The Floating City
It's a little water. What's the worst that can happen?
One week into the Giro d’Italia, the GC battle hasn’t yet begun. It’s not for lack of opportunity. There’s only been one actual flat stage, to go with four hilly stages and a time trial.
But the gaps have yet to appear. Stages 1 and 5 came together before the finale; Mads Pedersen won both in sprints. Primož Roglič put time into his GC rivals in Stage 2’s time trial, but not much. UAE’s quartet of Jay Vine, Brandon McNulty, Juan Ayuso, and Isaac Del Toro all stayed within 18 seconds of Roglič. Dani Martínez and Thymen Arensman: 21 seconds back. The Yates twins: 33 and 36 seconds back, with Richard Carapaz at 38 seconds. If we’re putting Egan Bernal in the GC conversation, he time trialed in just 48 seconds behind Roglič.
These aren’t big gaps, even to a rider who’s traditionally won grand tours by taking every last second there is to be won on short hills and bonification.
Vine, Arensman, and Martínez have all let the reins go a little this week, consolidating team leadership elsewhere, and possibly opening up opportunities to get in the breakaway in Week 2. But UAE has three riders with 18 seconds of Roglič and another within 35. Carapaz, Tom Pidcock, and Bernal, are all within 50 seconds of the Slovenian legend. The race hasn’t started yet.
You know how I know? Pedersen is still in pink. He’s won three stages already, taking 30 bonus seconds, and in the ITT he stayed within 12 seconds of stage winner Josh Tarling. In other words, he’s had the exact race Wout van Aert wanted before van Aert showed up at the start line suffering from the epizootic.
If van Aert doesn’t recover fully soon, I could see Visma-Lease a Bike pulling the plug and sending him home. The points classification is all but gone. Pedersen leads with 141 points to Olav Kooij’s 55; van Aert, who hasn’t scored since Stage 1, seems to have conceded Visma-LAB’s challenge for the maglia ciclamino to Kooij.
But, this being van Aert’s first Giro, he hasn’t won a stage here. Doing so would allow him to complete the Trilogy: At least one stage win at every grand tour.1 That’s worth sticking around for if van Aert is even close to 100% by the end of the race; the timing of the Giro means van Aert can’t race it frequently as he builds his calendar around the classics and the Tour de France.
But it’s an achievement a rider like van Aert really ought to seek to complete. If you look at other hybrid sprinter/classics riders who care about the grand tours,2 you’ll see some familiar names: Pedersen, Peter Sagan, Michael Matthews, Philippe Gilbert. You’d expect him to be able to do it too.
But on Thursday, you didn’t get the sense that van Aert really believes in himself. Instead of waiting to contest the sprint, he launched an attack from just inside the final kilometer of the race, and was duly caught before the finish. I’m glad he wants it bad enough to try shit, but the brutal season continues for van Aert.
I had a friend in town last week, and since he’s an engineer and we’re both military history buffs, I took him to see the USS New Jersey in Camden, uh, New Jersey, across the Delaware River from Philadelphia. I grew up 15 miles from where the ship is moored; my high school’s marching band played the annual Pearl Harbor memorial service held on the dock. I always took great pleasure in telling the rest of the band that the New Jersey’s main batteries could hit our school from there.
An unguided tour costs $30, and is worth every penny. My friend and I spent four hours on board, exploring the engine room and gun turrets, viewing the priceless silver place settings in the captain’s cabin, and pretending to fire the deck-mounted machine guns, which are not only on moveable mounts, they’re wired make a noise when you pull the trigger.3
But as we poked around below decks, bumping our noggins on bulkheads, reading about the life and times of Admiral Halsey, exploring the ship’s library’s extensive collection of military-themed literature,4 we were struck by how much normal stuff you have to have on a battleship.
I’ve watched enough documentaries about life at sea to have heard the phase that a capital warship is “a floating city.” A crew of 2,000 needs to eat and sleep, and anyone can go online and see the cramped berths and impressive mess facilities required to keep the crew in fighting shape.
What I did not appreciate was the need to do other stuff besides eat and sleep. It had been several years since I’d visited the New Jersey, in which time the ship had undergone at least one major renovation and refurbishment. This time, we saw the vast machine shops and wood shops (of course, you’d need to replace equipment and support repair efforts while underway during wartime), and the massive medical facilities required to support hundreds and hundreds of young American men of immense physical courage and varied intelligence. Two dental offices, a sickbay with an honest-to-God surgical suite, and my favorite part of the tour: A separate medical office devoted entirely to the treatment of sexually transmitted infections. Which is not what they called it in 1943.
A library, a chapel, two captains’ quarters, one of which served as a de facto diplomatic reception facility. A print shop, a post office, multiple convenience stores, and a full TV studio with an editing bay next door.
This is a ship designed to steam around the world at 33 knots and lob one-ton high-explosive shells, accurately, at targets 20-plus miles away. It’s a simple enough job. Servicing the guns, and the engines required to move them from here to there, was so labor-intensive a task it required not just the facilities found on any large ship, but the facilities found in any large government office building as well.
I mention all this because cycling people get very hoity-toity about the world being our arena. Don’t need to build a stadium, we’ve got the open road.5
This is a fiction. Generally, TV crews do a good job of maintaining it. We see the riders, and occasionally the team support cars and TV motorbikes when they get mixed up in the action. But it’s so much more than that. It’s not just a handful of team cars, it’s dozens of team cars in a rice as big as the Giro d’Italia. Plus the race director’s car, medical cars, neutral service cars and motorcycles. Team buses and equipment trucks run parallel to the action, and in a stage race TV sets and grandstands and ceremonial platforms get built up and broken down in a day.
There’s also the ambulances. And before Kaden Groves won the sprint into Naples, Stage 6 of the Giro had to be neutralized after wet conditions brought down a number of riders. The crash itself wasn’t anything spectacular, unless you needed a reminder of the spectacular precision with which a pro cycling peloton has to ride.
Even as someone who likes NASCAR but likes Formula 1 more, I think the greater driving challenge is not, actually, the precise navigation of a dozen or more left-and-right corners of varying degree and camber and entry speed. The greater driving challenge is doing more than 200 mph into Turn 1 at Talladega while keeping your two-ton stock car steady eight inches from the bumper of the car ahead of you. Chicken out, hit the brakes, spin the wheel—hell, even lift off the throttle at the wrong time—and you get a crash so spectacular they gave it one of the coolest nicknames in sports: The Big One.
This crash wasn’t some nipple-hardening 80 mph descent of an Alpine highway; one guy at the front of the field tapped his brakes on a wet road, and no one behind him had anywhere to go.
Enough riders hit the pavement that the commissaires threw a full-course caution flag. The ambulance services available to the race had been saturated by crashed riders, and continued racing would risk another crash, and potentially serious injury to riders who would not have adequate medical services at hand.
“Running out of ambulances? In Italy? What the hell are you guys even doing out there?” Lieutenant Frederic Henry of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms surely would’ve thought if he were watching this race. If he weren’t too horny to function.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen a race neutralized because the ambulances had been swamped. I believe that was the case during the infamous Tour of the Basque Country crash last year. But this is not just a couple hundred guys on bikes, plus the odd cameraman. This is a moving city, like a battleship, one whose continued operation is predicated on the concept of “enough ambulances.”
Fortunately, the casualty list does not seem to be as extensive as it could have been. Only three riders DNF’d the stage, most notably Jai Hindley, the 2020 runner up and 2022 Giro GC winner who was expected to be Roglič’s right-hand man in the mountains. Given the number of torn uniforms in the peloton by the time the stage resumed, I have to imagine that there will be more withdrawals overnight.
Still it could’ve been worse. Hindley will be a major loss with the first summit finish approaching, but the peloton—the battleship, the floating city—goes on.
111 male riders have already achieved this feat
In terms of stage wins and the points classifications
A docent told us this when we stepped on board, and I made an excited face that was frankly unworthy of my age.
They staged the exhibit to make it look like the executive officer was reading Catch-22 and The Caine Mutiny, which, man, that is not what I’d want my officers reading on deployment in the Pacific.
Hit it, Goofy!