I read an article recently on the excellent BackPageFootball.com on how pressure from fans and media can become overwhelming  for a young athlete and can eventually ruin their career. Sebastian Deisler was a German footballer who was pegged as ‘the next Franz Beckenbauer’. He had to live and play with the tag of being the saviour of German football from a very young age. Despite this pressure and a string of injuries he made it from Borussia Monchengladbach via Hertha Berlin all the way to Bayern Munich. However, at Bayern the injuries persisted and he never quite lived up to his promise. He was earmarked to lead Germany to World Cup glory on home soil in 2006 but he missed the tournament, again through injury. He struggled to cope with the immense pressure exerted on him and was eventually diagnosed with depression. He retired from football completely in 2007 saying:

In the end I was empty. I was old and I was tired. I went as far as my legs could carry me, and I could not go any further.

He was 27 years old.

As cycling fans, it is natural to be on the look out for ‘the next Lance Armstrong’ or ‘the next Mario Cipollini’, but as was the case with Deisler, these labels and pressures can be taken too far. Tom Danielson was labelled ‘the next Lance Armstrong’ from a young age and was even drafted into Armstrong’s team just as the Texan was winding down his own career in 2005. He won the Tour de Georgia that year which rubber stamped his label as ‘the next Lance Armstrong’ but he has never lived up to that promise and has consistently been dogged by illness and injury. He has never come close to living up to this label but he’s had a good career. Surely he should be lauded for what he has achieved rather than criticised for what he hasn’t? Along with the Tour de Georgia victory, he has won the Tour de Langkawi, the Osterreich Rundfahrt, the Tour of Austria, a stage of the Vuelta a Espana as well as being a multiple top 10 finisher in the Spanish Grand Tour.

Danielson has had a solid career despite missing large chunks of it through various maladies. But despite this, his career is seen by some as a failure. It’s a failure when compared with the expectation he was burdened with, but not when examined on its own merits. Pro Cycling magazine are guilty of maintaining a long running column called ‘Are you the next Lance Armstrong?’. Riders featured over the years have been as diverse as Lars Boom, Jurgen van den Broeck, Benoit Vaugrenard, Lars Bak, Rigoberto Uran, Martijn Maaskant, Kevin Seeldrayers and Tom Peterson. The column is written fairly tongue in cheek but is surely not a help to a young rider who aims to embark on a career as a classics rider! Perhaps I’m overestimating the influence that a cycling publication can have on the mindset of an emerging rider?

What is not an overestimation however is the pressure that the French media heap on any French rider who emits a mere whiff of being capable of challenging for the Tour de France. It’s now 25 years since the French had a home winner of the Tour. Thus, when a Frenchman manages a decent performance in the Tour de France he is likely to be labelled the saviour of French cycling. Christophe Rinero and Benoit Salmon are prime examples of this. (To further illustrate, try doing an advanced search on Google of the cyclingnews.com site, type the search term “French hope”. When compared to any other nationality in the search term there are considerably more results for the French). I mention all of this because I fear for the future of Richie Porte.

The young Tasmanian has had a fantastic Giro where he’s the leader in the young rider’s classification and currently sits in third pace in the General Classement. He has almost seven minutes in hand over Robert Kiserlovski, the young rider closest to his White jersey and he has an almost eight minute buffer between his current third spot and falling out of the top 10. Spurred on by the thought of achieving both of these goals, Porte has been climbing admirably. He has finished in the top 20 of both the stage up Monte Zoncolan and the Plan de Corones mountain time trial, results not to be sniffed at. While there are a couple of very difficult stages remaining, if he keeps this up he will mostly likely end the Giro in the top 10 and the winner of the White Jersey as best young rider.

However, let us not forget that these achievements have been made possible by fortuitous circumstances, two in particular. Porte, along with dozens of other riders was afforded almost 13 minutes on the rainy Stage 11 to l’Aquila. This sort of breakaway occurs very rarely in a Grand Tour, or indeed in any stage race. The two most prominent examples of long dangerous successful breakaways that come to mind are Oscar Pereiro’s breakaway in 2006 and Claudio Chiapucci’s in 1990. Richie Porte and David Arroyo have benefitted hugely from the inability of Liquigas, Astana and BMC to co-ordinate a chase. If these teams had co-operated, Richie Porte would now simply be a good young rider who built on his Tour of Romandie time trial by taking 6th place in the first time trial of the Giro.

The second circumstance which has led to Porte’s current circumstances is the composition of his Saxo Bank team for this Giro. The team’s biggest hitters, Fabian Cancellara, Matti Breschel, Jens Voigt and the Schlecks are all not present. The team had no G.C. aspirations for the Giro. Before the race started the team had two goals, to set up Baden Cooke for the bunch sprints and to get a stage win through Chris Anker Sorensen. These two goals were concluded early on in the Giro for very different reasons. Chris Anker Sorensen won Stage 8, thereby fulfilling half of Saxo Bank’s goals for the race. The following day Baden Cooke abandoned the race. By the time the massive breakaway stole away on Stage 11, Saxo Bank had no more goals to fulfill for the Giro. This resulted in the remaining seven riders on the team being able to lend their full support to the escapades of Richie Porte for the remainder of the race.

This is Porte’s first appearance in a Grand Tour. In the past 10 years there have only been seven riders who have managed to finish in the top 10 in their first appearance in a Grand Tour, meaning it is quite an accomplishment. Most notably, these include Andy Schleck who finished 2nd in the 2007 Giro and Robert Gesink who finished 7th in his maiden Grand Tour at the Vuelta in 2008. Unusually, also on this list is Ezequiel Mosquera who didn’t ride in a Grand Tour until he was 31 when he finished 5th in the Vuelta. The remaining riders are Jose Angel Gomez Marchante (8th, Vuelta ‘04), Jose Rujano (3rd, Giro ‘05), David Blanco (10th, Vuelta ‘04) and Jose Azevedo (5th, Giro ‘01).

Richie Porte is 25 years old. This will be the last year that he is eligible for young rider competitions. Therefore he will not be able to contribute to his reputation by acquiring anymore White Jerseys. However, there will be pressure on him to build on his Giro d’Italia success. I just hope for his sake that he will not be subjected to over zealous pressure but will be taken for what he is, a young all-rounder who can excel in the time trial, rather than be taken for a Grand Tour hope who could eventually eclipse Cadel Evans by becoming the first Australian to win one of cycling’s three week races.

Usually when it comes to writing a blog post on Irish Peloton I know what I’m going to write before I sit down and write it. I’ll have thought of a topic a couple of days beforehand, mulled it over during the commute into town or while out on a spin or while simply daydreaming at my desk, then I’ll write it relatively quickly. All that’s left to do then is to trawl through the cycling news archives and the cycling quotient site to verify a few stats and facts. But in general I’ll usually have a post fully mentally prepared so I can just spew it out when the time comes. I’m just back from a three hour spin over the Sally Gap and I still have no idea how to tackle the monster that is the Floyd Landis scandal.

I’ve met Lance Armstrong twice. The first time was at the Nissan Classic in 1992. My Dad had brought me down to the finish line of the final stage which ended on O’ Connell Street in Dublin city centre. Dutchman Louis de Koning won the stage but we were wandering around the team cars after the riders had finished and Paul saw a Motorola rider sitting in the back seat of a team car with his feet out the door changing his shoes. Paul leaned down to me and said “Cillian, that’s Lance Armstrong, he’s a young rider, he’s gonna be really good, go over and ask him for his autograph”. So I did. Just under 12 months later, that young rider who was going to be really good was the World Champion.

The second time I met him was last year when he was in Dublin after the Tour of Ireland had finished. Thousands of cycling enthusiasts showed up to the Phoenix Park to ride with him after he announced he was heading out for a few laps. I weaseled my way to the front of the sometimes volatile mix of racers and commuters and managed to share a few words with Armstrong. In true Irish fashion I talked about the weather. In fairness to me, the weather in Cork at the finish of the Tour of Ireland the previous weekend had been particularly atrocious and seemed worth talking about at the time. I was meeting a seven time winner of the Tour de France, I was on a high afterward, it really was an incredible experience to ride my bike beside him for the two or three minutes I lasted at the front before being gobbled up by the world and his mother. I had met a World Champion.

In contrast, Floyd Landis is a convicted cheat. He cheated to win the Tour de France. He adamantly denied cheating for almost four years. He shamelessly asked for money from unsuspecting fans to aid his expensive legal battle against the governing bodies of the sport. He was responsible for a phone call to Greg Lemond purporting to be Lemond’s uncle mocking him for being sexually abused as a child. Landis is an odd character who has lost all integrity over the past four years. Yet, I find myself believing him. I don’t believe him because he seemed genuine when talking to ESPN yesterday, nor do I believe him simply because he would have nothing to gain from lying. I believe him because much of what he claims is not brand new information. Allegations of drug use at US Postal and by Armstrong in particular have been rife for years.

Armstrong’s chief detractors have been Irishmen David Walsh and Paul Kimmage. Walsh has written two books on the topic, ‘From Lance to Lanids: Inside the American doping controversy at the Tour de France” and ‘L.A. Confidentiel: Les Secrets de Lance Armstrong’. The latter was never published in English, only in French. This is because Armstrong refuted some allegations brought by Walsh in the book and accordingly filed a lawsuit and won. As a result, the book was never published in English and consequently a large percentage of those who would be most interested in reading it were denied this opportunity. I must admit, I haven’t read either of them.

This isn’t because I don’t read cycling literature. As I type I’m staring at a bookshelf in front of me which is filled top to bottom with magazines and books dedicated to the sport of cycling. No, I haven’t read them because I didn’t want to be convinced that the allegations against Armstrong were true. I wanted to believe the miracle. But ever since the initial allegations by L’Equipe that Armstrong doped to win the 1999 Tour, there has been a huge elephant in the room that is the career of Lance Armstrong. Journalists like Walsh and Kimmage have continuously tried to blow the lid on that elephant, but they have never been allowed inside the room, they’ve only been peering in the window. Now, for the first time, somebody from inside of that room has begun talking about the elephant.

The responses of Armstrong and Bruyneel have been predictable. Denying the claims of Landis while attempting to discredit him as a credible source of truth. In fairness, because of Landis’s past he will be faced with this credibility problem for the duration of this scandal. But all it will take is for one of the people that Landis mentioned in his email to corroborate any of the allegations, and suddenly, Landis will have his credibility restored. There have been 14 people directly implicated by Landis thus far, apparently there are more emails which will eventually be released. Either Landis has created an uber elaborate lie or every one of these 14 people will have to lie themselves.

Often, when these huge stories break in the world of sport, somebody somewhere writes a book about it and makes a few bob, (Landis is already planning to write one). But for this story, the allegations making the front pages are not new. The books are here. They have already been written. I’ve managed to procure an English language copy of ‘L.A. Confidentiel’ (thanks to Simon Lamb), and I finally plan on reading it. If I had read it before, I would be reading it believing it was false with a blind, naive scepticism. Now that the Elephant has been released from its shackles, I’ll now read it with the belief that it is true.

The first line of the first page of L.A. Confidentiel is sitting in front of me, a quote from Saint Jerome:

If a misdeed arises in the search for truth, it is better to exhume it rather than conceal the truth.

Better late than never Floyd.

We’re just about half way through the 2010 Giro d’Italia and there has still been no Italian stage winner. Liquigas, a team consisting of six Italian riders did win the team time trial but there has yet to be an individual Italian stage winner (or ‘I-talian’ as Sean Kelly would have us say). So we are left to wonder why is it, that on their home turf, the race that most Italians base their whole season on, that none of them can win a stage? Perhaps, if we take a look at recent results elsewhere whe shouldn’t be all too surprised that the natives are struggling to find success in this year’s Giro.

There have been a number of incidents which have hit Italian racing hard over the past couple of years. First of all there’s the retirement of the Italian talisman Paolo Bettini. The double World Champion was a classics specialist who won Milan San Remo, Liége-Bastogne-Liége, the Tour of Lombardy and the Olympic road race throughout his stellar career. Since Bettini’s retirement, there hasn’t been a serious Italian contender for the classics (discounting Davide Rebellin who won Fléche Wallonne in 2009 but has subsequently been banned for doping). The closest rider to a classics all rounder that the Italians can now claim as their own is Filippo Pozzato but he is yet to build on his Milan San Remo success in 2006. Since Bettini’s last monument classic victory in 2006 there have in fact been three Italian winners of a monument. Alessandro Ballan won the Tour of Flanders in 2007 and went on to win the Worlds in 2008, but since then the curse of the rainbow jersey has most certainly had a hold of him. He was struck down with illness for the first half of 2009 and never regained top form and he has now become embroiled in the Mantova doping case which is centred on his former Lampre team. Danilo Di Luca also won Liége-Bastogne-Liége in 2007 but he is currently serving a two year doping ban after testing positive at last year’s Giro. This leaves Damiano Cunego, who won the Tour of Lombardy in both 2007 and 2008, as the only Italian monument winner since Bettini who remains active in the current peloton.

There has been no Italian winner of a monument classic in 2009 or (so far) in 2010. Looking back over the previous monument classics, there has been at least one Italian winner every year since 1992. Looked at another way, there has no been no Italian winner in the last nine monument classics. This is only the third time this has happened in the past 40 years. The only Italian to even reach the podium of a monument so far this year was Alessandro Petacchi. Italian results in general for 2010 have been few and far between. Stefano Garzelli won Tirreno-Adraitico and Giovanni Visconti won the Tour of Turkey. Even considering individual stages of Pro Tour races there have only been three stages won by Italian riders.  At one day races it is even more desperate, Enrico Gasparrato managed to add to Petacchi’s podium finish with a 3rd place at the Amstel Gold Race, but that’s about it. It’s a truly tragic state of affairs when the biggest one day victory by an Italian rider in the past 12 months has been Pozzato’s win in the Italian road race championship.

At the Tour de France it is an equally sorry situation. In the past two editions of the Tour there have been no Italian stage winners. Rinaldo Nocentini wore the Yellow jersey for over a week last year but he was the first Italian wearer of the Maillot Jaune since Alberto Elli ten years previously. Currently there are five Italians in the top 40 of the UCI World Rankings. These riders include Stefano Garzelli, Michele Scarponi, Alessandro Petacchi and Marco Pinotti, none of whom are the right side of 30 and two of whom are the wrong side of 35. Sacha Modolo is the only other Italian in the top 40, only 22 years of age and having finished 4th in this year’s Milan San Remo, Modolo provides a glint of optimism in the otherwise desolate landscape that is Italian cycling right now.

A further element which has severely hindered Italian cycling over the past couple of seasons is the number of high profile doping positives. Ivan Basso, Michele Scarponi, Danilo Di Luca, Davide Rebellin, Riccardo Riccó, Emanuele Sella and Leonardo Piepoli have all been caught and banned for various misdemeanors. This has hit Italian racing, and the prospect for victories, very hard indeed.

There have been some close calls in this year’s Giro with Italians finishing in the top three on a number of stages. Fabio Sabatini has finished 2nd and 3rd in sprint finishes losing to Tyler Farrar both times, but he never looked like getting the better of the American in either sprint. Simone Stortoni, Damiano Cunego and Pippo Pozzato have all also finished 2nd on a stage but again, none ever looked like actually winning. The best hopes of an Italian stage win remain entrenched with the old guard of Garzelli, Scarponi, Cunego and Pozzato. The Giro d’Italia has always been extremely indigenous over the years. The overall winners from 1997 until 2007 were all Italian. But since Contador and most recently Denis Menchov have broken the Italian stranglehold on the race, added to the lack of Italian results over the past couple of years and the number of high profile doping cases, Italian prospects are seeming forlorn indeed. The pressure will remain firmly on for an Italian to win a stage. A Giro d’Italia with no Italian stage winner? It’s never happened!

(Thanks to Paul Kelly for the idea for the post!)