A.C. - Photo: Ian Langsdon/EPA

With the Spring Classics now turning to debates over motorized doping and the hardman’s GT over, perhaps it’s time to start turning our gaze toward the Tour de France. Sure, there’s some sure-to-be good racing between now and then, but who cares? The TdF is next up on the VSP and we here at Velominati need to start conjuring up picks.

When Alberto Contador won the Vuelta in 2008 I was pretty excited for the guy.  I walked down the hall to a fellow cycling fan and colleague’s office after reading the race report on VeloNews and asked if he’d heard.  “Dude, Contador just won the Vuelta!” I said.  “That’s the past three consecutive Grand Tours he’s entered and three consecutive wins, really impressive. (15 months to be accurate but who’s counting)  Guys just don’t do shit like that anymore!”  And now he’s four for four.

But oh if things were that simple for me.  Pesky investigations, rumors and accusations stemming from Operation Puerto led to subsequent inquisitions of El Pistolero.  This eventually led to both the UCI and Spanish courts issuing statements that no legal action or sanctions would be pursued.  Later his new team, Astana, was banned from the Tour in 2008 because Veino was doped to the gills and swung through the Jiffy Lube for a 20 minute oil change the year before.  And then the whole media-fueled shitstorm started with that guy from Texas joining Astana.  Blech!  Trying to ignore the A.C. – L.A. drama of last year’s Tour was probably about as difficult as riding the Tour itself.  If anyone managed to get through the Tour without hearing about that B.S. they deserve an honorary Maillot Jaune and a kiss from two podium girls.

Throughout all this, perhaps even in spite of all this, A.C. continued to win races.  Okay so he didn’t make the podium at Paris-Nice last year, a race he won in 2007 and again this year.  The coverage would make one think that a 4th place finish in the Race to the Sun was disgraceful and that he’d lost his touch.  He bonked and bonked hard on the sixth stage.  But with wins at Volta a Algarve, Vuelta a Pais Vasco, a podium finish at the Dauphine, and becoming the Spanish National TT champion, A.C. was proving himself to be the best all-arounder in the peloton.

So what are the impressions we get of Contador?  Bruyneel has tossed out mixed messages.  On the one hand he’s the most explosive and gifted climber he’s ever seen.  On the other he’s some type of prima donna who rides for himself.  I would too after having to buy my own TT wheels and proving myself to be the strongest rider in the peloton only to be treated like a neo-pro.  Of course don’t even bother asking a Livestronger about Alberto.  Anyone who get’s in the way of another coronation for The Boss (read COTHO) has got to be arrogant, selfish, and just plain mean.  Okay, so Contador’s pistol shot salute is sort of lame and contrived but so what?  It’s a hell of lot better than playing telephone.  And he’s certainly not the most entertaining guy in interviews.  But I haven’t seen anything that makes him out to be anything other than pragmatic and perhaps even introspective.   He actually seems kind of chill.

In a recent interview in Cycle Sport America, David Millar had a few things to say about Contador (of course, Millar has a few things to say about a lot) . The gist was that Alberto went to war against Johan and Lance last year both in the press and on the road.  He won on both fronts.  He also spoke of the respect A.C. is garnering in the peloton, his strength on the bike, and the perseverance he’s maintained through all this.  On that classic bonk and subsequent stage in 2009′s P-N, he had this to say:

When you watch a race, you want to believe riders can stay away in a break.  That’s what’s exciting. It does still happen, like with Contador in the last stage of Paris-Nice (2009).  He’d been humiliated the day before.  He got the hunger knock and blew his nuts off.  Lost the jersey and was lying third or fourth.  Tragedy.  I said, ‘Watch Alberto go tomorrow.  First mountain.’ Nobody believed me. I said, ‘He will, he will, it’s Alberto.’  First Mountain, he went, from the bottom.  That’s old school.  His team didn’t set him up, he just went.  There were still 100k to go.  He attacked the whole peloton and he was still away at the end.

We saw this on the much bigger stage of last year’s Tour as well.  After getting caught out of a decisive split in stage three the L.A. show was supposedly on.  If you believed 1/3 of the guys on Versus and most everyone else you would’ve thought El Pistolero was now second fiddle.  Lance’s smart riding aside, THIS WAS ONLY STAGE THREE PEOPLE!   Enter the Arcalis.  A.C. took off to the consternation of the entire Astana team and  1/3 of the guys calling the race on Versus and turned a 20 second deficit into a 2 second lead over his soon-to-be-former teammate.   He was letting it be known that he was the strongest rider on the Astana team and the whine fest was on.

So what can we say more objectively about Contador?  Well, his light-as-a-feather climbing style has been compared to Charly Gaul and Marco Pantani.  Suffice it to say, there’s not another rider in the peloton who can really compete, day in, day out, with Alberto in the mountains.  He’s proven he can rip a TT course as well.  His performance in last year’s final ITT at the Tour was decisive.  Maybe he’s not the greatest at reading a race or making it into all the splits but I’m afraid to say that those are dying skills.  With race radios and directors barking orders into a headset non-stop, what rider really needs to think for himself?   And as far as needing a strong team to win this year, let’s not forget last year.  I’m not entirely convinced he needs a squad of super-domestiques to pull him through the Tour.  Maybe just a few solid riders will do.

When A.C. won the Vuelta in ’08 and pulled off the virtual Grand Tour trifecta I was a fan.  Then, for reasons I don’t fully understand, I thought I didn’t like him.  Then I was confused about why I was trying not to like El Pistolero.  I really still don’t know what to think of the guy. I guess I’m indifferent towards him. Regardless of what I or any of you think, the promise that he’ll continue to ride with dominance on the climbs and strength in the TT is going to shape the Tour this year .  This time, it’d be nice if there were a few guys who could keep up.   It’s not his fault he wins races, it’s everyone else’s.  Trying to beat Alberto and win the GC is what’s going to make this year’s Tour exciting, not a comeback, not a team leadership struggle, and certainly not a cat fight in the media.

The migration to electronic transmissions in cycling is inevitable. Cables have lots of inherent problems; they stretch, rust, break, and get clogged in their housings. Worse, they are part of an imprecise mechanical system that requires constant maintenance and adjustment, and one that can by design only work perfectly in one gear and gets progressively worse the further you get from that “perfect” gear. In short, cable shifting sucks, and it will eventually go the way of friction-shifting.

The obvious solution is the electronic drive-train; once adjusted, an electronic system should need little further adjustment or maintenance since there are no cables to stretch,  and it should work equally well in all gears because an electronic system should be able to set the chain perfectly regardless of the derailleur’s position with respect to the cog in the cassette.  The only problem with electronic shifting is that it takes human control out of the system, which makes it suck even more than cable shifting.

When Mavic released their Mektronic groupo, I jumped on it like a pothead jumps on a bag of Doritos.   Sadly, I very quickly became disenchanted with the system.  For starters, it would only shift the rear derailleur electronically; the front was operated by an enormous cast-iron lever that looked like it was forged in the middle ages by a monkey with one eye.   I felt like an executioner on the gallows pulling the lever every time I shifted from the big to little ring.

Unfortunately for Mavic, the front shifting was the best part of the system.  The Huangism “Press and Forget” was coined to describe the process for shifting.  This was supposed to mean that you didn’t have to think about shifting once you pressed the button to shift; the “reliable” system would deliver a perfect shift for you without you having to worry about it.  What it really meant was that it had a mind of it’s own. Every time I would press the little yellow button to shift, I sent myself on an emotional roller coaster ride as I waited to see what would happen.

On the good shifts, a second or two would go by and then it would shift.  On the averages shifts, it would not do anything for a little while and then shift at a surprising time, like right when you gave up and got out of the saddle to power over the hill you had intended to downshift shift for.  On the bad shifts, it would just never shift or shift without the button being pressed.

It got worse when riding close to a radio tower where radio frequencies were strong.  (Mektronic was wireless and functioned using radio frequencies.)  There was a television broad-cast tower on one of my routes, and on several occasions, riding by the tower would cause the whole system to reset and stop working at all.  It was like the Mavic version of the Blue Screen of Death.  That said, not shifting was much better than the cases where it would shift without input.  The worst experience I had was on a group ride out by the airport in Minneapolis when the derailleur shifted from the 12 to the 23 in a single instant because some guy in the control tower spilled his coffee on the switchboard or something, causing the chain to snap and me nearly crashing as the group sprinted for a yellow sign.

Another problem with Mektronic was it’s gargantuan size.  The levers were too long and  were banned by the UCI as they offered a non-regulation aerodynamic hand position (the unfortunate pro teams who were sponsored by Mavic raced an even uglier stubby version of these levers).  The derailleur was enormous, with a bulbous extension to accommodate the ratchet pushrod that provided the shifting mechanism and which was prone to snagging other items around the bunch like wheels and rider’s feet.  In a crash during a crit, I tore off my derailleur hanger when my bike hit the deck.

Eventually, I abandoned ship and moved back to a good old fashioned Dura-Ace 7701 drivetrain.  There’s something very comforting about knowing that a steel cable is running between my shifter and my derailleur; I don’t know about you but if I need to shift, I really can’t be bothered with waiting for a derailleur which was apparently programmed by a disgruntled software engineer from Microsoft to decide if it’s going to go ahead and shift or not.  But maybe that’s just me.

Electronic shifting faded into the background as Shimano and Campagnolo quietly worked on prototypes over the past decade.  Campagnolo and Shimano were both slated to release their fully electronic groupos last Fall, but Campy eventually decided against putting the expensive set into production due to the economic climate at the time.  Shimano, on the other hand, did release their version despite a whopping $3250.00 for the derailleurs, shifters, and batteries.  A complete groupo runs upwards of $4500-$5000.

On the plus side, it appears that Shimano has actually designed a good system.  Aside from it being a bit expensive, all reviews and stories point to this being a really reliable and effective system.  The system is wired, so outside interference is limited.  The front derailleur is electronic and, provided it is set up properly, will reportedly never drop your chain.  Shifts are lightening-quick and reliable.  The system self-feathers the chain, running silently in every gear.  Even ‘Cross racers are using it in the the mud and crud.

I’m anxiously awaiting my first opportunity to try it out.  Accepting donations now.

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Marco Pantani destroys the field on the Galibier of the 1998 Tour de France.

In 1998, Marco Pantani staged one of the most prestigious coups of cycling by winning the Giro-Tour double.  He made this run aboard what I believe to be the most beautiful bike in history, a Celeste steed with a yellow section of frame starting at the seat collar and spreading out down the tops of the seatstays, top tube, and seat tube.

Very little is actually known about this bike; it was a one-off creation made especially for Il Pirata by the Bianchi Reparto Corse division which makes all the top-end bikes for the company.   Some say the frame is aluminum, others claim it was boron.  The frame undeniably used a compact geometry (this is commonplace now, but it was unique in ’98), but whether the top tube sloped up or down seems to be a point of contention: did the top but slope up to give a longer head tube to bring his bars up to accommodate his unique in-the-drops climbing style or was the top tube sloped down towards the seat tube in order to reduce the weight of the frame and increase the stiffness of the rear triangle?

The bike has captured my imagination for a long time.  I love the way the saddle and tires match the portion of the frame where they intersect in what I call the “Yellow Cluster”; the vision of Pantani climbing out of the saddle on the Col du Galibier with those flashes of yellow swaying back and forth as he danced up the mountain remains one of the coolest images of cycling.  I studied his bike extensively when I was building my Bianchi XL EV2 and I mimicked it’s setup, choosing a yellow Flite saddle and solid yellow tires.  To this day I love the looks of that bike, and Pantani’s setup has even influenced one or two of The Rules.

I’ve searched the net over for information on his bike, hoping that at some point someone would find and catalog it for the world.  Occasionally, there will be an article posted somewhere that covers the bike, but each of these has ended up a disappointment as upon closer inspection, it is revealed that the bike is not in fact his tour-winning bike.

I did, however, find one article on Campy Only which appears to showcase the real deal.  It comes from an account by a fan at a post-tour criterium in 1998 where Pantani made an appearance:

Here you have the pictures of Pantani’s bike. Note that he is using tubulars on his Electron wheels, even for this small race. He seems to love this bike. In the Giro he used the normal team bike on the flat stages, but since the mountains he has not been apart from this ultralight “hillclimber” (except for time trials). I think the weight is about 7 kilos, but is is of course a very small bike.

The use of a downtube lever and the modified Ergo lever is a funny detail. It is very unusual these days to see homemade stuff like this on a pro’s bike, and he even won the two major tours on it–it’s a classic bike, this one!

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Recently on CyclingNews.com, they did a Retro Bike review of Pantani’s 1998 ride, reportedly stored at the Bianchi museum.  I was thrilled and dove into the photos, looking for answers to questions I probably didn’t know I had.  Unfortunately, closer inspection revealed a host of problems with the bike;  I am sad to report that this is not in fact Pantani’s bike, and in all likelihood did not even exist in 1998.  It appears to be nothing more than the Bianchi team replica frame clumsily loaded with a 1999 Campy Record 9-speed groupo.  The items that give this fact away are: non-compact geometry, carbon Ergo levers, no front down tube shifter (and accompanying left-side Ergo lever with guts removed), black and yellow tires (instead of his solid yellow tubulars), and silver Time mag pedals (he rode red ones in 1999).  This could possibly be a late-season racer or a 1999 trainer, but in any case, it is not his 1998 Giro-Tour winning magical steed.  Since it appears his real bike eludes even the Bianchi museum, my only hope is that he kept it for himself and it resides somewhere in the Pantani estate.

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For most directors, winning Le Tour for the billionth time would make for a successful season, but not for Johan Bruyneel.  It turns out that dealing with the Kazakhi backers of Team Astana really put a stinker on his season.  Add that stress to the considerable logistics involved in buying off testing laboratories and bribing the anti-dope controllers, and you’ve got yourself a busy season.

In a recent interview with CyclingNews.com, Johan finally put a topper on what has been a soap opera-worthy season for cyclists worldwide.

First, there was the comback of Lance Armstrong.  Does anyone else remember him saying that when he retired he wasn’t going to be like one of those other athletes who kept showing up at events after retirement?  I digress.  The Douchebag was back, and it turned out to be a challenge for Bruyneel due, in no small part, to Armstrong’s crash in the early season.  Turns out that Lance was whiney and felt like quitting, but Johan stepped in and threw his own famous quote back in the Texan’s face:

I had to force him: ‘Lance, you have to. You can’t go back now.’ I had to send him one of his famous sayings: ‘Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever.’ I didn’t get a response, but he gave it a good think and pulled through.

Rationalizing the paradox of being ignored and listened to at the same time is pretty stressful stuff.

Much has been made of the team situation at Astana and the tension between Armstrong and Cuntador.  Alberto felt isolated, and maintains that he won the Tour largely on his own steam and without the help or support of his team.  That’s a bit of a surprise, I’m sure, to the 7 guys on the team who controlled the race before 2km to go banner when the attacks came.  The quibbling culminated with Lance twittering that “there’s no I in team“.   This is what Bruyneel has to say on the matter:

He [Contador] continues to say that he won the Tour on his own. That is completely untrue: without the team he wouldn’t have won the Tour that comfortably – maybe he would’ve won it, but still…

It will be interesting to see how Contador rides next year without the support of the most successful Director in Tour de France history.  Speaking of which, what is the real problem with Cundtador?  Apparently, it has to do with questioning the Belgian’s leadership:

The problem was that whatever I decided – the race plan, the team tactics, the riders selection – he always expressed his doubts. We all have the experience: we don’t make mistakes anymore; while Alberto still has much to learn.

One is to take what Johan says and like it, dammit!  Also, I am to glean from this comment that he has become an Honorary Dutchman and has thus stopped making mistakes.  Interesting move.  I wonder who authorized that.  I happen to be on the Awesomeness Panel and didn’t see anything on the subject come through.

Finally, what of the Kazahki backers of the team?  What about those guys?  I guess they were the worst part of his season.  Unpaid salaries and general malfeasance permeated the season.   There was some friction over the direction of the team, it’s image, and who should be on it:

I’m being judged on the results and the international image of the team, not on the image of the team in a godforsaken country such as Kazakhstan.

As a Dutchman reading a quote by a Belgian calling another country godforsaken, I have to ask, isn’t this a bit of a “pot-kettle” situation?  Or was that Pot Belge?

Lance Armstrong and Frankie Andreu are speaking again.  You probably didn’t know (or care) that they weren’t speaking in the first place, but they weren’t.  And it destroyed the world of cycling as we knew it:  a relationship no one gave a crap about had fallen apart.

What happened?  Well, they used to be teammates and friends.  Then Andreu did the unthinkable:

1. He admitted to using EPO during his duties to help Armstrong to his first Tour win in 1999.
2. He testified that Armstrong admitted EPO use to his doctor when undergoing treatment for cancer.

Not surprisingly, Armstrong wasn’t thrilled with either claim, and did what he seems to do anytime he doesn’t get his way: he threw a hissy fit and stopped talking to him.

But everything has been all patched up, in an incredibly passive-aggressive way.  Said Andreu:

I got a phone call Saturday morning that I’m on the Astana detail and in charge of interviewing Lance and the rest of the team.  I was definitely surprised and shocked by it. They told me Astana had called over and requested it. I didn’t understand why or what was going on, but Versus said to go over and do it.

So I guess that does it.