Chef Prudhomme Tweaks the Recipe

Drum-roll please.

Today in Paris was the day. According to papa ASO's own website, "On Tuesday 19 October precisely, more than 4 000 persons and 500 medias from all over the world will descend on the Palais des Congrès in Paris to discover the detail of the stages of the 2011 Tour, which will take place from 2 to 24 July that year along the roads of France and …"

That was if those 4,000 persons could fight their way to their seats. In the streets outside the Palais it was getting worst than the chaos of a million rabid inebriated cyclo-fans blocking a TT up l'Alpe d'Huez. The French are engaged in that most French of all annual events - strikes! While the French streets were alive with honking horns and protesters across the country - heck, even the school kids were blocking schools (maybe part of their education to learn how to strike in the future--sort of a French rite of passage)--things are getting seriously out of control!

The one pocket of serenity? The Tour route announcement ceremony.

While socially the country is popping at the seams - petrol stations are running out of gas, students running amuck and President Sarkozy realizing de Gaulle was right, "Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?" - how can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese? The 2011 Tour route that was revealed promises a taste of something old and new:

2011 Tour de France route announced

If the legendary Henri Desgrange was ever going to have a reincarnation could it be Christian Prudhomme? It appears he is dedicated, as was Desgrange, to tweak and tweak the recipe until his Tour finds its perfection.

Generally the recipe get's most of its tweaking in the route, this year Chef Prudhomme went right to the heart of the ingredients - the jerseys:

Green Jersey - PMU. It is worn by the leader of the points classification. New in 2011: the flat stages will only include one intermediary sprint with points awarded to the first 15 riders. The aim is to systematically involve the sprinters in the pack, even after the passage of a breakaway.

Polka Dot Jersey - Carrefour. It is worn by the leader of the best climber classification. New for 2011: the points system and number of riders awarded points on each climb has been revised in order to reduce the gaps between the competitors. For example, points will only be doubled for a finishing line at the summit of 2nd, 1st and highest level climbs.

Chef Prudhomme has more in connection with the Tour's originator than just being French. Both men rose from careers in the media, albeit a century apart. Selling to the public is at its core the same whether newspapers and bicycle ads or radio and television and global corporate sponsorship. Prudhomme and Desgrange are in that sense cut from exactly the same marketing cloth.

Their respective early paths guiding the Tour share some similarities as well. While Desgrange got his inaugural 1903 Grand Boucle off successfully, his 1904 Tour became a near disaster and ended with the first victor, the 1903 winner Maurice Garin, being stripped of the title for cheating, along with the next three riders, resulting in the still youngest ever winner 19 year old Henri Cornet being elevated from fifth to first. Afterwards Desgrange struggled with the idea of even continuing the race sighting "blind emotions" driving the cheating. (Hmmm... blind emotions and the doping of today - some things never change?)

In 2006 Prudhomme's Directorial debut was christened with a similar disaster as the first GC winner since that 1904 Tour, American Floyd Landis, was stripped for cheating. In each case the pundits spoke of the death or degradation of the Tour. In each case the chefs knew they had to wrest control of their race or risk losing it. Desgrange tightened the recipe over the next few years until its outcome was organizationally crystal clear.

Similarly Prudhomme spent 2008 - 2010 testing a pinch of this and dash of that until he felt he had control. Then, interestingly, like his mentor, about half a decade into their careers each attempts to change the recipe so dramatically that all the patrons have to sit up and take notice. For Desgrange it was the bold introduction of the high summits of the Pyrenees in 1910 followed in 1911* by the monsters of the Alps including the mammoth Galibier. The Tour soared! For Prudhomme the centennial anniversary of the crossing of the Pyrenees sparked drama in 2010 race and he has returned with a mountainous Tour route for 2011 that echos that original Alpian debut one hundred years ago as it takes the battle for the malliot jaune up the most summit finishes since 2002 and in so doing produces what he calls, "suspense to remain until the very end but also have the possibility of a big battle well before that.”

(summit finishes for 2011 include the Pyrenean finishes at Luz-Ardiden and Plateau de Beille as well as the Alpine giant Galibier and L'Alpe d'Huez.)

Chef Prudhomme said at the presentation, "We are going towards simplification,” continuing,“The goal is to give these competitions more strength, and more suspense." Those were the aspirations of his mentor Master Chef Henri Desgrange 108 years ago when he cooked up this recipe. For cycling fans it means next July - Bon Appetite!!

*just a note - in 1911 Desgrange introduced the Alps as well as an iconic term and role to the Tour - le domestique. Although it should be noted that it was out of frustration and contempt that he did so in an editorial in his newspaper L'Auto - deriding the rider Maurice Brocco for assisting another cyclist.

Flying the Tricolor - A Centenary to Celebrate

All eyes were focused three kilometers down the north slope of the Porte de Balès, the fight for yellow was in full flight, attacks, counter-attacks, but over the summit and down the southern slope by a couple of minutes flew a diminutive Frenchman clad in the vibrant Tricolor, the colors of the champion nationals of his home country. Since 2004 we have come to love him for his affable smile and genuine verve for the sport, Thomas Voeckler was racing pell-mell for the lovely and historic spa-town of Luchon. Voeckler, of the French team Bbox Bouygues Telecom, scored not only a victory into Bagneres-de-Luchon for himself, but more importantly the 5th of this Tour for France, in Le Tour de France. In dropping the hammer and escaping his breakaway companions on the upper 10% reaches of the Porte de Balès, he help insure this was a day of double celebration. The victory marked the most successful Tour de France in a quarter century and Happy Centenary for Le Tour de Pyrenese.

For winner only mentality Americans there will be the inevitable question: So what's the big deal? Isn't this a race for the yellow jersey? And no Frenchman even cracks the top 10; in fact, John Gadret riding for AG2R La Mondiale trails in 15th at 14m 24s off the lead - that's about as close as the French will get to winning their race this year.

The big deal is, this is their race. Le Tour IS a French race. Despite the occasional starts on foreign soil it is called the Grand Boucle because it annually swings its way around the whole of France. Those scenes you see the helicopters beaming around the planet in HD - that's France. Those castles and chateaus Paul Sherwin warbles on about - they're French. This great race was born 106 years ago in France and despite its recent globalization it is an expression of French sport, culture, economics, politics and passion. More importantly it must remain French - Le Tour de France - and to do that it needs the French to love it, like they can only do if they feel a part, yes, that means winning.

The story of the birth of Le Tour de France is well known to most - a French newspaper's (L'Auto) marketing ploy to increase circulation, insure survival and most importantly perhaps, eliminate the competition (L'Velo), whose publisher had opposing political views. Buried on the backpages of this new event was the patriotic passions of the founder, self-appointed director, and often chief chronicler Henri Desgrange. Desgrange loved France with obsession, consequently his race was and is a representation of all he believe France and the French people should aspire to be.

Over the decades, through, and because of, political strife, wars, economic good times and bad, shifts in sporting attitudes, and the coming of new medias, the race that first circled the rutted roads of the French countryside has been influenced by, and influenced, French life. I won't lead you down the long history of Le Tour, if you are interested read the excellent, LE TOUR, by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, but suffice to say for the Tour to remain Le Tour de France needs a French cycling resurgence. There will never be enough American or British or Australian or Kazakh cycling fans to create a living gauntlet up L'Alpe d'Huez, or engulf the Tourmalet like they will Tuesday and Thursday, or set a table of fromage, vin and baguette roadside in a small village in the middle of Provence and wait three hours for its passing - forget your own nationalistic pride for two seconds and you realize part of what you love about this race is it is French. And it is a more than a bicycle race, it is a human drama in an amphitheater of life, that no other country could have invented and no other country has ever equaled.

A few months before that first climb to the Pyrenean summits, that crazy idea of making cyclists on bicycles that invented the word, ascend over mere muddy goat tracks, to which the race officials were shouted at "assassins!" American President Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in Paris, a speech entitled "The Man in the Arena". A speech that wasn't of the pen, but of the heart of Henri Desgrange and at the heart of his beloved Le Tour de France. President Roosevelt spoke,

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Today I smiled with joy for daring Frenchman Thomas Voeckler and
was proud to love my very French Tour de France.

Photo: AP

Andrew Messick has reoccuring nightmares of Henri Desgrange

History is a funny thing - ya know, the way it keeps repeating itself, but nobody bothers to listen, or read, or watch.

Look around, far and near, choose a subject, it's not hard, and you'll find historical stuttering. Sometimes it takes a few months or years, but if you can step away from the myopic perspective we 60-year-lived humans have, you find history weaves a pretty nice sin curve over and under the x-axis of all time.

Today AEG Sports president Andrew Messick denied rumors that ASO, Amaury Sports Organization, the French events and media mega-conglomerate that owns the Tour de France, Dauphiné Libéré, Paris-Roubaix, Paris-Nice and other major cycling events (as well as the French Open in tennis, is positioning for a takeover of the Tour of California, calling it only a “media partnership.” (Messick denies ASO takeover of California Tour) You, and Mr. Messick, might want to post those words up on the bulletin board for a future re-read, maybe under the header "History Repeating Itself."

Just a brief ride down the muddy cobbled road of cycling history might shed a little light on the new business arrangement AEG and ASO are team time trialing into. The ASO, or the true grand patron of the Tour de France, began life in the marketing madness of the Parisian newspaper L'Auto. A century ago L'Auto was being gapped off the circulation wheel by rival L'Velo. To avoid DNFing L'Auto's heads Victor Goddet and Henri Desgrange masterminded a race called le Tour de France and went on to demolish the competition and create a race legend.

For the next 50 years L'Auto dominated the sport print media in near monopolistic fashion - and fever. L'Auto ceased publication in 1944, a by-product of its ambiguous allegiance during the Occupation, with Liberation its assets were sequestered. In Phoenix-fashion it rose 18 months later from L'Auto ashes as L'Equipe, at it's helm Goddet's son Jacques. The 1960's telecast economic woes for print media with television assuming a more attractive role - L'Equipe was struggling, prompting Tour Director and L'Equipe head Goddet to capitulate to a merger of the paper and subsidiary cycling gemstone to Émilien Amaury (1965); with whom he had earlier made his successful bid to relaunch the Tour de France after WWII. Over the next decade and a half the two men transformed the conglomeration into the Amaury Group (ASO). The Amaury Group is owned by French publicity and marketing entity EPA (Éditions Philippe Amaury).[1]

In the past few decades le géant de sports de la France has been gobbling up events most recently the Dauphiné Libéré, and driving interest in Vuelta a España. “(UCI president Pat McQuaid) has heard these rumors too,” Messick said, referring to the ASO takeovers. “He and I talked about it, and I told him they are false.”, from the VeloNews article. Of course McQuaid heard them, he is having the same Desgrange nightmares. ASO is cycling, and has reduced the UCI to as insignificant an organization as can internationally exist. McQuaid knows once ASO has Tour of CA, and Australia that doesn't leave the UCI with any toys to play with. Kinda like the early days of the Tour and being a Isole - good luck on getting anything but the broom wagon to show up when you have a mechanical.

ASO has continued to grow, becoming more powerful, controlling more and more of what is professional cycling and spreading the sports media marketing tentacles first unleashed by Henri Desgrange. So Andrew Messick, those reoccuring nightmares you keep having, the ones where the ghost of Henri Desgrange keeps taking everything you own, take note, history says the giant he left behind is looking west, all the way to the coast of California.

PS - Andrew, how's your French?


[1] drawn from a fascinating book The Tour de France 1903-2003: A Century of Sporting Structures, Meanings and Values, editors Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare.

The Business of Bikes - Selling the Tour

If you have even the slightest curiosity about the Tour de France beyond who Lance Armstrong is and what he is likely to tweet next, it's likely you know this thumbnail history:

In 1903 Henri Desgrange, editor of L'Auto (ancestor to today's l'Equipe, owned by ASO, who owns the Tour), was desperate to win a circulation war with competing sports newspaper Le Vélo. and insure his papers survival. The Tour de France was suggested to Desgrange as a sales promotion, yes, to sell stuff, mainly bike advertising to bike makers. The new race was to be like the hugely popular Six-Day races (the Madison), only on the "roads" ringing France - so more people would buy more papers. The sporting gimmick was a huge success. L'Auto's circulation quadrupled, competitor Le Vélo 'bonked' into obscurity (although they did give us a century of Bordeaux-Paris) and Desgrange went down in history as the father of the greatest sporting event in the world.

Okay, so did you catch that little line - "to sell stuff"? Ever wonder why cyclists look like rolling billboards? From its outset bike racing and especially the Tour was about marketing, merchandising and sales. To twist an old saying,... while in the middle of sale, a bicycle race broke out... this one they called le Tour de France.

In the Tourmalet sized mountain of facts, figures and fiction I have been digging through while researching my book on the Lanterne Rouge there has been an interesting side track (that won't have much place in this book) about the business of the Tour. As the lights in the Tour history begin to shine more brightly I have begun to see so much of why the big picture Tour de France is what it is - simple stuff like why teams, why some of the archaic rules, but also why the sport has taken some of its left and right turns, why cheating, especially doping, has had a love affair with the Tour, and why the sports media we have today, influencing all sports, has such deep roots in the countryside and Cols of France. Desgrange's little newspaper L'Auto also enjoyed windfall advertising profits. It's actually amazing that today we don't call it Le Peugeot de France. Although today's mega-sponsors, or officially Club du Tour, are comprised of Goliaths - including Nike, Crédit Lyonnais, and Coca-Cola - and they have their influence.

For example (just one example), from a look at the Top 10 in GC in 1914, last Tour before the first World War would forever change the face of this and many other events, it's clear bike maker Peugeot-Wolber, known as the "Goliath" of the French bike manufacturing business at the time, wanted to clearly establish that they were not only the choice of professionals in the the Tour de France, but on some level, they were the Tour de France. The public as a result bought Peugeot's bikes hook, line and sprocket.

General Classification
1st: Philippe Thys, (Belgium), Peugeot-Wolber, 5405km in 200h 28' 48" (27.028km/h)
2nd: Henri Pélissier, (France), Peugeot-Wolber, @ 1' 50"
3rd: Jean Alavoine, (France), Peugeot-Wolber, @ 36' 53"
4th: Jean Rossius, (Belgium), Alcyon-Soly, @ 1h 57' 05"
5th: Gustave Garrigou, (France), Peugeot-Wolber, @ 3h 00' 21"
6th: Alfons Spiessens, (Belgium), J.B. Louvet-Continental, @ 3h 53' 55"
7th: Emile Georget, (Belgium), Peugeot-Wolber, @ 4h 20' 59"
8th: Firmin Lambot, (Belgium), Peugeot-Wolber, @ 5h 08' 44"
9th: François Faber, (Luxembourg), Peugeot-Wolber, @ 6h 15' 53"
10th: Louis Heusghem, (Belgium), Peugeot-Wolber, @ 7h 49' 02"

(54th: Henri Leclerc, (France), "Isole", @ 99h 04' 45" that year's Lanterne Rouge for perspective. Isole btw are individuals, or soloists not associated with teams, an opportunity open until 1914. No Isole ever won the Tour, Ernest Paul in 1909 finish 6th on GC, the best every Isole.)

(A remarkable footnote to that year's TdF - All living Tour winners from 1905 through 1923 (Louis Trousselier, Lucien Petit-Breton, François Faber, Octave Lapize, Gustave Garrigou, Odile Defray, Philippe Thys, Firmin Lambot, Leon Scieur and Henri Pélissier) start the 1914 Tour de France as well as 1926 winner Lucien Buysse.)

One of the things you have to marvel at studying the TdF is the adaptability of its sometime-maniacal genius/founder/director Henri Degrange. It was his race, and he ruled it with an iron fist, every year tweaking and turning up the torture screws on the riders, but he was also never so self-consumed to constrict his beloved Tour's success. One of the great pieces of Degrange's marketing genius is the publicity caravan, created in 1930, it will celebrate its 80th birthday in this year's Tour de France. If you have never seen the Tour live this "little" piece of the Grand Boucle is lost - and according to 39% of the people lining the road, you have missed the Tour. If you are feeling a bit empty about now, cheated by Versus, then the folks at ASO have created a nice bit of youtube to buffer the pain - the music is half the hype:

Death by Tourmalet - a play in two acts

Meeting your maker is generally something all of us set out to postpone as long as possible. Accidents and old age are going to take their toll, but to go seek it? The 2010 version of the hardest sporting event on earth has decided to turn the clock back, a hundred years to be exact, and reenact Henri Degrange's passion play "Death by Tourmalet", or as the lead actor Octave Lapize in the 1910 version of La Grande Boucle remarked, "You are murders, yes, murders."

The Tourmalet is a monster. It's one of the few Pyrenean climbs I remember with great detail from our two weeks crossing the mountains from Perpignon to St Jean de Luz in 2007. The western side, from Luz-Saint-Sauveur, is 19km long, climbing 1,404m at an average of 7.4 percent with a maximum of 10.2% near the summit. Starting from Sainte-Marie-de-Campan, the climb is 17.2km, gaining 1,268m, an average 7.4% with a maximum of 11%. And as if the climb was not hard enough, the road department has been kind enough to mark your journey skyward, with little tombstone looking markers (I'm certain there was nothing "murderous" in that choice) - each kilometer is inscribed by the distance to the summit and the average gradient of the next kilometer - in case your burning legs needed any additional reminder.

We, three of us, Todd, John and me, approached from the east through the now famous (thank you Phil & Paul) village of Ste Marie-de-Campan where the forge used by Eugène Christophe (more below) is now an official monument; it's on the left of the road, as you start through the village. From this side the granite monster is unseen for most of the climb; in fact, since the chopper views each July spare us most of the run up, I was actually a bit caught off guard. After Ste Marie-de-Campan the road flattens and dips a slight bit through a small valley. I'm racing along thinking - "what's this about?" Then I began really getting concerned, less road and still all that climbing means the gradient is definitely going to bite and bite hard. It does, it did!

From the east it's a wonderfully long strange climb, that's why I loved it. It gets steep, 9%, 10%, 11%, and opens to the world. A couple kms from La Mongie you disappear into a couple of snow tunnels - that only look out to the north - kind of an erie feeling that something above you is happening that you are privy to, but who cares, your in your own little personal pain chamber. It's in these tunnels, at 11%, where Armstrong attacked on Stage 11 in 2002. That year the Tourmalet just watched it all from 4 km further above, they finished in La Mongie.

As I struggled through the ski town of La Mongie I remember shaking my head at how insane this was - the gradient - it was just plain stupid! To be riding through the center of any town, even a ski town, at 10-12% was crazy; I had to pedal or roll backwards! I kept thinking about all those orange shirted Basques that line the road here, mouths agape and flailing about like fish on a beach. If one of them trips they'll start rolling down through town, launching an avalanche of orange, it'll look like a giant pumpkin smashing contest. The image distracted me from the pain - just kept trying to turn the pedals over at a respectable rate. Above the town there is a since of relief, the road begins to switchback, and you have the illusion you are going faster, making real progress, the top, the Tourmalet, is somewhere close, you hope.

The Tourmalet is at the very heart of the Pyrenees - and it will be there for many many Tours to come. Like a giant splinter of granite thrust skyward through a limestone crust it is 100-150 million years and youthfully rugged - not a good glacier or rounded erosion to mar its flanks. It's the Andy Schleck of the Pyrenees peloton, young, raw, angular and enormous potential. So PS - Lance, you have years of comebacks ahead of you and the Big T will still be there.

The summit has a historic café filled with old Tour velos, mementos and pictures - and on a cold rainy day, hot tea, fresh crepes du chocolat as well as other foods. We were glad to see it and Jenn with the van and took refuge there. What it doesn't have is a couple of decent cycling jerseys. Why not? They could make a killing. This coming year alone the etape du Tour rolls through the summit with thousands of cyclomaniacs clamoring for their piece of history - seriously, is there not one enterprising Frenchman (or woman) open to the idea of selling a few hundred or more jerseys????? And then there are all the folks - mostly drunk and clad in day-glow orange of the Basque country - who will camp out for there for days and the ultimate prize - seeing their heroes suffer over the geant twice:

Stage 16: Bagnères-de-Luchon - Pau - 196 km

Km 11 - Col de Peyresourde - 11 km climb to 7,4 %
Km 42,5 - Col d’Aspin - 12,3 km climb to 6,3 %
Km 72 - Col du Tourmalet par La Mongie - 17,1 km climb to 7,4 %
Km 128,5 - Col du Soulor - 19 km climb to 5,3 %
Km 138 - Col d’Aubisque par le col du Soulor - 5,4 km climb to 6 %

Stage 17: Pau - Col du Tourmalet - 174 km (pictured above)

Km 57,5 - Col de Maris-Blanque - 9,5 km climb to 7,5 %
Km 118,5 - Col du Soulor par Ferrières - 22 km climb to 4,9 %
Km 174 - Col du Tourmalet par Barèges - 19 km climb to 7,4 %

Some History
I love cycling history, and few races have more drama filled days than the Tour. So it was in 1909 when first Director Henri Degrange was looking for the same thing every director since has sought - a way to just spice things up a bit. Tricky bit for the riders of the coming 1910 edition of La Grande Boucle was that Degrange had every Col and goat track in the land to choose from - nothing had really been climbed yet, his palet of pain was wide open, so why not choose the most painful? The Tours to that point were largely left to the rouleurs (those tireless fellows of the rolling lowlands) - the 2010 Tour will give then their due: the roly-poly hills of Medoc, Bordeaux, the infamous cobbley “trouée” (the trench), in the northeast near Arenberg (where stage 3, Wanze-Arenberg Porte du Hainaut, will include 7 cobbled Paris-Roubaix sectors over a total distance of 13.2 km). But a century ago this coming year life in the young peloton was about to change - and it has since.

In the summer of 1910 riders must have approached the much anticipated geant Tourmalet with some trepidation. Octave Lapize (the eventual winner of the Tour) reached the top of the Tourmalet first, followed by Gustave Garrigou. Garrigou was the only cyclist to reach the top without dismounting and received an extra 100 francs.

This next July as the boys cross over the summit (2,115 m / 6,939 ft, it is the highest road in the central Pyrenees) climaxing the initial fun ride up the east side on stage 16 (the easy side) they will be greeted by the large statue of Octave Lapize gasping for air as he struggles to make the climb - oddly it's a memorial to Jacques Goddet, director of the Tour de France from 1936 to 1987; why not poor Lapize? He's the poor schmuck who did all the work. The best part of stage 16 is whizzing down off the Tourmalet, with every rotation of the wheels, is a reminder - "Crap, we have to come back up this side!"

I've only seen the west side in a cold rain; a cold rain from behind the windscreen, following my stubborn friend Todd as he descended as cautiously as I have seen him come off any summit. If July 20th is anything like "our" Tourmalet, I can't fathom racing off that monster - yet the maillot jaune will likely hang in the balance and it will be full on, like wheeled falcons stooping for golden glory.

The geant Tourmalet has been crossed 73 times since Degrange tossed it in there in 1910 based on a trusted collegue's appraisal - After reaching Barèges (with the help of rescuers), Steines sent a telegram to Degrange: "Crossed Tourmalet stop. Very good road stop. Perfectly practicable." , after mushing to the summit in the snow. (Even the Vuelta a España has crossed the pass several times.) In first year the poor peloton, all 110 of them that started dwindled quickly, but the monster was the main culprit - only 44 near dead riders finished Degrange's little experiment. The Tour now had Grimpeurs!

Three years later, 1913, comes one of the most painful and retold acts of this play. The famous cyclist, Eugène Christophe, known as 'le Vieux Gaulois' (the Old Gaul), worked feverishly in village of Ste Marie-de-Campan to repair the front-wheel fork of his bicycle there after being struck by a car during the descent of the Tourmalet. Director Degrange's rules were strictly enforced and prevented him from obtaining assistance and he had to walk 15 km to do the repairs himself. While in the forge he solicited the "assistance" of a young boy to work the bellows - on top of the four hours he lost in repair the unsympathetic King of the "murders" tagged him with a 10 minute penalty. This gave the leading pack an advance of four hours and Christophe's dreams of securing the maillot jaune went up in the forge's fires.

When the lads-n-lycra ascend the west wall it will only be the second time since 1974 that a stage finishes on the Tourmalet - and it may yet be the most dramatic final act in "Death by Tourmalet" since it was first crossed a century ago.

In the 'modern era' have there been tougher Tours than 2010? One thins is for certain - "Death by Tourmalet" should separate the men from boys, and the rest from the will to go on.

Inside Cycling - Perspective on the 2010 Tour route

By VeloNews' John Wilcockson

Slide show of the Tourmalet

F R A N C E.... the final frontier

These are the voyages of Capt. Prudhomme and the starship ASO, boldly going where no media hyped cycling event has ever gone before...

Just hours ago they unveiled the 2010 TdF route, including the much anticipated hundredth anniversary of then director Henri Degrange's near death march up the muddy goat track climb of Col du Tourmalet. In 2010 they lads in lycra will get tortured by Tourmalet twice - stock up on your high altitude blood supplies boys.

One day, I'm going to go to the Tour de France route unveiling ceremony for myself - just to see in person how ridiculously overhyped this event can be. Until then check out this bit of video-whizbangery...


And for a more practical look - these from VeloNews and Cyclingnews:
2010 Tour route unveiled
2010 Tour de France: a taste of the classics
Rider's reactions to 2010 route

Dope, Dopes & Dopers

Sometimes you start a blog - oh, say in the shower, or on the bike, or while having a pint with your girlfriend (her's is usually anything other than a pint), or when the new issue of CycleSport magazine arrives and Lance isn't anywhere on the cover in name or likeness (gotta be a mistake at the printer's). Then sometimes you have this blogopiphany just before you open another's blog and see it's a viral blogopiphany, they too are going down the same circuitous route of "WFT? - I can't believe what I just read?"

Well thank you Joe Lindsey (Boulder Report) for your befuddled-bewilderment at the most recent round of anti-doping WTF. From Joe's blog (but do go read it all), "First, they only re-tested 17 samples. Second, they didn’t find anything. Third and most interestingly, they didn’t expect to. “It was not our goal to find anything,” said AFLD head Jean-Pierre Bordry, to German press agency DPA (via CyclingNews), adding (via AFP/VeloNews) that they just wanted the “security of the truth” in knowing they’d not missed any positives. But they didn’t expect to find any. But ran the tests anyway. Gotcha."

Then said Bordry. "I am astonished that there were no positive doping tests at this year's race."

Okay, stop! I don't have a Phd in anything grammatical or pharmaceutical. But WTF? Bordry, where are you going with this?

For a moment let's skip all the alphabet soup labeling - CERA, AFLD, EPO, UCI, WADA, LA, WTF, eLaMiNOP, or whatever. Something that needs a little light shown on it is, if the cops quit catching robbers because robbers quit robbing (ya, right, I know) do we no longer need cops and therefore without cops we will get robbers robbing again which means we need cops to... well, get my point, sorta? It's about catching dopers, you dopes.

What is Bordry babbling on about? So, “It was not our goal to find anything,” HELLO? If you don't, you don't have a job! And neither do the dozens of other members of the labcoated beaker-brotherhood. As my friend from India would say, "Give me a break mon."

Now in a related (hang in there, I promise it is) Part II:
In all this we also lose track of the fact that this is entertainment... wait, it's Entertainment, with a capital E. Since when do any of these 20/30-something year olds - virtually none with an education beyond the bike - save lives, prevent wars, right social ills, create great art, even teach bike safety to a local grade school? (Ok, one concession: Major Taylor was chipping away at the color barrier when he raced.) They do what they do for themselves and for us as Entertainment. Like NASCAR (sorry, more alphabet soup) we even like the crashes - fess up, we've all seen a few youtube bike disasters.

As Entertainment it is entertaining - let's enjoy it.

C'mon, this years TdF was Entertainment because of the soap-Astana-opera - we enjoyed it - it was real egos crashing into one another, not just bikes - we all can't wait for Prudhomme's route announcement Oct 14th so we can talk about Season 2 of As the Tour Turns.

The thing is it has always been Entertainment - they created races to sell stuff; to sell newspapers, sell beer, sell bicycles, hell, maybe even sell dope.

One of my "favorite" doping stories is from the early 1920's when riders in the Tour de France use to smear cocaine-flake-impregnated cold cream on their legs to ward of the cold and pain while crossing the lofty Cols Director Henri Desgrange had cooked up to make the race 'truly manly'.

From a Wikipedia entry:

In 1924 the journalist Albert Londres followed the Tour de France for the French newspaper, Le Petit Parisien. At Coutances he heard that the previous year's winner, Henri Pélissier, his brother Francis and a third rider, Maurice Ville, had resigned from the competition after an argument with the organiser, Henri Desgrange. Henri explained the problem - whether or not he had the right to take off a jersey - and went on to talk of drugs, reported in Londres' race diary, in which he invented the phrase Les Forçats de la Route (The Convicts of the Road):

"You have no idea what the Tour de France is," Henri said. "It's a Calvary. Worse than that, because the road to the Cross has only 14 stations and ours has 15. We suffer from the start to the end. You want to know how we keep going? Here..." He pulled a phial from his bag. "That's cocaine, for our eyes. This is chloroform, for our gums."

"This," Ville said, emptying his shoulder bag "is liniment to put warmth back into our knees."

"And pills. Do you want to see pills? Have a look, here are the pills." Each pulled out three boxes.

"The truth is," Francis said, "that we keep going on dynamite."

Henri spoke of being as white as shrouds once the dirt of the day had been washed off, then of their bodies being drained by diarrhoea, before continuing:

"At night, in our rooms, we can't sleep. We twitch and dance and jig about as though we were doing St Vitus's Dance..."

"There's less flesh on our bodies than on a skeleton," Francis said.

The acceptance of drug-taking in the Tour de France was so complete by 1930, when the race changed to national teams that were to be paid for by the organizers, that the rule book distributed to riders by the organizer, Henri Desgrange, reminded them that drugs were not among items with which they would be provided.

There are others - from caffeine suppositories to hidden pee bags. Indeed, the history of modern doping virtually launched itself with the cycling craze of the 1890s - that's 1890's, as in over a hundred years ago, 10 years before they dreamed up the Tour - and the six-day races, or Madisons, (yes, they actually raced virtually non-stop for six days! Hell, I'd need drugs too for that) that lasted from Monday morning to Saturday night (no racing on the Sabbath, c'mon, this a dignified sport of Pius gentlemen). Extra caffeine, peppermint, cocaine and strychnine were added to the riders’ black coffee. Liqueurs, like whiskey and brandy, lifted the spirits of the tea drinkers. And one of the best - nitroglycerin - to ease breathing after sprints. This was Entertainment.

Of course there are always those on a crusade - Irish cycling journalist David Walsh, and John Hoberman, professor and chair at the University of Texas at Austin, self-proclaimed doping historian and author - their attacks are relentless against dope, Lance, and all before him. But guys, that's the point, there is an endless line before him.... So? Don't you get it? It's Entertainment!

German journalist and physician Hans Halter once said. "No dope, no hope. The Tour, in fact, is only possible because — not despite the fact — there is doping. For 60 years this was allowed. For the past 30 years it has been officially prohibited." That doesn't ruin it. As Entertainment it still is entertaining - let's enjoy it.

So everyone in cycling, please spare us the WTF denials, proclamations and moments of shock and pained distress when ever you catch or get caught - you'll never win an Oscar for them. In a world of REAL problems all you are doing is protecting your silly little jobs - period. If for two seconds you think any of your bullshit matters, might I suggest you hop on a plane, fly to Sumatra and tell the woman who just lost her house and two children to a tsunami - then listen to her story, she will show you genuine shock and pain.


Related: Dope - a good read on the subject can be found in the pages of A Dog in a Hat or check out the DVD The Six-Day Bicycle Races.