Off the Ball is an Irish radio show which airs at 7 O’Clock on Newstalk every weeknight. They cover most all sports and it’s a very entertaining show which regularly features big name guests.

Paul Kimmage often features, as does Nicolas Roche and they’ve even had UCI President Pat McQuaid on from time to time (although he refuses to appear on air at the same time as Kimmage).

Earlier this week, I was listening to the show as they were previewing the Bayer Leverkusen vs Barcelona match in the UEFA Champion’s League. As usual when discussing all things Barcelona, they had Scottish journalist Graham Hunter on as a guest.

Graham Hunter - loves Barcelona

Now Hunter might not be to everyone’s liking. He seems to get offended if anyone dares utter a negative word against Barcelona and he has regularly had on-air altercations with the show’s co-host Ken Early.

He has become so embedded with Barcelona and their to-defeat-us-is-an-insult-to-football attitude , that his objectivity must be questioned. But in general, he is a respected journalist who also regularly appears on Sky Sports discussing Spanish football.

But before the Leverkusen game on Tuesday, he was asked about midfield playmaker Xavi’s participation in the match and he said the following:

Dr. Muller-Wohlfahrt uses 'homeopathic' methods

The Bayern Munich doctor that Hunter mentions is Dr. Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt. He is a controversial doctor who has been responsible for administering some controversial treatments such as injecting crushed pieces of the fleshy pink comb on a cockerel’s head into England cricket captain Michael Vaughan and injecting goat’s blood into sprinter Usain Bolt and England footballers Michael Owen and Steven Gerrard (among others).

This guy is football’s Eufemiano Fuentes.

But where are all the websites picking up this story? Where is the public outcry that Xavi, a player who has won all of the game’s major trophies in the last four years, is on drugs?

This past week has admittedly, been very bad for the image of cycling. The cases of three Tour de France winners all came to a head. Alberto Contador was banned for ‘two years’ and stripped of results, Jan Ullrich was also banned for ‘two years’ and stripped of results while the investigation into Lance Armstrong was dropped as the Texan remains as elusive as ever.

Mainstream media reporting on these stories I can understand, they are mainstream stories involving some of the cycling’s biggest ever names and cycling’s biggest race.

Football, football and more football

But why then do Sky Sports News feel the need to report on, for example, the disqualification of French track rider Gregory Baugé? They never think to report on Baugé when he wins a race.The only cycling related news that ever makes the headlines on this channel are when Team Sky win, or when someone (anyone) tests positive.

Sky Sports News spend about 45 minutes of every hour reporting on football. That’s over 30 hours of coverage (and counting) since Hunter revealed this information about Xavi taking growth hormones. Needless to say, they did not mention this revelation amongst their bloated, tiresome coverage of the UEFA Champion’s League, a trophy which Xavi won last year, as captain of Barcelona.

Earlier this year, a German T.V. show revealed that the winner of today’s stage of the Tour of Oman Marcel Kittel had undergone a blacklight treated blood transfusion. Kittel was forced to answer all sorts of doping-related questions. His Team 1T4i were also obliged to respond to the allegations (which they did so in an admirably diplomatic fashion).

Kittel described the experience as a nightmare and the worst day of his life. Xavi has experienced absolutely none of what Kittel went through.

The audio snippet above is akin to a cycling journalist such as Lionel Birnie revealing on a national radio show that he knows for a fact that Mark Cavendish takes EPO, but then move swiftly along to discuss Geraint Thomas’s qualities as a lead-out man.

But this is not cycling. This is football.

So nobody cares.

Martin described how he constantly doubts the quality of his work and whether the band deserve the success that they’ve achieved. He went on to divulge that as soon as he steps on stage he forgets all those fears and in his head, for the duration of the gig, he thinks that Coldplay are ‘the best fucking band in the world’. But as soon as he steps off the stage, the questioning and self-doubt return.

The accompanying headline that the magazine decided to run for this article was:

Coldplay - The best band in the world?

We’re the best fucking band in the world

Needless to say, the decision to extract this sentence out of the context in which it was spoken completely misrepresents what Martin was saying and misrepresents the entire article. It wrongly and grossly fueled the stereotype that Martin and Coldplay are up their own arses.

The point is, the author of the article didn’t come up with the headline, a sub-editor did.

The same could be said for William Fotheringham’s recent piece on the Guardian website which was given the headline:

Alberto Contador ban clears Olympic and Tour path for Bradley Wiggins

This headline suggests that the only thing standing in Wiggins’s way of winning the Tour de France and an Olympic gold medal was Alberto Contador, conveniently ignoring all other likely challengers like Cadel Evans, Andy Schleck, Tony Martin and Fabian Cancellara.

Bradley Wiggins - wants to become first Brit to win the Tour

The allusion of the headline was even questioned by the directeur sportif of the Garmin-Barracuda team, Jonathan Vaughters.

But what Fotheringham actually wrote in his article is slightly different:

Bradley Wiggins’s chances at the Tour de France and in the Olympic time trial have been improved by the banning of Alberto Contador, who will contest neither after being banned for his clenbuterol positive test in 2010. The odds on Wiggins winning the Tour were shortened after the ruling by the court of arbitration for sport to ban Contador until 5 August this year.

It’s a British view on things to be sure, but it’s a British publication. Fotheringham is merely stating facts whereas the headline, although using only slightly different wording, is more suggestive of the ultimate, now inevitable, success of Bradley Wiggins.

But perhaps Fotheringham should have looked a bit closer to home as to the obstacles that may impede Wiggins succeeding this summer.

The last time that Wiggins and Mark Cavendish raced as team-mates was at the summer Olympics in Beijing. The pair were taking part in the Madison event in the Laoshan velodrome. Wiggins had already won two gold medals, one in the individual pursuit and one in the team pursuit. Cavendish however, was in Beijing to compete in just one event.

The pair had previously combined to win the Madison world championships earlier that year in Manchester. But in the Madison final at the 2008 Olympics, it just didn’t click and they only managed to finish in ninth place.

Wiggins and Cavendish as Madison team-mates

Cavendish was left as the only member of the Great Britian team without an Olympic medal. He didn’t speak to Wiggins for weeks afterwards. But the pair eventually patched things up and have both spoken about a brotherly relationship that they share.

While both had Olympic gold in mind in 2008, their goals for 2012 are vastly different. Wiggins wants the yellow jersey, Cavendish wants the green. Since the re-introduction of trade teams to the Tour de France in 1969, a single team winning both Yellow and Green at the Tour with two different riders has only been achieved three times. It’s not easy.

To digress slightly, Cavendish is undoubtedly the best sprinter in the world. When he is an position to win a race, he very rarely gets beaten by anybody. But there are some sprinters who have cause to curse Cavendish more than others. Amongst the 79 road race wins that he has won thus far in his career, there are, naturally, some riders who he beats to the line more often than others.

Cavendish beats Farrar and Hushovd...again

The rider who Cavendish has beaten into second place in a bunch sprint most often is the American Tyler Farrar who has watched on eight times as the current world champion threw his hands up in victory right in front of him.

In joint second place, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Cavendish’s nemesis from the 2009 Tour de France, Thor Hushovd who has finished second behind him five times. But Hushovd shares this feat with Juan Jose Haedo who has also finished second behind Cavendish five times in races as diverse as the Tour of California, Vuelta a Espana, Tour of Denmark and the Volta a Catalunya.

If we widen this net to include both second and third places, the distribution is largely the same, apart from the results of Alessandro Petacchi, who jumps up to second place behind Farrar in the queue to resent Cavendish’s success.

One notable absentee from the list of riders who Cavendish has condemned to the minor placings is Marcel Kittel. The big German who is widely considered to have racked up the most ever victories as a neo-pro (now there’s a stat waiting to be disproved) has never come up against Cavendish in a bunch sprint.

Marcel Kittel may challenge Cavendish in 2012

In fact, the two have only ever contested the same race on three separate occasions. Two of the races were last year’s Scheldeprijs and last year’s Worlds road race, both of which Cavendish won (Kittel finished 36th and 176th respectively).

The only other race where both have been present is the 2011 Vuelta a Espana where Kittel won the first Grand Tour stage of his short career. But by that stage Cavendish had already abandoned and had not contested any of the bunch sprints.

Cavendish will see Kittel as just another rider who will be racking up second place finishes behind him, but the potential for rivalry between the two could be a highlight of the year.

Chris Martin may have doubts whether his band are the best in the world. But Cavendish has no doubts, he knows he’s the best in the world. And he’s going to keep on beating potential challengers to that title regardless of who they are.

However, in the height of summer at the end of July, it may not be Kittel or Haedo or Farrar or any other sprinter who will be cursing the loudest that Cavendish prevented them from winning, it may well be Bradley Wiggins.

In 1969, the great Belgian finished the race in the yellow jersey while also winning the green points jersey and the mountains prize. In addition, he won the combination jersey and his Faema team won the teams classification. In those days, there was no prize for the best young rider, but aged just 24, Merckx would have won that too. He won six stages that year, three time trials and three mountain stages and finished almost 18 minutes ahead of anyone else – total domination.

Freddy Maertens - Won 13 stages of the 1977 Vuelta, a record for any Grand Tour

Other famous total victories in Grand Tours are Freddy Maertens’ win in the 1977 Vuelta a Espana where he amassed a tally of 13 stage wins. There’s also the 1929 Giro d’Italia where Alfredo Binda won eight stages in a row on his way to overall victory. A win that was so dominant that he was paid not to compete the following year.

While there are many stories surrounding these and other famous victories, there are many less heralded Grand Tour champions who nevertheless remain on the roll of honour in the history books.

It is unfair to suggest that any Grand Tour winner is undeserving of victory, after all, every ride in the race faces the same route, but there have been some riders who achieved victory in a thoroughly underwhelming fashion.

Oxymoronically, the most famous underwhelming victory in a Grand Tour was probably the 1956 Tour de France won by Roger Walkowiak. In much the same way that Oscar Perieiro won the 2006 Tour, the Frenchman of Polish origin got into a breakaway in an early stage which finished a massive 18 minutes ahead of the peloton. Walkowiak lost the yellow jersey a few stages later but regained it again before Paris using his 18 minute buffer to full advantage.

Roger Walkowiak surprised everyone by winning the 1956 Tour de France

Walkowiak did not win a stage of the 1956 Tour de France. Furthermore, he didn’t even finish in the top three on any stage that year. Although he is remembered as an underwhelming and surprise winner of the Tour, the race itself was considered extremely exciting. A race report at the time reveals the following:

Whereas most of the post-war Tours have been on the lines of scientific boxing contests and often of little interest to the general public, the 1956 version was more like a good old free-for-all, with action from the word go.

By this reckoning, Walkowiak is a fighter rather than a calculator, and his surprising victory may well mark the revival of other fighters who for years have been battling away with no spectacular success in all corners of the continent.

Walkowiak is not alone in winning an edition of the Tour de France without winning a stage. There are six* others: Firmin Lambot (1922), Gastone Nencini (1960), Lucien Aimar (1966), Greg LeMond (1990), Oscar Pereiro (2006) and Alberto Contador (2010). However, Walkowiak remains the only Tour de France winner who has never won a stage in any edition of the Tour.

Also on Walkowiak’s palmarés are two stages of the Vuelta a Espana, one each in 1956 and 1957. Consequently, there are two candidates for the title of most underwhelming Grand Tour winner ever who were even more underwhelming than Walkowiak.

Marco Giovannetti was a rare Italian winner of the Vuelta a Espana in 1990. He finished the race in the gold leader’s jersey almost one and a half minutes ahead of runner-up Pedro Delgado. But, like Walkowiak in the 1956 Tour, he did so without winning a stage. And also like Walkowiak, Giovannetti won his Grand Tour without finishing in the top three of any stage.

Marco Giovannetti - won the 1990 Vuelta without winning a stage

However, unlike Walkowiak, Giovannetti never won a stage of any Grand Tour throughout his whole career. However, he did finish on the podium of the Giro d’Italia in 1990. And he’s also one of an elite group to have ridden and finished all three Grand Tours in the same year, a feat he managed in 1991.

These additional achievements by Giovannetti set him apart from the one other outstanding candidate for the most underwhelming Grand Tour winner ever – Angel Casero.

The Spaniard won his home Grand Tour in 2001 beating Oscar Sevilla and Levi Leipheimer into second and third place respectively.

Angel Casero

And like our other underwhelming champions, he won it without finishing in the top three of any stage.

However, there is a further detail which adds to the insipidity of Casero’s victory. Having only taken the race lead after overhauling Sevilla in the final stage time trial, he didn’t wear the leader’s jersey for the entire race. He has also never won a stage of either of the other Grand Tours.

Having won the 2001 Vuelta a Espana, Angel Casero, perhaps the most underwhelming Grand Tour winner of all time, never won another race.

Valverde won the stage thanks to the strength of his team. For the two laps of the circuit which brought the race over Willunga hill, there was a Movistar rider constantly at the front of the race, or thereabouts.

Before the decisive last two kilomtres, Valverde had Jose Ivan Gutierrez, and Angel Madrazo up the road.

Valverde after winning Stage Five of the 2012 Tour Down Under

The plan was for Valverde to bridge the gap to the front, then be aided by his team until the time came to launch the sprint for the finishing line. Which is exactly what happened. Valverde bridged and was shielded by Madrazo until the final few hundred metres where he latched on to Gerrans and sprinted by him for the stage win.

But the Movistar team cheated.

Riders performing a hand-sling in a velodrome

A hand-sling is a move used in the Madison track racing event. Rider A stretches his arm backwards waiting for his team-mate, Rider B, to come from behind and grab hold. Rider A then sacrifices much of his own momentum to propel Rider B forwards at a speed far greater than the speed at which he had initially approached Rider A.

‘Hand-sling’ is the colloquial term for this manouevre. It is known in the UCI rulebook as a flying relay. It is perfectly legal in Madison events on the track but during road racing it is forbidden.

But this is exactly what the Movistar team did when Jose Ivan Gutierrez gave Angel Madrazo a helping hand in the final kilomtres of Stage Five of the Tour Down under. This gave Madrazo the boost he needed to reach the leading group before Valverde’s group passed him out on the road. The result was that Madrazo was in a perfect position to aid his team leader in the final few hundred metres. A position which he may not have reached had he not cheated.

In 1972, former World Champion Hennie Kuiper won the Tour of Britain, finishing ahead of Marcel Duchemin. The Frenchman and his team lodged a complaint after the race claiming that the Dutch team had been giving Kuiper illegal hand-slings throughout the stage which ultimately led to Duchemin’s defeat. On this occassion, the complaint was ignored and Kuiper remained the winner.

But this was in an era where there weren’t several video cameras providing live high definition footage of the race. The footage of the alleged hand-slinging incidents was not available. For the 2012 Tour Down Under, this footage is available.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhtQFiPmoqg

Race incident number 9, article 12.1.040 of the UCI regulations states that the punishment for performing an illegal flying relay in a road race (amongst team-mates) is a fine of 200 Swiss Francs and a penalty of 10 seconds.

Having contacted the UCI about this matter. A spokesman responded saying:

We will receive the race report from the international commissaire designated at the Tour Down Under. I don’t know yet whether or not this rider has been sanctioned for this infringement. He should have been. If not, unfortunately, we cannot sanction a rider retroactively for such an infringement.

From checking the stage times and overall times of the riders in question, it appears that no time penalties were incurred, leading to the conclusion that neither Gutierrez nor Madrazo were penalised for this infringement.

Apparently, we have a case of the UCI not applying their own rules.

In the past, Alejandro Valverde tried to gain an edge over his rivals by cheating and was suspended for two years as a result. In his first race back in the peloton, he has already won a race by gaining an edge over his rivals via cheating. It’s a pity nothing was done about it at the time.

Same old Spaniard, always cheating…

Update: I followed up with the UCI asking them the following questions:

Since the riders in question have not been sanctioned, why is this the case? Whose responsibility is it to bring this matter to the UCI’s attention? Does a complaint need to be made by an opposing team? Do the race organisers need to inform the UCI? Or is it the UCI’s responsibility to remain aware of these sorts of incidents themselves?

Also, since it is now impossible to sanction these riders retroactively, how long after the incident occurs must the riders be informed that they are being sanctioned? Before the podium presentation at the end of the stage? Before the end of the day on which the infringement took place? Or is it before the end of the entire stage race?

A spokesman repsonded:

The international commissaires are supposed to sanction the rider and respectively the team.

In this case, if a commissaire saw it, Gutierrez should have been sanctioned. I don’t know whether or not a commissaire was around or not at the time Gutierrez gave a flying relay to Madrazo. We will see this in the race report from the Down Under that we will receive in the next few days. The UCI is officially informed through the race reports, even though sometimes we know it before, almost instantaneously by phone.

Something is sure, this is bad that this scene was covered live on TV. This is not a good image for cycling.

Normally, a complaint has to be made directly after the race, or stage, so that the commissaires panel together with the organiser can discuss it and make a decision before the ranking is drawn and transmitted. Retroactively, it is possible but always more complicated to sanction a rider, especially if no complaints have been made right after the race. As far as I know, only in very serious cases the UCI can sanction a rider retroactively.

So began a 200 year old connection between the two countries. A connection which has been strengthened recently, again for all the wrong reasons, by many more thousands of Irish fleeing their homes, this time in search of work. The big R has hit Ireland harder than most and the construction industry has ground to a halt. This has led to many tradesmen downing tools and applying for Australian visas in the past few years.

This week there will be another Irishman to add to the list of those making the trip around the world to ply their trade in Australia: Matt Brammeier.

Matt Brammeier will be the third Irish road race champion to take part in the Tour Down Under

Having been part of the HTC-High Road setup which folded last year, the Irish road race and time trial champion will be making his race debut for his new team, Omega Pharma-Quick Step.

He will most likely be playing a support role for either of the team’s two sprinters Gerald Ciolek or Gert Steegmans, both of whom have struggled to have the desired impact in recent years.

But Brammeier is not the first Irish cyclist to take part in the Tour Down Under. Nicolas Roche made his debut there for his current AG2R team in 2009 where he finished a decent 14th overall. He said afterward:

“It’s not bad for a first race, especially a ProTour event. Unfortunately it doesn’t get me any ProTour points though.”

(Showing a fixation on points which will be the topic of a whole other post).

Mark Scanlon rode the Tour Down Under as Irish national champion in 2003 (via cyclingnews.com)

Brammeier will also not be the first Irish rider to show off the national champion’s jersey Down Under. That honour befell former Junior World Champion Mark Scanlon. The Sligoman won the Irish jersey in Meath in the summer of 2002 and then rode the Tour Down Under the following year, also as part of the AG2R team and, like Roche, also in his first ever race for the team. He finished 19th overall and managed eighth on Stage 4 into Goolwa, the highest stage placing ever achieved by an Irish rider in this race.

The Irish champion’s jersey made one further appearance at the Tour Down Under in 2005 when David O’Loughlin, fresh from his first of three national road race wins, took part in the Tour Down Under as part of the Navigators Insurance Cycling Team, an American setup. O’Loughlin ended the race in 21st place, the best placed rider on his team and just over five minutes behind eventual overall winner Luis Leon Sanchez.

David O'Loughlin rode the Tour Down Under as Irish road race champion in 2005.

One of O’Loughlin’s team-mates that year on the Navigators Insurance team was Waterford man Ciaran Power who actually finished second to Scanlon in the national road race in Stamullen in 2002.

Consequently, Brammeier will be the fifth Irishman to fly the flag in the Tour Down Under.

There is a further, tenuously linked Irish interest to be had on Brammeier’s team as Andrew Fenn will make his World Tour debut in South Australia next Tuesday. Fenn is English but he rode last year as part of the An Post-Sean Kelly Team. He is a former winner of the Junior Paris-Roubaix and has also finished fifth and 10th in the Espoirs edition of the famous race. His biggest result to date is a bronze medal at the Under-23 World Championships last September. Andrew Fenn is definitely one to watch for the future.

With Brammeier likely to be on domestique duty we probably won’t see an end to the Irish famine of stage wins in the Tour Down Under but it should make for interesting viewing nonetheless.

The Spaniard ended up winning the race because of time bonuses. He accumulated 32 seconds more in time bonuses throughout the race than Froome. Thus, the Team Sky rider actually rode the race route 19 seconds faster than Cobo.

But did he really?

If you look at the finishing positions of both riders on every stage, there are plenty of stages where they both crossed the line as part of the peloton, who of course are all attributed the same finishing time (unless you finish in the top three and are awarded a time bonus). However, there are more stages where Cobo finished in the peloton ahead of Froome than vice versa.

Cobo beat Froome of Team Sky thanks to time bonuses.

So with a forensic analysis of the race footage to see what the actual time gaps were between the two riders on each stage, it could be argued that Cobo made up those 19 seconds by consistently finishing a few seconds ahead of Froome in the bunch and therefore actually did ride the route faster than anyone.

Of course this point is moot and borderline nonsensical, but it just goes to highlight that Froome wasn’t bothered about these time gaps because of the timing system used in the Vuelta a Espana. He knew he didn’t have to be bothered. He knew he would be tagged with the same time as long as there were no one-second gaps between any two consecutive riders finishing between himself and Cobo. Just as he knew that that same timing system would award a time bonus to the first three finishers over the line at the end of the stage.

Cobo knew this and Froome knew this and Cobo won.

The fact that Froome lost the Vuelta due to time bonuses doesn’t suggest that Froome was cheated out of victory by the timing system. It suggests that Froome lost the Vuelta to a rider who beat him in the race that they were taking part in.

Cobo had team-mates like Denis Menchov who were hoovering up bonus points so that Froome couldn’t, while Team Sky were busy weighing down Froome with a Bradley Wiggins-shaped anchor.

This is also not the first time that a rider has won a Grand Tour due to time bonuses.

In 1983 the World Champion Giuseppe Saronni won the Giro d’Italia where he finished 67 seconds ahead of runner up Roberto Visentini. But on a relatively flat Giro route, Saronni dominated the points jersey competition and amassed a massive tally of time bonuses.

Saronni won the 1983 Giro thanks to time bonuses

Bonuses of 30, 20 and 10 seconds were awarded to the first three riders across the line on every stage. Saronni racked up three stage wins, two second places and three third places throughout the three weeks of racing, which took a total of 2’40″ off his actual time. Visentini on the other hand only managed to gain one minute in time bonuses.

Consequently, had time bonuses not been awarded to the riders, Visentini would have won the 1983 Giro d’Italia by 33 seconds. But Saronni used his ability to sprint to ensure victory in Italy’s biggest race while in the Rainbow Jersey, the last rider to achieve this distinction.

The rule which states that all riders in the same group be attributed the same time is there for a reason, safety. It’s to prevent the mayhem which a bunch of 180 riders all clamouring for a position at the front of the peloton would create.

The rule which awards time bonuses at the end of stages is also there for a reason, excitement.

It ensures that sprinters can aim for the leader’s jersey of the race in the opening week. It adds a layer of uncertainty at the stage’s end as to who might be in the race lead. And, as with the two cases mentioned here, it can ultimately decide the race.

Currently, the Tour de France does not include time bonuses. Race organiser Christian Prud’homme has said this is to get back to basics and to award the Maillot Jaune to the rider who actually does complete the circuit in the fastest time (even though, as mentioned, the current Tour timing rules may inhibit this from being the case anyway).

Wilfired Nelissen would never have worn the Tour's Yellow Jersey if it wasn't for time bonuses.

But without time bonuses we no longer get the ding-dong battle for the Yellow Jersey between sprinters in the opening week of the race. Prud’homme rid the Tour of time bonuses in 2008 but if we consider previous Tours without time bonuses we would have been treated to some very average opening weeks.

If there had been no time bonuses in the 1993 Tour de France, having won the Prologue time trial, Miguel Indurain would have been in yellow for the entire race. Instead we saw the jersey swap shoulders five times between Mario Cipollini, Wilfred Nelissen and Johan Museeuw. It would have been a similar tale of monotony in the 1999 and 2002 Tours.

Having time bonuses in the Vuelta a Espana last year made the race all the more interesting, contributing to the fact that a total of nine riders wore the leader’s red jersey. It’s been said before, and it’ll be said again…bring back time bonuses at the Tour!

This is what champions do. They recon routes in the depths of winter. They attach a helmet cam to their heads as they do it. They watch the route video over and over in the days before the event. Then when it comes to the day itself, they are able to draw on all of the extra knowledge they’ve gained, thereby giving them a crucial edge over those opponents who are not willing to go to these lengths in their pursuit of victory.

Fabian Cancellara - cycling champion

Fabian Cancellara has won the World Individual time trial title four times and he is going to London to defend the Olympic individual time trial title he won in Beijing. Cancellara is a champion.

Andy Schleck is not.

It is well-known that time trialling is Schleck’s biggest weakness as a cyclist and is the major hurdle he must leap over before he will finally win the Maillot Jaune. This year’s Tour de France had just 41 individual kilometres against the clock. This was the lowest amount since this individual discipline was introduced to the Tour in 1934. Schleck was in the yellow jersey going into the final time trial, but he still didn’t win.

The 2011 Tour de France route had been announced the previous November. Schleck knows how bad he is at time trials and yet he chose not to recon the route of the only individual time trial in the race. He was asked on T.V. after the final time trial of last year’s Tour why he had chosen not to ride the route of the stage before the Tour. Schleck responded in an aloof manner saying that he thought he had done all he could to win the Tour.

Cadel Evans - Riding the time trial in the 2011 Criterium du Dauphiné

The organisers of the Tour de France, A.S.O., made it extremely easy for Tour contenders to get used to the time trial route when they decided to include the exact same route as part of the 2011 Criterium du Dauphiné in June. But Schleck didn’t even enter this race, opting to ride the Tour of Switzerland instead. Eventual Tour winner Cadel Evans rode this time trial in the Dauphiné and finished sixth. But more importantly, he was gaining information about cornering and gear selection for the Tour de France the following month.

If Schleck knows how poor his technique is at time-trialling and that this technique may cost him the Tour de France, then how could he not recon the route? How could he not record it on a helmet cam and watch it a dozen or more times before July? How could he not do everything possible to try and gain an advantage in any other way?

He has said himself: “I cannot lose the Tour again because of a time trial”.

It’s not like Schleck doesn’t have the time or effort to spare to gain these slight advantages. He doesn’t focus on any other stage race other than the Tour de France. He has entered 52 stage races as a professional cyclist and he has won none of them. He’s the first rider ever to finish the Tour de France in second place three years running.

Italo Zilioli - The first rider to finish second three years in a row in one of cycling's biggest races.

If you consider the nine biggest races in cycling (three Grand Tours, five monument classics and the Worlds road race), only two other riders have finished runner up in any of these races three years in a row. The first of these unfortunate riders was Italo Zilioli who finished second in the Giro d’Italia in 1964, 1965 and 1966. The other was Giuseppe Saronni, who finished second in Milan-San Remo between 1978 and 1980 before eventually winning the race in 1983. Schleck has now joined this unfortunate list.

However, there is a silver lining visible for Schleck in that same Cycling Weekly article which reported on Cancellara’s activities. That silver lining is Johan Bruyneel.

When discussing cyclists, the word ‘preparation’ comes laden with all sorts of negative connotations. And it is certainly no exception when mentioned in terms of how Bruyneel gets his riders ready for the Tour de France. But all doping-related undertones aside, Bruyneel knows how to prepare his star rider for the biggest race in the world.

Lance Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel won seven Tours de France together.

Lance Armstrong didn’t invent the idea of reconning Tour de France stages but under Bruyneel’s tutelage he certainly helped to popularise it. For Schleck’s sake, Bruyneel needs to instill an Armstrongian level of attention to detail, something which Schleck seems alarmingly reluctant to embrace:

Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France seven times and he would have done it with or without Johan Bruyneel. I know who I am and I know what I can do. I will not change my ways of doing things according to this or that manager.

Next year’s Tour de France route contains almost 100km of individual time trialling, more than twice the amount of kilometres over which Schleck managed to concede this year’s race to Cadel Evans.

No rider has ever finished second four times in a row in one of cycling’s biggest races. But Schleck shouldn’t be worried about becoming the first. With the amount of time trial miles in the 2012 race and less mountains than in previous years, unless he adopts a more professional approach towards his preparation he’s not even going to finish on the podium.

Roche once said that people shouldn’t look at their respective careers as separate entities, weighing up which one of them won which races. Instead, said Roche, we should put their career achievements together and view them as one.

These successes which brought so much joy to Irish cycling fans took place before I became one. Despite the recent resurgence spear-headed by another Roche along with Dan Martin and Philip Deignan, I can’t help but feel I missed out.

Fortunately, there are many ways for us to relive these moments.

Both Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche have books detailing all their ups and downs on the bike throughout their period of dominance.
Both riders also have DVDs documenting their life stories.

Sean Kelly even had a board game.

And in 1987, as he was on his way to winning the Tour de France, Stephen Roche had a song. It was written by Dermot Morgan of Father Ted fame for the radio show Scrap Saturday. And thanks to a very kind girl called Sinead, here ’tis resurrected from an old magnetic piece of tape housed in plastic, reborn as a living breathing digital sequence of numbers.

Get outta that saddle Stephen!

Mark Cavendish, the current World road race champion has broken these rules.

The following is a photo of Cavendish on the podium in Copenhagen shortly after accepting his prize for winning the biggest one-day race in cycling.

This is the style of jersey that every world champion wears with no exceptions.

An example of this jersey is provided by the UCI in their regulations.

The only difference between the jersey that Cavendish was presented with in Copenhagen and one which he wears from now on while racing should be the position of his team sponsors’ logos. The details of the size and positioning of the logos is clearly defined in the UCI’s regulations.

But Cavendish’s jersey which he was worn since his victory does not conform to these regulations. He has been wearing an odd variation which breaks the iconic rainbow stripes so they are not continuous around his torso.

While it doesn’t explicitly say in these regulations that the rainbow stripes must be continuous, it does say:

The design, including colours and layout, of each world champion’s jersey is the exclusive property of the UCI.
The jersey may not be reproduced without UCI authorisation. The design may in no way be modified.

In addition, these regulations also state that the world champion of one discipline cannot wear their world champion’s jersey while competing in another. For instance, world cyclo-cross champion Zdenek Stybar can wear his rainbow stripes whilst competing in cyclo-cross events over the winter. But as soon as he goes back to road racing with his Quick Step team, he has to revert back to the standard issue team kit.

Mark Cavendish has also disobeyed this rule by wearing his rainbow jersey as road race champion in a track meet in the UK Revolution series yesterday.

For breaking these rules he is subject to a fine of 10,000 Swiss francs. He is not likely to ride any more for HTC this year, so Team Sky will be providing him with a new world champion’s jersey anyway. But why the understated look?

By wearing his rainbow stripes on the track, even though he’s not supposed to, it sends the message that he wants to be seen as much as possible in the iconic jersey. But then, the jersey design sends exactly the opposite message.

At first glance it’s not entirely clear that he’s wearing the rainbow jersey at all. Does he not want to stand out and send the message ‘I’m Mark Cavendish and I’m the World Champion’?

Isn’t that the whole point?

Edit: Having contacted the organisers of the Revolution series, a spokesman responded with the following when asked about the legalities of Cavendish wearing the Rainbow Jersey at the recent series in the Manchester Velodrome:

The rules can only be applied to UCI events and Revolution is not a UCI event so we can get riders to wear anything we like.

Having also contacted the UCI, they repsonded with a different view on things:

Regarding the track exhibition race, [Cavendish] shouldn’t have worn his world champion jersey. But as far as I know, we cannot do anything in retrospect as it was certainly not a UCI recognized event or part of the International Calendar.

The rainbow is the exclusive property of the UCI and I can tell you that it is a nightmare to fight against misuses of this registered trademark! But we are going to be more and more severe according to the same.

The UCI also had this to say about Cavendish’s strange variation on the Rainbow Jersey which he wore at the Revolution series and at Paris-Tours:

Cavendish has already been fined for wearing neither a correct nor submitted jersey on the occasion of Paris-Tours 2011.

The category ‘Best Stage Race’ is rarely ever not the Tour de France in these retrospective lists. This is because it is the most famous race and many people deciding to fill out the voting form may not know their Paris-Nices from their Paris-Roubaixs. But this year, when people decided to give their vote to the Tour de France it seems to come with a caveat along the lines of ‘I know everybody always votes for the Tour de France, but this year’s really was the best stage race of the year’.

They’re not wrong, but I found that this year’s Vuelta a Espana was also massively intriguing. We saw one of the smallest winning margins of any Grand Tour ever. And in Juan Jose Cobo we were also presented with a winner who did not complete the 3,300km in the fastest time. Cobo beat Christopher Froome by 13 seconds thanks to time bonuses. The Team Sky rider clocked up the actual fastest time around the lap of Spain this year.

Froome and Cobo battling it out at the 2011 Vuelta a Espana

But these trivialities all became apparent after the fact. What made this year’s edition of the Vuelta so unusual and captivating was that the G.C. was being contested by riders who had never really challenged the G.C. in a Grand Tour before.

Cobo had managed a 10th place in the Vuelta back in 2009. Wiggins, lest we forget, rode himself into fourth place at the Tour de France the same year; but he managed that even before he realised himself that he may have a future as a Grand Tour rider. Froome’s best ever Grand Tour performance also came in 2009 with a modest 36th place in the Giro d’Italia.

None of the podium finishers of the 2011 Vuelta a Espana had ever finished on the podium of a Grand Tour before.

Three Grand Tour podium newbies.

While these seems like it may be a statistical abberation, it actually happens more often than you’d think. In fact, this year’s Vuelta is the 31st time that a Grand Tour podium has been filled with riders who had never had that particular honour before.

The last time it occurred was in the 2007 Giro d’Italia won by Danilo Di Luca whose previous best effort had been fourth in the same race in 2005. He was accompanied on the podium by a spotty kid called Andy Schleck who was making his Grand Tour debut and by Eddy Mazzoleni who had managed a 10th place in the 2003 Giro.

But if we add in this year’s fourth place Vuelta finisher Bauke Mollema, this makes the top four of the Vuelta having never finished on the podium of a Grand Tour. To find the last time this happened in any Grand Tour we have to go a lot further back than 2007.

It was the Vuelta a Espana in 1985 the last time the top four finishers in a Grand Tour had all never finished on the podium of a three week race. Pedro Delgado was the winner that year, who of course would go on to win the Tour de France in 1988. Just behind him in second place, after the Spaniards ganged up on him, was Robert Millar who had won the King of the Mountains at the Tour but this was the first of three visits he would eventually have to a Grand Tour podium.

Pedro Delgado

Third place in the 1985 Vuelta a Espana went to Francisco Rodriguez who also won two stages and finished third in both the points and mountains classifications. Prior to this, his best result of note was winning a stage of the Dauphiné Libéré the previous year. And finally in fourth place was Pello Ruiz Cabestany who had won the Tour of the Basque Country that year and would go on to finish fourth again at the Vuelta in 1990.

But in 1985, the notion of challenging for the G.C. was new to all of these riders, just as it was to Cobo, Froome, Wiggins and Mollema at the Vuelta this year.

At the Tour de France, we knew that Cadel Evans, Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador were capable of finishing on the podium. Between them, they had done it 11 times before at Grand Tours. The excitement lay in the occasions where they bucked the trend of all riding to a summit finish together at the head of the field.

Andy Schleck winning Stage 18 of the 2011 Tour de France after an unexpected attack on the penultimate climb.

Two of the most memorable moments of the Tour were when Contador cracked on the climb to Luz Ardiden and when Andy Schleck attacked with 60km to go on to stage to Serre Chevalier. These moments were memorable because they were out of the ordinary.

At the Vuelta we were presented with a more subtle layer of intrigue, but every mountain stage was out of the ordinary because Cobo, Froome, Wiggins and Mollema had never found themselves making the race at a Grand Tour before.

Every day we were wondering just how far each of these riders would make it. Would this be the day that they finally cracked, thus proving they didn’t have what it takes to make it on to the podium? This is also the reason why we were so captivated every day by Thomas Voeckler’s performance at the Tour. We just didn’t know what he was capable of. And neither did he.

So while the Tour de France might make it to the top of all the ‘Best Stage Race’ of the year lists, the Vuelta had it’s own charm and mystery. From one point of view, the Vuelta lacks the gravity to pull the sport’s big names towards it, which may be true. But is this very reason, the lack of big names, that made the Vuelta so unpredictable and is perhaps a worthy runner up in the category of the ‘Best Stage Race’ of 2011.