Marc Madiot’s Cri de Coeur

I have a deep respect for Marc Madiot, the former Paris-Roubaix winner turned team boss. Madiot, the most French man in all of France, was a superb racer blessed with movie star looks matched with a superb level of professionalism – very much like our own Frankie Andreu. Marc Madiot lives and breathes cycling; most of my friends in Europe, my old racing buddies from France and Switzerland, the ones I live to see, are like that. They possess true cycling culture and are blessed – or cursed – with a mad love of the sport, one which never diminishes. We can talk for hours and hours and never be bored. Helps that one of them owns an excellent Beaujolais vineyard…

 Madiot shouted out the alarm yesterday and everyone should listen because he speaks from deep knowledge and is expressing a real fear for cycling. He lashed out at everyone - race organizers, manufacturers, riders and the UCI. He’s right on all counts as this is everyone’s problem and not just, “the fault of the racers who don’t pay attention,” as UCI President David Lappartient put it. Lappartient is a terrible leader, in case you might be interested, having started off his presidency latched to the red herring of motor doping to, for me, cynically position himself as some sort of caped crusader fighting for the morality of the sport. That statement above about the crashes is all you need to know about what’s wrong with cycling these days. 

 The racecourse was in fact too dangerous. Tight, twisting downhill into a town with two turns in the last 200-meters of the race – the modern peloton is simply too fast, too aggressive to handle a parcours like that given that the GC riders (ones in the hunt for the Yellow Jersey) are right up there fighting for position with the sprinter teams. Well, one might ask, what about races like the Tour of Flanders? That’s held on narrow roads too and the riders seem to generally get through those races in one piece. Every rider in Flanders is an expert with the one goal of getting their team leader to front. There are so many different levels of bike handler in the Tour, so many different goals to be chased that the racing becomes chaotic. Put that chaos on tiny roads at 75-kph and the results of yesterday are a guarantee. However, the roads are the roads. According to Thierry Gouvenou, the Tour racecourse designer, they had to eliminate five other finish towns because of the dangers inherent in their layouts for a sprint to hold the stage in the Mayenne region. As he put it, “10 years ago there were 1,100 ‘points dangereux’ in the Tour, this year we have 2,300.”

 I consider men’s pro road racing as the NFL of endurance sport yet even in the NFL, brutal and pitiless as it is, there still seems to be a general, unwritten rule of not hurting the quarterback – the money generator. I’ve repeatedly heard that in today’s peloton, any and everyone gets chopped no matter their standing and no matter where in the field they are. This intensity, this fraught atmosphere, is largely contributing to the mental breakdowns we’ve seen in certain riders over the past few years. I can only remember that when I raced in the pros, there was a certain camaraderie and sense that we were all actors in a great show biz spectacle; that a rigorously high level of bike handling competence and respect was required and strongly enforced. The peloton was balletic in its grace. Are things the same today? 

Geraint Thomas seemed to crash on his own, not his first time. Are his riding characteristics the result of too much coaching, too much stopwatch and not enough real racing? He’s not a fluid, true racer; I can’t see Thomas flying around a 165-meter track like Brad Wiggins. Primoz Rogič, another crash-prone rider, is coming off two months of secret training away from the peloton dulling the razor-sharp reflexes needed to navigate it. It seems that he tried to pass Sonny Colbrelli and hooked bars – why was he fighting for position with, of all people, an Italian sprinter on a sprint stage? I’m completely on Colbrelli’s side on this one as he’s a class act. Why not let the sprinters go to work and not get into their way?

 Caleb Ewan simply crashed himself out, hit a wheel – it happens. By the way, did you all notice how Peter Sagan hit the deck along with Ewan, at 75-kph, and immediately stood up and just walked away? He really is the Hulk.  But again, a turn with 150-meters to go is going to cause troubles. 

 There is no one answer of course. But should this continue, sponsors will determine that the risks of injury begin to outweigh the benefits of sponsoring a team, especially if it’s a team with one or two possible race winners on it, as are most of the smaller squads. The sport needs a leader, a real leader to help corral everyone into a safer place. For me, the one who has demonstrated the best leadership qualities, who has been consistent and measured in his responses is Phillipe Gilbert, the former World Champion. He’s tried hard to put together discussions, but his efforts have been largely ignored by the peloton until things come to a head, when they all start yelling after it’s too late. The riders have also not helped their case to be heard after the past two Giro d’Italia’s when they struck rather than ride in the rain. Those actions were dreadful and damaging to their image.

  In the end, it’s up to the racers to self-police, to figure out how to keep the GC riders and sprinters separate at the finishes (Tim Declercq had a good suggestion to take the GC times at 8-k to go thus backing off the GC teams, but of course it was given too late in the day). Perhaps the elimination of race radios, getting rid of the constant “Move to the front!! Move to the front!!” that’s always in the racers’ ears could held calm things a bit. Gilbert has called for meetings before, only to be met with empty rooms where the racers should have been sitting, staring alone at a full UCI contingent on the other side. Everyone needs to pull together on this one as Madiot is sounding a real and most serious alarm. Empowering Phillippe Gilbert, that is – I’m talking to you, racers – really listening and respecting his efforts, would be a good start.