I Will Never Be As Happy As Richard Carapaz Looks, and Other Stories

The road racing season starts with the Tour Down Under, Bora-Hansgrohe announces a loaded Tour de France team, and I tell my favorite story from the entire history of cycling.

Photo Credit: Thomas Maheux, ASO

When I started writing this newsletter, I wanted to have different flavors of posts for Tuesday and Friday. Tuesday would have a single focus, in-depth, and one narrative thread from front to back. Friday would be a little more scattershot, a roundup of news of the week, previews of the upcoming weekend’s big races, and stray thoughts about the sport.

What happened over the fall is I turned every post into a monolithic take on a specific subject, because I wanted to impress would-be readers before the paywall went up. At the same time, I devoted Tuesdays to my series on the 41 most interesting riders of the season, which I intended to be a quick and easy rundown of some riders I’d be writing about in the coming year. Instead, it turned into writing 10 mini-columns for each installment of the newsletter, because I have no self-control.

So for today’s newsletter, I’m returning to the original spirit of the Friday post: Short, punchy, hitting on multiple topics.

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Thanks to everyone who’s bumped into and signed up as a free subscriber to this newsletter during the week it’s been featured on Substack Discover. As of Thursday night, there are nearly three times as many free subscribers as there were last Sunday, and I hope that many of you liked what you read enough to become a paying subscriber.

I promise that in addition to publishing overbearing anticapitalist jeremiads, I’ll be doing some actual cycling analysis once the races start up properly. In the meantime, if there’s anything you’d be interested in reading about—especially if you’re new to the sport—leave a comment. If I can get a post out of it, I’ll write aboutit.

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By the time you read this, the Women’s World Tour will already be underway, with the Tour Down Under running from Friday through Sunday. The men’s Tour Down Under starts next Tuesday and runs through the following Sunday.

The first World Tour race on the calendar tends to be pretty sparsely attended; it’s one of the less prestigious World Tour one-week stage races, and the parcours tends to be hilly, but not mountainous, with no individual time trial. It’s also early enough (a solid six weeks before the the first World Tour race in Europe) that there’s no point in getting in shape for it. At the same time, it’s close enough to the start of the meaningful race calendar (some second-division races and the national championships in Colombia and Ecuador come at the end of January and start of February) that it’s a pain in the ass to fly all the way from Spain or Italy to Australia and back.

As a result, the race is dominated by Australians, many of whom are home this time of year for the national championships anyway. Since 2014, every winner except one—men’s and women’s races combined—has either been Australian, ridden for an Australian team, or both.

I expect defending champion Grace Brown of FDJ. Her team is bringing the most star power, including Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig, and given that Brown just won the national time trial championship, she seems to be in good form.

Also exciting: the women are going up Willunga Hill this year. Willunga is one of the better-known climbs traditionally used in the men’s race; Stage 3 of the Women’s Tour Down Under will be a summit finish, if you want to call it that.

Still, we’re a few weeks from most of the big guns coming out of hibernation.

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Speaking of the big dogs: Tour de France lineups aren’t officially due for months, but a few teams are announcing provisional squads early. (Stefan Kung’s going to the Tour? Feels like a lot of mountains to hump over for the Stage 21 time trial—which isn’t even on the Champs-Élysées—when that effort would jeopardize Kung’s shot at an Olympic medal.)

Bora-Hansgrohe has signed four-time grand tour winner (and perpetual Tour de France heartbreak kid) Primož Roglič, in the splashiest and most expensive transfer of the summer. Winning the Tour would complete Roglič’s set of grand tours and vault him into the historical tier below the likes of Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault on the list of all-time greats.

Roglič is running out of chances. If he wins this year’s Tour, he’d be the oldest first-time winner ever, the oldest winner in 102 years, and the second-oldest winner ever full stop. So Bora is putting all of its GC eggs in one basket.

Bora has five riders under contract who have finished in the top five at a grand tour, and four of them are going to the Tour: Roglič, 2022 Giro winner Jai Hindley, Dani Martínez, and Aleksandr Vlasov. And in contrast to Jumbo-Visma’s dual-leader strategies of late, there is no question: Roglič is the whole ballgame. No stage hunting, no sprinter, no nothing.

There’s pushing the boat out, and then there’s this. We have no idea how these riders—many of whom haven’t worked as domestiques in ages—will mesh together, or how that team cohesion will remain if and when Jonas Vingegaard or Tadej Pogačar smash everyone else. Which is not, you know, outside the realm of possibility.

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I know I mentioned the EF Education-EasyPost/EF Education-Cannondale kit reveal video on Tuesday, but I have further thoughts.

The thing about EF being a hipster favorite is that some people think their act is a little too cute, a little too self-aware, a little to impressed with its own cleverness. You know why cycling is great? Because you can have an elite sports team that people find off-puttingly twee. The closest thing mainstream American pro sports has to twee is Mike McDaniel, and we’re at least one more unsuccessful Dolphins playoff run from public opinion fully turning on him.

Anyway, the people who are kind of over EF’s act? I’m not one of them. I’m a total mark.

There’s one clip from the video I can’t get over, and it lasts less than a second because this teaser has more quick cuts than Barry Sanders. The riders are coming around a corner with the sun at their backs, led by the ever-smiling duo of Alison Jackson and Richard Carapaz. (Two great cycling nicknames, by the way: Action Jackson and El Jaguar de Tulcan.)

And after another quick cut, they’re going uphill, and the camera cuts to a close-up of Carapaz, looking like the happiest man in the fucking world.

I can’t stop thinking about that huge grin, that head bob. He looks like his internal monologue is set to “Wait for Love” by St. Luica. I’ve never been this happy. Most people in beer commercials aren’t this happy. Giro d’Italia champion, Olympic gold medalist, just vibing with his buddies on a work outing. I’m jealous.

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After hyping up Slaying the Badger over Christmas, I watched another Greg LeMond documentary, The Last Rider, available on Hulu. While Slaying the Badger focused on the 1986 Tour de France and the rivalry between LeMond and Bernard Hinault, The Last Rider treats LeMond’s career more holistically. The second half of the film includes the hunting accident that derailed his career and almost killed him, as well LeMond grappling with being sexually abused as a child, and finally culminating in his second great Tour de France, 1989.

This was, of course, the race LeMond won despite his body being riddled with shotgun pellets. More than that, he won with a titanic effort in a (to that point) unique final-stage time trial, overhauling a 50-second deficit to Laurent Fignon to win by eight seconds, to this day the smallest margin of victory in Tour de France history.

The interviews from Slaying the Badger come mostly from journalists, and people involved in La Vie Claire. And for the 1989 Tour section of The Last Rider, we hear LeMond himself, his wife, and Cyrille Guimard. Guimard is a legendary figure in cycling; it was he who recruited LeMond to come to Europe, where he, Hinault, and Fignon were all teammates at Renault in the early 1980s. (If Tour de Pharmacy hasn’t poisoned the well on cycling-based historical fiction forever, I’d watch an HBO series about a lightly fictionalized version of that team.)

In 1989, Guimard was the directeur sportif of Fignon’s Super U team. Fignon died of cancer in 2010, so Guimard fills in the gaps from his perspective.

But the reason I’m bringing The Last Rider up now is that it does not narrow the focus of the race to Fignon and LeMond, as is so often the case. Also featured in the documentary: Pedro Delgado, the third-place finisher.

Delgado had won the Tour in 1988, and it was he, not Fignon, who entered the 1989 Tour as heavy favorite. How he contrived to only finish third is my favorite story in all of cycling history. It’s even better than Tom Dumoulin’s emergency shit at the 2017 Giro.

The Last Rider has Delgado go into some detail on this: The first stage of the 1989 Tour was a 7.8 kilometer prologue—a little almost ceremonial time trial—around Luxembourg. Delgado, wearing no. 1 and the yellow jersey, started last. He got to the warmup area, got ready, but half an hour before his start time, the crowd was starting to close in on him, so he went to stretch his legs. He ran into another top rider, Thierry Marie, and started up a conversation. Marie filled him in on what the course was riding like, and the two parted ways.

Then Delgado got lost.

He lost track of time wandering around the city just outside his team’s stage area. When it was his turn to start his time trial, the stopwatch started, and he was not there. By the time someone found Delgado and brought him back to the start ramp, two minutes and 40 seconds had elapsed. Even after screaming through the prologue, Delgado finished the stage dead last by a huge margin. The second-to-last-place rider, LeMond’s teammate Philippe van Vooren, was closer to the yellow jersey than Delgado was to van Vooren.

In The Last Rider, this anecdote is played mostly so Delgado can repeat a conversation he had with Fignon afterward, in which Fignon said that if he were in Delgado’s position, he would’ve quit. This being cycling, a sport made up mostly of mind games, especially in the 1980s in France, Delgado took this interaction to mean that Fignon would not deal well with adversity.

Me? I just cannot imagine up and losing a rider at the start of the Tour de France, especially the best rider in the peloton. And the story gets even wilder from there. (For much more detail, see Three Weeks, Eight Seconds: Greg Lemond, Laurent Fignon, and the Epic Tour de France of 1989, Nige Tassell’s book on the race.)

Delgado was so freaked out by his mishap in the prologue that he didn’t sleep the first night of the Tour. The second day of the race featured two stages: a short, flat stage, then a team time trial. And an exhausted and rattled Delgado absolutely tanked the team time trial; his Reynolds team, featuring a young Miguel Indurain, among others, had to stop and wait for him to catch up. By the end of the day, he was six and a half minutes down on LeMond and a further 51 seconds behind Fignon; the yellow jersey was nearly 10 minutes ahead of him.

But Delgado didn’t quit. He started getting into breakaways, taking chunks out of Fignon. He finished second behind LeMond in the Stage 5 individual time trial that announced the American’s return to elite status. And by the time the race arrived in Paris for the final stage, Delgado was back in third place, just 2:28 behind Fignon.

What that means is that if you subtract the two-minute, 40-second head start he gave everyone by showing up late to the prologue, Delgado would have been in the yellow jersey heading into the final stage instead of Fignon. As it was, Delgado kind of dogged the final time trial; he knew he was so far behind LeMond he had no shot of moving up, and his third place position was even more secure.

But if he’d shown up on time to the first stage and raced the final stage flat-out, Delgado probably would’ve won the Tour. Even including his Day 2 collapse that ended with him the best part of 10 minutes out of the lead, Delgado took less time than anyone else to actually complete the first 21 stages of the race.

It’s an incredible counterfactual that got overshadowed by LeMond’s even more incredible real-life achievement. But of all the things pro athletes need to remember, actually showing up for the event on time is something you’d think we’d be able to take for granted.