Crash Into Me, Baby
Grace Brown can't retire now, plus glory for Pidders and tragedy for Plappy
It rained in Paris on Saturday. Team USA sent four riders out for the individual time trial at the Olympics—two men and two women—and three of them crashed. One of them, converted triathlete Taylor Knibb, crashed not once but thrice.
On Thursday evening, in my preview post, I wrote the following:
[Magnus] Sheffield has already run [Remco] Evenepoel close at one time trial this year, at the Volta ao Algarve, and I think he’s due for a breakthrough win against the clock if he can just. Stop. Crashing.
Friends, he could not just stop crashing. And it wasn’t just the Americans. Lotte Kopecky dumped it. Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig dumped it. Filippo Ganna almost dumped it on a straightaway, saving himself from coming to grief only through a reflexive spasm that somehow straightened out his wobbling bike in the nick of time.
As you might expect, I want to talk about Chloe Dygert dumping it.
The two-time world time trial champion went off the ramp last but tagged the first time check five seconds down on her chief rival, Australian veteran Grace Brown, winner of Liège–Bastogne–Liège and the runner-up to Dygert at worlds last summer. It was on a 90-degree left-hand corner that was completely drenched, with two sections of asphalt separated by maybe 10 or 15 feet of what looked like a brick crosswalk.
And as a quick aside, I saw some people calling the surface Dygert slipped on “cobblestones,” because cycling equals cobblestones and Paris equals Champs-Élysées equals cobblestones. But this was brick. Cobblestones are uneven and rounded and textured. Bricks, laid together to create a road surface, are flat. And they don’t drain water as well as asphalt.
When I was learning to drive in the snow, my dad told me the key to not crashing was to avoid making big inputs. Don’t move the steering wheel quickly, don’t mash the gas or brake—avoid touching the pedals as much as possible, in fact. And on a slick brick surface that might as well have been snow and ice, Dygert didn’t do any of that.
In fact, as she approached the corner I remember throwing my hands up in frustration that she wasn’t being more aggressive. Dygert can be an iffy bikehandler, and the last time she raced a championship time trial in these conditions she overcooked a corner and almost ended her career. But even with grandma’s approach to this left-hander, Dygert got on the power while leaning into the turn. It wasn’t by much. It wasn’t jabby, it wasn’t aggressive—I’m not sure she moved her pedals more than about a third of a turn.
But it was enough to upset her back tire and send her to the ground.
Now, at this point Brown was having the time trial of her life. Being a few seconds ahead at the first check and clearly looking better in the wet conditions I’m not sure Brown was catchable. I am, at best, skeptical that this crash cost Dygert gold.
But it absolutely cost her silver. Ultimately, Dygert finished 0.87 seconds behind second-place Anna Henderson. Dygert was probably falling and sliding for longer than that, let alone the time she lost getting back up, and the further time she lost regaining the momentum she would’ve gone around that corner with, and whatever intangible damage she suffered from being shaken up in the crash. And I worried, as Dygert rounded the final corner, that even bronze would end up out of reach.
There was an enormous gap from Brown and Dygert1 to the rest of the field. Ellen van Dijk, still recovering from injury, wasn’t competitive. And the rest of the field was made up not of out-and-out time trial specialists, but of GC-type riders who aren’t particularly weak against the clock. And none of those raised their game. There were 91 seconds from Brown to Henderson, but only 25 seconds from Henderson to Kopecky in sixth place. In fact, if you took the margin from Brown to Henderson and put it behind Henderson, you could’ve fit 12 of the remaining 33 finishers.
The big surprise of the day: Kim Cadzow, of New Zealand and EF Education-Cannondale, who finished seventh and was briefly in the hot seat. Cadzow, 22, is a climber primarily, and while she’d had a couple top-10 time trial results in her career—including third in a mountain time trial at the Tour de Suisse—I had no idea she had this performance in her: Over a 32 kilometer flat time trial, she beat Elisa Longo Borghini and lost just 15 seconds to Demi Vollering. And she did it with a wicked reverse split—Cadzow was 13th at the first time check, but she was fourth between the first and second time checks and between the second time check and the finish. From T1 to the finish she was faster than Vollering and from T2 to the finish she was faster than Henderson. Anyway, keep that in mind the next time she lines up for a stage race.
In any event, this race was Brown’s to win all the way through, and she absolutely dominated. Apparently, she’s decided that the season in which she’s taken the two biggest wins of her career is a great time to retire. Brown’s impending retirement reminds me of when The West Wing2 introduced Matt Santos by having him pull off some astounding feat of legislative brinksmanship3 as he’s preparing to announce he’s not going to run to keep his seat in the House, and Josh says, “You can’t walk away, you’re too good at this.”
A propos of the Olympics, and before I throw up the paywall for the second half, I want to shout out my old colleague Rodger Sherman, who ran an excerpt from here in his Olympic cycling preview. Rodger’s writing about the Olympics every day, and is even more of a sicko for esoteric sports than I am, so if that’s your bag you should subscribe to his newsletter.
