A Curated Selection of 21st Century Cycling Farces
When the sport gets weird as hell
In my first couple posts in this newsletter, I’ve kept going on about how odd cycling can get. Mostly, I’m talking about subtle pettiness and interpersonal conflict. Like when Movistar’s GC riders were squabbling among themselves and the team decided to make them record a hostage video on the bus to assure everyone, “no, no, we’re still friends.” Alejandro Valverde as the human get-along T-shirt.
But no, let’s remember some times things got really weird. Like, literally can’t believe what you’re seeing weird. If your favorite farce isn’t on this list, don’t worry, I’m positive I’ll return to this gimmick before too long, as there is no shortage of disasters to ridicule.
Chris Froome Breaks Cycling’s Cardinal Rule on Mont Ventoux, 2016 Tour de France
Stage 12 of the 2016 Tour de France was scheduled to be an ascent of Mont Ventoux, one of the most famous climbs in the world. Mont Ventoux is famous for is brutal wind; the name is close to the French for “windy mountain,” though Wikipedia says it’s actually derived from an unrelated Gallic phrase. Folk etymology is fun.
The last couple kilometers before the summit are devoid of trees, therefore the road is unshielded from the wind. The night before the stage, organizers announced that the stage would end not at the summit, but six kilometers lower, at Chalet Reynard. This prevented riders from being blown off the hill in projected 60 mph winds, but it caused other problems.
Even big cycling races like the Tour de France take place on public roads, which means fans who want to come out and see the race can just show up early, park, and stand around until the riders pass. Fans tend to congregate on climbs, where the action is not only significant, but slow. Stand on flat ground in the middle of a stage, and you’ll see the peloton go by in a blur, barely. Stand near the summit of Mont Ventoux, and you might actually witness the move that wins the Tour de France.
Up at the summit, with no trees, there’s plenty of room for fans to spread out and get a good view. Down at Chalet Reynard, not so much. Fans, who normally crowd the riders even under ideal circumstances, spilled out onto the road. When race leader Chris Froome put in an attack, with Bauke Mollema and Richie Porte in pursuit, they finally ran out of room.
The TV cameraman’s motorcycle stopped abruptly. Porte crashed into the motorcycle, and Froome crashed into Porte. Both wrecked their bikes, and the team cars carrying spare equipment couldn’t make it through the chaos. The race organizers provide what’s called neutral service vehicles—standard equipment any rider can take in an emergency—but with his custom Pinarello in pieces, Froome couldn’t get the loaner bike moving.
So he took off on foot. The then-two-time Tour winner, in the yellow jersey, just panicked and bolted up the hill in his cycling shoes. Which is supposed to be illegal, by the way. Rule no. 1 of bike racing is that you have to, you know, do it on a bike.
Eventually, cooler heads prevailed. The race organizers retroactively neutralized the stage at the moment of Porte and Froome’s crash, and Froome—rather than being disqualified—went on to win the Tour.
Nature Calls, and Tom Dumoulin Answers, 2017 Giro d’Italia
Think about the worst you’ve ever had to poop. In 2017, Tom Dumoulin was on the verge of becoming the first Dutchman to win the Giro d’Italia. Dumoulin and the leaders had just ascended the iconic Stelvio Pass. Just one more climb to go on Stage 16, just a few more days of racing after that.
So when Dumoulin pulled off to the side of the road, it was clearly an emergency—a flat tire, a broken wheel, a dropped chain, something of that nature. But instead of changing his bike, Dumoulin ran down the embankment at the side of the road, chucked off his helmet, and started hysterically removing his clothes.
This man risked a career-defining victory to take a dump in the middle of a field on international television. No one has ever had to poop that badly, before or since.
More Like Steven Ice-Wreck, 2016 Giro d’Italia
Why was Dumoulin the first Dutchman to win the Giro? Because of what happened the previous year. After 18 stages, Steven Kruijswijk had a three-minute lead on his nearest competitor, and he’d crested the highest climb of the stage—Colle dell’Angello, more than 2,700 meters in elevation—and was on the descent. Barring disaster, he had the win in the bag.
Pro Cycling Stats has a section on each race page that notes key events from that stage. Here I’ll quote the “Key Events” page from Stage 19 of the 2019 Giro in full:
Steven Kruijswijk rids into wall of snow
So, yeah, at that altitude, even in May, you’ve still got waist-deep snowdrifts along the side of the road. Kruijswijk, inexplicably, hit one and went ass-over-tea-kettle. His bike somersaulted 10 feet in the air. By the time Kruijswijk had recombobulated himself, had his bike checked by the neutral service mechanic, and gotten back underway, he’d lost so much time and so much momentum it cost him the Giro. Kruijswijk dropped nearly five minutes on the stage to eventual winner Vincenzo Nibali.
"My morale is broken,” Kruijswijk said after the race. “I tried to give it everything but my body hurts like hell and so it's all over."
Despite Kruijswijk delivering the realest quote in the history of sports, this is not the dumbest way anyone’s lost a grand tour. But I love the Pedro Delgado 1989 Tour de France story so much I’ll save it for a different post.
Annemiek van Vleuten Should’ve Checked the Scoreboard, 2021 Olympic Road Race
If I were to make a ranking of innovations introduced by cycling teams built around Lance Armstrong this would probably be my top three:
Doing shitloads of EPO and bullying the entire peloton and the UCI into covering it up for more than a decade
Race radios
Mountain train tactics
Radios were an innovation of (fittingly) the Motorola team in the 1990s. Until then, cyclists got information midrace in a couple ways: First, you could write the time gaps on a chalkboard and hold it up while riding by on a motorcycle. Alternatively, you could drive up alongside a rider in the team car, stick your head out the window, and shout.
You see why they started using radios.
The Tokyo Olympic road race was unusual for four reasons. First, it had an unusually mountainous parcours for a one-day race. Second, it was contested not among trade teams but national teams, and with smaller squads—just 67 contestants total, and a max of four per team. (For comparison, this year’s women’s Tour of Flanders had six riders to a team and 138 riders total.)
These two factors are important because it became very difficult to employ team tactics. All the more so because the four-woman Dutch team comprised Anna van der Breggen, Marianne Vos, Demi Vollering, and Annemiek van Vleuten. These are arguably the four most successful female cyclists of the past 15 years, and would ordinarily have been spread across three different trade teams. This team was so strong nobody else would want to help them chase down a break, but so star-studded it wasn’t a given that these riders would actually work together.
Also, riders aren’t allowed to wear radios in the Olympics.
Every cycling race features a breakaway at the start; usually, these riders have a slim hope of beating the main peloton, which usually reels them in without too much trouble. At the Olympics, the break is hopeless, usually made up of amateur and semipro riders from countries where cycling is a mode of transportation, not a sport.
One of these riders was 30-year-old Austrian Anna Kiesenhofer, who’d retired from professional cycling a couple years earlier to pursue a career as a mathematician. By the time Tokyo rolled around, she was part-time racer who paid the bills as a postdoctoral fellow. Because it’s easier to get a spot on the Olympic team nowadays than a tenure-track job.
Kiesenhofer and a few others went off at the start of the race, and against all odds, the Dutch team reeled them in one by one. At race’s end, it was van Vleuten who crossed the line first and threw her hands out to celebrate her victory. It was a touching moment; five years earlier, van Vleuten had a horrendous crash on a greasy downhill section in Rio, while leading the previous Olympic road race. I vividly remember watching it live, it’s in the Hermann Maier Hall of Fame for “Oh my God I just saw someone die at the Olympics. (The 2016 Olympic road race is probably the best cycling race I’ve ever seen; I’ll do a separate post on it later.)
Unfortunately for van Vleuten, she never overtook Kiesenhofer. Never even got close enough to realize that Kiesenhofer was still out there ahead of her on the road. And without a radio, her team car couldn’t tell her before it was too late. So by the time van Vleuten crossed the road, everyone at the finish line knew Kiesenhofer had won, as did everyone watching on TV around the world. But van Vleuten had no clue until she’d already finished, celebrated, and dismounted her bike.
It’s fairly common to see confusion over who won a sprint finish; it’s disconcertingly common, in fact, for riders to DeSean Jackson it and lose a race by celebrating too early. But to simply lose track of a rider more than a minute up the road? That’s incredible, a mistake that’s almost been designed out of the modern sport.
And finally, a brief history of all the most farcical ways the first stage of a grand tour has been screwed up in the past five years.
The Kiddie Pool Incident, 2019 Vuelta a España
The 2019 Vuelta started with a team time trial. One interesting facet of time trial racing is that starting order can have a huge impact on the outcome of the race. All things being equal, it’s better to start late, because the last riders to go know what time they have to beat.
But sometimes all things are not equal. Sometimes the weather changes mid-stage; a sudden rainstorm could turn a predictable stage on its ear. And sometimes, in the middle of a team time trial at the beginning of the Vuelta, a kiddie pool overflows in the front yard of a house on the race course, soaking the road on a blind corner. Sometimes that happens right before Jumbo-Visma and UAE Team Emirates hit that corner, and because it’s a team time trial, when one rider crashes everyone crashes.
Jumbo and UAE finished 18th and 21st, respectively out of 22 teams on that stage, both losing at least 40 seconds. But Jumbo’s Primož Roglič recovered, and fought back to win the general classification quite easily, with UAE’s Tadej Pogačar in third.
The Soapy Road Incident, 2020 Tour de France
Surprisingly, there are worse things for a race surface than water. When it rains, all the crap that soaks into the asphalt floats back to the surface again—dirt, oil, other treacherous detritus. That happened in Nice, the day of Stage 1 of the 2020 Tour.
It rained like crazy that day, and there was a rumor that since the last time it had rained, a truck carrying soap had crashed on the race course and scattered its cargo all over the road. Either way, numerous riders came to grief as if they’d hit a banana peel in Mario Kart. Here’s Miguel Ángel López:
Whee!
The veteran riders in the race, led by Tony Martin, effectively neutralized the race until the slippery sections were behind them. It got worse the next year.
“Allez Opi-Omi!” 2021 Tour de France
Fans who turn out for cycling races love to bring costumes and/or signs. Bring a sign to a baseball game and it’s not a given that the cameras will even find you. But with a predictable course and limited real estate, if you get to the side of the road at the Tour de France you will show up on TV.
So thought a fan who wanted to say hi to her grandparents. She saw the peloton coming, picked her moment, and jumped into the road with a big smile on her face…
…and accidentally clotheslined poor Tony Martin. And because Martin was at the very start of the peloton, the whole pack came to a complete stop in the middle of the stage. In addition to immediate worldwide infamy, the fan was given a €1,200 fine by the French authorities.
Racing in the Dark, 2023 Vuelta a España
As silly as some of these crashes are, it’s part of cycling. When the world is your arena, extrinsic forces are just another thing racers have to account for. But the organizers ought to know better.
Last year’s Vuelta was scheduled to start with a glitzy time trial through downtown Barcelona. Spain likes a late start time for its sporting events, but this one cut it close. The first team set off at almost 7 p.m. local time; with 22 teams and four-minute offsets, the last riders didn’t get onto the road until 8:19 p.m.
You know what happens at 8:19 p.m., even in the summer? It starts to get dark. All the more so when the weather is overcast and rainy.
The early starters were in decent shape, but the last teams on the road had to do the entire course—which, again, took place over wet roads—in almost total darkness. Streetlights and the headlights of the chasing team cars offered little in the way of illumination. And yet off they went, at an average of about 50 km/h, not being able to see shit.
What a silly sport.