The Tour de Romandie starts today. The spring classics are done and the focus of the sport now shifts to stage racing.
If races were ranked by their websites, it’s the best race of the year. But Romandie is a great race in its own right with some big names on a good course and it’s all taking part just before the Giro d’Italia. Here’s a quick preview.
You probably haven’t heard of Jean-Maurice Ooghe. But the man in the striped shirt above is responsible for the TV images of the Tour de France and several other races, including the Tour of California.
Whilst the cycling world might be thinking about the upcoming Giro d’Italia, Ooghe is currently doing his own Tour de France ahead of the race in July, visiting all the stage towns en route. Last week he was in the Pyrenees and on Sunday morning he was in Brive, the finish of Stage 18.
For a while it looked like Vincenzo Nibali was going win Liège-Bastogne-Liège but he was reeled in with one kilometre to go by Maxim Iglinskiy and the Astana rider sailed past and soloed to the line, look carefully and you can spot the losing shade of lime green above. But perhaps this time there was no single winning moment and today’s race was instead defined by attrition and endurance?
The oldest one day race of the year. Liège-Bastogne-Liège might be in Belgium but it has over 4,000 vertical metres of climbing, comparable to an Alpine stage of the Tour de France. Steep climbs and twisting descents make this a supreme physical contest where there’s rarely a surprise win.
Liège-Bastogne-Liège is the hilliest of the one day classics. Glance at the race profile and you’ll note 11 climbs on the route, plus the climb to the finish. These are described as côtes répertoriées, or “catalogued climbs”.
Only the race has many climbs that aren’t catalogued. One in particular is crucial as it is climbed with less than 20km to go.
Track racing has a big debt to the USA and in particular New York. The sport was so popular a century ago with urban audiences that today’s Madison race, where pairs of riders take it in turn to compete in a sort of relay race got its name from the Madison Square Garden. The original venue has now gone but a wealthy benefactor has donated $40 million to help build a indoor velodrome again in New York. There’s talk of a Harlem velodrome but I think one reader via Twitter had a better suggestion:
@inrng Wonder if it will be named after Major Taylor…
— Seneca J. Rose (@sansenmag) April 19, 2012
The Jersey Project by Bill Humphreys and Jerry Dunn
The cycling jersey has changed so much over the years. From a simple piece of clothing made out of wool, today’s jerseys deploy modern fabrics, reflect corporate sponsors and are cut to suit a racer bent low on the bike. This book traces the evolution of cycling jerseys, cataloguing all the changes via a series of photos.
That’s the prize list for yesterday’s Flèche Wallonne race with a first prize of €16,000 for the men’s race and just €1,128 for the women’s race.
It’s one of the most prestigious one day races on the calendar but many might see the cash prize as rather small. For comparison, last Sunday’s Amstel Gold Race offered €16,000, a sum similar to the prize for making the semi-finals of the Dutch Open tennis tournament, in other words coming fourth in a modest tennis tournament.Win the golf tournament in the Netherlands and you pocket €300,000.
But the value of a bike race probably isn’t reflected in the prize list. Instead there are other ways of judging the value of a win.
Joaquim Rodriguez attacks on the Mur de Huy with 350m to go. Normally riders sprint when they are this close to the finish line. But this isn’t a normal finish and Rodriguez put in a powerful attack to go clear. This was the moment the race was won.
It might be a midweek race but the Flèche Wallonne is big classic thanks its history and its finish. The race heads across the Belgian Ardennes before the finish on the vicious Mur de Huy with a gradient that can reach 26%.