The Wishbone
Oh yeah, this is offseason as hell
The big news in the world of cycling this week came from the Singapore Criterium, a “race” held in…uh, Singapore in the format of…a criterium. So I guess there’s no mystery where they got the name.
Anyway, Mark Cavendish, his record-breaking 35th Tour de France win safely in hand, wrapped up his career by winning an exhibition race organized by ASO, the company that runs the Tour de France. These races are pretty common in Asia, and the outcome is predetermined. The value add for the spectators and local organizers is less about watching competition but seeing big stars wearing the iconic Tour de France special jerseys. And apparently there’s enough of an appetite to fund handsome appearance fees that entice the likes of Cavendish, Arnaud de Lie and Jasper Philipsen to fly halfway across the world1 to putter around a closed course for a while.
I don’t really get it. I mean, I’ve gone to exhibition soccer matches between MLS teams and the likes of Manchester United and Real Madrid, mostly just to be able to say I saw these big European teams play. But even though the game itself is meaningless, and the stars only play half the game—if they dress at all—a friendly is at least a competition where everyone tries. There’s just not a tradition of fixed exhibition matches in any other sport.
On to today’s topic, which is about finding commonality between cycling and other sports. The audience I have in mind for this newsletter is American dilettantes. (Though I’m grateful to those of you who follow and read despite either 1) being more serious about cycling or 2) living in a land where Cheez Whiz violates local food safety regulations.)
So a frequent thread is “cycling is like…” in an attempt to make this unusual sport legible to people who grew up watching football or basketball. My most common comparison is to baseball, mostly because that’s where I make my living, but also because baseball and cycling are both pastoral, low-pressure, slow-burn spectator sports. Watching cycling or baseball is not about constant activity and stimulation, it’s about sitting outside with friends, enjoying the sunshine and perhaps sipping a beverage, and then oh my god it’s the end of the world all at once.
Having belabored that point over the past 12 months, I’m going to turn the mirror around. Cycling is like baseball. But what, in the wider world of sports, is like cycling?
What makes something cycling? Unrelenting effort. Equally unrelenting vigilance so as to avoid either defeat or a race- or season- or career-ending crash. Suffering, to the limits of endurance. So if you like cycling, you’ll also like these things from other sports.
Talladega
The NASCAR cup playoff final or whatever the hell it’s called2 was on Sunday, and my man Martin Truex Jr.34 was on pole for the championship race at Phoenix Raceway. Truex is a specialist in short, low-speed oval racing. Concrete surface, relatively little banking, a mile or less in circumference as opposed to the 2.5 mile ovals and tri-ovals like Daytona and Indianapolis, where you can push 200 miles an hour in a stock car and 230 in an open-wheel car.
Short-track racing is tense and precise, and passing is difficult. But on the superspeedways, positioning is key. Aerodynamics are paramount. But at the same time, if you just don’t have the power you might as well not show up. And all strategic and technical considerations are secondary to what happens when there’s a crash. A NASCAR superspeedway crash can take out a third of the field at once, just because everyone’s too close together to get out of the way when someone blows a tire or taps a wall. They call it “The Big One.”5
Any of that sound familiar?
You might not find a lot of similarities at first between cycling and stock car racing, but what unites us is greater than what divides us.
The 5-on-3 Penalty Kill
Ice hockey is by no means unique in that rules infractions are punished by taking a player off the playing surface. But the power play is a bigger part of hockey than red cards are in soccer and rugby. Playing a man down is routine; it happens several times a game, and the penalty kill structure gets drilled repeatedly in practice.
A 5-on-4 penalty kill forces the shorthanded team to play defensively and usually to concede the puck. But you can still put pressure on the offense and pass with purpose and occasionally turn defense into offense.6 But down two men, there’s little to do than to set up in a triangle and try to keep your opponents from getting the puck in on the net.
I’m not gonna ask you to watch that entire 27-minute compilation; the first segment tells the whole story. The offense can dictate play, and the forwards on the far side can relax and rest when the puck isn’t coming their way. The three defenders, however, have to react to everything, knowing that a half-second delay caused by confusion or fatigue can lead to a juicy scoring chance.
Also, this goes on until you get the puck back and clear the zone. And if you’re in a 5-on-3 shell, you’re never getting the puck back. A normal NHL shift is about 40 seconds. Penalty killers in a 5-on-3 situation will often go more than twice that long without a respite. Tired? Too bad. Drop or break your stick? Too bad. Take a puck or an elbow to an un-padded spot and get the wind knocked out of you? Too bad.
You’ve just got to keep your legs moving and your eyes on the guy in front of you, or you’ll lose. Just like climbing Alpe d’Huez.
The Triple Option
When it comes to football, I’m a caveman. Spare me your fancy jargon and flashy passing game. You have four chances to gain 10 yards. Run the ball. Get three yards a carry. Move the chains. Rinse, repeat, never punt, never ever pass.
The ideal way to gain three yards a carry is to recruit the fastest running back in America and put him behind five dudes (six if you have a tight end, seven if you run two tight ends and/or a fullback) who, when they’re in the squat rack, don’t move the bar up—they actually push the gym down.
The service academies—West Point, the Air Force Academy, and the Naval Academy—somewhat inexplicably play the highest level of college football. They can’t recruit those guys, because every service academy athlete is going pro in something other than sports. Your average SEC offensive tackle is too tall to serve on a submarine and has thighs too thick to fit in an airplane cockpit. Besides, if you were good enough at football to earn fame and fortune at Alabama or Ohio State, why would you subject yourself to four years of demanding classwork and dehumanizing indoctrination at a service academy?
You wouldn’t.
Which means Army has to go out there and compete against big state schools with even bigger football players, with a lineup of mechanical engineers and future Republican legislators. But all three service academies have figured out a way to hang.
It’s called the triple option, or the wishbone, or the flexbone. A normal running play goes like this: The offense decides where the ball’s going, and the line moves defenders around until it can go there.
In a triple option offense, the ballcarrier has choices. He looks where the defenders are, and then goes the other way. So when the quarterback takes the snap he has the option to either hand the ball to the fullback or take the ball and run, depending on where the defenders are. Then, once the quarterback gets outside, he can either keep the ball or pitch it to a halfback a few yards away—again, depending on where the defenders are.
The idea is that even if the defense knows, broadly, what’s coming, it’s hard to line up in such a way that you can stop all three branches of the play. So if everyone does their job, you get three or four yards a carry every time and you reach the end zone before you have to punt. It’s very slow-moving, and very heavily choreographed. There’s no room for improvisation. And you never pass, because you offensive line wouldn’t hold up to the pressure, and your receivers are too slow to get open anyway.
It’s not sexy, or even innovative—this is the Remember the Titans offense, which was considered ancient and conservative even at the time the movie was set— but it’s oddly mesmerizing to watch when it works.
And it works. Army is currently 9-0, and beat North Texas on Saturday despite throwing the ball just four times (one of those pass attempts was an interception).
As a way of making forward progress, the triple option looks outmoded. It’s not for everyone. It requires a long, grinding effort and great stamina, and if even one piece of the puzzle is missing it doesn’t work. And as miserable as it is to run, it’s even more miserable to play against, as defenders get progressively more confused as to how they’re holding these normal-sized guys to three yards a carry and they’re still losing. It’ll make you crazy if you let it.
Just like cycling.
Though I have always wanted to visit Singapore. Ever since I found out about the open-air food markets I’ve been able to think of little else
I don’t understand why NASCAR distributes points the way it does. Why can’t you just have one race a weekend and at the end of it whoever finishes the best wins? Why do we need artificial cautions and a playoff bracket? I guess I don’t watch much NASCAR anyway, so my opinion doesn’t mean much.
I used to love stock car racing when I was little but my interest has waned over time. I heard Joey Logano referred to as “the old man” during the race and I immediately texted the biggest Dale Earnhardt fan in my life: “Isn’t ‘The Old Man’ Mark Martin? Isn’t Joey Logano a fetus?” (Logano just wrapped up his 17th season and third championship; Martin turns 66 in January and hasn’t raced in more than a decade.)
Oh right, Martin Truex Jr.: He’s from South Jersey so I automatically root for him.
Note to self: Remember to start using “The Big One” in reference to big pileups next season
I *loved* killing penalties when I played hockey. I was a terrible skater and puckhandler, so creating offense was a bit of a weakness in my game. But I was big and willing to block shots and clog passing lanes, so this was my calling. Born to be a traffic bollard, forced to skate.