Are Sports Better When They're Worse?
"We want to go for the win, but at the same time, we also need passion."
I’d like to start this post off with an apology. Last Friday, I offered my thoughts on the first five episodes of season two of Tour de France: Unchained. And I got so deep into contemplating the sources of Ben O’Connor’s tetchiness1 that I forgot to include my most important takeaway.
In the second episode, just before the title card announcing Stage 5, the producers included a lovely helicopter shot of a bird of prey soaring over the countryside. A huge, brown bird of prey with swooping wings, presumably an eagle of some kind. I went to Wikipedia in hopes of discerning which species, but it turns out they’ve got a lot of different bird species in France, including dozens of species of raptor, most of which have brown feathers.
The species is unimportant, because the symbolism is clear: The scenery is majestic, like an eagle. And the cyclists who are about to set out across that scenery are graceful, like an eagle. And powerful, like an eagle. And dangerous, also like an eagle. And as the camera pans across the valley, just before it cuts, the bird takes an enormous midair shit. Two clear clumps of white fall away, clear as day. I’ve included a screencap for reference.
I’m sorry for omitting this crucial bit of analysis from the original post. Also, if the producers left the eagle poop in the shot intentionally, well, chapeau, because it really tied the scene together. I’d like to buy those producers a beer.
And speaking of beer. The final two episodes of Unchained were devoted to a spat between Groupama-FDJ sporting director Marc Madiot and Jumbo-Visma2 general manager Richard Plugge. Longtime readers will remember Plugge from his part in floating a super league trial balloon this past offseason.
On Stage 16, Jonas Vingegaard basically put the race to bed by winning the individual time trial stage. He put a minute and 48 seconds into Tadej Pogačar, who had himself beaten third-place Wout van Aert by more than a minute.
I remember the result itself being shocking, but Unchained chased Madiot’s unsubstantiated speculation that Vingegaard had achieved this result by doping, as well as Plugge’s counterpunch: Repeating a rumor that FDJ riders had been drinking beer between stages, a sign of the French team’s unprofessionalism.
The spat itself is kind of petty and uninteresting, and it seems like both Madiot and Plugge quickly concluded that this war of words had been more trouble than it was worth. I did enjoy the camera dwelling on Madiot at every team dinner thereafter, as he always seemed to have a full pint glass of whatever tepid grasswater passes for beer in France.
I have a hard time sympathizing with Madiot generally, because leveling a doping accusation without proof, particularly in a sport that’s as sensitive to the issue as cycling, is a serious party foul in my book. A faux pas, in the vernacular. One frustrated comment and all of a sudden Vingegaard and his team have to deal with the ire of fans who make college football message board sickos look like the audience of This Old House.
Besides, Madiot’s real beef is much more interesting, and entirely sympathetic. Unchained juxtaposed the meticulous planning of Jumbo-Visma against the guts-and-thunder approach of FDJ under Madiot. We got shots of Grischa Niermann going over the time trial parcours with Vingegaard turn by turn as Vingegaard says something like “Grischa knows where every pothole is.” They pinch off excess fabric on Vingegaard’s skinsuit so it can be retailored for minimum wind resistance.
And when all the recurring characters—riders and sporting directors alike—get to give their two cents on whether Vingegaard’s doping, almost as an afterthought AG2R’s Julian Jurdie pops up and says he tracked the line Vingegaard took on the descent in the time trial and was astounded by how fast he was. Doing your homework is the new doping.
Madiot put it in terms of national identity. Jumbo-Visma is3 a Dutch team with a Dutch GM, a German coach, and a Danish GC rider, so their meticulous, scientific way of doing things was “Germanic” to Madiot.4
Here’s what Madiot’s star rider, Thibaut Pinot, had to say on the issue:
I’ve always been old-school, as they say. I ride on instinct. And I think that it’s reasonable to suggest that today that instinct to take risks has gone.
We just watched guys go screaming downhill at 70 miles an hour, and sat through about six replays of Fabio Jakobsen getting his full-body scabs debrided, so I don’t think Pinot meant physical risks. Rather, tactical risks—riding aggressively and taking chances rather than just pedaling to the numbers and winning by attrition.
Pinot tried that on Stage 20, building up a lead on the final mountain stage of his Tour de France career before he was overhauled and overtaken by Vingegaard and Pogačar.5 It was yet another heartbreak for Pinot, who’s been a national hero in a cycling-mad country despite accomplishing relatively little compared to French superstars of days gone by. Or Alaphilippe, for that matter.
Pinot has won a monument and taken stage wins in all three grand tours, but he’s never won a World Tour stage race. And despite having finished third in the Tour and won the white jersey in 2014, he never podiumed a grand tour again, and he retired with more grand tour DNFs than top-10 finishes.
But that persistent heartbreak—the most gut-wrenching, in my opinion, was the torn quadriceps that cut his 2019 Tour short by three days. If he hadn’t gotten hurt, I think he wins that Tour over Egan Bernal—only endeared him to the French fans. Unlike Americans, who demand victory at all costs and in all conditions, they can see the literary arc in Pinot’s career and love him for it. Even Madiot, who said this:
This stage says it all. He was in position to win, but he didn’t. And I think that it’s poetic that he didn’t win. It fits with everything else. Victory is important, yes. We want to go for the win, but at the same time, we also need passion.
And I agree, 100%. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I find perennial also-rans far more interesting than perennial champions. For those of you who don’t remember every word I’ve published in this newsletter, my favorite riders are the ones who always seem to come up short. You can read what I’ve written about Neilson Powless, Kasia Niewiadoma, or van Aert (much as it kills me to add him to this list it’s probably appropriate at this point). Or even Tejay van Garderen, who’s got more in common with Pinot, career-wise, than either American or French fans would probably like to admit.
I love that Madiot—who won Paris-Roubaix twice in his own racing career; this man knows a thing or two about what it takes to win the big one—can see that there’s more to life than winning. Obviously Pinot has one of the most interesting literary arcs of any rider of his generation. Obviously he’s earned every bit of the fanatical devotion the local fans showed him.
But it’s pretty wild that Madiot is talking like that in his capacity as DS. His job is not to create the perfect literary arc, it’s to win races. And in order to do that, for better or worse, you need to think and work the way Niermann and Plugge do.
Guts and passion make for great storytelling, but they won’t win you races on their own anymore.
Madiot knows this. His team has all the technological bells and whistles. They have nutritionists and tacticians and so on. He’s making a normative argument.
We’ve never known more about how to win than we do now. This is true in cycling, baseball, auto racing, football, cricket, golf, chess, swimming, whatever. The best riders and teams can—and do—treat the human body-bicycle complex like an automobile. Calories and oxygen go in, power comes out, the wheels turn, the bike goes up the hill. You can calculate in advance, within certain bounds, how many watts a rider will be able to produce over a given period of time.
It’s not a perfect science; there’s still no defense against a rider getting a cold, or getting diarrhea, or just waking up in the morning and not having it. But the sport is eminently quantifiable now.
Is that boring, or bloodless, or predictable? It can be. I think of how Formula 1 tried to make its running order more competitive by placing limits—both technical and financial—on car development. And for a while, it closed the gap in terms of speed but it led to a very static running order because everyone had converged on similar technical ideas under the very narrow constraints allowed them.
It’s the same in cycling. The gaps might be smaller in terms of time, but it’s harder to gain 30 seconds on an opponent in 2024 than it was to gain five minutes in 1984. The battle is still as hotly contested as ever, it’s just fought with greater precision.
That makes Madiot’s job harder. He has to chase minute advantages—marginal gains, as another cycling exec would’ve put it—that he might’ve ignored during his own racing career. It also makes the job of the fans and media harder. When hockey had its own statistical revolution a decade ago, I remember one stats-heavy writer6 saying that stats don’t make the game harder to understand; they just make it harder to get away with talking bullshit.
As much as I’m a romantic at heart when it comes to sports, I’m an empiricist by training. More than that, I’m a journalist by training, which means I like to have evidence to back up whatever I’m talking about. But I often find myself agreeing with Madiot, wishing for less information and more chaos in sports. I love college baseball because sometimes, the pros are just so good you take it for granted. There’s less room for the unexpected, less room to get weird.7
Does empiricism take away some of the passion for sport? This is the religion vs. science argument, and my view in that case is that understanding how the universe works does not make the universe less beautiful. And when victory and passion are incompatible, everyone can make their own choice. Winning is great, but judging by the crowds who followed Pinot through his final competitive Tour de France stage, it’s not the only way to exhibit passion.
And I might’ve been unfair; he cooled off a lot in the last three episodes.
Now Visma-Lease a Bike
Maybe “was” since it’s a different name now?
As an aside, these guys get away with a level of national and ethnic stereotyping that makes my scalp itch, as an American who covers baseball for a living. I’m only like 90 percent sure that my “Julian Alaphilippe is experiencing Frenchness” jokes are onside, but I guess if Madiot’s just out here saying everyone from Northern Europe is a bloodless robot, the bar is lower.
Also, it might be boring to watch Pogačar win all the time but no GC rider I can remember takes bigger swings or forces the action more, so maybe Pinot’s wrong about both kinds of risk-taking.
I don’t remember who it was, and the tweet’s surely been lost to time
Hockey broadcaster Jeff Marek has advanced a similar preference for major junior hockey over the NHL, though I don’t know how you can watch the Stanley Cup playoffs and think “Nah, this isn’t chaotic enough for my taste”