Tour de France and competitive cycling generally

[Gavin Chipper]

I didn't really want to start a thread on this because I don't have much to say really. I thought there was an old thread but I couldn't find it. I definitely remember a discussion about sprinters in the Tour de France and them winning random stages but not the whole thing. It involved Richard Brittain. Could that be why it doesn't exist? Dunno.

Anyway I read about Mark Cavendish crashing out of the Tour de France when he was trying to beat the record for the most stage wins and he's supposed to be retiring now so he'll remain joint with Eddy Merckx. But something struck me in that article:

Widely regarded as cycling's greatest sprinter of all time, Cavendish...

Is he though? Or is he just the best sprinter in an event that isn't really designed for sprinters? If he was the greatest sprinter, surely he would have been racking up Olympic gold medals in the velodrome, rather than just slipstreaming off a load of endurance athletes in an endurance event and then, surprise surprise, being able to outsprint them at the end. But only in the short flat stages that allow for it obviously, which is why he could never win the whole thing. It seems like he spent his entire career gaming the system.

I seem to remember at an Olympic games he was trying to win some road race but he failed and I think the commentators said it was something to do with there not being enough people on an Olympic team to provide the slipstreaming for the whole race, so they all ended up dropping out exhausted and leaving poor Mark Cavendish with too much work to do at the end. Just enter a sprint race.

[David Williams]

Have you ever seen a sprint race in a velodrome? Most of it is at a speed that is as slow as you can go without stopping, because being in the lead is almost guaranteed to fail. If you wanted a true sprint race like a 100 metres in athletics you'd probably need a straight track maybe 500 metres long, and with the lanes so far apart that there was no slipstreaming. And it would be won by the cyclist who could accelerate quickest from a standing start rather than the one capable of the fastest speed. The nearest you get to a true sprint is the keirin, where they are brought up to speed by being paced by a motorbike, but even then being drawn to be the lead cyclist is a big disadvantage.

It's true that road cycling is an event not really designed for sprinters. But cycling itself is not really designed for out and out sprinters.

In road cycling it's massively less effort to ride in the peloton. If a stage is flat it's very hard to get away. You finish with a bunch sprint. If it's hilly the mountain specialists can put the pressure on, the peloton breaks up and the sprinters are toast. But breaking away from the peloton is always a risk. If they do stay together and catch the break that's a lot of wasted effort. Not chasing down a break is also a risk. You may never catch them. Best scenario is that another team will chase them, while you conserve your energy. The road race in the Olympics is designed to give both sets a chance. What happened in 2012 is that one team made a break. All the other teams knew that Cavendish would very likely win a sprint, so left it to the GB team to chase it down. They knew they couldn't sustain that all race. Then another team made a break. Then another. And by this time there were two pelotons, GB were in the second one, and that was that.

Incidentally, I've always thought the Olympic road race is a massively selfless event. There is a team leader, a sprinter, mountain specialist or all-rounder, and the rest of the team is there to eliminate the opposition and deliver him to the finish. And none of them get a medal.