Three mainly overlooked peloton heroes

Reading cycling magazines and websites the same names keep cropping up.  Contador, Schleck, Cavendish et al are good and deserve some of the limelight but not all of it. There are three riders who inspire me not so much because of their results but because of their attitude and style.

1) Jen Voigt: he always there and already has something insightful or funny to say after each stage. This is a man who works like a dog, sitting on the front of the peloton reeling breakaways in and never gets any of the individual glory. He also writes a great blog and there is a amusing Jens Voigt fact page. And his approach to pain...play the link!

2) David Moncoutie: like Jens he has been around for a year and always seems to be thinking about retiring but never quite gets round to it, because he simply just likes riding his bike. Also, he is one of those classic French escape artists who does not want to hide in the peloton day after day but prefers to gamble on glory in breakaways. When Cofidis were going through their dark doping years Moncoutie was always in the team but always firmly anti-drugs. Bit of a pity that he likes homeopathic options though! Oh and he just looks just so damn cool on a bike.

3) Marco Pinotti: like Moncoutie, Pinotti has been a long standing critic of drugs in cycling. He is a quiet man, but when he decides to speak he does mince his words. Just read his views about some of his colleagues in the peloton! I wish a few more were brave enough to take a stronger moral stand on some of the cheats in the sport.

La bomba, EPO and tents…

Every so often I start thinking about doping in cycling, but it never seems to get much clearer in my mind about where we should draw the line.

 

Doping in cycling was not actually made illegal until 1965. Before then it might have been a dirty word but it was hardly a secret. In the 1930s the Tour de France rule book said that the race organisers would not provide drugs for the riders! The first explicit admission of drug use was from the Pélissier brothers when they talked to a journalist about running on ‘dynamite’ (see a previous post).  But there are tales of drugs being used as far back as the 1880s with cocaine and strychnine being favourites.

Over the years the many of the stars of the sport have been either open about their drug use or been found guilty of using them. Coppi was upfront about his drug use of la bomba (amphetamines) saying it was the only way to stay competitive. Anquetil was equally frank saying that he had a backside like a pin cushion. Tommy Simpson was not quite as open about his drug use but also did not deny it. Eddy Merckx denied ever taking drugs but was kicked out of the 1969 Giro d’Italia for taking the stimulant Reactivan, and was found guilty again in the 1973 Giro di Lombardia. 

But what is and is not permissible is not quite as clear cut as it might seem. Partly because there is no clear definition of what doping is. But a handy working definition is that a performance enhancing drug (PED) must meet at least two of the following three criteria:

1)      The potential for enhanced performance

2)      The potential for being detrimental to health

3)      Violation of the spirit of sport

If we take the usual doping example of increasing the number of oxygen carrying red blood cells it quickly demonstrates how tricky drawing the line can be. Four ways of increasing red blood cells are:

1)      Having a blood transfusion

2)      Taking EPO

3)      Training at altitude

4)      Sleeping in an oxygen tent (one which sucks the oxygen out!)

Having a blood transfusion and taking EPO clearly tick all three of the doping criteria so are obviously banned.  Training at altitude, certainly does not tick 2, but does tick 1 and could be argued is borderline for 3, but it is permissible. Sleeping in an oxygen tent ticks 1, not 2, but more is even more borderline for 3 than altitude training. In fact in Italy, seemingly a hot bed of doping, it is actually banned, but not anywhere else that I am aware of.  Is it because it seems more artificial than training at altitude?

Can you see why whenever I start to think about doping I end up even more confused?

Why no books?

I saw a couple of lists of the 5 greatest road cyclists of all time the other week. These were long view lists rather than those that only seem to remember the fairly recent past. These were the five in no particular order:

- Eddy Merckx
- Jacques Anquetil
- Fausto Coppi
- Lance Armstrong
- Bernard Hinault

I think that's a pretty fair list but it could be argued that Merckx and Hinault are the only definites and Miguel Indurain and Gino Bartali would be strong candidates to be in that top 5.  But sticking with my top 5 for the moment and returning to my bugbear of the moment (see last post about Henri Pelissier) why are cycling biographies missing some of the obvious targets?

Of the top 5 Lance Armstrong is everywhere, Paul Howard has written an admirable biography of Jacques Anquetil, and William Fotheringham wrote a great Fausto Coppi biography. But of the big 2 there is nothing currently in print in the English language. Granted Richard Moore's fabulous 'Slaying the Badger' was about the Hinault / LeMond relationship, but it was not a biography. There are older books about Merckx and Hinault but nothing current. Come on someone (with talent) please satisfy me!

The “pigheadedly arrogant champion"

The quote above was how Henri Desgrange, the founder of the Tour de France, apparently described Henri Pélissier the 1923 winner of the Tour.  Forget Lance, Alberto, Cadel, and co this was one larger than life than life character who makes Pantani look like a choirboy.

Henri was a handful from an early age and was kicked out of the family farm at the age of 16. The farm itself was the last farm in Paris. He chose to become a semi-professional cyclist and through challenging race organisers and sponsors become a campaigner for better rights for cyclists describing their conditions as being like “convicts of the road.”

He also described how the harshness of races like the Tour made riders use doping products. This is the first recorded instance of doping I can find. The journalist Albert Londres in an article about a conversation he had with Henri, his brother Francis and another rider Ville said:

“You have no idea what the Tour de France is like,” said Henri. “It’s a Calvary. But Christ only had 14 stations of the cross. We have 15. We suffer from start to finish. Do you want to see what we run on?” From his bag he took out a phial: “That’s cocaine for the eyes, that’s chloroform for the gums.”…In short said Francis, “we run on dynamite”.

A few years after he retired his wife Léonie shot herself. Henri took up with another woman, Camille, 20 years younger than him. The two of them had a fiery relationship which ended with Camille shooting him five times after he attacked her with a knife. She used the gun that his wife had taken her life with. When it came to the trial Camille got a one year suspended jail sentence.

And, the strange thing is nobody has written a book about him in English. How many more good stories are needed to make a great book?

An Etape story and a harsh realisation

I was looking at my Facebook page today and came across the following video showing the highlights of the second of this year's two Etape races...the long lumpy one from Issoire to Saint-Flour. 

http://www.velo101.com/videos/voir/183/resume-de-letape-du-tour-mondovelo-acte-ii-entre-issoire-et-saintflour

Apart from the dreadful conditions which meant that fewer than 2000 of the 4000 riders finished two other things struck me and then a depressing realisation:

(1) the man who won was riding the same bike as I bought last year, a Parlee Z5. See an earlier post to this blog about how crap I am at choosing a new bike. I asked Barry at Bespoke Cycling (the sole UK Parlee dealer) if he knew the winner. Apparently he is the brother of a new Parlee dealer in France.

(2) the first UK finisher in 7th place, at least I am guessing he was the first UK guy from non-English sounding names in front of him, was someone in my year at school. I remember him as being a focused even manic looking type but I never realised he was that good. And, he came 15th in the the Alpe d'Huez stage a week earlier.

I rode the Etape last year finishing somewhere mid-pack a country mile from the front end of the race and a similar distance from the broom wagon at the other end of the race. I felt pretty pleased with myself.

This year having seen my bike cross the line in first place, and a school friend finish in the top 10 the horrible realisation is that I really am not the next Contador and am just a journey man who needs to try a little harder next time!