Full Gas by Peter Cossins

Author:Peter Cossins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER 11

HOW TO WIN IN THE MOUNTAINS

Part of being a climber is that you can’t have a bad day and just draft in. If you are bad, you are gone. There’s no hiding.

– Andy Hampsten

Sky are the new Saeco and climbing is the new sprinting. As bunch sprints become ever harder to control, the nearest the sport now gets to a perfectly conceived lead-out is in the mountains, which says everything about the extent to which tactics have changed in this most challenging of racing terrains. With eight teammates lined out in front of him, Chris Froome has become the new Mario Cipollini, kept out of the wind until the moment he decides to accelerate, his rivals desperate to be on his wheel, hoping to be primed for the instant he attacks, their resources depleted by the battle to remain in Sky’s slipstream.

This, cycling’s decision-makers would have you believe, is the contemporary reality of racing in the mountains. Their response to it? To cut one rider from every team from the start of the 2018 season in order to reduce control, to free up strategy and liberate the peloton’s born attackers, to return the sport to a more thrilling era of long-range attacks by solitary raiders and fluctuating fortunes in the high mountains, to encourage the kind of tactical anarchy that fostered the exploits of Fausto Coppi, Federico Bahamontes, Eddy Merckx and Marco Pantani, who were never hampered by such constraints.

However, if the concept of ‘marginal gains’ tells us one thing, it is that Sky have essentially done no more than adapt or improve established practice to gain a competitive advantage on their rivals. Nowhere is this more evident than in their strategic approach to racing in the mountains.

As with most advances that have taken place in racing during the post-war period, credit for instigating it goes to Coppi. As the peloton took on a more international and organised appearance in the early 1950s, the Italian realised that by maintaining a high tempo on climbs, he could keep pure climbers in check, neutering their sudden bursts of acceleration. Furthermore, by getting his teammates to infiltrate breakaways and attack off the front of the bunch, provoking a response from his rivals, he could sap their reserves to the extent that the mountains became a domain where he could dictate rather than defend.

What Coppi began, Jacques Anquetil continued. When climbers such as Federico Bahamontes and Raymond Poulidor jumped away from the French five-time Tour winner, he would reel them in in the same gradual manner that would be adopted later by Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Sky domestiques in the service of Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome.

Merckx had been initially dismissed as a Classics specialist whose strengths in that area would not translate to Grand Tour racing because he was widely regarded as not having the ability to contain the best climbers in the high mountains. However, he also embraced Coppi’s tactic to conquer his rivals in this terrain. He refined it, too, implementing his bullish and totally uncompromising strategy of la course en tête.

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