Pop The Cork

Cyclo-cross seems to be replacing track racing as the preferred school of formation for the current crop of top road racers. The Yellow Jersey and now double stage winner at the Tour, Mike Teunissen, was the 2013 U23 World Cyclo-cross champion, current second place on the General Classification Wout van Aert has a cross palmares as long as your arm, while the favorite for today’s stage finish in the Champagne capital of Epernay, Julian Alaphilippe, was second at the World Junior Cyclo-cross championships in 2010. Of course Mathieu Van der Poel, absent from this Tour, looms large over them all, he the best cross man in the world and fast becoming a Classics great as well.

The prototype for in this mold of racer was Belgium’s Roger De Vlaminck, aka the Gypsy of Eeklo and/or Monsieur Paris-Roubaix (for his four wins on the stones). De Vlaminck, along with his troubled brother Erik, took up the sport as juniors after the winter Antwerp velodrome burned down, and, as they had to fund their father’s card-playing café life through their prize winnings, pere De Vlaminck ordered them to take up cross to keep him in beer and bets. 

Cross riders like De Vlaminck are often fast, powerful sprinters. The constant explosivity of the races, the extreme intensity of the one-hour efforts and the maintenance of year-round form all contribute to creating a superior bicycle racer. But most of all, especially today, it’s the extraordinary bike handling skills they develop that set them apart and above all the rest.

There are far too many crashes in the peloton today. OK, I’m old and perhaps have a selective memory, yet I don’t remember a year where so many favorites were eliminated pre-Tour through accidents. Froome and Dumoulin are out, Bernal missed the Giro (although voices claim that he didn’t actually crash that hard and that the team used the scrape as a means to save him for this Tour), Geraint Thomas crashed out of the Tour de Suisse and as already hit the deck this week, Fuglsang is bloodied and battered… Can anyone remember Merckx, Gimondi and Motta unable to start the Tour because of similar situations? This issue is something the peloton needs to seriously address because if investing in a star becomes too risky, if the chances of crashing continue to grow, sponsors will begin to reconsider their investments in cycling. But until then, a set of cyclocross skills, or in Egan Bernal’s case, MTB (he was third once in the Junior World Championships) is becoming a requisite insurance policy for a top road racer. That, and perhaps racing at bit – a lot – more than the current crew of contenders do. Bicycle racing is a game which requires reflexes and experience. When riders come into a race as savage as the Tour, and savage it is, with only a handful of racing days in their legs, their handling skills must be lacking as, with anything else, those skills require constant practice to stay sharp.

Which brings me to the WAPO article on the Walton family’s new contributions to cycling. Who is advising them? The same Rapha crew that wrote the VeloNews report that, among other jewels, proposed eliminating the World Championships and cutting the racing calendar way down? A move that would take live cycling away from literally millions of people. What stunned me in the article, besides the nausea-inducing comments from the quoted cycling experts – why do we so eat our own in American cycling? – was the fact that their goal is to create a “hero” champion that the public could rally around to grow the sport. We already did that. His name is Lance Armstrong and looked how that turned out for everyone. The Dutch, who have races, deep knowledge, grand traditions, an exuberant fan base, huge talent pool and easy access to all of the European circuit – with all of that, have had to wait for 30-years for a few days in the Yellow Jersey let alone a Tour winner. Ask the French about this too.

The idea of the Walton family program is wonderful. The fact that they are helping my friends at the StarTrack program, perfect. However, they should reconsider the purpose of racing which is, to my mind, to help create an acceptance of the bicycle in society. Any community that has a velodrome or great race, develops not just a racing fanbase, but also encourages everyday people to ride while also stimulating civic leaders to fund bike paths and other pedestrian-friendly improvements. The criterium I founded in Doylestown, PA, is a perfect example of how racing benefits a community. 

Back to the Dutch. The Jumbo-Visma team is basically the reconstituted Rabobank program. When the doping scandals hit, Rabobank ended their sponsorship of their pro men’s squad, yet kept money in the sport, funding local velodromes with attached criterium circuits, junior and women’s’ teams and all sorts of other cycling activity. Those Dutch executives has a realistic understanding of what the world of professional sport actually is – mind you, sport, not just cycling – and didn’t allow the lifting of that blanket to destroy something they’d been building for decades. Marianne Vos is a fine example of what came out of their continued support, as is, of course, the current Yellow Jersey. 

I hope that the Walton’s will expand their advisory base and make a trip to the Netherlands to intensely examine how a successful national cycling program, one that benefits the community at large, is created and implemented. And since my dream of a national series of affordable (for a community) pro-am UCI road races is clearly not going to happen, the next best, or perhaps even better option, would be to focus on year-round cyclocross competition on a local and national level, fulfilling the dreams of the Mike Fraysse’s and Richard Sach’s of our own cycling world. Those American cyclo-cross pioneers were right all along and the Walton’s should speak with them to get a real worldview. And as we watch the crazy, twisting finale to today’s stage into Epernay, the bike-handling benefits of a cyclo-cross formation will become abundantly clear.