6,000km away from the UCI headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland lie the red roads of Rwanda.
If it’s been a heavy week of revelations, rules and more that takes us too far from what cycling should be about, the film trailer above is a reminder that there so much more. It feels a million miles away from the troubles of pro cycling.
Today brought the news that Johan Bruyneel will stop as general manager of the Radioshack-Nissan team. The decision seems obvious given his name appears 129 times in the USADA reasoned decision but note today’s team press release said he “contests the validity of the procedure as well as the charges against him.”
Yet there good grounds for his departure before the USADA report was published, for example the team’s dismal performance. And if he’s gone, there’s still a team in need of new direction plus the removal of one director on one team only makes us look at the other squads.
Think the USADA case is about the past, with talk of the Tour de France from a decade ago and the retired Lance Armstrong? Maybe it’s over once Johan Bruyneel, Josep Marti and Pedro Celaya complete their hearings?
Wrong. The information released by USADA is so extensive that it will cause aftershocks for months and years to come. Forget the procedural spat between the UCI and USADA and an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Instead teams and high profile riders are facing fresh questions and possibly new investigations.
USADA have published their report on the decision to impose a lifetime ban on Lance Armstrong for doping and drug trafficking. The report is extensive and damning, complete with testimony from unimpeachable sources like George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer. Indeed every American cyclist who rode the Tour de France with US Postal and Discovery for the seven year period between 1999 and 2005 has now confessed. Except for Lance Armstrong and Kevin Livingstone.
Yet the report isn’t just about Armstrong. It contains references to his old teams, to senior officials in the sport, from US Cycling across to the UCI and beyond. Over one million dollars in payments to Michele Ferrari are detailed for example.
The report goes into extensive detail, offering a chronology of the US Postal team and Lance Armstrong’s role based on sworn affidavits from 26 people as well as extra information from others, whether media reports or more.
The full report is so damning in its entirety that picking the key points is immaterial, it is the weight of evidence rather than any particular selections that matters. Nevertheless here are some summary points:
I have a mental picture of the cycling calendar where April is packed with racing and August is a sleepy month, the post-Tour de France blues set in and there’s not much going on. But after publishing the calendar of races on Tuesday I toyed with the numbers and the chart above shows the distribution of men’s pro racing throughout the year. It turns out April is a quiet month with just 51 days of racing and August has more days of racing than any other month of the year.
Pro cycling’s off season is arriving but if the racing stops, the planning doesn’t. Whether you’re plotting a victorious classics campaign or a trip to Europe you need to know when the pro races are.
Here’s the 2013 pro cycling calendar. It is blank for October but skip into 2013 and you’ll find the races appear. In addition below you’ll find a link to download an iCal file to import the same calendar into your organiser, phone and computer diary.
If the government says healthy people should avoid outdoor activity should a bike race go ahead?
That’s the question facing the organisers of the Tour of Beijing which starts tomorrow as air pollution levels in Beijing today reaching a red-alert score of 397, a level declared as hazardous for all. Is it safe to race?
Marco Marcato wins Paris-Tours from a three man sprint. The trio held off a surprise attack by John Degenkolb, the German sprinter went rogue with 10km to go and almost caught the leaders in the final straight.
Dutch champion Niki Terpstra launched the sprint and Marcato has swept across the road, forcing Laurens De Vreese to change direction. This briefly robbed the Belgian of momentum and gave Marcato time to sit up and celebrate as he won the fastest ever one day classic, averaging 48.629km/h. This was the moment the race was won.
Labelled “the sprinters’ classic”, this Sunday’s race might have a flat route and a long finishing straight but in fact most of the winners since 2000 have come from breakaways and attacks. Since the majority of bike races end in a bunch sprint, it means the race is far from the foregone conclusion its title suggests and it can offer an action-packed final half-hour.
The wrong side of thirty? Not as fast as you once were? Felt strong in some big races this year? But you’ve not been offered a new contract. It’s got to hurt, you were always in the service of the team, carrying bottles, punching a hole in the wind for someone else and often there when the team got a result. So what do you do?