Tom Pidcock’s rise has been something that’s intrigued me quite a bit over the last while. Earmarked as the next great white hope of British Cycling since he was an U16, he has followed his own path. And I’ve wondered over the last year or so if the puff has gone out of his hype train. With the likes of Evenpoel, Simmons, Eekhoff, etc all stepping up as such young ages I had wondered was the value diminshing in his stature.
This video gives a good insight into his background, and into his makeup and has made me question my assesment of him. If you have the time, it’s certainly worth the watch
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How the Game is Broken..
I was searching through some folders of stuff the other day and I came across this piece I wrote in 2013. It’s still relevant today ..
How the Game is Broken..
You often hear the phrase bandied about “Don’t hate the Player, hate the game” and it’s never been more relevant than in connection with cycling. The game of professional cycling (and De Gri is turning in his grave at me mentioning it as a game) is broken. The twin doping positives from the Vini Fantini team are showing up a true broken game, it’s raised more questions about how we treat people, teams, riders and how Professional cycling has to use up and spit out riders to make it all go round.
We expect riders to be caught if they are doping, yet we have nothing firmer than suspicions, inneundo and Secret Pro esque rumours. We hear time and again after someone was pinged that *the whole peloton were suspicious* if the whole peloton is always suspicious, well how come no one does a Xavier Tondo and reports anything to the authorities (simple answer, some of the authorities are broken too) – so how do we change this ?
Some say Life Bans are the only way to change this, but I disagree with this, I don’t think the envirnoment exists that they can be implemented fully. We’ve had rules, regulations and gentlemen’s agreements about returning dopers previously but when push came to signing a deal on the dotted line, no one blinked an eyelid when Ivan Basso was the first big name rider to re-sign for a WorldTour team instead of spending two years at a lower level. We have commerical interests determing how someone returns to the sport and at what level, not in a predefined manner. Life Bans are using a hammer to crack a singular nut.
What we have at the moment I agree is broken, we have dopers returning without showing faith, or rebuilding trust in them, we have Teams hiring ex dopers and letting clean riders go, we have silent ex dopers at management, coach, Sporting Director levels and no one really bats an eyelid. There’s a quote from Trent Lowe that has stuck with me from earlier this year
“I am convinced that to complete the workload I was given on an ongoing basis, one would have to dope in order to recover. I was not doping and therefore my health suffered a lot from such over training. Sadly I believe this scenario may still be ongoing in professional cycling, and I feel it still has a very long way to go.”
We can’t go banning cyclists for life when the sport is as broken as this, to paraphrase Floyd Landis the whole thing needs burning to the ground with the hottest flame possible and let it die. It seems that it is impossible to untangle the good, the bad, the good going bad, the bad trying to be good. For a fan how can they differentiate between a David Millar and Danilo DiLuca other than innuendo, twitter hearsay and dodgy rumours ?
It seems as if the Professional sport doesn’t have a doping problem it has a fundamental ethcis problem, it seems as if everyone operates on the attitude of well someone’s going to be screwing me, so I might as well screw someone/everyone else. We have teams that are only concerned with optics, to be seen to do the right thing, we’ve teams trying to do the right thing but failing, and we’ve teams not giving a damn.
If we you don’t subscribe to the Floyd Landis idea of burning the whole thing to the ground, what do I think we need to do ? We need to change our anti doping policy to a drugs policy, we need to look at the bigger picture than just the cyclist that uses, we need a review of the doctors involved in the sport, the sporting directors, the race calendar, the treatment of riders during grand tours, we need to let people see there is a belief in the system, be it the passport, be it the reporting system, be the legal system when it prosecutes.
We need a sea change from the top down for Professional Cycling to work, and this doesn’t mean a breakway league with tv rights for teams Mr Vaughters, it means a searing honesty to the sports faults and flaws, not a slow reveal when it best suits your commerical needs. It needs a different UCI – not just a different President – it needs a better model for young riders to come into the sport and be valued as young riders not some talent to be flogged for the greater exposure of some sponsor.
Who ever you are in the sport of professional cycling you have a duty to be honest and try make a single change to your sport to make it a better place after you leave than when you started. Don’t talk bullshit, don’t speak out of both sides of your mouth, don’t say one thing and practise another, reach out and try and make that change or face someone like Floyd burning the whole shit pile to the ground when you least expect it.
Trent Lowe Quote from – http://cyclingtips.com.au/2013/02/trent-lowe-life-after-cycling/
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Yes, you are a cheat, even you Larry.
It’s not neccessarily your fault but still.
Post the U23 Worlds there seems to have been a huge amount of hand wringing and gnashing of teeth from Pros saying “Well everyone drafts the cars, so please let me massage my conscience for a minute to make it seem as if it’s okay”. It really doesn’t matter if the nicest guy in the Peloton gets back on using a draft. It’s still against the rules. So lets set the rules out fairly clearly, here they are from the UCI Website. (PDF Download Here)
So lets get a couple of cards on the table, I’ve DS’d, I’ve rode races (the latter not in a while, kids eh?) I’ve been on both sides of doing this. I’ve been the one sheltering, I’ve been the one shouting at the driver to close up to the car in front so I can jump across, I’ve been the one shouting at the driver “Steady Trapper, for f**ks sake”. I’ve also been that guy in the drivers seat, one eye glued to the rear view mirror, the other eye watching speedo, wing mirror and the road ahead, sweating bullets to make sure you don’t have a rider come in that back window. I remember on the first day of the Rás, the first rider to sit on my bumper was Russ Downing, as I was moving up to feed the riders, me absolutely bricking it to get up and get my job done, but also to give Russ a good chance to get back up through the cars.
Any good DS that doesn’t help his own team, or others out, in this scenario isn’t a good DS.
With all those cards laid out on the table, how do I still see this as cheating ? Simple the rules as defined above deem that it is. The UCI Regulations on everything are not designed to give anyone clarity but mainly to put a veil of decency over what happens and they like to seem in control.
In Nils’s case, it was such a prolonged time behind the car before he was even in the cavalcade that it really warranted detailed attention. The only thing mitigating in his favour was that in my own experience when you have the prescene of a Commisare on a motorbike, they will normally warn you when they feel you are breaching the tolerance for fairness.
Instead of wringing the hands, and oh sure look everyone does it, how *can we all be cheating*, Professional Cycling needs to put it’s own house in order. And sadly this is where it all falls apart, an invisible CPA, a UCI that doesn’t really care and riders divided, you can be sure nothing will change. We’ve been down this road before, actually we are always down this road, the usual sign posts occur, someone threatening to sue, the UCI hiding behind something and the rest of the world still turning. And nothing changes.
We’ve moved passed the era of Armstrong, Ullrich and the super charged doping, the UCI, the CPA, they have no super baddies to fight, but like any relationship, the hard work is the grind. Riders need to pull the finger out and put the CPA to the sword, or do the decent thing and join the Cyclist’s Alliance. No amount of David Millar throwing shapes is going to change anything. What’s needed is actual change.
Sadly in the case of Nils or Larry the problem is there is no Referee’s Whistle, there’s no pause in play, there’s no second chances. Riders, and the CPA need to stop pissing about and actually start making meanful changes to the sport now, before it’s too late.
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Empire State of Mind: Where to now for Team Ineos
Going into the 2020 Season it looks like Team Ineos has the strongest team of all time put together. In reality, is this true? Or could they be heading for what looks like a different style of team altogether?
When you say the names Carapaz (Current Giro Winner), Bernal (Current Tour de France Winner), Thomas (Last year’s Tour de France Winner) and Froome (4 x Tour de France, Giro, 2 x Vuelta) you have to wonder what they can’t win next year, in reality how do you manage these riders and get them to ride for someone else. Which brings us to the point if you look past the headline names are Team Ineos changing to a model of Galácticos, rather than structure around a defined leader.
If we look back at previous Grand Tour wins for Sky/Ineos you can see they have a structure to the team, a couple of Rouleurs/Gregarios, a couple of mountain domestiques, a trusted lieutenant and a leader. Looking past the Galácticos and you get a sense of a team on the wane. Elissonde, Rosa, Poels, Halvorsen on the way out, and you have to look where the slack will be taken up. You also have to factor in, Kiryienka and Knees are no longer the forces they were in years past. Previously you saw Sky/Ineos sign the likes of good GC challengers (Roche, Kwiatkowski, Nieve, Landa) and make them into supercharged domestiques for the defined leader (Froome/Thomas/Wiggins). Now we have 4 possible leaders, with only three possible Grand Tours, so we now have a conundrum on our hands as to how Sky will play it.
If we look to this year’s Tour de France we can possibly see a glimpse into how they intend to play their role going forward. It’s going to be less about the front foot dominance and more about well we think we have the two best contenders in the race, it’s up to everyone else to get rid of us. It’s pushback time. You could see this year that the Tour de France was less controlled from Ineos and they were okay with taking a more passive approach. They still kept Thomas and Bernal up the front and out of trouble but they weren’t attempting to ride tempo all day and launch themselves at the final climbs. Now there is a slight aside here, was this by design, or by circumstance, but more on that later.
I think they have gone out and purchased what they see as the most capable GT Contenders for the next 5 years and will put them in a position to make their own attacks on GC. You can see how Movistar executed that this year in the Giro with Carapaz, and how Bernal stole a march in the Tour de France before the stage was cancelled.
There are drawbacks to this, if we look at Movistar over the past few years were they’ve left the road sort out the favoured rider it really hasn’t worked. And sometimes the road doesn’t necessarily give you the result you want. We look at the 2018 Tour de France and how Thomas was clearly the best rider, but the plan was clearly to back Froome. Even to the point that Thomas didn’t have the favoured rider status in the TTT, they still backed Froome.The other fly in the ointment of this plan is the rise of Jumbo Visma over the past few years, and they are aligned with some super domestiques behind a singular leader. And now with the signing of Tom Dumoulin they’ve added a superstar to slot in at the top of their train. They really look like a team that will challenge the status quo of the past few years.
Now that question from earlier, I think a couple of events have aligned at Team Ineos and this has been less by design and more by circumstance. I think for sure they have had the policy to recruit the best, and younger riders than before. This has happened alongside another event, the leaving of the man who seems to have been the glue in the team Rod Ellingworth. You look at the way Poels and Kwiatkowski were really off the boil in the Tour De France, and how the rest of the team this year has failed to fire as a collective unit in the three Grand Tours and you’ve got to look at a management failure. Ellingworth was put on gardening leave quite early in this season and perhaps the slack wasn’t quite taken up by others. I don’t see Ellingworth as a messiah and guru that held all the training secrets, but he was just that guy who did everything. And in an organisation sometimes when a person like that leaves, it takes some time to replace him, and in fact he maybe irreplaceable and it could end up that the position is eventually carved out into separate more defined roles.
This transition in both management and purchasing is signalling an alignment to the idea that this year’s Tour De France may be the method of winning we see more often than not from Team Ineos. It also means that Team Ineos have evolved before the Tour De France has had a chance to, we can see with the 2020 route, they are looking for a less controlled race, they are looking to climbs that don’t favour one strong team to ride tempo, as we have seen previously. They are looking towards the individual, and Team Ineos have gathered the most talented individuals, for such an occasion.
The King is dead long live the King.
