Last year at the age of 37 Lance Armstrong finished 3rd in the Tour de France. In doing so he became the oldest rider to finish in the top three of the Tour since, well, since Lance Armstrong in 2005. To find an older man than the ‘05 Armstrong to have finished on the podium of the Tour you need to go way back to 1982 when Joop Zoetemelk finished 2nd at the age of 35. So will Armstrong’s exploits at such a ripe age encourage other G.C. hopefuls to extend their careers further than they had originally foreseen to continue their quest for Tour success?

Kim Kirchen certainly seems to think so. In a recent interview with Shane Stokes for Cycling News, when asked in relation to Armstrong’s form in his late thirties does he still have aspirations of a high G.C. finish at the Tour, Kirchen said this:

I am really close to the podium as well, everything is possible. I am not saying that it is possible to win the Tour [at this point] but I am saying that for me, it is possible to reach the podium. That has to be a goal and that will be in my thoughts for this year’s Tour de France. Longer term, I hope to keep improving further.

These are lofty long term aspirations for a rider who will turn 32 on the day of the Grand Départ this year. Classics riders have long been capable of challenging for honours right into their late thirties, just ask Seán Kelly, Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle or Johan Museeuw, or try telling George Hincapie he’s ‘too old’ to win Paris-Roubaix. But classics riders are a different breed to Grand Tour riders. A classic is raced over six or seven hours whereas a Grand Tour is raced over 80 hours. As a rider gets older, his ability to recover from day to day decreases which makes it increasingly difficult to challenge consistently over a three week period. Historically, the Tour de France podium has been a relatively young man’s game. Outlined in the plot below is the average age of the Tour podium riders for the last thirty years:

The average age of the Tour de France podium finishers for the last 30 years

The average age of all the Tour podium finishers for the last thirty years is 28.2. I found this somewhat surprising having always thought that a Tour riders best years were his early thirties. However, the plot shows that since the early 1980s the average age of a Tour podium finisher has, in general, been climbing steadily.In fact, two years ago Carlos Sastre, Cadel Evans and Denis Menchov with an average age of 31.33, made up the oldest Tour podium since 1980. Over the past thirty years, late twenties definitely seems to be the optimum age to win the Tour but recently, Lance Armstrong has been almost single-handedly bucking that trend. When he retired after his 7th Tour win he was nearly 34, this was older than many Tour winners were when they chose to retire.  Riders like Indurain, Roche and LeMond all called it a day when they were no longer challenging for the Tour and when they were younger than Armstrong was in 2005. Also, amazingly, Bernard Hinault was only 31 when he retired!

So will Armstrong’s achievement of a third place finish at the Tour at the age of 37 have any effect on the rest of the peloton? If more riders like Kirchen are inspired by Armstrong’s longevity and decide to prolong their careers, the next few years could see an upset in the balance of retirees and neo-pros in the peloton.

Imagine the amount of current professional riders as a volume of water flowing through a pipeline. The younger riders are the water at the start of the pipeline and the older riders are represented by the water which is about to reach the end of the pipeline. If older riders decide not to retire, this results in a blockage and the water does not flow freely out the end of the pipeline anymore. As a result all the water throughout the rest of the pipeline has nowhere to flow to and consequently no new water can enter the pipeline until the old water flows out.

If plenty of riders postpone retirement it will have the effect of lengthening the pipeline instead of the old water being flushed out. Until enough riders retire this will result in a large queue of riders waiting at the beginning for professional contracts until the new longer pipeline is filled by the old riders and the system stabilises once more. But if all this occurs, it will take a few years to regain a stable ‘one in one out’ system. Meanwhile plenty of young talent won’t be snapped up by professional teams because they won’t have the room on their rosters.

I think the idea of having an under-23 squad or a feeder team is great. It gives much better shape to the process of how one becomes a top professional cyclist. The Rabobank Continental squad and Trek/Livestrong are prime examples of such setups. The experience that the young riders on these teams are afforded by racing against top pros at races like the Tour of Oman and the Tour of Ireland is invaluable. But, if they’ve got nowhere to go once they’ve finished their apprenticeships at the feeder team, what’s the point?

It’s fantastic to see older riders like Jens Voigt and Robbie McEwen still slogging it out with the rest of them. It would also be great to see the likes of Evans, Menchov and Sastre still battling for a Tour podium place in 4 or 5 years time. But if it becomes more and more commonplace for riders like Armstrong to prolong their careers it will have an adverse effect on young talent emerging at Pro Tour level and it will take a number of years for the youth of the peloton to recover.

It has a been a full month now since the cycling season officially began in Australia at the Tour Down Under. The rider who won the most professional races in 2009 was sprinter Mark Cavendish. This time last year he had already won two stages of the Tour of Qatar and two stages of the Tour of California. These races along with Tirreno-Adriatico were used in preparation for his first attempt at winning Milan San Remo. After 298 kilometres of racing he succeeded in spectacular fashion, beating Heinrich Haussler by a few millimetres.

Cavendish is due to start his season on Sunday 21st February at the Ruta del Sol. Cavendish’s late start to the season is due to an abscess on a tooth which required plenty of rest and recovery. As a result this is now the latest he has ever started his season which will certainly have an affect on his ability to defend his Milan San Remo crown.  It will be five and a half months since his last professional race at the Tour of Missouri last September. By the time he gets to Tirreno-Adriatico he will have raced 33% of the amount of days he raced by that stage last year.

The Ruta del Sol (or Vuelta a Andalucía as it’s also called) is a five-day stage race which interestingly was once won by his mentor Erik Zabel on his way to winning Milan San Remo in 1997. However, winning the race overall will not be on Cavendish’s to-do list, but even though it is his first race this year winning stages should not be beyond him as Oscar Freire and Borut Bozic seem to be the only other decent sprinters on the startlist. While Cavendish has been sidelined, the world’s other best sprinters have been busy. Boonen, Chicchi, Boassan Hagen, Petacchi, Bennati and even Freire and McEwen have all been victorious already this season.But perhaps most importantly of all, Cavendish’s team mate André Greipel has racked up six victories.

HTC-Columbia will now have an important decision to make on whether to put the full weight of the team behind Cavendish at La Primevera. Team manager Rolf Aldag has indeed hinted that due to the fact that Cavendish has already won Milan San Remo that the more important goals for the season will be the Green jersey at the Tour and the World Road Race Championships in September. Perhaps backing Greipel for the win would be a wiser decision. He is obviously on fantastic form and if he had the the whole team behind him he would certainly be considered one of the favourites for the race. Although it must be noted that the German has never ridden a monument classic before.

Cavendish was blessed last season, having been involved in so many bunch sprints he was never involved in a crash, allowing him to stay fit and take victories throughout the whole season. This year, although not due to a crash, is the first time since he burst on to the sprint scene that he has had to sit things out. Perhaps this could be a sign that he won’t have things all his own way in the sprints again this season. The main reason why Cavendish avoided any bunch pileups throughout the course of last season was because he was always at the front of the bunch where the chances of crashing are much lower. This was due to his superior lead out train at HTC-Columbia. But there have many personnel changes at Cavendish’s team over the winter which will affect his team’s dominance of the lead outs.

The most notable loss from Cavendish’s lead out is undoubtedly George Hincapie. The sprinter had this to say about the American “In every single race that I was with him, he was part of me winning.” Plenty of established experienced riders like Greg Henderson, Kim Kirchen, Marcus Burghardt and Hincapie himself have all left HTC-Columbia. Team director Bob Stapleton has done his best to replace them bringing in the likes of Hayden Roulston, Lars Ytting Bak, Matthew Goss and the Velits brothers.

One can’t help but look at this year’s squad and feel that it lacks the heavyweight punch of last year’s equivalent. Add to this the fact that Cavendish’s time off the bike due to his tooth problems will have put a dent in the team’s plans to practice lead outs for the Manxman. No doubt the new riders who will aim to lead Cavendish to the line will need time to slot in effectively. Since Stapleton took over the old T-Mobile team and converted it to an American outfit there has been plenty of roster changes. In fact, despite Cavendish’s relatively young age he is now one of the longest serving riders on the team. Only André Greipel, Michael Rogers and Frantisek Rabon have been part of the team longer.

With the apparent return to form of sprinters like Boonen, McEwen, Freire and Petacchi along with the emergence of young riders like Farrar and Boassan Hagen, this years sprints should be more hotly contested than ever. The dent that’s been put into HTC-Columbia’s lead out train will encourage other teams to improve on their own sprint trains. Team Sky have already shown that they are eager to prove what they can do at the front end of the bunch. Cavendish has said in the past “We have the best guys in the world in our train. It’s easily forgotten that I was winning without a train. I don’t need a train to win. When I didn’t have a train, I was winning”. Having been shepherded to the line so effectively all last year, he may find that he will need to prove this all over again. At the Ruta del Sol, Cavendish will be aiming to keep up his amazing record of having won a stage in every stage race he’s entered since Tirreno-Adriatico two years ago. It’s been Cavendish’s teeth that have hampered him so far this season, it will be the teething problems of his new look team which will determine whether Cavendish can be as dominant this year as he was in 2009.

Omertá. The code of silence. A code which was adopted by members of the Mafia to protect criminals. A code which had since been adopted by professional cyclists, also to protect criminals. Riders who used performance enhancing drugs to win races, riders who cheated, riders who had no regard for the fact that they were role models to millions, were protected by this code. Any rider who broke the silence and dared to speak about the doping within the peloton was deemed to be ’spitting in the soup’ and was scorned by their fellow professionals.

In the wake of the Festina affair in 1998, Christophe Bassons dared to speak out against the doping that was being organised within his team. In 2004 Filippo Simeoni testified in a court case in which he gave details of how infamous doctor Michele Ferrari had instructed him how to dope effectively. Both of these riders were subsequently ostracized from the peloton. To speak out against doping was seen to be bringing unwanted attention to the fact that there was a doping problem. Twisted logic to say the least.

The highest profile doping story in recent years is Riccardo Riccó who tested positive for CERA at the 2008 Tour de France after he doped his way to two stage victories. He was banned for 20 months and will be returning to professional racing next month. Far from riders keeping the code of silence, they have been very vocal in their disdain for Riccó and his behaviour. Mark Cavendish recently said “It’s like a parasite coming back into the sport. It’s not the fact of what he did, because everyone can make a mistake. But he doesn’t see it as a mistake. He’s not even sorry about it”. Robbie McEwen expressed a similar attitude toward Riccó recently commenting on his twitter account “Ricco – what a fucking hypocrite. Just don’t come back you piece of shit”. It must be said that Riccó was quite unpopular before his misdemeanors but the outspoken nature of these rider’s comments is a refreshing change from the silent solidarity we had previously come to expect.

So why have things changed? Why are riders now willing to break the Omertá? One of the major turning points was the public admission of former Team Telekom rider Bert Dietz that he had doped. This act of honesty led many of his then team-mates to also admit that they had been involved in systematic doping. Subsequently, two of the most successful riders of that era, Bjarne Riis and Erik Zabel came clean about doping at Team Telekom. These admissions seemed to draw a line under the undoubted doping problems that undermined cycling for so long and there was born a new impetus to leave the dark days behind and move into a new era of dope-free cycling.

Another factor that has helped in changing attitudes is that a number of new teams with outspoken directeur sportifs have entered the sport. Teams who are committed to anti-doping programs and maintaining a drug free roster of riders. Bob Stapleton at HTC-Columbia, Jonathan Vaughters at Garmin-Transitions and Dave Brailsford at Team Sky have all spoken openly about anti-doping and their commitment to running a drug free team. Also, the number of cyclists now who have Twitter accounts is increasing. This allows riders to communicate their opinions directly with fans. So riders who wish to be outspoken about other rider’s doping practices can now do it regularly and easily, which helps fuel the anti-doping sentiment amongst fans and other riders alike.

In addition, the UCI led by President Pat McQuaid must also be acknowledged for their anti-doping efforts. The introduction of the biological passport is a big step toward tackling doping. There may not have been many high profile riders been caught out by the passport system yet, but perhaps the fact that it is now in place, coupled with growing anti-doping sentiments in the peloton, is dissuading any potential offenders from doping in the first place.

There are still inconsistencies amongst attitudes toward riders returning from suspension. For instance why has Ivan Basso been given such an easy ride by the media and the rest of the peloton while Alexandre Vinokourov is constantly treated with disdain and abhorrence? The answer lies within the attitudes of the returning riders themselves. If a rider has apologised and has expressed a willingness to return to cycling without resorting to performance enhancing drugs, the likelihood is they will be afforded an opportunity to redeem themselves. But when riders like Riccó and Vinokourov return having neither apologised nor acknowledged that what they did was devastating to the sport, we rightfully get reactions from angry fellow cyclists such as McEwen and Cavendish.

Doping is still a problem amongst professional cyclists and there are still riders willing to cheat. But if Bassons or Simeoni did now what they did before, they would be heralded rather than victimised. Finally the riders who are willing to speak out against dopers are no longer considered to be ’spitting in the soup’, it is the dopers themselves who are doing the spitting. The Omertá is over, a new code has been created and is catching on, the code of honesty, and as a result an entirely clean peloton is getting closer and closer.

This article was written for Bike Pure – Supporting Clean Cycling.
Bike Pure