As the 2013 season approaches here is a selection of riders to watch for. I’ve picked six established riders who face different challenges in the new year and six young riders who could impress but first have to hop the chasm from amateur and pro.
Book Review: The Cycling Professor
“To give an idea of how hard a race that lasts more than twenty days feels, try to remember where you were or what you were doing three weeks ago.”
This simple explanation of how hard a grand tour can be is a good example of the book’s tone. Written by Pinotti himself, there’s no florid prose nor hyperbole. Marco Pinotti is not just a professional cyclist but a northern Italian and a graduate engineer and be brings a concise analytical take to the sport.
Tour Winners and Music
Bernard Hinault’s disco disc is not the only example of a Tour winner doing a record. The video above is altogether more classy as Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi share the stage and start singing together.
To list them as Tour winners is restrictive, the pair amongst the greatest the sport has seen and their rivalry was tremendous and supposedly divided Italy. Yet watch as they unite. There’s no tension, just light entertainment.
Bernard Hinault’s Disco Fever
Bradley Wiggins is reaching audiences well beyond the circle of pro cycling with his guitar performances. For years he would take a guitar from race to race and now the effort looks worthwhile.
But he’s not the only Tour de France winner to get musical. The image above is a record sleeve with with five times Tour winner Bernard Hinault in a relaxed lean on the right of the image. Laurent Olivier is the “musician,” a term that merits quotation marks as you will discover below. Renault team manager Cyrille Guimard stands on the left.
2013 World Tour Points Analysis – Part II
The chart above shows the split of points between stage races and one day races for the UCI World Tour in 2013. Out of a total of 16,664 points available during the season, 69% are to be won in stage races. This is disproportionate on a calendar of 154 days of racing where stage races account for 140 days or 91% of the calendar.
Is this a bias for stage races? Who gains and who loses? And what do smaller teams do when they decide how to spend their budget on riders or deploy tactics on the day?
World Tour vs Pro Continental Ethics
Gerard Vroomen raises a very good point on his blog that others have mentioned on Twitter in recent days too: if the Katusha team is rejected from the UCI’s World Tour on ethical grounds why did the Licence Commission say the team is free to apply for a lesser Pro Continental licence?
Surely a team could be in the second division because it has weaker finances or less ranking points, but not because it has looser morals and easier ethics?
As a follow-up to Vroomen’s observation here are the rules for the World Tour and Pro Continenal candidates alike. A signed copy of Eugène Christophe’s 1919 maillot jaune if you can spot the difference…
Defining Panache
Cycling borrows many French words and for many maillot jaune, peloton and other terms have been absorbed into English, just like blonde or savoir-faire. But panache is an elusive word that’s harder to define. Maybe you know it when you see it?
Typically a rider with panache is said to be one who attacks, displaying courage and flair. But the surprise factor counts and a rider who wins too often can lose this label.
But where does the word come from and what does it mean?
Winter Training
Yesterday’s post on points explained the importance of March and April for teams and riders alike. But if the start of the new season is a month away, most of the peloton faces damp and cold roads. Some find snow and ice block the way.
It’s a case of fight or flight. Riders can don the thermals and do battle with the winter and adopt alternative training plans. Or they can fly to somewhere warmer, lodging in out of season resorts where weak sunlight and quiet roads await.
2013 World Tour Points Analysis
The chart shows the number of race days in the UCI World Tour for each month of 2013. We might thing April is the biggest month of the spring campaign but March has racing. March is not just a busy month but a vital one for it is also the biggest month of the year when it comes to UCI points, and by a long way.
Similarly we might take July to be the highpoint of the cycling season but it turns out there are more ranking points to collect in September.
Whilst we follow cycling for excitement instead of arithmetic, analysing the numbers helps assess the incentives and structures within the sport. In the first part of a statistical analysis of the 2013 UCI World Tour here is a look at the distribution of race days and points.
What are the key races? Which months of the year count the most? The answers and more are below.
Sunday Shorts
When the French think of “le Yorkshire” most often it is the dog breed that takes its name from the English county so the decision to start the 2014 Tour de France in Yorkshire could help promote a more rugged image.
Yorkshire fought off competition from Scotland, northern France and Italy in part thanks its bid of €14.5 million. Cash isn’t everything but it goes a long way to winning the bid. ASO will be pleased to offer its sponsors exposure to the large British market. But it is said host towns quickly recoup the money in promotion, hotel bookings and more
Remember the media circus arrives in town several days before the race starts, a grand départ is more than a weekend. Rotterdam hosted the start in 2010 and claimed 800,000 visitors. A separate study showed the €11 million spent on the grand départ generated over €20 million back although of course the net gain still means winners and losers, for example residents pay taxes whilst, say, a hotel chain gets 100% occupancy. Often these studies depend on assumptions made, the outcomes desired and who is paying for them.