The Crash – Another Look
After reading the (always excellent and measured, for which I’m most grateful) comments on last week’s piece, The Crash, about the dreadful sprint finish in Poland that left Dutch Sprinter Fabio Jakobsen fighting for his life, I thought to make a round-robin of calls to sprinters to get their views on the situation. While I continue to firmly lay the majority of blame for Jacobsen’s plight on the weak and completely insufficient barricade system, combined with that unconscionable downhill, 85 kph sprint finish, and do call for a set of finish-line safety standards to be created by the UCI as quickly as possible, the talks with my fast-man friends raised interesting perspectives.
They all felt that Dylan Groenewegen, the aggressor in the crash, was wrong, that he had crossed the line, but, as one of them said, “it’s a very fine line, one that’s hard to define”. He continued, “ What is certain is that in the Team Bus briefing the morning of the race, the Deceuninck-Quickstep directors were telling Jacobsen, ‘Don’t give an inch of asphalt to anyone! Fight with everything you have and don’t back off no matter what happens!’. The sort of call to action one hears on the (American) Football field. He found it typically hypocritical – of cycling - that Patrick Lefevere, the Deceuninck-Quickstep team boss, knowing how sprinting works, suddenly turned around and called for the arrest of Groenewegen.
“As you know John”, a highly successful European sprinter friend said, “ If you get a reputation as a ‘Gentleman Sprinter’ in the Benelux or Italy, the racers will eat you alive and you’ll never do anything”. Baseball provides a good illustration of this dynamic. The American sport, for my international readers, is played by very large, powerful and highly skilled men. It is, in fact, macho-beyond. The pitcher will often try and intimidate the batter and force him away from the plate into a less advantageous batting position by throwing the ball, which is basically a 75-mm diameter rock, at 150 kph (90-mph), directly at the batter, sometimes even at the head. If the batter flinches and backs off it’ll be done to him every time: so sometimes they just stand there, take the hit, and develop a reputation of toughness. It’s exactly the same in sprinting.
Michael Matthews, the Australian sprinter, aka “Bling”, is a racer that all the other sprinters know can be “backed off the plate” so to speak. His career, while excellent of course, should have many, many more wins than it does due to the fact that he is not good at the “frotte” as the French term it, or in the banging of handlebars and bodies for position at 70 kph+ in the sprint finishes. Another is Arnaud Démare, the hyper-fast French sprinter, recent winner of Milano-Torino, who’s even given media interviews on the subject of his caution in the sprinting game – although it must be said that when French sprinting rival Nacer Bouhanni is anywhere near him, Démare begins to slash and burn with the best of them. Matthews went out of character last week in Milano Sanremo, perhaps, as a cycling journalist friend posited, because of his near crash and loss of arm skin as he scrapped along a wall at who know what speed on the descent of the Poggio just before the finish. Maybe it was an adrenalin surge from the incident, or maybe it’s because he was finally fed up with being pushed around, but the Aussie rode Peter Sagan right into the barricades to snatch third place in the race.
Groenwegen should be sanctioned, of course, but within reason considering how the game is played. Had those barricades been properly designed, we’d be looking at far less severe injuries for poor Jakobsen as he would have bounced and rolled/slid down the straightway. It’s to the Tour of Poland that the severe sanctions must be aimed with a cuff of the ears to the UCI technical inspectors who allowed those levels of shoddy protections to exist. The racers, all athletes in fact, can only keep their place in the hierarchy of their respective sports by taking everything to the very limits, right to the edge. That’s why we watch them. It is the duty of the various federations and ruling sports bodies to recognize this fact and to put in proper protections for the athletes who will invariably, at one time or another, cross over that razor-sharp line.