Mortal Armstrong hits the wall on the rock of hell
12 July 2010
Most of the Tour’s greats are forced to endure a moment of brutal clarity, when they are reduced to the ranks of mere mortals. For some a particular time and place always denotes the point where they have visibly taken on un Tour de trop.
After Lance Armstrong’s disastrous showing yesterday the next 13 days will show whether or not signing up for one last Tour at the age of nearly 39 was the two-wheeled equivalent of the boxer who cannot resist one final bout and ends up sprawling on the canvas after two rounds.
Halfway up the Col de la Ramaz, a sign offered leisure cyclists the chance to take part in a circuit of the rock of hell. The heat beating off the asphalt definitely had an infernal quality about it, and the steepest part of the climb leading to a series of tunnels and avalanche shelters through a rocky gorge marked the start of Armstrong’s personal purgatory as he slipped inexorably off the back of the group that included all those with pretensions to a high placing overall.
The group still numbered some 35 and that made the point: the seven-times winner was about to have the worst day he has endured in 12 Tour starts. As if by magic – but more probably on the orders of an Astana team manager who had seen the television pictures of the team’s former leader in trouble – two of Alberto Contador’s team-mates appeared at the front of the group and upped the pace.
The chance to put such a major rival out of the reckoning could not be missed but it was hard to resist the obvious conclusion: Contador was taking revenge for the mind games Armstrong played with him as they jostled for team leadership last year.
Even before the race hit the Ramaz Armstrong’s day had a nightmare quality. As the field accelerated before the foot of the climb, the Texan touched a pedal on a roundabout, his front tyre came unstuck from the rim and he fell on the right side of the road.
His jersey was ripped, his knee cut but critically his saddle broke, meaning he needed a new bike, and there were no kind souls in the field to stage a go-slow. Instead he had to fight to close a 45sec gap, with the help of four team-mates, and when the climb started, he had still to fight his way to the front of the peloton.
All those efforts must have taken their toll. The luck that had assisted Armstrong to seven Tour wins – marred by one chute that had any true gravity, in 2003 – had finally deserted him. It was not his first crash of this Tour. He fell, along with many others, on stage two to Spa and he had suffered an ill-timed puncture on the cobbles of the Arenberg stage.
“I’ve never been so unlucky,” he said later. The counter argument runs that in the Tour good luck tends to follow the men in form, because the slightest weakness means a fractional slowing in reaction time and a minute increase in stress levels that can make a cyclist simply try too hard.
The rest of the stage was what the French love to call un calvaire, a road of the cross. Atop the third category climb to Les Gets, Armstrong was nearly involved in another crash. His head shake spoke volumes. He climbed to Avoriaz in 61st place, nearly 12 minutes behind, pedalling at normal speed rather than his usual frenetic cadence, alongside also-rans such as the French national champion Thomas Voeckler, in happier times the recipient of largesse from the Texan, who “permitted” him to take the yellow jersey in the 2004 Tour.
“I was behind, so starting the Ramaz was hard and then it went from bad to worse,” Armstrong told French television. The company unwittingly underlined the extent of Armstrong’s misfortune by switching from live coverage a few minutes after Andy Schleck’s stage win, including a lengthy ad break and a fulsome preamble to their World Cup coverage, before eventually going back to live pictures of Armstrong crossing the line. He was that far behind.
The Texan’s mentor, Eddy Merckx, lost his mystique in 1977, when he rode up the Col du Glandon in a daze due to stomach trouble. Miguel Indurain was never the same again after blowing up at Les Arcs in 1996. For those places and dates, read Armstrong, Col de la Ramaz, 2010.
He spoke bravely yesterday of continuing for his team but those with long memories remember the fate of the first man to win the Tour five times, Jacques Anquetil, who set out on his “one Tour too many” in 1966, and ended it anonymously on a roadside near Saint-Etienne. Armstrong is now in 39th place overall with a kicking to digest: this is uncharted territory for the Texan.
Seventeen years after his first stage win at Verdun in 1993, this will remain the final image in my mind of Armstrong on the Tour de France: grovelling up the climb to Avoriaz with the no-hopers. Given the way he had made plenty of also-rans suffer thanks to his blood-fuelled racing, it seemed only just. The man’s trajectory through the race cannot be disconnected from his doping. He was at one and the same time, Armstrong the hero, Armstrong the cheat. From now on, his battles would be fought elsewhere.
Vendée takes detour on road to redemption
26 June 2011
The Tour de France is back in the Vendée and back at Madman’s Hill. Yet again. This week, the region south-west of Nantes will host its fourth Grand Départ of the Tour in 18 years, after 1993, 1999 and 2005. That is astonishing given the demand from cities and regions all across Europe to host the five-day junket that brings in millions in revenues from the Tour and its vast caravan. There is, however, a good reason for this.
It boils down to a partnership going back 20 years between a politician, Philippe de Villiers, and a former professional cyclist, Jean-Rene Bernaudeau, who was chief lieutenant to the five-times Tour winner Bernard Hinault in the late 1970s and early 1980s. De Villiers, president of the Vendée general council from 1988 until his resignation in 2010, wanted to promote his region. Bernaudeau, who is now 55, wanted to set up a cycling club that would nurture young riders, as he himself had been nurtured in his youth.
Symbolically, next Sunday’s stage two will start and finish in front of the Manoir de Saint Michel, an attractive 19th-century manor house in the village of Les Essarts which is the headquarters of Bernaudeau’s project. On Thursday, the riders of the Tour will be presented to the public at the Puy du Fou – Madman’s Hill – theme park, dreamed up by De Villiers as a way of simultaneously bringing the public to his region and promoting his “traditional” view of French history.
In a sport that has been buffeted by drugs scandals for a dozen years, it is a success story and possible role model for the future. The amateur club founded by Bernaudeau, who twice finished sixth in the Tour, ran for 10 years before he founded a professional team to sit at the top of the structure; now, sponsored by Europcar, they are France’s most successful Tour team, having taken two stage wins last year with Thomas Voeckler and Pierrick Fédrigo, and the King of the Mountains title with Anthony Charteau. Bernaudeau and his riders are the régionaux of this weekend’s racing, and will be warmly supported.
Below the pro team sits the 20-rider strong Vendee-U amateur team, a feeder squad sponsored jointly by the Vendee departement and a supermarket. The bottom of the pyramid is the sport-etudes project, also known as Pole Espoir which has two full-time staff overseeing 50 young cyclists combining cycle training and studies.
“The goal was to create a philosophy of cycling which combined education and work and cycling,” Bernaudeau says. Among the centre’s intake are cyclists from outside the sport’s mainstream: France’s Pacific and Atlantic islands. Three-quarters of the Europcar team have come through the structure, notably the team leader Voeckler, pictured left, probably the most popular cyclist in France. “The advantage of the Pole Espoir is that you can combine study and sport and come away with a qualification,” Voeckler says. “It’s important because in sport you don’t always make it.”
Bernaudeau’s project was founded in 1991, seven years before cycling woke up to its endemic doping problem but it clearly offers a solution. His pro team has never had a positive test, which speaks for itself. “The key to preventing doping is education,” he says. “It’s a matter of the way people are raised and nurtured. Someone w
ho dopes is just as capable of stealing from a shop. After all, they are riders who steal results and glory from others. They are hooligans.”
Bernaudeau believes cycling has taken the wrong approach. “I tell my riders that I could have won a Tour de France stage at l’Alpe d’Huez; I made a mistake with my gears but today, that hasn’t changed my life. Cycling doesn’t need to be about winning at all costs. It’s not boxing. It’s a sport where you can race 100 times a year but that doesn’t mean you have 100 chances to win.”
He is known for having trenchant opinions on some of his fellow team chiefs but says: “I don’t believe some of the other managers can get the pleasure I can take in what I do. Where is the satisfaction in having a rider like Riccardo Ricco [who tested positive for EPO in 2008] in your team? I pity those guys. For me, the satisfaction is in seeing a rider come through from the beginning, seeing a rider go to another team, then come back to me and begin winning.”
The problem, as he sees it, is that it is hard to know how to measure success because of wave after wave of scandals. “We need to wipe out 10 years because we have lost our reference points. Some of the results in the last 10 years are simply meaningless. There are riders who make sense to me: [Thor] Hushovd, for example, hasn’t come from nowhere. Bradley Wiggins has been fast since he was 18 or 19. You can’t wipe out 10 years of the sport, but in my mind I don’t use those years as a measure of reference.
“We are on the right road. We are seeing things that make sense again. You can see the riders grimacing as they ride up the mountains. I don’t like seeing riders climbing mountains with their mouths closed, or the same guys riding super-strong on the flat and in the mountains.”
With that return to normality, he believes, the French will again begin to shine in their home race. And the chances are that Bernaudeau’s riders will play a lead role in any French renaissance.
Bernaudeau’s riders had a great Tour in 2011, with Voeckler wearing yellow and finishing fourth and Pierre Rolland winning at l’Alpe d’Huez. But this piece was satisfying for other reasons. For one thing, amidst all the hype around Wiggins, Cavendish and Sky, it was good to write about European cycling, and for another, Bernaudeau’s upbeat approach and ethical philosophy was something I had wanted to write about for several years.
Havoc reigns as rogue car takes out two of the leading riders
11 July 2011
The Tour de France is “a massive televisual spectacle” to quote the organiser Christian Prudhomme, but the small screen’s contribution was less than glorious 36km from the finish [in Saint-Flour]. A car driving personnel from the French channels that cover the Tour collided with the cyclists in the winning escape, sending Juan-Antonio Flecha of Team Sky crashing to the floor while the Dutchman Johnny Hoogerland went flying over him and landed in a barbed wire fence.
The incident happened as the five leaders who had survived the toughest stage of the race so far were speeding towards the finish. Car No800, bearing stickers from French television, attempted to overtake the escape – a daily procedure for the many vehicles in the race that have “all areas” passes – but they did so driving along the left-hand verge, and disobeying an order from the race’s internal radio system to move aside to permit team managers to drive up to the riders to provide feeding bottles.
The driver saw a tree in his way, and swerved into the road, colliding with Flecha, who was leading the string. The second-placed rider, Thomas Voeckler of France, narrowly avoided the Spaniard, but Hoogerland, who was lying third, rode into him then catapulted down the left hand verge into the fence and was lucky to suffer only deep cuts.
“It was unbelievable, they were going at 60kmh, I just saw him flying into the air,” said his directeur sportif, Michel Cornelisse. “He’s bleeding a lot, he has deep cuts in his legs. He was lying in the barbed wire, completely in it, his shorts were completely off, he was completely naked.” Flecha suffered a bruised elbow and multiple abrasions. “It is a scandal,” said Prudhomme, a former television journalist himself. A communiqué from the race organisers described the incident as “intolerable”.
“I did what felt like a few somersaults. I don’t know where the car came from,” said Hoogerland. “Before I knew it, Flecha was on the ground and there was nothing I could do. I landed on the fence and I looked at my legs and thought, ‘Is this what cycling is about?’”
The Dutchman, who figured prominently in the Tour of Britain last year, was in the lead in the mountains jersey standings when he fell. He crossed the line nearly 16 minutes behind the stage winner, Luis León Sánchez, went on to the podium to receive the polka-dot jersey and then was taken to hospital. “I have three cuts that are about seven centimeters long and quite deep too. I think I’ll need about 30 stitches at least.”
Sanchez, who outsprinted Voeckler for the stage win, said that in his view there were too many cars getting too close to the riders. “It’s terrible. There were guest cars following us all day and they were often overtaking us to try and follow the race more closely. Several times when the roads got narrow they were coming close. If there is an accident it’s our bodies against a car. Things like that should not happen in the world’s best bike race. The organisers need to get the message.” Sky will assess Flecha’s injuries during the rest day but are not sure he will continue.
Last night the car and its driver were thrown off the race, which was the minimum possible sanction. The same sanction was issued to a Getty Images motorbike which caught the handlebars of the Saxo Bank rider Nicki Sorensen and sent him flying out of the bunch on stage five in Brittany. “Two accidents due to media on the Tour de France is two accidents too many,” said Prudhomme. Team Sky and Vacansoleil were last night reserving comment until the rest day.
The incident had a major bearing on the result of the stage by eliminating Flecha and Hoogerland, two of the strongest cyclists in the five-man escape that dominated the day. However, the mass pile-up on the descent from the Col du Puy Mary that did for Alexander Vinokourov and Jurgen van den Broeck also decided the fate of the yellow jersey. The crash was so severe that the peloton slowed up for several kilometres to permit the pedaling wounded to regain contact – as they did after last year’s mass pile-up on the stage to Spa – but in doing so the escape’s lead rose from three minutes to a far less manageable seven.
After the crash, the yellow jersey Thor Hushovd’s Garmin team were left short-handed in the chase, and in any case the Norwegian was not in the best of shape. Voeckler will start stage 10 on Tuesday in yellow, the second stint in the maillot jaune of his career and the culmination of a season in which he has won eight races. Since his defence of the maillot jaune in 2004 he has become France’s most popular cyclist, and this will do him no harm.
This was one of the craziest Tour de France stages I can remember, along with the Les Arcs day in 1996 (see chapter two). So much incident, so much drama. And it had a massive bearing on the final outcome, as Voeckler was to wear the yellow jersey for the next 11 stages. The other outcome, after the Hoogerland-Flecha crash, was that there are now much more draconian restrictions on cars driving within the Tour’s protected “bubble”.
Bradley Wiggins had left the Tour with a broken collarbone the day before the Hoogerland crash. While he was building for his return in 2012, I spent a couple of days at his high-altitude training camp in Tenerife in late May. As an insight into the sacrifices, hard work and radical thinking called for as Team Sky attempted to win the Tour, this felt pretty telling.
Volcano gives Wiggins the fire for Tour assault
23 May 2012
The Parador hotel in the Teide national park in the centre of Tenerife is eerily quiet and surreally isolated, 15 miles from the nearest village. It sits in a desert of solidified igneous rock where clearly no farmer has dared set a hoe or graze a sheep. High above rise the vast cone and threatening black lava flows of a volcano that looks dormant rather than extinct. The one road that passes through goes from nowhere in particular
to nowhere else, through a hostile wilderness where sudden winds whip up dust storms that sting the eyes and burn the sinuses. There is no tumbleweed blowing past the chapel outside the hotel but there should be.
Four hours flight due south of Britain, on the same latitude as the Sahara, the hotel hosts three kinds of visitors: astronomers who want to take advantage of a lack of light pollution and observe the stars, weekenders who want to escape the stag parties of Playa de las Americas in total solitude, and professional cyclists such as Bradley Wiggins and his Team Sky cohorts. The cyclists come in little groups but in sufficient numbers for the hotel to boast a fully kitted bike room, where the carbon fibre machines hang neatly on hooks, and teams such as Liquigas and Astana have left bike bags and cool boxes ready for their next visit.
One can feel what draws the cyclists as one tries to sleep in the hotel. Breathing does not come easy in the thin, dry air at 2,100m above sea level. The lungs struggle from time to time. The nose and throat burn a little, as if breathing in acid. The hotel is at high altitude and it has drawn a select group of Tour de France contenders over the years. Lance Armstrong has slept here. Maxim Iglinsky, winner of one of the biggest Classics of the spring, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, is breakfasting two tables away from Wiggins and his probable team mates in the Tour: Michael Rogers, Chris Froome, Kanstantin Siutsou, Christian Knees and Richie Porte.
The presence of Wiggins and Co can be traced back to the Tour de France of 2010, which the triple Olympic gold medallist describes as “a disaster”. He had come into that race under a massive weight of expectation, having just signed with the big-budget new boys of Sky and having finished fourth the previous year, although that happened, he says, without his knowing quite how or why.
In terms of the hopes invested in him he bombed, finishing 23rd, prompting a complete rethink of his approach. “We had no data or information about how I did it, not even a VO2 max test.” He invested his trust in two men: one was the former professional Shane Sutton, who had been key to the British Olympic cycling’s team’s effort in Beijing, “the only person who could tell me exactly how it all was”. The second confidant was also Australian, the sports scientist Tim Kerrison, who had trained Olympic swimmers and rowers but knew nothing about cycling when he joined Sky with a brief to look outside the box for ways of improving performance.
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