s earlier book about the history and politics of Colombian cycling.

So I’ll be a much better-educated cycling fan by the time the 2005 Tour kicks off in the Vend�e.

(Other recommendations of quality cycling lit more than more than welcome.)

While the Tour de France has been making its way through the Alps, with Lance Armstrong winning all three stages in very great style, and just before my attention shifts for the rest of the Summer to the England - West Indies cricket series, I’ve been enjoying Matt Rendell’s new book, A Significant Other, which follows Victor Hugo Pe�a through the 2003 centennial Tour and tells me a lot about the history of the race which I’d never really picked up from Sean Kelly’s commentary on Eurosport.

Anyway, here’s race founder Henri Desgrange on the threat to his creation posed by the invention of the freewheel in 1912:

Over the 379 kilometres of [stage eleven], the riders applied pressure on the pedals for scarcely half the distance. The rest was covered freewheeling. Behind the man who devotes himself to sustaining the pace, all our strapping fellows installed themselves as if on a sofa; they were sucked along, and covered enormous distances without any fatigue. The presence, I repeat, of men like Everaerts and Deloffre, Huret and Engel, for example, clearly indicates the ease with which they rode the stage. Is there any remedy? Are our races seriously threatened with decadance by the freewheel? Will the Tour de France be undermined by this infernal invention? Where will it lead? I well know that as far as L’Auto is concerned, the 1913 regulations will authorise the race director to suppress the freewheel in certain stages.

A Significant Other, pp.69-70.

It’s only just gone noon (UK time), but I see that Richard Virenque has already led the Tour over the top of three hills as he begins to rack up the points in the King of the Mountains competition.

All I can say right now is that it would be splendid if he won the stage and finished the day in the polka-dot jersey.

UPDATE [Just past 3pm]: Yes, Virenque’s still on the attack, has been first to the top of all nine summits today, and looks set for the stage win. (And the live coverage of the Tour de France is proving much more gripping than the unfolding of the Butler saga…)

Here’s one, found as they ride towards the finish at Quimper today. Haven’t looked to see if it’s any good or not, but it’s good to see that it exists.

It’s back! Hooray! And this year I don’t seem to have any technical problems channeling the radio commentary through my computer, which is very good news, from my point of view, at least. Look out in particular for stage 16 on 21 July, when the riders go up the legendary Alpe d’Huez in what will be a really unpleasant time trial.