Boys from the Golden Era of Soviet cycling:Sergei Morozov, Andrei Vedernikov, Sergei Soukhoruchenkov, Sergei Krivosheyev, Vladimir Voloshin and Yuri Barinov. Tour de l’Avenir 1982.

Some time ago, I started a series on Soviet peloton’s nicknames. Abdoujaparov was the obvious first choice – he is, without a doubt, the most famous Soviet rider who made a name for himself in pro peloton. Next in line, and again, for obvious reasons, is Sergei Soukhoruchenkov (or Sergueï Soukhoroutchenkov as the French preferred to spell his name) – the most famous Soviet rider of an era when amateurs and professionals were separated by two different governing bodies. Soukhoruchenkov was the subject of my post a few days ago and this post is a follow up while the topic is fresh on my mind.

Also Known As

Soviet riders’ nicknames made up by Westerners were always different to the nicknames used in the Soviet peloton. The Western version was just a contraction of the rider’s surname – Eki for Ekimov, Abdou for Abdoujaparov or Soukho for Soukhoruchenkov. Tchmil was an exception because his surname is too short to take any letters away, and, unlike Soukhoruchenkov, not too difficult to pronounce.

Although most of the original Soviet nicknames were derived from surnames too, they always had some definite meaning attached to them, sometimes even an array of meanings such is the case with Soukhoruchenkov whose Soviet nickname was Сухарь (Soukhar).

Please Explain

Soukhoruchenkov’s surname is made up of two words with roots in сухой (soukhoi – dry) and рука (rouka – an arm). The nickname, Сухарь, was derived from the first part of his surname. Сухарь is a rare Russian word in that it has only one meaning – dry bread, the kind of bread that becomes hard if left in the open for several days.

The nickname was perfect for Soukhoruchenkov on more than one level. For example,  сушиться, or “getting dry”,  is a Russian cycling slang for “getting lean” and Soukhar was as lean and dry as dry bread – Сухарь indeed.

Just like dry bread, the guy was hard too; hard as in “hard rider” and also hard as in “not easy to break”. He was legendary for training in all and any conditions. A story was going around how he defied Kapitonov’s decision to cut short a 6 hour ride because of cold weather and continued on riding after everyone else turned back. Thing was – Kapitonov almost never cut short training rides no matter how bad the weather was, and, more importantly, nobody ever was crazy enough to defy Kapitonov’s orders. This wasn’t an act of a rebel though – Soukhar set his mind on doing a 6 hour ride that day and he didn’t see why it had to be cut short, so he just went on doing what he had planned to do in the morning.

He raced in a similar style too. If he set his mind on going to attack somewhere, it didn’t matter what else was going on around him; he would patiently wait for the right moment and strike with demoralising fury. Winning solo was his signature – he liked to be alone on the road.

Close Encounters

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to know Soukhar very well. When I showed up at my first training camp with the national team at the end of 1984, Soukhar wasn’t there. This was surprising because he was the then current Peace Race winner and I was looking forward to train with him in Sochi where the national team traditionally spent the winter months. I was too scared to ask anyone where Soukhar was – a nobody 18 years old wouldn’t be casually asking cycling dignitaries where the king of Soviet road cycling was; bad manners. Stranger still, when he was spoken of, at a dinner table or sauna (the best battle stories were told in sauna), I had a feeling he was spoken of as if he had retired or was out of the picture, at least for now. Some were saying his relationship with Kapitonov had become too tense for Kapitonov to have him on the team while others said he couldn’t be bothered racing anymore. Whatever the reason was, it was very unusual for a rider of Soukhar’s caliber not to be with the national team, especially in 1985 when Peace Race was scheduled to visit Moscow for the first and only time to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat. The Peace Race that year was taken very seriously in Kremlin and Soukhar’s absence was hard to explain.

He reappeared some time later with the Soviet Army’s ЦСКА team (as most top Soviet riders were, Soukhar was an army officer) but he wasn’t the same Soukhar everybody knew and remembered. In 1987 he finished 2nd behind Konyshev at the national stage race championship, a race he won in 1978. When the Soviet cycling federation made a deal with Alfa Lum in 1988 to supply a full roster of Soviet riders to race in pro ranks, Soukhar, who would turn 33 in 1989, was among them, mostly for branding purposes (he was very popular in Italy) than results.

As many have expected, Soukhar’s professional career didn’t last long – he retired in 1990. Soukhar being Soukhar, managed to win Tour of Chile anyway the same year he retired.

Postscript

Check this video clip from 1980 Olympic road race won by Soukhar and see if you can spot Stephen Roche, Adri Van Der Poel, Marc Madiot or Peter Winnen there.

Watch this video on YouTube.

The post Dry To the Bone appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

Who is the greatest of them all? People often compare great athletes from different eras – what if Bernard Hinault raced against Eddy Merckx? How would that go? Or how would Wayne Gretzky compare to Valeri Kharlamov if both played in NHL? Or how about Bobby Fisher v Garry Kasparov? (by the way, here’s a good piece by Kasparov about “How the king of chess lost his crown“). Now I’m salivating.

Idle questions? Perhaps, but hey, maybe you’re reading this during your lunch break and idle questions are not so idle when tuna sandwiches are involved.

At any rate, this is not a what if post; I’m not going to bore you with speculations about what could have happened if … I have an opposite goal in mind – I’ll try to argue why comparing contemporary athletes separated by political barriers is a fruitless exercise.

This post was “inspired” by Lucio, a Facebook friend from Lombardia who asked me if, in my opinion, Sergei Soukhoruchenkov would have won Tour de France or Giro d’Italia had he turned pro at 23 instead of 33 when his career was pretty much finished.

Some Background

I realise there’s not a great deal of information available about Soukhoruchenkov (known as Soukho in the West), so I’ll briefly outline who he was as a cyclist.

I watched my first Course de la Paix (Peace Race for plebs) in 1979, the year Soukhoruchenkov won it the first time. I was 13, he was 23. If there was a sport hero for me, he was it. I don’t remember how exactly he won it, all I remember was one long, crazy solo attack he did some time during the race, got the yellow jersey and never let go of it.

Next year we had Olympic Games in Moscow and as you probably know, it was boycotted by Americans. The rest of the Western world boycotted it too but allowed their athletes to go to Moscow on their own. I don’t know how the boycott affected other sports but, in my opinion, it had little impact on cycling – the main players were all there including some from Western countries such as the then current World Road Champion Gianni Giacomini, the 1978 World Road Champion Gilbert Glaus and of course all the heavy hitters from GDR, Poland and Czechoslovakia. My friend and I watched the live broadcast at my sister’s because she owned a colour TV (we didn’t).

I remember the race pretty well. The circuit was specifically built for this race and was absolutely insane. I raced on it 5 years later and left some skin and buckets of sweat on those roads; it’s one crazy circuit with banked corners and walls to climb. Anyway, the break went very early with Barinov, Lang and an Italian guy who crashed soon after. Soukhoruchenkov bridged to the break and they were gone, two Russians and a Pole. With about 50km to go, Soukhoruchenkov attacked and soloed to the line. Textbook win and more hero points.

Everyone expected him to win Course de la Paix again in 1981 after the Games but he didn’t – he finished 2nd while Shakhid Zagretdinov, his team-mate, won. This is when things went south for him – he didn’t make the team for 1982 Course de la Paix, went off the radar in 1983 and then somewhat miraculously re-emerged in 1984 to win Course de la Paix again.

These are just some highlights of his career. The UCI recognised him as the best cyclist in the world in 1979, 1980 and 1981 (professional cycling was not governed by the UCI back then, imagine that).

He was often compared to Bernard Hinault – tough, never give up attitude, not a pure climber but impossible to get rid of even on steep climbs if he’s determined to stay. And because of that, a lot of people wondered, I guess, what if ..?

No ifs and no buts

Now, even though it’s clear Soukhoruchenkov was made from the same kind of dough Fausto Coppi, Gino Bartali, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Greg Lemond and a few others were made from, there’s really no way of knowing how things would have unfolded for him in professional cycling because:

1) Amateur cycling, as tough as it was, never had anything even close to a professional racing calendar. For example, Course de la Paix aside, there was nothing even resembling a Grand Tour. Course de la Paix itself, without taking anything from it as a mother of all amateur stage racing, lacked the Alps, the Pyrenees, the one hour long hors catégorie climbs. True enough, there are some hard climbs in Tatra Mountains but there wouldn’t be 5-6 high mountain stages in a single race. It wasn’t an easy race, but you can’t really compare the Tour or the Giro with the Course de la Paix.

There were no Classics either. This is because about 90% of amateur racing was domestic. Each country had its own domestic calendar which is where most of the racing was happening. This, in turn, meant that international amateur calendar was pretty thin and it was thin because only national teams and well funded clubs could afford to travel to international races. A thin international calendar leads me to my next point:

2) With only World Championships and Course de la Paix as the grounds for all out clashes between amateurs, it was hard to know where the best riders stood on the international arena. Apart from these two and a couple of other bigger races (e.g. Tour de l’Avenir, Milk Race or Giro delle Regioni), the peloton’s make up at other international races was a bit anarchic, a mixture of 2-3 top national teams racing against local teams in whatever country the race was in. You might think that you rock the world while racing somewhere in the south of France and then you meet with an A-team from GDR a month later somewhere in Holland and they remind you of your place in the corner very quick. Had these meeting were ongoing against more or less same opposition as it is often the case in professional cycling, the fans and the racers would know where most people stood, giving a clearer picture of who is who in amateur cycling. Speaking of racing against inferior opposition, here is my next point of why comparing amateur stars with professional stars is nonsensical:

3) Eastern Bloc amateurs were not amateurs in any meaningful sense of this word – they were professionals. I wrote about it here in part I, part II and part III. Not only they were well paid to race their bikes, they also had all the time in the world to train and prepare for racing while most Italian, Dutch, Belgian, French etc amateurs had no such luxury – they had real jobs to do at home. Again, it doesn’t mean winning Tour de l’Avenir was easy, it wasn’t, but it does place the Eastern Bloc domination of amateur cycling in a proper perspective when these things are considered. And finally, the race dynamics:

4) The Soviets were the only riders in the world who valued stage race’s team classification more than individual. Not a well known fact, I reckon, but still a fact. The socialist ideology, peppered with communism, elevated collective effort over individual (never mind that collective is only a sum total of individual). Applied to road cycling, it meant that the Kremlin chiefs required the national team to chase team classification first with individual one being an icing on the cake. If you can do both, great, but don’t you dare to lose team classification to GDR. If you look at the statistics, you’ll see the Soviets won Course de la Paix in team classification 20 times while the 2nd best team, GDR, “only” 10. The individual classification is 12-10 in GDR’s favour.

This approach led to some awkward tactics on the road with everyone puzzled about what the Russians were up to. For example, a typical situation might be to shut down a break because it was hurting the Soviets’ team classification even though the break favoured them in individual standings. This, by the way, partially explains why the Soviets were hopeless in major one day races like World Championships (only 2 gold medals in the entire history of  USSR) – they were not used to race without team classification as their priority.

This deficiency and inability to race for yourself, showed later when the Soviets were finally allowed to race as professionals from 1989 and only a handful of riders who were naturally more aggressive than others and hungry for individual success, such as Tchmil or Konyshev, made it to the top of professional cycling.

As for Sergei Soukhoruchenkov, when he signed a contract with Alfa Lum as part of the first wave of Soviet riders to go pro, he was 33, way past his best years and nowhere near the level he needed to be at to race against the likes of Lemond or Indurain at the time.

The post Mirror, Mirror on the Wall appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

1st – Anzac 25 (Elite), 2009;
1st (relegated to 3rd for being mean) – Bike Week Cup (Elite), 2009;
1st – Glamorgan Vale Road Race (Masters A), 2009;
1st – Battle on the Border (Masters A), GC, 2009;
1st – Battle on the Border (Masters A), Stage 1, 2009;
1st – Battle on the Border (Masters A), Stage 2, 2009;
2nd – Queensland TTT Championship (Masters), 2009;

1st – Anzac 25 (Masters A), 2010;
1st – Mt Cotton Kermesse (Masters A), 2010;
1st (GC + 3 2nd places) – Battle on the Border (Masters A), 2010;
1st – Ipswich Open Kermesse (Masters A), 2010;
1st – Fusion Games Criterium (Masters A), 2010;
2nd – Queensland Road Championship (Masters 3), 2010;
2nd – Queensland ITT Championship (Masters 3), 2010;
1st – Fusion Criterium (Masters A), 2010;

1st – Queensland Road Championship (Masters 4), 2011;
3rd - Queensland Road Teams Series (Elite), Criterium 2, 2011;
3rd – National Road Championship (Masters 4), 2011;

4th – Mt Cotton Kermesse (Masters A), 2012;
4th – Anzac 25 (Masters A), 2012.

I stopped racing in May 2012 and did very little riding until November. I’m on the bike almost every morning now, clicking 400-500km a week. I’m very keen to race, as keen as I was in 2010 after I came back from a hip fracture.

Objectives

I’m looking for a bunch of guys to enjoy time on the bikes with, racing and training. Although I’m an ambitious type of a rider, always hunting for a win, I have nothing to prove to anybody and am willing to work for whoever happens to have good legs on the day or a better chance of winning. It’s all about having fun and good time though. Cycling is the best sport for it.

2013 Racing Goals

Battle on the Border — I rode this race twice and won it both times. I would like to come back and do it again. I like this race and it’s on my high priority list in 2013.

Anzac 25 — I like this circuit and I was successful there twice on the row (in different categories). I will aim to bag this one again.

Cunningham Classic — This one ain’t called Classic for nothing. It’s a traditional point to point road race, the only one in Queensland. I rode it only once and mucked it up. I know the course now and I want to go back and win it.

Queensland Road Championship — first time I did this race I got popped early and quit. Second time I got popped by my breakaway partner but managed to bring it home in 2nd place. And then finally in 2011 in Warwick everyone but one guy popped and I won. I want to do it again, especially if it will be as cold as in 2011.

National Road Championship — I thought I had this one in the bag in 2011 but two other guys had different plans and I finished 3rd. I want to go back and nail it.

Contact

I can be contacted by:
Mobile — 0468 586 032;
Email — nikoraz@gmail.com;
or you can leave a comment below.

Thanks for stopping by.

Nikolai

The post Looking for a ride appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

Louison Bobet and Jaques Anquetil

This story happened 30 years ago during my first ever stage race. I was 16. A common strategy used by many Soviet coaches in those days was to throw young, inexperienced juniors into a seniors’ race to toughen them up and teach them the skills they could never learn racing against boys of their age. When you’re 16, two years age difference is significant enough to separate riders into different age groups. Racing against guys 8-10 years older is no easy feat—the speeds are higher and the distances are longer. A typical seniors’ stage race, like this one, was eight stages long—four days on, rest day, and another four days.

I’ll talk about this race in my upcoming book because it was a turning point for me as a cyclist, but I’m not sure if I’ll include this episode.

This was a 5th stage, we just had a rest day and I felt alive again. The previous four stages were pure hell—single digit temperatures (Celsius), rain, snow, wind, crashes, punctures, the whole lot. I developed saddle sores because I couldn’t wash the sand off of my knicks—there was no hot water in the resort we stayed in. It was a workers’ resort, early March, too soon for the workers to have holidays. Because it was empty, the resort’s administration didn’t see the need for hot water and heating in the buildings, it was turned off. There was a boiler building in the middle of the resort, ran on coal and this is where we had our showers, all sixty or seventy of us.

Most of the teams staying at this resort arrived at about the same time after each stage and the riders went straight to the showers. Within minutes, the shower room was filled with sixty or so naked men waiting for their turn to wash off dirt, grime and blood. They would give you about three minutes to do your business, including washing your kit and then you had to move away and wait for another turn if you didn’t finish what you were doing. Wet, naked, with a handful of dirty kit in your hands.

Like most riders in the USSR at the time, I rode in knicks made from wool. Even in a washing machine you couldn’t get rid of the sand in your knicks after a rain, never mind doing it by hand in one minute after racing in mud covered roads every day.

Then I crashed on the 4th stage—nothing serious except I didn’t wear gloves that day, they were wet and I only had one pair. As it happens, I landed on my hand because it was a slow speed crash. I tore off a chunk of skin off my hand. Holding to a handlebar with a hand like this is unpleasant.

When I reached the rest day, I was thinking of packing up and going home. This race was getting worse every day. I wasn’t sure how much more of it I could handle. Staying in bed all day, only coming out to eat, helped; by evening I felt normal again and ready to rock & roll. And rock & roll I did, especially the rock part.

We stood on the start line of the 5th stage and listened to the race commissaire explain what’s in store for us in the next 140 kilometers. Cold rain was pouring down like it did the four previous stages. We all loved it by now. At least it wasn’t snowing.

A lot of road races in Soviet Union were out and back types—you ride half of the race’s distance one way, make a u-turn and finish at the same place you started from. The 5th stage was a loop. Not a circle, only part of the race was a loop and then we had to come back on the same road we already rode on and go on to the finish.

The commissaire explained where the turn off will be and where we’ll come back on the same road again. All good. And then he said, “There’s a road work about 25 kilometers from here. No asphalt, it’s gone. The road is covered with gravel and sand mix. No more than 5 kilometers long. Be careful.”

There were more than hundred guys standing on that start line. All miserable, tired and angry. And here comes this fat clown and tells us we’ll have to ride through mud and rocks for 5 kilometers? I have never heard so much swearing being said at the same time. Russian is rich in swearing vocabulary, it’s practically infinite, and I heard a colourful spectrum of swearing expressions I didn’t know were possible. Guys were yelling insults from the middle of the peloton, calling the commissaire all sorts of names and promising him a painful death after we finish the stage.

The commissaire grinned with an evil smile, walked away from the road, raised his starter pistol, shot in the air, and we were off.

When we hit the dirt section, we knew it was the work of the demons themselves—in the middle of farmlands, the road we raced on was used by tractors and trucks coming off farm fields, carrying a lot of dirt on their wheels. It was already dirty and slippery as it is after so much rain. But the dirt section was special—a swamp with melon size rocks thrown in to help tracks and cars drive through without getting stuck.

I couldn’t believe no one was slowing down when we hit it. It’s only later I learned how you deal with this crap—you have to hit it head on, full speed and keep smashing your pedals until you come out at the other end, if you want to come out that is. Slow down and you’re dead meat—a road like this will eat you alive. First, the bike will start to wobble left and right and you’ll have trouble steering it; you hit one of those rocks the wrong way and you go down. Then you notice the gear’s too big as the speed keeps dropping; you can’t push it and this too wrecks your balance. Without thinking too much, you reach for the shifter on your downtube. Two things might happen when you do this—you hit the rock with only one hand holding the bar, and you go down, or you hit the shifter too hard, because you’re in a panic mode, drop the chain and will have to stop. Remounting the bike and trying to get going again on a road like this is a trick not everyone can pull off without outside help. This is why those in the know, and there were a lot of them in that peloton, fly with their sails up into a disaster zone like this.

I came out at the other end of the swamp shocked but in one piece. The peloton was scattered all over the joint. I was surprised no one attacked. I guess we all felt united in our misery and the big boys decided to hold a ceasefire until everyone catches up.

We rode piano for a few kilometers and then saw something strange ahead of us—the commissaire’s car was parked across the road, blocking the traffic, and the man himself was standing in front of it, about ten meters away, with a red flag in his hand, waving. This was a u-turn, no doubt about it, except there wasn’t supposed to be one—we were briefed before the race that the stage is a loop, not an out and back race.

And then I got it—the guy was on a revenge trip. You complain about a piece of dirt road? Call me names? Here you go, you bunch of schmucks, take that for a gift.

We turned around and headed back to the mud and rocks exhibition. What else could we do? I was thinking of leaving this psycho show, board the broom wagon and never race again. I wasn’t looking forward to another I’ll shake you up real good session, not with the pain festival going on between my legs.

The peloton was silent, no one was talking, no one was joking, we rode faster and faster until we hit the dirt and the torture started all over again, in reverse direction this time.

When we came out at the other end, the peloton was stretched a lot longer than the first time—the exercise was taking its toll. I don’t know what others thought, but I started to wonder where we’re going to go from here; we only did about fourty kilometers and were about twenty five kilometers away from the finish, heading in its direction.

And then I saw the commissaire’s car passing us. You’re joking, I thought, you’re not turning us around again you bloody bustard. Sure he was.

Five k later, we saw him again, blocking the road, him and his stupid flag.

The word got around the peloton in seconds to keep our mouths shut on the u-turn. Nobody wanted to find out how many more laps he was willing to make us ride through the rocks if he heard more abuse from us. Some couldn’t stop themselves from thanking the guy for a great day of racing, but that was as abusive as it got.

The third edition was the best seller. Guys were crashing right and left, losing speed and getting stuck, dropping chains. I saw one guy stop and throw his bike away into a ditch. The show was on.

I rode in auto pilot mode thinking some little guy was sitting between my legs with a steel rod, pricking my sores with it while his brother made his way to the handlebar and was doing the same therapy to my injured hand. I didn’t care about the slippery rocks anymore; I imagined I was a tank heading to Berlin to crash into Reichstag to declare a WWII victory. The Europe’s “It’s a final countdown” song was playing in my head and I promised myself that if I make it to the sealed road without stopping, I’ll start saving for Italian knicks with good chamois and five pairs of gloves to last me a stage race.

The post U-turn when I tell you to appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

Jacques Anquetil attacks the peloton

This post is about number 9, or more accurately, about the inadequacy of number 9.

As you know, there are 9 riders on each Grand Tour team. Not 11 and not 13, 9. Ever wondered why? I don’t know and I suspect nobody does. Is there is anything wrong with 9? I think there is.

I talked in my last post about the need to improve the road cycling spectacle and I believe one other way to improve it is to reduce the number of riders a team can have in a Grand Tour.

Currently, with 9 riders per team, it’s possible to create a Super Team that can control the race to such an extent that the victory in the individual classification is almost guaranteed. We saw this with the Postal team under Lance Armstrong and the recipe was reused by the Sky team this year with Wiggins.

Assuming you’ve got a guy capable of winning, for example, the Tour de France, two other ingredients are needed to build a Super Team: money and a smart Directeur Sportif (DS for short). Once the three elements, the guy, the money and the DS, are in place, the chances are high a Super Team will do the job it was set up to do – win the Tour. This is so because the three elements are hard to come by all at once – you might have the guy but no money to buy good enough domestiques (or enough good domestiques), or the guy and the money but no DS capable of building a Super Team (think of Katyusha and BMC, they’ve got the cash and each team has got the guy, but no DS capable of setting up a Super Team).

Because the three elements are hard to put together, it’s unlikely two or more Super Teams will appear in a single Grand Tour. Once it is set up and ready to go, a Super Team will take care of business. Great ROI for the sponsors, but we’ll be the ones watching 7-8 guys riding tempo col after col, stage after stage with no one crazy enough to attack anywhere, save for the last 2 km.

Is it possible to minimise the strength and the dominance of a Super Team? I think it is: with 6 riders per team instead of 9, no team will be able to dominate the peloton a Super Team can today – not enough riders available to do that kind of job. Add to it a real possibility that one or two riders on most teams won’t make it to the end and I can’t see how 4-5 guys, with one of them being a “protected” rider, can dominate a race like Tour de France.

Smaller teams will also mean breakaways will have a better chance of staying away – unless several teams cooperate, a single team with only 3-4 riders available to do the chasing will have a hard time shutting a breakaway down if they let them gain any serious advantage.

Better breakaway chances will encourage more aggressive tactics – if riders know they have a chance of not being caught with the right breakaway, they will try to form them more aggressively and we will even see bridging attempts and all the rest of road cycling tactics of old. Given there is still enough kilometers left to race, no race is over until it’s over – this is one of those things that made road cycling so special when it was a sport rather than a business.

Sprinters too will have to rely more on their skill of picking the right wheel rather than on a lead-out train to position themselves for the sprint – the flat stages will become, once again, less predictable.

The advantages of smaller teams don’t stop there. There are 23 teams and 207 riders in the Tour de France today. With 6 riders per team, the number of teams can be increased to 34 while the number of riders on the road will stay almost the same. With more teams having access to the Tour, the sponsors will be willing to invest more money into the teams with a Tour de France ticket. Not only that, with the number of teams increased by 45%, it’s likely more new sponsors will be found willing to invest in their brand through the exposure Tour de France offers.

More teams in Grand Tours will also mean more young riders can race in big races who wouldn’t have had a chance otherwise because their teams do not qualify automatically or are never invited. This will build up their experience and speed up their maturity as a professional road cyclist, something too many of them denied in the current 9-rider per team set up.

In summary, the main advantages of 6-rider teams instead of 9 are:

1. No more Super Teams – increased competitiveness and spectacle of road cycling.
2. Better chances for breakaways not to be caught.
3. With higher chances for successful breakaways, road racing will return to its inherent aggressiveness.
4. Without lead-out super trains, sprinters will have to rely on their positioning skills to win – flat races will return to their less predictable scenarios.
5. More sponsors will have access to Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Vuelta a España and other major races and more new sponsors are attracted to the sport – more money flows into road cycling.
6. More younger riders will ride in major races to gain experience with more chances to show their talent.

If you have any other interesting ideas, please feel free to share them in the comments. We just never know who might be reading this

The post Road cycling reforms: show me the number appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

Hard men of old: Jacques Anquetil, Rik Van Looy and Eddy Merckx

Call me old fashioned, nostalgic or whatever, but road cycling today is not the same sport it used to be. Where is the Bernard Hinault of this age? Eddy Merckx, Fausto Coppi, Sean Kelly, Roger De Vlaeminck, Gino Bartali, Lucien Petit-Breton and Henri Pélissier? Where are the men who could win Liège – Bostogne – Liège, a bunch sprint and a Grand Tour? Philippe Gilbert is good, but can we really write his name next to Sean Kelly’s? Time will tell, but in the meantime…

Lack of Champions is not the only problem of cycling. The peloton is infested with sissy whiners who seem to be stuck somewhere between a toddler and a second grader in their development, despite being paid a six figure salary. They seem to confuse mass media with their Moms and wail on and on about what an unfortunate lot their life is, how unfair everybody is to them and how riders from other teams don’t help them win races. For every dozen of Schlecks and Cavendishes, we only have one Johnny Hoogerland. Hard times.

The races too have become the festivals of mediocrity. Not boredom; bike races are never boring if you know what to look for, but most of modern races appear to be scripted, are uneventful, lack improvisation, craziness and the “all or nothing” attitude that used to distinguish this beautiful sport from golf. Remember the stage to Sestriere in 1992, a five hour solo breakaway by Claudio Chiappucci? When was the last time you saw something like this? Who can pull this off today? Better question is, who will even try? Or Andy Hampsten’s Passo Gavia triumph in 1988? Can you imagine the reaction in the peloton if they were facing something like this today? If Twitter existed in 1986, think of LeMond and Hinault engaged in a sobbing war while they are chasing each other in the Alps.
“You chased me!”
“Did not!”
“Did to!”
“Did not!”
“Did to, did to, did to!”
Toddlers…

And then there’s doping. When we have to wait until 2012 to know the winner of the 2010 Tour de France, you know there’s something seriously wrong with road cycling. Never mind that we’ve got now no winner at all between 1999 and 2005, the 2006 winner was disqualified, the 2007 one won because the guy who was supposed to win was thrown out from the race to avoid a doping scandal, the 1996 winner confessed he doped to win his race, the 1997 winner was disqualified for doping violations later and the 1998 winner ended his own life probably because he was sick of all the lies he had to live with. Not very pretty, is it? And yet, Pat McQuaid, the current UCI president, as well as his predecessor, Hein Verbruggen, an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee, no less, assure us their organization is not responsible for this mess. Whoa!

But enough whining, let’s talk solutions – I have figured it all out in my spare time and I’m about to tell you how professional cycling can be reformed. Read on.

There are exactly 3 acts in this play:

1. Structural Reform
2. Racing Reform
3. Equipment Reform

Let’s have a closer look at each.

Structural Reform

This one is a biggie. It involves the governing of the sport and the funding, both of which will impact the problem of doping. Because it’s such a complex matter, I won’t go into any detail about it right now – it deserves a treatment of its own – but I’ll say a couple of things anyway.

Structural Reform must include the complete dissolution of the UCI. This organization has shown over the years its not only inability, but, what’s even worse, unwillingness to look after the sport it governs. Some superficial changes will be futile – too many people’s livelihoods depend on the current status quo, and if reports about corruption in the UCI are true, there’s even less hope some window dressing “reforms” will achieve anything. Today’s stakeholders are not interested nor willing to embrace any changes which will deprive them of their lucrative incomes and power. The UCI must be shut down and a new governing body, based on principles designed to prosper the sport, should be set up. Anything less than that is a waste of time and an idle clapping of hands in the wind.

Racing Reform

Road cycling is not ice hockey, we all know that. The non-stop action is both impossible and inappropriate in cycling. This sport is more like reading a book versus watching a movie – the show is long and you need to plough through all the details to enjoy the story. But, as I mentioned above, racing has become sluggish and lifeless, especially the Tour de France.

I have noticed this though – throw in some cobbles or dirt roads, and cycling transforms into a thrilling spectacle, the kind it originally was, the kind that captured the hearts of the Europeans early in the 2oth century. Ask yourself this: what races do you enjoy watching the most? Is it not the cobbled Classics like Paris-Roubaix, Ronde van Vlaanderen and Gent-Wevelgem? Don’t you love the Strade Bianche? Do you remember what those dirt roads did to the 7th Giro d’Italia stage in 2010? By the way, note well who immediately popped up to the surface when the going got rough – the hard nails of professional cycling like Evans and Vinokourov. Or the Arenberg stage in the 2010 Tour de France – the peloton was blown up to pieces because of the cobbles and same story repeats: the hard men come out, the gloves are off and the fight begins.

Another observation – have you noticed the racing usually gets real tough once the “magic” 6 hour mark is passed? Take the Milan-San Remo, one of the Monuments, as an example. Almost completely flat, the race has often been won in the past by the hard men of the peloton like Merckx (7 times!), Petit-Breton, Henri Pélissier, Coppi, Bartali, Bobet, van Loy, De Vlaeminck, Kelly, Tchmil and so on. With no major climbs to speak of, the universal agreement among the pro’s is that at 298 km long, distance is the main factor that makes this race so hard. You can be smart as much as you want, you can save your legs and be ready for the final showdown, but when you hit the Poggio with almost 300 km in your legs, the lights will go out and you’ll feel the fatigue in every muscle of your body, at which point someone will attack and the race begin.

Conclusion? To return road cycling to its golden days, to make it as spectacular as it once was and reward the toughest riders, the distances must increase, the cobbles and the dirt roads must be a regular feature of road cycling rather than an exception.

Equipment Reform

Since about the 50s, the time trial stages became the all important key for winning a Grand Tour, especially the Tour de France. Who can ever forget Greg LeMond crushing Laurent Fignon on the final stage to Champs Élysées in 1989? And yet, I can’t help but ask – had LeMond not used that triathlon bar, what would be the outcome? I’m not saying he cheated or used a trick to beat Fignon, not at all; LeMond played within the rules while Fignon chose not to use the same bar and lost not only the stage, but the entire Tour. As we all very well know today, the aerodynamic position LeMond was able to achieve with the help of a triathlon bar he used that day gave him an advantage. How big nobody knows, and personally, I don’t care. Fact is, a piece of an aluminium pipe had probably influenced the outcome of one of the most exciting Tour’s in history.

Today, since everybody is using a time trial bike for time trial stages, the potential discrepancy in the results is neutralised. If it is, then why do we need them in the first place? In other words, since nobody gains any advantage – or so it seems – from using a time trial bike, why not ban them? Recumbent bicycles are banned from road cycling, are they not? Why time trial bikes are not be banned? These heinous mutants came from triathlon, to triathlon they should return, they have no place in road cycling.

The advantages of this would be numerous. If time trial bikes are banned, teams won’t have to drag them around, sometimes across the oceans, anymore. This will save them money, slow down ice melting in Arctic (or is it the Antarctic that is losing its ice?) and help increase the whales’ population. These are good things regardless of your world view.

More importantly, as far as the health of road cycling is concerned, banning time trial bikes will truly even out the so called playing field in the time trial race itself. I made a remark above about the “seemingly” level playing field when time trial bikes are used by everyone in the race. In my opinion, the field is not level at all.

Firstly, nobody really knows how much advantage each piece of aerodynamic equipment gives you. Manufactures employ professional smoke and mirror masters, known as “marketing people”, to tell us stories about their aerodynamic wheels, frames, helmets, skin suits, shoe covers and so on. Without testing the products in the wind tunnel, you can’t know how much truth is in the manufactures’ claims. And even then, it’s one thing to see x units of energy saved in a lab with one particular aero helmet, while the story will be different once you put that helmet onto someone’s head, combine it with a time trial bike, aero wheels and let the rider lose on a windy road. Will anybody really know the effects of all this on every rider in a race? For race results to be fair, the aerodynamic effects should be more or less equal for every rider in the race. Without this equality, the results are skewed in favour of those with superior aerodynamic equipment. This superiority can only be achieved through extensive wind tunnel testing where every piece of equipment is put together and tested with the rider. And here is the problem – not all teams can afford this sort of testing. And even those who can, only do it for the so called prospective Grand Tour contenders and TT specialists, everyone else is passed over. But what if someone who wasn’t expected to lead a Grand Tour grabs the leader’s jersey and has a serious shot at winning it? What if he needs only a few seconds to hold on to his jersey and loses it because his TT bike wasn’t set up perfectly some months ago? Why do we need this rubbish in road cycling? So that manufactures can sell more bikes?

Secondly, setting up a TT bike – not everyone can adapt well to this very unnatural bike riding position. This is why we have guys who can solo away from the peloton on a road bike but lose insane amount of time in a time trial because they are made to ride those stupid machines. Do you really think this is fair and adds anything to the cycling show?

By the way, about the show. The only thing that TT bikes add to the show is embarrassment. Do you remember how many times Michael Rasmussen fell in a single time trial stage in the 2005 Tour? I don’t. What I remember though is that he lost his 3rd place in the general classification on that stage of the Tour de France because of those crashes. Or the 2003 Tour when Ullrich came closest to beating Armstrong? Only seconds behind, last time trial and he hits the floor, Tour’s gone. Menchov in 2009 Giro – last time trial, almost home, last corner and bang, he is down but luckily holds on to his overall victory.

All of these crashes, and many more like them, have nothing to do with the riders’ skills – these guys have excellent riding skills, they don’t crash riding alone. It’s the TT bikes that caused the crashes – they’re awkward to ride and are very unstable. Just when you think you picked a good line through a corner, a gust of wind comes along, hits your disc wheel and your aero frame and you hit the deck before you know what happened.

The stupidity of TT bikes really shines in the team time trials when 9 highly skilled professional bike racers ride their bikes like a bunch of poo’s floating down the Yenisei river. This is a team time trial abomination, no less. Go and look at the amateur team time trial World Championships of the times past – what you’ll see is the clockwork like execution of the most sophisticated kind ever done on a road bicycle when more than two riders had to ride together to achieve a common result. To do that, you need to control your bike as much as possible and not being left to the mercies of the environment you happened to race in. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, watch the TTT stage of the 2009 Tour de France and count how many teams didn’t have at least one rider go down in that race. The Bbox boys lost 4 (!) riders on one corner because they couldn’t control their TT machines. Can road cycling get more ridiculous than this? Give these guys the bikes they know how to handle and watch them do what they do best – race bikes without worrying about losing control of their machines because the machines are designed to be ridden on a straight road without another rider anywhere near you. Time trial bikes are both stupid and dangerous, they must be banned. Once they’re gone, race organisers will have much easier time to find roads for individual and team time trials because any road will do, including cobbled and dirt roads.

In conclusion, to revive road cycling, we need to ditch the very organisation, the UCI, that is largely responsible for the decay this old sport is in today.

To thwart doping, a new environment must be created with financial incentives to compete clean and harsh punishments for fraud, which is what doping is.

To return road cycling to its former days when great champions, and not the doctors, battled each other in the most testing, spectacular circumstances, the races must return to their original roots where endurance, stamina and character were tested to their limits. The aerodynamic innovations that bring nothing to the sport and only enrich the manufactures must be left where they belong – in the world of triathlon and bicycling enthusiasts.

The post Road Cycling Reforms: Can road cycling be revived? appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

The party doesn’t end until I say so! Source: The Daily Telegraph

I know your excuse for wearing a pro kit when you ride your bike – you think it’s the same as wearing a Broncos jersey. Except it’s not. A fat guy wearing a Broncos jersey is a Broncos fan, while a fat guy riding a Pinarello in Sky kit is a dork who thinks he’s a Sky fan. Except, again, he is not. You see, a fat guy in a Broncos jersey is an expression of a religious affection, which is totally acceptable, while a fat guy in a Sky kit is a $200 shot at looking like a pro while not being a pro but wanting to be one in the next life. This is why it’s dorky.

Or, if your name ends with -ev or -ov, or your grandpa was born in Siberia, then yes, I get it, wearing Katyusha kit will be like some kind of national pride, but do you really think Denis Menchov gets really excited knowing you’re riding in the Katyusha kit on Oxley road every day at 5 o’clock in the morning? And no Graceville resident will pick up a phone and order some crude oil from Itera because they just saw a Katyusha jersey in their window when you woke them up with your “Car back!” shout. I can even tell you that Igor Makarov, the guy who pays Katyusha’s bills, when asked recently what he thought of Brisbane’s cycling scene said he never been to Croatia before. True story.

Oh, and by the way, I bet you have no idea what Katyusha really stands for, do you? You think Katyusha is one of the 57 diminutives of the Russian female name Ekaterina? Wrong (although it is true). Katyusha is a rocket launcher which was extensively used by the Red Army at the end of the WWII to bomb the crap out of Germans. In Russian psyche, Katyusha evokes a similar image shouting “Banzai!” does for a Samurai. Something like what an Aussie feels when he sees a meat pie. Pride, yeah, that’s the word I was looking for. And I bet you didn’t know there’s a bad Russian swear word printed on Katyusha jersey about the wearer, and this is how you know the jersey is fake. Every time you’re passed by a Russian driver, guess what he thinks of you? “Hey honey, look at this dork in a Katyusha jersey!” And you paid for it too. Oh, those Russians.

Anyway, where’s my cycling tip for non cyclists you’re wondering? Here – mate, unless you ride your bike for like hours and hours, don’t bother with a Lycra kit, pro or otherwise. Remember this – fat, middle aged man in Lycra ain’t cool, yo. No excuses. A pair of buggy shorts and a t-shirt is all you need. Seriously.

The post Cycling tips for non cyclists: pro kits are for pro’s, dude appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

If you live in Brisbane, you’ve probably noticed the number of cyclists on the roads has at least tripled in the last two weeks. This is because, and it’s only a guess, the so called winter is finished. Just like a lot of cyclists in Montreal stop riding their bikes in winter because it’s freezing, so too most Brisbane cyclists don’t ride in winter because “it’s bloody freezing” out there. “Bloody freezing” in Brisbanish is anything below 20 degrees Celsius. Harsh, I know.

Anyway, I think it’s great so many people these days are riding instead of driving. Keeps petrol prices down (the supply and demand law, if you were wondering). Yet, I can’t help but feel pity for some of these guys who try to do the right thing for themselves, for me, for the trees, the wales and the ice of the North Pole (Pole here refers to a geographical location, not someone from Poland).

So, if you’re an overweight, middle aged male who bought a carbon bicycle with Garmin computer, a pro team Lycra kit and a Livestrong helmet, you should read this series of blog posts because, who knows, maybe you won’t have to sell your bike on eBay around Christmas after all. Bicycles are meant to be enjoyed, they’re not torture machines. I bet you didn’t know that.

Which brings me to my 1st tip in the series (apologies for the long introduction). When you have a chance, have a look at your rear wheel. You’ll see a bunch of rings with teeth-like things sticking out. These are not spacers, these are gears. Cars have gears, bicycles have gears. Very simple.

And here is the tip – use them, gears that is (you paid for them anyway).

When you start going uphill, it’s time to change gears. Your car does it automatically for you, but not your bike, not yet anyway even though we’re heading into that direction. Your goal is to find something you feel comfortable on. Keep looking (shifting) until you find it. It’s there, trust me, you just have to find it.

PS – Bonus Tip: just because Lance Armstrong used to pedal fast going uphill, doesn’t mean you have to too.

(Inspired by a poor soul on a bike I saw today grinding on a huge gear up a hill with a face that said “Crap, I had no idea riding a bike is so hard.”)

The post Cycling tips for non cyclists: Dude, use your gears appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

Thomas Voeckler attacks everyone, everywhere.
© J. Roncero under Creative Commons

Road cycling is a unique sport. I mean, with all other sports, if your intelligence is anywhere near average, you’re old enough to understand what winning and losing means and someone takes a minute to explain to you the basics, you’re all set, you can watch and enjoy any sport you want, even cricket.

Road cycling is a Kabbalah of sport. A casual half hour viewing of a Tour de France stage with a beer in one hand and a remote control in another (because you want to keep an eye on that Formula 1 race) won’t give you any clue about what’s going on. Talking to your friend who rides to work and drinks decaf mocha with fat free soy milk won’t help, most likely he won’t have a clue either. And yet, because you’re intrigued and want to know why such a seemingly boring sport attracts so much attention to itself (doping aside), you catch yourself thinking – wotthehell is going on, why all the fuss?

So while everyone else is talking about Wiggins and Evans (and of course Armstrong) in these last few hours before the start of 2012 Tour de France, I’ll try to be different and talk about the mundane and the banal – the theory of stage racing.

At this junction you’re quite possibly thinking, “Mate, I have pinned a dossard on my derrière more times than I care to mention, I can spell bidon even if you wake me up at 2 in the morning and I have never, ever spelled peloton with an “e”. Theory of stage racing? You’re kidding me…”

You might be right but then you probably never heard of “Every day I learn something new” expression. You have? Read on then, you never know.

The Prologue

What is prologue in a stage race like Tour de France? The Free Dictionary defines prologue as “an introduction or preface” or “an introductory act, event”. In stage racing, it is that but also much, much more.

As far as the stage race itself is concerned, the main, the prime purpose of a prologue is to sort out the general classification (GC) from day one. Before the race proper even starts, you already have your GC leader wearing the leader’s jersey. It’s neater that way and everyone knows what to do from this point on. But this is not all.

There’s a belief out there, spread out by fools like these, that prologue is not a real race but rather some kind of ceremony. Others, slightly more “educated”, think that even though prologue is a bike race in its own right, only the GC contenders go full gas in a prologue. Not true.

Not every rider goes full gas of course. For most, it makes no sense to race all out and finish 37th. You might as well take it a little easy and finish 68th, who cares. But there are more than 5-10 riders who will throw everything at this short race.

Why would a non-GC rider, whose job is in fact to work for his team’s GC contender, go full gas in a prologue? Wouldn’t it be better for him not to bother and save his legs since he’s going to lose a lot of time later in the race anyway working for his teammate? It would but…

No one knows what lies ahead in a stage race, especially a 3 week long Grand Tour like Tour de France. 7-10 days later after the prologue, you might find yourself in a top 5 position with a shot for the overall win because:

a) you went well in a prologue, and
b) your team leader is out of GC contention (for whatever reason)

Hence, there are plenty of riders in a prologue for whom this first, short race is very important. Apart from the GC contenders with a special status of full protection from their team (usually no more than 5-7 riders from the entire peloton), other riders who will go all out in a prologue are those who are as good or almost as good as their protected team leaders but for whatever reason are not designated team leaders. These guys will be given green light to go all out in a prologue in case something goes wrong with their team leader.

Then, there are self designated dark horses who think (or even know for sure) their team leader is out of form and will not deliver. If they believe they have the legs to fight for the GC, they will try to place as high as possible in a prologue and then wait day after day for their team leader to stumble. Once the team leader’s down, voilà, the dark horse is now next on the GC and is willing to pick up the flag. Those 10 minutes of hard work in the prologue are now paying off.

As I said, you just never know. A lot can happen in a stage race and unless the rider knows for sure there’s no point racing full on a prologue, there will be a lot of riders tonight seriously hurting themselves because they have to.

The Show

And then there’s the show. Because prologues are short (less than 10km), they are always held in a city. And this attracts crowds. A major stage race, like Tour de France, attracts huge crowds. Crowds means advertising money. The streets will be splattered with banners and billboards. In a televised race, stationary TV cameras will be installed at many points on the course making the broadcast not only less expensive but easier to “package” to the viewer. This, in turn, increases the TV audience and brings more money to the organisers.

Short but important if you want to win a stage race – prologue, underestimate to your own peril.

Happy viewing everyone.

The post The Fundamentals of The Tour de France: The Prologue appeared first on Top Dog Cycling.

Pure climbers, Voloshin (44) and Demidenko (45) in action at the 1983 amateur Giro.

To fully appreciate the significance of what Yuri Elizarov set himself up to accomplish with the Titan project, a short discourse into some history should be appropriate at this point.

The Way Things Were

The international amateur road cycling scene of the 1950s was unaccustomed to seeing outstanding performances from the Soviet racers of the time. This wasn’t surprising. There weren’t many young men left alive in the USSR after the Second World War, and even though the roads in the European part of the country were still good enough for tanks and trucks, they weren’t any good for competitive cycling. This, however, didn’t stop some from trying to earn respect in Europe.

The breakthrough came in 1960 at the Olympic road race in Rome (I wrote about this race before) won by Viktor Kapitonov. Yuri Melikhov followed this success with a win of the Peace Race in 1961, Saydkhushin in 1962 and Lebedev in 1965. Things were looking good until Ryszard Szurkowski appeared on the scene in 1969. Four Peace Race wins, a Road World Championship title and a truckload of many more wins by the Polish machine made some Kremlin rulers really peeved. Heads started to roll and solutions were sought out.

Reconstruction

The answer came, once again, in the person of Viktor Kapitonov. Almost immediately after retiring from racing, he was called into high places and asked if he could turn the tables around as head of the Soviet national team. He said yes and the face of road cycling was forever changed in the USSR. The “new approach” was born.

By 1972, Kapitonov managed to get things back on track by delivering gold in the München’s Olympic Games team time trial, the only championship race that really mattered for Kremlin. The Soviet team won back to back at the next Games in Montreal in 1976 and again in Moscow in 1980. The Soviets felt so invincible in Moscow that on the eve of the Olympic road race, there was still no consensus among the riders who they should be working for. A classic case of everyone being a chief and no Indians in the team. To solve the problem, Soukhoruchenkov took the gold with a crazy solo attack no one, including his teammates, could match. Apparently, the road cycling connoisseurs talk about this race as one of the finest championship wins ever in the history of the sport. It was definitely a mad move on a mad circuit.

The Peace Race scene was taken care of too. After a few hiccups and near misses, Aavo Pikkuus finally won it in 1977. Then Averin, Soukhoruchenkov, Barinov and Zagretdinov each took a turn to win it every year after Pikkuus. It took someone like Olaf Ludwig to stop the Russians only to see Soukhoruchenkov win it again in 1984 after he decided to come out of self imposed hiatus from cycling.

The Primacy of Peace Race

The importance of Peace Race should not be overlooked. “During the Cold War,” says Wikipedia, “the Peace Race was known as the Tour de France of the East.” Although a flattering comparison, it’s not exactly accurate nor even fair.

Unlike Tour de France, Peace Race was as much a political event as it was a cycling race. This race wasn’t selling ice creams, refrigerators or coffee machines. Peace Race was selling ideology. Private property and free enterprise, the ideology proposed, were not indispensible ingredients of a successful, internationally significant stage race. Not only private capital was unnecessary, the new societal system was loudly claiming to be superior in providing the means and resources needed to develop world class athletes. Musicians and ballet dancers, scientists, aerospace engineers and athletes, these were the poster boys and girls of a New Society. Peace Race was one of the cogs in the Ministry of Truth’s propaganda machine.

To illustrate the might of socialism, Peace Race organizers were always keen to invite the best amateurs from Western countries to demonstrate to the world how impotent these riders were against the riders from the Eastern Bloc. Of course, the poor guys were never told they’ll be racing against full time professionals disguised as amateurs (I wrote about professional amateurs before). Not surprisingly, those Westerners who performed well in the Peace Race went on to have successful careers in professional cycling (Peter Winnen, 2nd in 1980, was one of them; that year, he kept in check the entire Soviet team including Yuri Barinov, the eventual winner).

Prestige and politics aside, the scar left on the Russian psyche by German invasion in the WWII was yet another, in some sense unique, aspect that made Peace Race so special for the Soviets. Every time the Soviet team was victorious, there were a lot of people in the country happy to see the German ass being kicked once again. In the minds of many, the race was about “Us against the Germans” just like all our childhood war games were. “Go and get them” was never meant to refer to anybody but Germans in the Soviet national team regardless of how big or small any race was. In the Peace Race, the stakes were high. Kremlin was watching.

The Plan

Clearly, when Kapitonov was charged with the task of developing the dominant force in amateur road cycling, he not only knew the seriousness of this assignment, he already had a plan how to fulfil it.

The “new approach” I mentioned above was a development system undoubtedly of the Kapitonov’s design – brutal and uncompromising, its one and only goal was to produce race winning riders, use them as much as possible while they’re still capable of good results and then discard them at the first sign of malfunction. Get rid of one, there are three more waiting to replace him, primed and ready to race full gas.

How exactly this new approach worked, I’ll explain in the next post.

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