Oh, I Don't Know, I Don't Know, Oh, Where to Begin. We Are North Americans.
And for those of you who still think we are from England, we're not. No.
As a rule, I find relentlessly upbeat, energetic people to be exhausting. I know you’re like a shark, where if you stop moving or talking or dancing or whatever, you think you’re going to die. And while I sympathize, I just want to be left alone. Don’t make me participate in a bit. Please.
Why is Alison Jackson an exception? I think it’s because her act really does seem genuine. The world of sports is full to overflowing with phonies and poseurs, but—and I mean this with the utmost respect—I can’t imagine anyone acting the way Jackson does out of affectation.
But also, she seems to understand something too many athletes take for granted: Winning rocks. It’s great, man. Just the best. And it never gets old.
A lot of riders, having just won a bunch sprint in a grand tour stage, will coast over to wherever their DS or soigneur is standing, and exchange hugs and fist bumps and handshakes with teammates and those competitors who swing by to offer congratulations. They’re happy, but you’ve got to act like you’ve been there before.
That’s not enough for Jackson. She unclipped her pedals before she screeched to a stop against the guardrail so as to make for an easier dismount. Once on her feet, she practically wrenched Kristen Faulkner’s head off her shoulders, then she bounced over to Kim Cadzow, who—in an attempt to match Jackson’s energy—was already skipping up and down like a kid who’d just been offered funnel cake.
After three hours in the saddle, Jackson found the juice in her legs not only to finish the last 500 meters of the race at full tilt, but to jump and skip and dance and leap—yes, after one circuit of hugging her teammates, she leaped into Faulkner’s arms. And fuck it, let’s wrap up a passing Brodie Chapman1 too, even though she’s on a different team. When the Action Jackson Express comes in, everybody gets a hug.
This sprint finish in Moncofar represented Jackson’s third career World Tour win, and she knows how to pick them: She’s got a grand tour stage, as well as Paris Fucking Roubaix. That’s how this hyperactive Canadian, who was 34 years old before she was anything like a household name, ended up getting co-top billing alongside Richard Carapaz as the face of cycling’s most fashionable team.
On Friday, I predicted that Stage 1 of the Vuelta Femenina, the dreaded team time trial, would give Gaia Realini—my pick for a mild upset GC win—a leg up on her competitors, if the diminutive Italian could hang on to the tail of her team’s powerful train. Not only did Realini hang on, she crossed the line first to go into the red jersey, but in unsatisfying fashion.
Lanterne Rouge did a proper recap of the final-corner crash that almost took out Realini, but Lidl-Trek’s bikehandling snafu cost the team probably 10 seconds or more, which is a lot in a stage where the top three teams were separated by one second and the top eight by 12 seconds.
With Stage 2 coming down to a sprint and 10 bonus seconds on the line, it was unlikely that Realini could hold the red jersey wire-to-wire. No fewer than 32 riders were within nine seconds of the red jersey, and 46 were within 20 seconds at the start of the day. All signs pointed to Marianne Vos navigating the stage’s lone category 3 climb and winning at the line to take the race lead.
Only the peloton—already reduced by splits on the climb, suffered two crashes on either side of a traffic circle in the span of about 500 meters, within three kilometers from the finish. Jackson, who’d managed to skate through the carnage near the head of the field, only hooked back up with Faulkner in the final kilometer.
And with 500 meters to go, at the head of a group of maybe a couple dozen survivors, Faulkner pegged it. The final bunch stretched out like a globule of silly putty, with Jackson tucked into her American teammate’s wheel.
Faulkner’s leadout—improvised at the last second, and coming after she’d had to fight to move up after the crash had split the bunch up—was almost halfway between a pacing stint and a proper leadout. It set Jackson up for her sprint, but it also kept the other riders from being able to get into position to launch their own attack. Jackson had to launch early, 200 meters from the line, and when Blanka Vas and Karlijn Swinkels pulled alongside I thought for sure she’d gone too early and was about to get swamped.
But this is what Jackson does. She’s not a climber, or the fastest rider in the peloton, but just like at Paris-Roubaix last year, she can hang onto a sprint and just drag herself over the line in messy, chaotic conditions.
It was a monster ride by both Faulkner and Jackson, a mad, desperate dash for paydirt that required both riders to go up to the redline and beyond, then stay there for just a little longer in order to secure victory.
You’d have to be made of stone not to start hugging strangers and doing the funky chicken. Everyone in Spain, short of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, at least got a high-five.
When Jackson wins, the whole mood of the peloton changes. The cagey, passive-aggressive atmosphere lifts, and all of a sudden the ASO photo wire looks like the end-of-season slideshow from a high school marching band.
Act like you’ve been there before? Jackson’s been there before. That’s how she knows how good it feels to win, and how to throw an appropriate celebration.