Blazin' Saddles - Generational shift caps unique year for cycling
Updated 11/11/2020 at 15:48 GMT
After all the uncertainties of a 2020 season derailed by a global pandemic, three of the grandest of Tours came to cap a unique, yet far from perfect, year for the sport. Felix Lowe reflects on the Tour, Giro and Vuelta narratives we thought we'd never get – plus the other stand-out moments of cycling's Covid comeback.
An Englishman, an Irishman, and two Slovenians walk into a bar…
It has all the hallmarks of a topical joke – one in which the punchline is something about them all emerging before 10pm, after much champagne, prosecco and cava, as if they were attending a traffic light party or a mardi gras celebration. Or perhaps something about the bar not yet being closed because of a second lockdown.
Admittedly, it needs some work. It could certainly be snappier, for starters. And it requires a bit of prior knowledge about the exploits of Tadej Pogačar, Sam Bennett, Primož Roglič and Tao Geoghegan Hart in yellow, green, red and pink respectively. But as an intro, it helps paint the picture.
This was a cycling season like no other: one we thought we'd never have, one which almost went off the rails on numerous occasions, but one which seldom disappointed (save for that slight lull during the Giro when nothing happened except the Portuguese puncheur in pink adding a few seconds to his lead here and there).
But even that was quite a thrill – for the vast majority of fans had never heard of Quick-Step's 22-year-old Grand Tour debutant João Almeida before he snared the maglia rosa on Mount Etna while Welshman Geraint Thomas was nursing his wounds from a nasty fall caused by a stray bidon in the neutral zone.
When, weeks earlier, Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme tested positive for on the race's first rest day in early September, the writing seemed to be on the wall. And yet the Tour managed to get to Paris via one of the most dramatic penultimate-day turnarounds in living memory as debutant Pogačar wrested the yellow jersey from the slumped shoulders of compatriot Roglič on the final climb of the race in a nail-biting time trial.
When, during the subsequent Giro d'Italia taking part after the Tour for the first time in history, scores of riders tested positive for Covid-19, resulting in two teams leaving the race, it seemed inconceivable that La Corsa Rosa would make it to the Dolomites, let alone Milan.
EF Pro Cycling's petition to bring the race to an early end fanned the flames, although race director Mauro Vegni's decision to dismiss Jonathan Vaughters's appeal was vindicated when one of the most exciting finales in Grand Tour history played out, resulting, after spellbinding stages on the Stelvio and to Sestriere, in a man Italy's most renowned commentator knew only as "Googanga" coming out on top despite having never donned the maglia rosa during the previous three weeks.
Geoghegan Hart's victory in the Giro, coupled with the aggression of his Ineos Grenadiers team (as relentless as it was uncharacteristic) bore all the elements of the crazy, unorthodox, but welcome way of racing, that this otherwise unwelcome 2020 has thrown at us.
This was a year that sounded the death-knell for the old guard – a year where Vincenzo Nibali, Alejandro Valverde, Philippe Gilbert, Chris Froome and even Thomas De Gendt didn't win one bike race between them; a year where even Peter Sagan didn't win the green jersey and only notched one, albeit glorious, victory; a year where 37 of 60 Grand Tour stages were won by debutants or riders who entered that particular race without a previous win in that same race, where only 11 riders in their 30s tasted success in cycling's three big stage races, and where two of the overall winners were also the best young riders of that race (in polka-dot Pogačar's case, the best climber, too).
This was the year were the likes of Marc Hirschi, Søren Kragh Andersen, Filippo Ganna, João Almeida, Jai Hindley, Hugh Carthy and David Gaudu came of age, a year that former cyclocross stars Wout van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel both won a Monument, where the winning margin of all three Grand Tour winners was under one minute for the first time in history.
The spring lockdown and the ongoing fallout from coronavirus always promised for a unpredictable season that veered off-script, but not even Nigel Farage would have put a £10,000 bet on Ineos Grenadiers winning over swathes of new fans by hoarding a third of all Giro stages, plus the ultimate prize – not least after their designated leader Thomas crashed out so early on.
But it proved to be Geoghegan Hart's Sliding Doors moment, the Condor of Hackney assuming the John Hannah role in bagging a pretty-in-pink Gwyneth Paltrow (even on a socially distanced London Underground).
A race which could have been an unmitigated disaster for Ineos ended up with the home-grown 26-year-old raising the Neverending Trophy outside the Duomo of Milan, and with beaming manager David Brailsford promising his reinvigorated team would never park the bus again in the style of the Team Sky train of old.
Attacking being the new form of defence was not something you'd have expected from a team managed by Brailsford. But when, unable to attack, the defending champion Egan Bernal was forced out of the Tour in the final week, the signs of a new philosophy soon crept though with Michal Kwiatkowski and Richard Carapaz pulling off that emotional one-two in La Roche-sur-Foron dedicated to the late Nico Portal.
After a third successive day in the break, Carapaz gave up his chances of a debut Tour stage win and settled for a polka dot jersey instead, allowing the loyal Kwiatkowski to cross the line first and take a rare moment in the spotlight. The Pole's win would make him, along with Jan Tratnik, something of an anomaly in 2020: riders in their 30s picking up maiden Grand Tour stage win.
Although not by design, Ineos continued this offensive tactic in the Giro with debutant Ganna winning four stages, not to forget leading all four jersey classifications at varying points in the race. Geoghegan Hart added two more stage wins (and the overall title), with Jhonatan Narváez also picking up a victory, while Salvatore Puccio, Jonathan Castroviejo and that man Googanga all finishing runner-up once.
Talk about a changing of the Grenadier guards. Even Geraint Thomas, recovering back at home, said he struggled to watch his young teammate's triumph, knowing what may have been had he not been floored by the kind of curveball that so many of us can relate to after this testing 2020.
Ineos' successful recalibration during the Giro was not something the team could pull off in the Tour – and not simply because Bernal's withdrawal came much later. While Carapaz was not in the same condition which saw him win the Giro in 2019 or push Roglič for the Vuelta crown just over a month later, the team, following the much publicised snubbing of Froome and Thomas, was all at sea.
But the total domination of Roglič's, by contrast purring, Jumbo-Visma train came to nothing when the Slovenian, forced to fend for himself for the first time on the penultimate day, caved in during the decisive race against the clock. Tellingly, the man who beat Roglič was someone who did not have a similarly strong team to fall back on.
We shouldn't be too harsh on UAE Team Emirates – even their directeur sportif Allan Peiper was surprised at the impact Pogačar had in his first Tour appearance – but there's no denying that the young man who ultimately won the yellow jersey did so very much off his own 21-year-old back.
Stage wins in the Pyrenees and the Alps should have been a sufficient warming for Roglič and his Jumbo team that it was not enough to simply try and suffocate the race. Ultimately, they paid the price for riding too defensively – a mistake Roglič wouldn't make twice, as proved by his four-stage haul en route to taking the red jersey into Madrid (drawing the curtain on yet another Grand Tour which, given the backdrop of rising Covid-19 cases in Spain, looked certain not to get beyond the first act).
If Pog's Tour win over Rog laid bare the over-reliance on a train, the latter's defence of his Vuelta crown underlined how, in a tight contest, having strong support can still be the difference.
Carapaz and Carthy, without the same kind of ballast from their Ineos and EF Pro Cycling teams, struggled to take the time off Roglič who, on his only major wobble, was able to rely on the dependable Sepp Kuss to nurse him through. You could say that Roglič's win came down as much to his time trialling ability on the Mirador de Ézaro as it did Kuss' pacing on the Angliru, where another British rider – Carthy – came of age.
To think, there we were thinking Adam Yates's four days in yellow was going to be the highlight of Great Britain's 2020 cycling season…
La Vuelta, like the Tour and the Giro, kept us riveted to the end, with Roglič battling to limit his losses on La Covatilla. Roglič's eventual winning margin on Carapaz was just 24 seconds, the Slovenian having recouped 32 more bonus seconds than the Ecuadorian over the course of the shortened 18-day race – justification for all that aggressive riding and the fiercely contested sprints to the line (Roglič not once conceded bonus seconds to his rival).
That may have been the closest winning margin of all three Grand Tours, but the Tour and Vuelta's usual processional final stages were overshone by the Giro's to-the-death dynamic with the top two – Geoghegan Hart and the super-impressive Australian Hindley – tied on time entering the final-day race of truth. In the end, 39 seconds separated the two riders after 15.7km.
If the generational change and emergence of a new power structure – the novel feeling that non-favourites could end up competing not just for plucky stage wins but overall titles – did not make the shifted 2020 season so special, then the actual backdrop to the Grand Tours made each of them individually unique.
The low sun casting long shadows across the road, the autumnal leaves gone golden, a Spain not parched but lush and green, and fresh snow (as opposed to last winter's remaining ice) on the higher peaks: these were the signatures of these delayed races playing out through to early November.
For all the riveting racing and the indefatigable Rohan Dennis's race-changing input, the Stelvio stage of the Giro will also be remembered for the blue skies, orange-tipped trees, and snowy backdrop. And the lack of fans.
Covid has generally proved that live sport without fans is a travesty, although in cycling it has found an exception. In fact, there were times at the Giro when it actually looked quite like RCS's spine-tingling promotional video starring Nibali and some of the old greats riding on a dream-like mystical mountain. If only, with the push of a pink button on our remote, the TV coverage could be overlaid with Nessun Dorma then we may have slept soundly in our beds at night.
Of course, a sparsity of spectators didn't always work. It made the Tour's stage to Mont Aigoual something of an anticlimax, with Alexey Lutsenko's solo win becoming about as riveting as watching someone alse read The Rider, Tim Krabbé's seminal novel based on an amateur race on that same mountain.
But it did work in other places – the Alto de l'Angliru, for instance, where a dearth of moronic fans meant we could concentrate on the race and see the pain etched across each rider's face in what seemed like a slow-motion montage of uphill savagery.
No one wants the Grand Tours to be wholly devoid of fans – after all, the proximity of rider and spectator is what makes the sport so special – but it was gratifying to have experienced it occasionally on some of the higher, more desolate peaks this year.
The Grand Tours may have been the backbone to this curtailed and rebooted season, but they were by no means the only highlights. From Wout van Aert finally winning Strade Bianche on the season's (and his own) comeback, to his teammate Roglič, the stand-out rider of the year, burying his demons in Spain, 2020 provided some glorious thrills that almost made us forget those endless weeks of uncertainty and worry.
Julian Alaphilippe's solo attack (and subsequent tears of joy) in the Worlds, Mathieu van der Poel and van Aert's thrilling duel in the Tour of Flanders, Marc Hirschi's third-time-lucky break in the Tour, Rohan Dennis's shift on the Stelvio and to Sestriere, Tadej Pogačar astounding TT on La Planche des Belles Filles, Roglič's never-say-die victory in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Alex Dowsett's disbelief and delight, and 35-year-old Richie Porte's maiden podium finish in the Tour in a year where youth tended to trump the old… all these combined to give the season a sheen disguising the doom and gloom.
For many, that James Bond-style panning helicopter shot of the magnificent Anna van der Breggen whizzing down the ridge at Imola alone was worth being locked up for three months for.
And how some of the funnier moments helped spirit us away from the anxieties of the pandemic: Jai Hindley struggling to put on his jacket, Tim Merlier's acrobatic wince-inducing save (above), Roglič's lopsided helmet, Alaphilippe's early celebration in La Doyenne, EF Pro Cycling and their ridiculous Mighty Ducks kit, or, summing up 2020 to a tee, Gregor Mühlberger's hash at jettisoning a musette of water bottles…
Of course, if the Covid framework wasn't cause enough for concern, there were some terrible moments to the 2020 season which cast a shadow on all that we celebrated. Horrific crashes sustained by Deceuninck Quick-Step duo Fabio Jakobsen and Remco Evenepoel were evidence of the dangers of an overly hasty return to racing and a reminder of the huge strides race organisers and the sport's governing body must take to ensure the safety of the sport's protagonists.
Alaphilippe's crash into the back of a motorbike was something none of us wanted to see, and a cruel way to end the new world champion's season, while the strike action in the Giro resulted in farcical scenes that saw a needlessly long longest day of the race reduced to a sodden shortest stage that cruelly distracted from Josef Černý's otherwise brilliant ride that day.
But, on balance, 2020 will be celebrated for its exciting, exhilarating, bold riding, its unpredictability, escapist narrative, and the seismic shift in cycling's balance of power. We may never see Nibali, Froome, Thomas or Valverde win another bike race, while the likes of Sam Bennett, Caleb Ewan and Arnaud Démare may deny Elia Viviani and Mark Cavendish another sprint, or Sagan another green jersey. And next year, everyone – even the Italians – will know how to pronounce the names of Geoghegan Hart and Pogačar.
Perhaps the biggest endorsement to the rejigged 2020 season was the fact that, in the end, it really didn't matter that the so-called Super Sunday never happened. The absence of Vuelta showdown on the Tourmalet and an autumn Paris-Roubaix – even the wet one that was forecast – didn't put a dampener on a glorious three months of cycling.
Good luck living up to your predecessor, 2021…
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