John Rees

The “Fake”.

In a bike race, the people who often win are protected for most of the stage by their teammates.  These teammates ride in front of their leader, saving as much as 20% of the protected rider’s effort in the wind.  They bring bottles from the team car and chase down attacks by rivals on the course.  On mountain stages, a team might send their riders to the front of the group to set ‘tempo’.  In other words, teammates will sacrifice themselves at the front, driving a hard enough pace to keep other riders from trying to slip away.  Once they are spent, the rider will slip behind and end up finishing well back for the day, their job done.

In stage 10 of the 2001 Tour, the worker bees on the teams were going to have their work cut out for them. The stage had several climbs that finished with a climb up the famous Alpe d’Huez.  In an earlier stage that was not nearly as hilly, Lance’s teammates were unable to stay with him and the Texan was isolated quickly on a climb.  Since the hills were not as severe, Lance survived with no time lost to his rivals.  Before stage 10, the talk was whether it would happen again and whether Lance would lose time.  As the stage progressed, TV viewers and team directors were witnessing a Lance Armstrong they had never seen previously.  Instead of riding at the front of the diminishing pack of riders, Lance was near the back floundering.  Since the team directors had TV’s in their cars, they were all seeing the same thing as viewers at home.  “What was wrong with Lance”? Is his defense of the Tour de France over on the first major mountain stage?

The rival Telekom team of Jan Ulllrich saw an opportunity and took it.  The German team sent all their riders to the front and rode a hard tempo through the first three climbs.  This brutal pace thinned their own team members, but also thinned out the number of riders in the pack.  Armstrong seemed to hang on, if only barely.   One TV close up (from a motorcycle for the broadcaster) showed Lance shaking his head in apparent defeat.  Telekom had expended a lot of energy and riders keeping the pace hard.  Now even Ullrich was showing the signs as he rode with his team at the front of the group.  When the riders reached the foot of the mighty Alpe d’Huez though, another Lance Armstrong appeared.  Very quickly, the Texan moved to the front of the group and quickly sped away.  Ullrich had nothing left and lost 2 minutes to Lance by the finish.  Lance chalked up another stage win and took time out of his chief rival.  The trick had worked.  Thanks to modern technology, everyone saw the acting job, and many were tricked.  Later, Rudy Pevenage, the director Ullrichs Telekom team said “When we saw the way Armstrong attacked we lost all our morale”.

This stage also is the source of the last of my seven on word events.. tomorrow.

The “Wait”

As I mentioned yesterday, there is an unwritten code amongst racers to wait if the leader has had difficulty.  This policy isn’t always followed and the circumstances and tactics of a race can make it impossible or even unsafe to do so..  However, in stage 13 of the 2001 Tour, Lance waited for his perennial rival, Jan Ulrich when he crashed off the road during a fast decent from the Col du Peyresourde.  Ulrich was using carbon fiber wheels, which were new at the time.  As light as these wheels are, they have a quality that is quite undesirable for fast, mountainous downhills.  They have poor braking performance.  Unlike aluminum wheels, which collect the heat from the brake pads readily, and distribute it throughout the rim, carbon fiber conducts heat poorly.  This means all the heat from the friction remains in the pads.  It was quite common for rubber brake pads to literally melt away from heat build up.  Later, pads of cork and also composite materials were developed.  But at the time, the braking was still quite dangerous.  This was a risk Ulrich knew and apparently accepted.  Armstrong, on the other hand, was racing with a set of lightweight aluminum wheels.

The crash:  Armstrong, Ulrich and a teammate of the Germans, Kevin Livingston were making their way down the twists and turns of the narrow mountain road.  On a particular sharp bend, Ulrich could not stop enough to avoid hitting his teammate in front of him.  He chose to take a wider line and missed the corner entirely.  The German champ ended up rolling down a ditch and into a stream.  Livingston waited as Ulrich climbed back out from the muck.  Amazingly, the bike was intact as was the rider.  They remounted, and with Kevin Livingston pacing him back, they later re joined Armstrong.

They were able to catch back on because Armstrong, aware of his rival’s bad luck, sat up on the bike and slowed, allowing him to rejoin.  Once back together Lance asked Ulrich if he was OK, and the fight resumed.  The wait was a nice gesture, but Lance still won the stage.  But since he was sporting about the crash, nobody could claim the stage win was because Lance had taken advantage of the crash.  One of the reasons this give and take works is because riders never forget, and if the situation is reversed, the favor is returned.  As, in this case, when Ulrich waited for Armstrong in the 2003 Tour de France

The “Bag”
As I mentioned yesterday, racers in the Tour de France do not stop to eat.  They get food handed to them from team cars or in a designated ‘feed zone’.  In these zones, team assistants hand the racers cloth bags full of food, gel and water bottles.  These bags are called ‘musettes’.  Once the riders have transferred the contents to their pockets, they discard the bags.  But before you think these bags litter the French countryside, you need to know they are highly sought after as souvenirs.  These musettes get grabbed up immediately after the riders have moved on up the road.

In stage 15 of the 2003 Tour, Lance was in a fight with Basque Iban Mayo and German Jan Ullrich on a climb to the ski area of Luz-Ardiden.  Shadowing the Texans wheel, Mayo was right behind Armstrong when his handlebar clipped the musette bag of a girl standing on the side of the road.  The bag pulled Lance down and over the handlebars.  Mayo went down and crashed into Lance’s bike.  Ullrich, who was a few meters behind was able to steer away from disaster and ride on.

Then, two remarkable things happened:  Lance managed to get up and re-mount his bike.  The road was so narrow and full of spectators, the team could not get a spare bike to him.  Lance took off in pursuit of Ulllrich up the road.

Next, Ullrich, observing an unspoken code in the Tour, slowed and waited for Lance to get back up to speed.  It is considered bad form for riders to attack the yellow jersey when they encounter misfortune, and Lance was wearing the yellow jersey of the leader.  Two years previously, in another mountain stage, Armstrong had waited for Ullrich when, on a fast descent, the German had lost control and crashed off the road and into the trees.  Armstrong waited then as a sign of respect, and Ullrich returned the favor when the Texan tumbled.

As he raced up to catch Ullrich, Lance once again nearly crashed as his foot clipped out of the pedal. Once back with German, the racing resumed, and the adrenaline from the crash and near crash lit a fire in Armstrong and he dropped his break away partners and went on to win the stage.  It was another epic day in the mountains, but there is more to tell:  After the stage, Lance’s bike was inspected and it was found to have been cracked from the impact with the road.  The bike could have failed at any time, and the damage is likely the reason that Lance had trouble keeping his foot in the pedals as he chased down the other riders.

The “Bonk”

Stages in the Tour de France are tough.  They often take over 5 hours to complete and the riders never stop.  No time outs.  No water breaks.  If you need to eat or drink, you need to do it on the bike.  Team cars, riding at the back of the peleton, supply drinks and food, and there are one or two ‘feed zones’ in a stage where riders can pick up supplies as they ride by.  At this level, a rider can burn up to 10,000 calories from their effort.  If they do not eat enough, they will run out of energy and suffer a condition know as “the bonk”.

On Stage 16 of the 2000 Tour de France, Lance was safely in the lead over Jan Ullrich by seven and a half minutes.  But that kind of time can be lost quickly in the mountains, and stage 16 was full of mountain climbs.  The last climb, over the Col de Joux-Plane would really sting the riders as it was occurring after 185 KM of racing.  Early in the stage, Marco Pantani, still fuming at Lance from the stage at Ventoux, took off on a suicide attack, leaving the other riders and the peleton behind.  At this point of the Tour, Pantani was no longer a threat to Armstrong, but the Texan decided to work to reel in the tiny Italian climber.  Fighting alongside Jan Ullrich, Armstrong was so focused on catching Pantani he lost track of his eating.  As the chasers began the 12KM climb to the summit, Lance suffered the bonk.  TV footage showed a visibly shaken Armstrong, slowly losing time to his German rival.  He was isolated, with no teammates nearby to share food or drinks.  The team car could not reach him.  Seeing a chance, Ullrich teamed with the Spanish rider, Roberto Heras to take as much time away from Lance as possible.  By the time they reached the finish, Ullrich had claimed back 2 minutes of the 7 minute gap he was behind at the beginning of the day.  It could have been a lot worse.  Lance got lucky.

What about Pantani? After baiting the Texan into chasing him, he slowed mid stage, and ended up well down by the finish.  His tactic?  perhaps, simply to force Armstrong into some trouble.

The “Gift”

When Lance returned to the Tour in 2000 as the defending champion, there was a lot being written by the press and other riders that his 1999 win was a fluke.  The pundits mentioned the absence of the past two winners, German Jan Ullrich and Italian Marco Pantani, as reasons the Texan had taken the yellow jersey.  As both were back this year, the expectation was one of these two riders would re claim the top spot on the podium.

And so it came as no surprise that Lance and Pantani would battle, head to head up the difficult Mount Ventoux climb.  The two had escaped from a small group of riders that included Jan Ullrich.  With 2KM left, Armstrong sensed an opportunity to take more time from Ulrich.  At this point, Pantani was well down in the general classification, so it was more important to Lance to get time on the riders behind, than to actually win the stage.  During the last kilometers, Lance kept urging Pantani on ‘vitesse , vitesse’ he yelled.  This seemed to annoy the Italian, and he pressed on.  At the finish, Lance eased up, apparently handing the stage win to Pantani.  Later, a war of words was exchanged through the press between the two riders.

Pantani was mad, and would be heard from again in the 2000 Tour de France…. Tomorrow

The Tour de France is starting July 3 with the prologue in Rotterdam.  Once again, Lance Armstrong will be joining 197 other riders in the 3 week stage race circling France, with forays into the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.
Lance has already won the tour 7 times, and managed to finish on the podium in 2009 after 3 years away from the sport.  How will he do this year?  We will have to wait until July 25 to know for certain.

As I was pondering Armstrong’s astonishing string of 7 consecutive victories, I began to see key events that could be summed up with one word.  Over the next 7 days, I will post a key even in 7 of Lance’s previous tours that played a significant role in the outcome.

Here is the first::

The ‘Slime’

In 1999, Stage 2 of the Tour passed over a causeway called the Passage du Gois, a roadway that can only be navigated for about 4 hours during low tide.  The road is cobbled and remains wet and slimy even after the sea has temporarily revealed the surface.  Lance and his team, aware of the dangers of this section of the stage, managed to get to the front of the peleton as the riders approached.  As expected, there was a large crash on the cobbles, creating a large pile up and trapping many key riders.  At the front, Lance and his captain, George Hincapie, along with other riders such as Mario Cippolini, took full advantage of the carnage, working together to increase the gap.

Stuck in the pile up was Swiss rider, Alex Zulle, one of the riders expected to contend for the overall.  The unfortunate Zulle lost 6 minutes to Armstrong on this stage alone.  At the end of the tour, the Banesto rider finished in second place, seven and a half minutes behind the Texan.  Would Zulle have used different tactics on other stages had he not been trapped on the slippery cobbles?  We will never know, but the stage demonstrated the advantage of tactics and planning as Armstrong’s postal team were aware of the dangers of this section, and successfully kept their key rider out of trouble.