Bradley Wiggins by Deering John

Author:Deering, John [Deering, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857905321
Publisher: Birlinn

STAGE 11:

Albertville–La Toussuire, 148km

Thursday, 12 July 2012

Back in the mists of time, way back as far as the 1990s and even the 1980s, the cycling season went like this: spring classics, Vuelta, Giro, Tour, autumn classics, World Championships, Tour of Lombardy. That was it. No Tour Down Under. No Tour of California. None of that stuff. What’s more, races used to be run in a logical start-slow-get-faster sort of way. When the Tour went through a French rider’s home town, he had time to hop off and share a glass of bubbly at un picnic en famille before lolloping back up to join the leisurely peloton.

Then things began to change. People started putting up a bit more money for folks to win their bike race, or even just for them to come and ride it, especially if it was in some far flung place. The decidedly two-bit Tour de Langkawi in Malaysia, for instance, became the fourth richest race in the world for teams prepared to spend two weeks in February riding through a jungle. Now, the Tour of Qatar and the Tour of Turkey attract squads chasing early season euros and UCI points.

Ah, yes, UCI points. Points dished out for results at races, weighted according to the seriousness of the event. It’s all a bit chicken-and-egg, but people started chasing UCI points around the same time as races got richer and quicker. A rider with points against his name can secure a team entry to the races they want to ride. It’s made racing more competitive but flawed: Saxo Bank team manager Bjarne Riis recently pointed out that it’s not easy to get a domestique to sacrifice his own ambitions for a team leader and then be told at the end of the year that he hasn’t earned a contract for the following year because he hasn’t accrued enough UCI points.

All these things meant that the traditional way of racing was impossible to sustain over the course of a season. It was just too hard to ride all of the races, especially to ride hard in all of the races. Something had to give.

The first thing to give was the Vuelta a España. Rooted to its spot in the annual calendar at the beginning of May, immediately after the cessation of the spring classics, the Tour of Spain suffered horribly through the new regime of hard riding for ten months of the year. Nobody was turning up. It was fast becoming a domestic race, and even the brightest Spanish stars were finding it hard to find room in their year to ride the Vuelta. Even the legends Pedro Delgado and Miguel Indurain began to duck it in order to better prepare for the Tour de France.

The solution was to fan the three grand tours out. The Giro d’Italia would be the first one of the year now, moving from its customary appointment in June to May. The Vuelta would be pushed back to September with the World Championships even later than that to bookend the season.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.