How the Frig Does This Keep Happening

Lorena Wiebes forgets to play to the whistle

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

For the past 30 years or so, my favorite football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, have almost always been good. The architect of most of that success was a coach named Andy Reid, one of the greatest offensive innovators of the 21st century. But despite being a generationally gifted mastermind of the passing game, Reid is averse to employing good wide receivers.¹

On the Eagles’ all-time career receiving yards leaderboard, there are only three wideouts from the past 25 years in the top 20—even though this is the most pass-happy period in football history and the barrier to entry is extremely low.² Jason Avant is in the top 15 all-time in career receiving yards. Jason Avant!

About a decade into Reid’s tenure, the Eagles spent a second-round pick on DeSean Jackson, the explosive and elusive and jaw-droppingly fast receiver from the University of California. It was a massive departure from the norm, and Jackson paid off the investment many times over. He’s third all-time in receiving yards and he’s all over any highlight package from the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Jackson was one of those rare athletes who was fueled by hubris; he was so talented it just never occurred to him to play it safe, which led to great moments of astounding creativity. The greatest highlight of his Eagles career was the walk-off punt return to cap the second Miracle at the Meadowlands, in which he dropped the ball, ran in the wrong direction for a bit, and then scythed through the entire Giants defense to score.³

Unfortunately, the name DeSean Jackson is a metonym for something other than crunch time heroics. Early in his rookie year, Jackson ran straight through the Cowboys defense and onto a Donovan McNabb deep ball. And rather than walk into the end zone to score, he celebrated early, dropping the ball at the one-yard line.

It was an unthinkable mistake, just because it was so unnecessary. Every athlete in the world gets taught from childhood to play through the whistle, because if you let up even a split second too soon all of your effort might be for naught.

Which leads us to Sunday’s Amstel Gold Race Ladies’ Edition.⁴

This race came down to a pretty sizeable sprint, with a little over 20 riders making it to the finish together. And they had to drill it all the way, since there was another group of 15 or 20 riders visible in the distance on the final straightaway. SD Worx had the upper hand, bringing Lorena Wiebes to the finish; in order to make Wiebes’ job as easy as possible, no less a leadout rider than Demi Vollering had her nose in the wind and set the pace in the final kilometer.

It wasn’t exactly a layup; Wiebes had to contend with Marianne Vos, and got steered over to the barriers by Elisa Longo Borghini’s early sprint. But SD Worx put the fastest sprinter in the peloton in a position where she’d be expected to win, absent a crash or an equipment malfunction in the final 100 meters. The juicy part of the video starts around 5 minutes in.

Oh, mon dieu.

It was an extremely close finish; Vos made the actual pass on her bike throw, which took place within the area where “FINISH” was painted on the road. A little over 100 kilometers of racing, decided within what looks like the final meter. Pretty thrilling stuff.

So I’ll water down my take a little bit by saying this: I don’t think Wiebes had any idea Vos was there until the race was over. When she really hit the afterburners, she was right up against the fencing on the left-hand side of the road, and her competition was Longo Borghini and Pfeiffer Georgi of DSM, both of whom were to Wiebes’ right. And you can see, after Wiebes drifts right to close off Longo Borghini, she checks over her right shoulder before slowing down to celebrate.

Vos had been way back in that group of about two dozen riders the entire final kilometer. Even when Visma-Lease a Bike was on the front setting a tempo, Vos was just hanging around nowhere near her leadout riders’ wheel. Instead, she was glued to the back of Wiebes for the last 500 kilometers, and again, I didn’t see Wiebes look back once after Vos got there. Not that you would; taking your eyes off the road in this situation is a very good way to spend the night in the hospital and the next three months on the couch. Surely Wiebes could hear the telltale sounds of someone right on her back bumper, but unless she’s intimately familiar with the sounds of Marianne Vos’ breathing, she had no way of knowing that someone was worth worrying about.

Indeed, Wiebes said after the race that she thought Longo Borghini was the only rider she had to worry about, and that she didn’t know Vos was coming on the other side.

From when Wiebes let off her handlebars to when she crossed the line, I counted four pedal strokes. Out of—let’s call it a cadence of 100 rpm over two and a half hours, just to make the math easy—15,000 pedal strokes on the day. If Wiebes had just kept the hammer down for another second, she would’ve won.

“I felt really stupid,” she said. “I think it’s a mistake you only make once in your cycling career.”

Full credit to Wiebes for standing up and taking it on the chin in her postrace interview. Not that you can make many excuses in a situation like this. Wiebes is only 25, and probably has another five years of top-end sprinting ahead of her, maybe more. She’s won 77 professional races, and I’d be shocked if she doesn’t make it well over 100 by the time she’s done.

And I absolutely believe her when she says this is a mistake she’s only going to make once in her career. Nobody knows the comprehensive embarrassment of DeSean Jacksoning a win away at the line until they feel it firsthand.

With that said: She’s got TV.

Because a premature celebration decided a monument not too long ago, when Julian Alaphilippe was at his Julian Alaphilippiest, and he decided to post up while Primož Roglič was still close enough to catch him.⁵

That was a fairly famous incident. Feels like that should’ve put everyone in the peloton—men’s and women’s alike—off dropping the football at the one-yard line for at least 10 years. But no.

Just two months ago Tobias Halland Johannessen mountain goated his way up the final pitch of Classic Var, saw no one else around him, pumped his fist, and got beaten to the line by Lenny Martinez.

Eh, that’s probably forgivable. That was a twisty uphill finish, maybe Johannessen just missed Martinez among the awkward sight lines. Also, Lenny is a little tiny guy—he’s easy to miss.

But what about Wout van Aert, who lost a sprint in the 2022 Dauphiné to David Gaudu when he pulled the chut too early?

You have any idea how bad Wout van Aert has to fuck up to lose a sprint to a puny little climber like Gaudu? Van Aert got all the way into his eagle celebration⁶ and lost it in time to see Gaudu slip past him before the line. I love this one because you get van Aert going full surrender cobra in the finish photo. “I’m actually really ashamed to lose it like this,” van Aert said after the race. And he should be! This was a colossal fuckup!

One more: Carina Schrempf at last year’s Tour de Romandie. She actually didn’t let up that early, and with the pack closing the gap so fast she wouldn’t have survived much longer anyway.

But the margin on the line was minuscule. And while you’ll notice that Schrempf is wearing the Austrian national road race champ’s jersey in this video, that national championship is her only professional win. Schrempf let off the gas a split second too soon and it might’ve cost her the only World Tour win of her career.

I don’t know how you live that down. I don’t know how you watch someone⁷ try to live that down and not be scarred by the experience. How does it happen?

Well, Schrempf is an exception here; Alaphilippe, van Aert and especially Wiebes win races routinely. Maybe Alaphilippe biffing the finish at Liège–Bastogne–Liège is too big a mistake for him to just hand-wave away, but van Aert has won the equivalent of a Dauphiné stage so many times he can live with giving one away. The same with Wiebes, even in a race as prestigious as Amstel Gold.

That’s what I suspect happened to Jackson with his famous fumble; scoring touchdowns is so routine to him that he can afford to think about the celebration. He doesn’t just want to score, he wants to do it in the coolest way he can manage.

In cycling, there’s another consideration: the finish line photo. Sponsors pay millions of dollars to get their company’s branding across cyclists’ chests specifically for the moment Wiebes was trying to create: Arms raised in victory, “SD WORX-PROTIME” legible across her torso for the entire world to see. So that SD Worx can be associated with victory in the public consciousness. This is why, when a rider unzips their jersey to cool off while on a solo attack, they’ll always button it all the way back up before posing for the photo at the finish line.

When you’re looking for…what the hell does SD Worx even make, again? “Payroll and HR services.” So, an email job that helps companies keep track of their other workers who have email jobs. You ever think about the titanic quantities in which the spark of human consciousness gets wasted on tasks that are in no means necessary for the survival or enrichment of our society? How many Mozarts or van Goghs have we lost because they were processing paperwork so that millionaires can enrich themselves by passing money around in a circle? How many husbands and wives spend their waking lives apart, or parents and children, to feed this insatiable goat-demon of capitalist banality to which we’re all enslaved?

But I digress. When you think of payroll and HR services, consider SD Worx, the company that means victory!

Unfortunately, SD Worx’s logo is now associated with celebrating before the job is finished.

So, like, look over both shoulders, maybe take a second to make sure Lenny Martinez isn’t hiding behind a fire hydrant or something, and only then slow down to get the good photo at the finish line. Otherwise, just pedal for another second. Literally a second, if that. The photographers shoot digital now—they just sit on the shutter and clickclickclick and pick out the best shot later. You’ll end up with the good promo photo even if you wait until a split second after the finish to do the Rocky pose.

I can’t believe this keeps happening. I can’t believe this doesn’t scare the shit out of every professional cyclist. Maybe that’s part of it. Maybe you just don’t become an elite athlete if you’re as anxious and pessimistic as I am.⁸

There’s nothing to be gained by celebrating too early. You’ll look like the biggest tool on two wheels. You’ll end up—at the risk of stating the obvious—losing the race. You’ll have to face a bunch of reporters with microphones and have to talk about your own shame and stupidity in front of the global cycling press. And you’ll have to bump into gifs and images and videos of that humiliating moment for the rest of your career.

Just put in the four extra pedal strokes. Please. You’ve come this far.

1. Chiefs fans who lived through last year’s Super Bowl run with Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and a bunch of receivers who couldn’t catch COVID at an indoor Morgan Wallen concert: Eagles fans feel you. Andy’s been pulling this shit since he saddled the young Donovan McNabb with Torrance Small as a no. 1 wideout.

2. I cherry-picked a little; DeVonta Smith (three years with the team) and A.J. Brown (two years) are no. 21 and no. 24. But that only illustrates how low the bar is.

3. This fan-edited highlight reel of that comeback, cut to sync up with both Merrill Reese’s radio call and the Remember the Titans score, is a holy relic in Eagles circles. This video is basically a father figure for a lot of us.

4. Calling the women’s version of a race “Ladies Edition” feels at once extremely spiffy and also slightly patronizing. To say nothing of how “Amstel Gold Ladies Edition” sounds like a low-calorie beer that goes on special on Thursday nights at a nightclub that caters to swingers and middle-aged divorced people.

5. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered, because Alaphilippe got himself relegated by swerving all over the fuckin place before the line. No one has ever been more Alaphilippey.

6. Shout out Evgeni Kuznetsov

7. Wiebes wasn’t in this race herself, but several of her teammates had a front-row seat to the action.

8. Anxiety and pessimism are blogger traits.