Sepp Kuss Is Back and He's Hungry for Revenge
Plus more gold for Kristen Faulkner, and the first round of transfers
This is probably going to be a little shorter than the usual newsletter. With the Tour and the Olympic road events just having finished, I can finally take a bit of a breather. Of course, the Donostia San Sebastian Klasikoa is on Saturday, the Tour de France Femmes starts on Monday, and the Vuelta starts the following Friday, so it won’t be much of a breather.
The past six weeks have been great for this newsletter, with paid subscribers increasing by a third since the last week of June, and the total subscriber mark passed 1,000 a week ago. Thanks to everyone who’s clicked or read or shared or reposted, and please keep doing it—like I said, the season is about to kick into high gear again, so if you joined just for the Tour, I hope you’ll stick around for the Vuelta and world championships. I’m in the process of deciding what this newsletter will look like in its second season, and what I decide to do depends in large part on what the appetite for my cycling writing is. Also, if I’m not covering something you want to read about, or if you have questions, let me know. I’m always looking for new ideas.
For the first time since 2019, Sepp Kuss sat out the Tour de France, having contracted COVID in the leadup to the race, but he’s finally back in action. The Durango Kid is not only returning to the Vuelta, where last year he won the first grand tour by an American man in 10 years—and the first by an American man who came of age after U.S. Postal and the Armstrong Era. Where last year, he rode as a domestique and almost backed into the red jersey, this year, he’s going as Visma-Lease a Bike’s presumptive GC leader.
Preparations are going well. Sepp is currently riding (and may have won, by the time you read this) the Vuelta a Burgos, which is a one-week stage race in, um, Burgos, which I guess is somewhere in Spain? My knowledge of Spanish geography is absolutely for shit, though I’m trying to rectify that by playing as Republican Spain in Hearts of Iron IV.1 No pasarán, and so forth.
Vuelta a Burgos has a crowded field—so much so that there are two Ecuadorian riders named Jefferson A. Cepeda in the top 20 on GC—but it’s no surprise that Sepp is beating wholesale ass on an 11 kilometer, 5.5% climb. He also, crucially, held onto the race lead in the following day’s individual time trial. Jay Vine of UAE Team Emirates won the ITT—his first win since the carnage at the Tour of the Basque Country. I believe Vine is the last major rider from that casualty list to return to action, so hopefully we can put that nightmare behind us.
Kuss ended up 15th on the stage, 43 seconds behind Vine, but that was enough to maintain the leader’s jersey. And APPARENTLY he got help from a camera motorbike that gave him less breathing room than it did Max Poole, who finished the stage just five seconds behind Kuss on GC. To which I say: Skill issue. Cry about it. USA! USA! USA!
And speaking of USA! USA! USA! Chloe Dygert and Kristen Faulkner were back at it on the track in the Olympic women’s team pursuit competition where, to nobody’s particular surprise, the Americans took gold, giving Faulkner two in the span of a week and Dygert one of each color medal for her career.
Track cycling can be, in my opinion, a little monotonous but both medal round races were pretty wild. Plus you’ll recognize a few of the names if you follow road racing. In the bronze medal race, the Italian team—led by Elisa Balsamo2—jumped out to a huge lead more than halfway through the race before completely imploding to hand Great Britain the bronze.
For the most part, the gold medal race followed a familiar script. I haven’t watched Dygert on the track much, but I’m pretty sure the same thing has happened every time I’ve seen her race: She comes out of the gate setting a blistering pace, while an announcer with an Aussie or Kiwi accent sounds completely baffled that she’s started so hot. Surely she can’t keep up this pace for the entire four-minute race, then of course she does.
This time, Team USA built a big lead over New Zealand34 in the first two-thirds of the race, but then Dygert got on the front and actually rode Faulkner and Lily Williams off her wheel. That’s problematic because the team pursuit is scored like a team time trial: Four riders start, and the clock stops when the third one crosses the line. So when Dygert separated from Faulkner and Williams, she caused all three of them to slow down and allowed New Zealand to scrub away about a second from Team USA’s lead.
Ultimately, the goodguys held on to win by about six tenths of a second, and now Kristen Faulkner is one of the breakout stars of these Olympics. Lester Holt interviewed her on the NBC Nightly News tonight. What a wild week this must’ve been.