What Does an Ideal Winner Look Like?
Liège-Bastogne-Liège recap; getting bored with Tadej Pogačar; previewing the Vuelta a España Femenina; and I want to move to Mauritius
If you spend as much time as I have thinking and writing and talking about sports, you tend to get up your own ass. I’m talking not just analysis but meta-analysis. Real navel-gazey shit. In this case: What do you root for in a sporting event?
I think in most cases, it’s these three things:
My team to win
A close/entertaining/otherwise interesting or memorable contest
My team’s rival to lose
And not necessarily in that order. For those of you who didn’t already know, I went to the University of South Carolina and am therefore a psychotic Gamecock football diehard. But for almost a decade,1 my team was at best irrelevant and at worst total dogshit. There was no joy to be had for rooting for them. So I’ve said that for a few years in the late 2010s, I was actually a de facto Alabama fan. Do I give a shit about houndstooth or Nick Saban or Forrest Gump? Not really. Would I miss Tuscaloosa if it got raptured off the map with all hands tomorrow? Probably not.
But during that time, Alabama was the one and only thing standing between my two least favorite teams—Clemson and Georgia—and an unbroken string of national championships. The Crimson Tide protected me from so much misery over the years; it would be ungrateful not to give them their due.
I don’t really have that in cycling. There are riders I like more and less, but none I like as much as the Gamecocks or hate as much as Clemson. So in most cases, I’m in it for a good time.
I want tense, tactically complex, aggressive racing. If it’s going to be a solo break or a blowout, I want it to be the result of a superhuman effort.
Which is, I guess, kind of, what we got in the men’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Tadej Pogačar won by a little over a minute, with a 35 kilometer solo break—almost identical, to within a matter of meters and seconds, to his winning move from last year. The margin was lower, thanks to what was actually a pretty interesting battle for second between Giulio Ciccone and Ben Healy, who had to balance their individual ambitions against the horde of chasers who came roaring up behind them.
But once Pogačar goes, he’s gone. And I think I’m tired of watching it.
Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but admiration for Pogačar as a racer. It’s not his fault that nobody else can get on his level. And he’s not hiding behind his teammates or lollygagging up the big climbs when he knows he’s got a stage race in the bag; he’s going for broke, all the time. He’s more proactive than any other dominant rider I can imagine.
But at some point, the wonder of watching the greatest of all time do his thing, week in and week out, isn’t compelling enough to outweigh the reality that most races are a foregone conclusion.
I’m somewhere near the crossover point with Pogačar. I’m either approaching it or just passing it. I think it took me longer to get there than a lot of people, and it definitely took me longer to tire of Pogačar’s dominance than Max Verstappen’s, or the New England Patriots’.2
And to be honest, I’m not sure I’m tired of Pogačar. I think I’m tired of the other 20 or so teams in every race treating him like a normal human competitor. Because he clearly isn’t.
We’re into Year Five of normal tactics just not working against Pogačar. He will outclimb anyone. He will outrun anyone over a long distance. He will out-time trial, he will out-punch, and so on, and so forth. I’m open to the possibility that there is no tactical or strategic countermove, that Pogačar is just so good he cannot be beaten systematically.
But nobody’s trying. Tom Pidcock rode with him at Strade Bianche. Even on Sunday, Lidl-Trek helped UAE Team Emirates control the break, and came to the line second with Ciccone, fifth with Thibau Nys, and sixth with Andrea Bagioli. Also in Group 3 on the road: Mattias Skjelmose, who’d just done the unthinkable and beaten Pogačar straight-up in a classics race the weekend before.
You can’t help. You can’t play games with him. It’s not working. The only rider who seems to understand this is Mathieu van der Poel, who’s the closest thing there is to a rider who’s on Pogačar’s level.
I don’t know what the answer is. Constant, rolling attacks? Total, absolute non-cooperation by riders on his wheel? Regular attempts for the Visma-Lease a Bike-style team time trial bum rush? It’s tough. You can’t dial up gadget plays or disguise your blitzes or switch to Cover-1 in cycling. Like I said, maybe there isn’t an answer. But until I see desperation breed more creativity, I’m going to assume that there is an answer, and nobody’s found it yet.
So if you don’t have a preferred rider, and the favorite winning is boring, who’s the ideal winner for a bike race?
I love a shock result as much as the next guy, but paradoxically, too many shock results just make the sport feel like random chance. Matthew Hayman or Alison Jackson can win Paris-Roubaix once a decade. A Sepp Kuss can back into a shock grand tour win once every five years—anything more and it stops being special.
Still, that leaves plenty of room for underdogs. But a satisfying narrative conclusion has to feel earned. It can’t be a bolt from the blue.
How about Kim Le Court? She came to the finale at Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes in a group of four. Demi Vollering, the race favorite,3 got stuck at the front of the pack, putting her at a massive disadvantage. Cédrine Kerbaol, the 23-year-old French puncheur-climber, had spent a ton of energy on a solo attack in the final 15 kilometers that got brought back. She was out of gas.
That left Le Court and Puck Pieterse, who’d just ridden the race of her life to take victory at La Flèche Wallonne.
Le Court made an explosive start to her sprint, and I kept waiting for Pieterse to make her move and swing around, but the finish line got there first.
Most of the time, when I’ve talked about Le Court, it’s been in the context of being annoyed at her jersey. The Mauritian national champion’s jersey is white with four colorful horizontal stripes, rendering it nearly indistinguishable at a glance from Lotte Kopecky’s world championship jersey. (The difference, I’ve learned: Le Court wears a multicolored helmet, while Kopecky usually wears a white lid.)
But a big result—maybe not a monument, but a big result—has been coming. Le Court was sixth at La Flèche Wallonne, fifth at both Ronde van Vlaanderen and Milan-San Remo, and third at the UAE Tour both in the general classification and on the Jebel Hafeet stage.
Le Court had a two-year stint as a professional road cyclist in Europe almost a decade ago, in her age-19 and age-20 seasons. And since then, she’s been making her living as a cross-country mountain biker. It’s not quite the Pauline Ferrand-Prévot comeback, but it’s an impressive interdisciplinary success story nonetheless.
It’s also gotten me very curious about Mauritius. Before Le Court started showing up in big races and confusing me, all I knew about Mauritius was that it’s an island nation that was once home to the dodo. Now, after about an hour of reading the Wikipedia page for Mauritius and following the various links, I know it’s a vibrant multiethnic democracy with a population of 1.2 million; a strong welfare state; a syncretic cuisine influenced by France, China and India; and a growing rum industry. Like most Americans, I’ve been fantasizing about what it’d be like to live somewhere else, and Mauritius sounds like just the quiet tropical paradise I was looking for. I’ll learn Mauritian creole if that’s what it takes.
On Sunday, grand tour season officially starts, with the Vuelta España Femenina. A welcome development of the past couple seasons continues, in that the women’s grand tour routes have gradually become less patronizing to their competitors. There should be time gaps on at least six of the seven stages.4 And while there’s no Angliru, there are two legit summit finishes: Stage 5, which ascends to 1,867 meters’ elevation at Lagunas de Neila; and Stage 7, which ends in a pair of first-category climbs. the latter, the Alto de Cotobello, is 10.5 kilometers at 8.0% gradient. There are sustained pitches of closer to 10% early in the climb, followed by a relatively mild kilometer a third of the way up the hill.
That’d be an ideal place to attack, and if an attack comes that early in the climb, we could see big time gaps either established or erased. In other words, no GC lead is going to be truly safe until the very, very end.
Even four days out, there’s no full startlist yet. I know Vollering will be there, flanked by Évita Muzic and Juliette Labous. Vollering will be the favorite in any race she starts—especially a stage race—and has Muzic and Labous to ride for her.
Ferrand-Prévot is slated to start, and after her surprising win at Paris-Roubaix this is going to be the first test for just how back she is. Kerbaol, as I mentioned, is white-hot at the moment, and will ride with a surprisingly deep EF Education-Oatly group that includes Kristen Faulkner, Letizia Borghesi, and Madgeleine Vallieres. Any one of those four could end up in the top 10, depending on how EF wants to play its cards.
The other team I’ll mention before the race kicks off is Canyon-SRAM, which is loaded for bear: Kasia Niewiadoma, Neve Bradbury, and Chloe Dygert. Dygert is too big to be a threat for GC, but she’ll probably be in the fight on the sprint stage. Moreover, the race opens with a team time trial, and her presence alone makes Canyon-SRAM a formidable presence in that discipline.
This is an ASO race, which means it’ll be on Peacock, which means that even if you’re not enough of a diehard to shell out for Flobikes, you can still have the Vuelta on in the background while you’re pretending to work in the mornings.
I’d define this period as starting when Steve Spurrier stopped giving a shit in 2014 and when Spencer Rattler arrived on campus in 2022
I’m still not tired of Alabama’s dominance under Saban, because, again, the alternative was unthinkable
Though maybe not in a four-rider sprint
Stage 3, a flat stage to Huesca, is the exception
Interesting read, thanks. I’ve got to agree with you on Tadej. If they know what he’s going to do, and the exact climb where he’ll attack, is there nothing to be done to counter that? I know the answer is probably no, because he’s just that goddamn good, but it feels like someone should be able to try something!