Alejandro Valverde confronts his friend Nicolas Portal (Photo: Team Sky)
Yesterday threw into the spotlight the most controversial of grey areas that exists in the sport. When does a rider, or a team, or a peloton wait for a rival? And when is fair play no longer the priority? I don’t want to overplay an issue that has now passed, but I think that there are some interesting conclusions to be taken from this and some interesting questions worth considering.
The situation is follows. As the peloton tears along a road through exposed plains, the crosswinds strike, and Sky make up their minds that this is an opportunity not to be missed. Just as Juan Flecha takes to the front, there’s a scramble behind for wheels and there is contact near the very front of the peloton. A few riders look back at the fallen riders – they may or may not glimpse the red jersey wearer on the ground (though there’s little doubt they would have been aware of his presence towards the front) – but there’s no hesitation. It’s game over for the race leader.
Cue furious reactions and defensive statements. Twitter was overflowing with accusations and snide remarks, and even a few comments that were made suggested that Sky had directly caused the incident. Adam Hansen, thought to be the first to go down, had this to say: ‘ I don’t mind Team Sky putting it in the gutter, but how about next time you don’t slam us in the gutter’ (he was more measured in his criticism the following day on the start line). Niki Terpstra also appeared to be claiming that Sky ran Movistar down. Does this make Sky’s actions more unforgivable? That depends on your standpoint…and how forgiving you are. It doesn’t mean, however, that most of the Sky team understood exactly how the crash had occurred. It wasn’t just Sky who pushed the pace, either, for Katusha helped out for a short time and BMC inexplicably kept the pace high on the approach to the final climb.
Sky and Katusha form an echelon (Photo: Graham Watson)
What will bother a lot of people is how Sky treated the case in the media. The Sky directeur sportif Nicolas Portal (a former teammate of Valverde it must be remembered) claimed not to have seen that Valverde had been involved in the crash initially – surprising, though possible – but also stated that he had let the team know after a few minutes that the leader had been caught up in the crash (though Sky seemed to be on the front for an awfully long time). Chris Froome, meanwhile, claimed to know nothing of the Valverde incident until the very end of the stage, despite what the DS had told the media and despite Cobo and Castroviejo riding up to the front to persuade Sky to stop riding. Something doesn’t add up there.
Now cast your mind back to Paris-Nice in March, where Levi Leipheimer crashed a total of three times on a descent and a Valverde-led Movistar reacted by stepping on the gas, supposedly with a view to helping Valverde onto the final podium. A week later, the roles were reversed at the Vuelta a Catalunya, where Valverde had fallen and OmegaPharma – Quick Step took great care to make sure the Spanish rider would not regain contact in what was an unmistakeably avenging piece of riding. The case was wrapped up and did not need to be revisited.
Why then, five months later, is this still relevant? For whatever reason, Hayden Roulsten, for one, was unsympathetic on twitter, saying that ‘Paris-Nice was talked about a lot in our group up the last climb.’ Has Catalunya been entirely forgotten I wonder? There is a point here and it is that Movistar have now had a double helping of their own medicine. Some might say they deserve that, but I’d say that that’s missing the point, because the issue is that this has nothing to do with what happened in Spring and that etiquette has, again, been thrown out of the window.
Or was it? The riders at Sky will be of the view that they instigated a move and therefore the race was on; the crash was an unfortunate development that they weren’t prepared to adjust to, given their plan was in full flow. The plan, of course, would have been to split the race into bits and hope that some favourites were caught out. What they really wanted most of all was to distance Contador, the only rider that Froome should really have reason to fear at this point. What if Contador had gone down at this point? Would a fuss have been made then if nobody waited for him? Yes, certainly. Rodríguez? Absolutely. How about Gesink or Mollema? Wait…maybe not. And here is yet another difficulty with unwritten rules: there is a lack of clarity in terms of the context in which such an unwritten rule can be applied.
Valverde finds himself at the back-end of the race (Photo: Graham Watson)
We speak of etiquette, but when did good manners really emerge in cycling? I’m no cycling historian, so I won’t even attempt to answer the question for now, but what is quite clear is that the idea of waiting for a rival is a relatively new phenomenon. The laws implemented by race directors in the first part of the twentieth-century were draconian to say the least; cyclists were bred to be tough, uncompromising racers, not gentlemen. Think of how Coppi or Bartali would attack the moment the other fell foul to a flat tire. How times have changed.
On the other hand, let’s not kid ourselves that waiting for a fallen rival is a well respected moral code. Remember Alberto Contador’s ‘chaingate’ in the 2010 Tour de France? On this occasion, the cost of playing by the unwritten rules was risking not winning the Tour de France, and Contador wasn’t going to let his opportunity pass. This year we had ‘tackgate,’ where Bradley Wiggins acted as the patron to allow Cadel Evans back into the front group having suffered a puncture, but it was clear at this point that Wiggins was very comfortable in yellow and Evans simply didn’t have it in him to defend his Tour de France title. I have come to the conclusion that fair play is generally only embraced by a rider when it suits them.
Why, then, does cycling have these unwritten rules? Would it be much simpler for the teams to unanimously come out with a clear message that they wish to erase all trace of these unwritten rules that can undermine the integrity of a race? I believe that, no, as much as the kind of grey area we saw yesterday is far from ideal, the sense of fair play that would be lost if all fair play was ditched, the kind of ‘win at all costs’ cycling that we would be left with would further taint the image and ethics of the sport.
I realise that I have been asking as many questions as I have been answering, and that ultimately there is no good answer to the issue as a whole. Everyone will have their own opinion on this. For what it’s worth, I think Sky were unsporting (I hesitate to use the word ‘wrong’) in the way they raced yesterday, but it’s worth considering that they have given other teams the excuse to take advantage of their own misfortune, whenever that arrives. What goes around comes around, after all.
procyclingfanatic 
Posted on August 22, 2012
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