Tragic Beauty

Poor cycling: the most beautiful sport in the world is serving as a perfect antidote for Covid-19 isolation and depression, providing magnificent vistas of the Alps and Lago di Como, scenes that so many have desperately missed, like prisoners finally seeing a blue sky. This sport, which has been exemplary in its handling of the crisis – so far, one must always caution – with the riders, teams and fans all perfectly behaving according to safety regulations, getting through the inaugural races as the Tours of Poland and Burgos with no confirmed infections, and which, with its admission-free 100-mile long stadiums, coupled with portable live television images for an open space-hungry public, should indeed be the ideal pandemic-era sport. Yet, as always, tragedy and uncertainty follow cycling like an ever-present dark cloud hovering above its head. 

 “I aged five years in the last four days,” stated the experienced AG2R La Mondiale racer Mikaël Cherel after the finish of the Critèrium du Dauphinè on Sunday, such was the intensity. The riders are taking each day of racing as if it is their last of the year, and with the recent – and I must say questionable - cancellation of the World Championships in Switzerland, odd since the country recently opened stadium sports to 50% to 75% capacity, who can blame the riders. That intensity and the fact that all the top riders in the world have been thrown together with no warmup races to calm nerves and allow a normal amount of commonsense-influencing fatigue to settle in, has made each race a veritable World Championship. With the season short and the stakes incredibly high, as so many riders and teams remain unsure of their futures, the riders are pushing to the very limits in every way from start to finish. The list of racing carnage shows that those limits were being redefined and surpassed each day.

 Who would have ever thought that the presence of Chris Froome in a race would elicit pity in the public? The sight of the man who has won every Grand Tour suffering and struggling as he was in France was a poignant one and had to contribute the greatest counter-performance in the history of the Sky/Ineos juggernaut. Imagine the atmosphere at the post-race team dinners: they must have been grim indeed no matter what brave face Froome tried to put on his comeback. Geraint Thomas slipped back into anonymity; Michal Kwiatkowski showed that his decline of the past years is continuing; 2019 Tour winner Egan Bernal was missing a gear and unable to even finish the race – although one learns to never believe the Brailsford organization’s declarations, they may simple be resting him; and their one remaining hope, the brilliant Italo-Russian Pavel Sivikov, managed to crash himself at who knows what speed trying to follow the acrobatic Julian Alaphilippe down a mountain on the final stage. British cycling fans must be in a full state – although private – knuckle-gnaw right about now: as one English friend put it in a most typical understatement, “None of the Brits seem to be featuring in this…”

 French hope Thibaut Pinot, who in turn broke French hearts with his near miss victory despite the coming together of other French teams to help him, crashed on Saturday. The news that he won’t start next Sunday’s French National Championships shows that the injuries were worse than thought and provides yet another example of his bravery while eliciting fears for his Tour.

 Pinot was only in a position to win because of crash of the supremely dominant race leader, Slovenian Primož Roglič, on the equally dominant Dutch Jumbo-Visma team, and dislocated shoulder of his super teammate and co-crasher Steven Kruijswijk. What a blow for the team that up until then was heavily favored to win the Tour. And the carnage, the wholesale destruction of the stars, didn’t stop there. 

 Dan Martin crashed on Stage 2, fracturing his sacrum, giving him two weeks to heal before the Tour; Bora-Hansgrohe lost Emanuel Buchmann, who was sitting third overall at the time to a “damaged shoulder”, and teammate Gregor Mühlberger, all in the same crash that took out Roglič and Kruijswijk – not to mention Bora’s German Champion Maximilian Schachmann, out with a broken collarbone in Italy, back to that in a bit.

 Then onto “il Lombardia” the great, normally season-ending Italian Classic, held between Bergamo and Como, one of the most difficult single-day races on the calendar, and of course the heartbreaking crash of 20-year old Belgian superstar, Remco Evenepol. I don’t know why so much darkness lands on the Belgians. Their great sprinter, World Champion Stan Ockers, died in a track race in 1956; Jempi Monserè, possibly the most charismatic racer in Belgian history, whose win in the 1970 Professional Worlds in Leicester, England inspired me to begin racing, died while wearing the Rainbow Jersey in a Belgian race the following year; Eddy Merckx came close to the same end as his idol Ockers when he in turn crashed while motorpacing on a velodrome: Eddy lived but the driver was not so lucky. Johan Bruyneel and Philippe Gilbert both went flying into ravines on mountain descents – luckily both came out relatively unscathed. The same cannot be said for Evenepol, as his distraught boss Patrick Lefevere, who must wonder how much more can befall his embattled team said when Evenepol tried to apologize from his hospital bed: “You are still alive. Shut up”. Evenepol, with a fractured pelvis and damaged lung, is out for the season and all of Belgium, and all cycling fans, mourn. 

 It’s all really too much. As I wrote in “The Crash”, the riders, teams, UCI and race organizers all need to come together to figure out a solution because if the big money stars are this vulnerable, especially in the current economic atmosphere, will they be worth the financial risk to sponsors?  Is there really a need for a climb as the Muro di Sormano with its 27% grades and reliably dangerous and damaging descent to be in a race? Is it good spectacle, in fact, for a single day race to have more than six-minutes between the winner and 10thplace? Should race finishes be held in wealthy towns such as Como? The well-to-do don’t tend to accept inconvenience very graciously as shown by the driver that somehow pulled out in front of the afore-mentioned Maximilian Schachmann, just short of the finish of il Lombardia, miraculously “just” breaking his collarbone. I can hear that driver now: “But there’s no one coming! I’m just going to mover over there and…” They’ll probably try and sue the race for car repairs.

 Of course there was beauty, excitement and some of the most intense racing ever seen this week. Wout van Aert continues to astound, winning the first, uphill sprint of the Dauphinè, then turning team rider, hauling the peloton through the valleys and up and down major mountain passes in the most superlative performance in memory. USA’s Sepp Kuss, yet another star graduate of the Jonas Carney school of racing (along with Mike Woods, Ben King, Chad Haga…) won the final stage with an end-of-race surge that all of the Jumbo-Visma riders seem to have;  Jacob Fuglsang and his new, rising star Russian teammate Aleksandr Vlasov rode a tactically brilliant race to beat Kiwi George Bennett  (Jumbo-Visma again!) at il Lombardia. But it’s the crashes and the loss of exciting race contenders that dominated this week of racing for me, all on top of that horrible sprint crash in Poland. Something needs to be done for our beautiful yet so very fragile, beloved cycling.