By Joe Lindsey
As far as trash talk goes, it’s pretty hard to beat “Scoreboard, baby.”
And after a week of taking some public criticism for its tactics at the Tour of Flanders, the Garmin-Cervelo team responded handily by winning the 2011 Paris-Roubaix in a show of total strength.
Their principal victim was none other than Leopard-Trek’s Fabian Cancellara, who at the finish sounded by turns frustrated and philosophical about the way his Classics season has gone so far.
Much was made of Cancellara pulling alongside the Garmin team car after the pivotal Mons-en-Pevele sector and appearing to protest the American team’s tactics.
Cancellara has a word with Hushovd's directors.
It was a crucial moment in the race. A medium-sized break was up the road, but Cancellara’s move on the five-star Pevele sector succeeded in cracking the chase down to a highly select trio of himself and former Roubaix podium finishers Thor Hushovd (Garmin-Cervelo) and BMC Racing’s Alessandro Ballan.
The break was dangling at just 35 seconds, disintegrating under the force of the chase and the pounding of the cobbles. But when Cancellara flicked his elbow to signal Hushovd to take a pull, the big Norwegian stayed glued to the defending champ’s wheel.
Thus Cancellara’s displeasure, conveyed clearly through his expansive gestures. “I do think Ballan and Hushovd rode against me,” he said later, although he was also gracious and genuine in congratulating eventual winner Johan Van Summeren at the finish.
But even if Hushovd wanted to chase (a replay of the moment shows him briefly banging on his handlebars in seeming frustration), it would have been a terrible idea.
He had Van Summeren up the road in the break and another teammate – Sep VanMarcke – trying to close the gap behind. Hushovd had already tried two accelerations and failed to shake Cancellara.
While Thor is world champion and a perennial top finisher at Roubaix, a chase would have accomplished little other than bringing the most dangerous man in the race right to the front.
And whatever you thought of the break’s chances, at that point it still included a former winner (FDJ’s Frederic Guesdon) and several dangerous riders with a history of decent Roubaix results like RadioShack’s Gregory Rast.
Of particular focus for Garmin, however, was Van Summeren, who was nobody’s favorite or even fashionable dark horse entering the event, but who had finished 8th in 2008 and 5th in 2009.
(As an aside, for all that the criticism again focused on Garmin, BMC was in an identical position: top Roubaix contender in the Cancellara move – Ballan has two podium finishes here and is a former world champion – and a serious teammate up front; Quinziato was ninth at Roubaix in 2009. They made the exact same decision as Garmin – so if you criticize Garmin for it, include BMC in your ire.)
Before coming to Garmin last season, “Summie” rode for leader Leif Hoste at Silence-Lotto. Nicknamed the Camel, Van Summeren is neither a climber nor a sprinter, but a rouleur – he can lay down the power for long periods of time, a strength he used for years riding tempo on the front of stage races for sprinters like Robbie McEwen or overall contenders such as Cadel Evans.
Van Summeren is a blue-collar bike racer whose usefulness to his team and willingness to ride himself into the ground for them means that his Roubaix win is not only the biggest win of his career, or the biggest win in Garmin’s history as a team, but also just his third individual victory ever, and first since the 2007 Tour of Poland.
This long discussion of palmares serves a point: No one else might’ve given Van Summeren a shot, but Garmin’s directors, including Classics advisor (and former Roubaix winner) Peter Van Petegem and GM Jonathan Vaughters, clearly did.
And they made absolutely the right calls, from the decision to have Hushovd sit on to Van Petegem’s call to bet it all on Van Summeren to Vaughters’ insistence on waiting for the Carrefour de l’Arbre section for the crucial move.
Every single one of those calls had to go right to beat Cancellara, who rallied to chase down the remnants of the break and win the sprint for second, and whose 19 second deficit to Van Summeren showed that had Summie gone on, say, the Camphin sector just before Carrefour, he might not have had enough gas in his tank, or air in his tire, to stay clear of the hard-charging Swiss.
But go right they did. And key to that was Hushovd’s willingness to sit on. Although this was his race target for the whole year, Hushovd was gracious at the finish, declaring that he was happy as long as the team won.
Cancellara might well have been the strongest rider on Sunday, but he was beat by a team effort, and partly because he himself did not have much team support.
It’s fashionable to bash on Leopard-Trek because it was the top-ranked team even before the start of the season. That’s not my point here.
But it’s instructive to note that at the 2010 Tour of Flanders, Cancellara had seven Saxo Bank teammates to set the pace on the Oude Kwaremont, and a valuable foil in Matti Breschel. This year, he was all alone.
At Roubaix, he had his own teammate in the obligatory early break – Kasper Klostergaard – and Dominic Klemme was along to help. This year, Cancellara’s last teammate disappeared with more than 60km yet to race.
Roubaix is a race of luck and circumstance, as Quick Step’s horrendous day – a mechanical that cost Tom Boonen three minutes in the crucial Arenberg forest; crashes for Boonen and Chavanel and countless flats – showed.
But no fewer than six of Cancellara’s teammates failed to finish, and the next-closest Leopard rider was Klemme, in 94th, helpless to assist his leader.
Leopard-Trek has nothing to be disappointed in, at either Flanders or Roubaix – they were simply beat in both races by combinations of tactics and luck, and that’s bike racing.
And while Cancellara might be frustrated by other teams’ tactics, putting a teammate in the early break and marking the prohibitive favorites are ancient tactics in the sport – Leopard knew and expected they would be employed, and simply did not effectively counter.
But neither does Garmin have anything to apologize for or justify in the way it won Roubaix. In fact, that it was Van Summeren instead of one of the team’s stars underlines what I wrote months ago – that team-building takes time and careful, hard work.
Garmin is just now benefiting from that patient work. And even the most powerful individual rider in the world needs a team.
Roubaix Winners
I’m not doing losers here because, at Roubaix, it’s pretty hard to tell who really lost and who’s just unfortunate. Much as Filippo Pozzato is a whipping boy for the press, is it really his fault his team car had a flat when he had a mechanical himself? So, three clear victors on the day other than Garmin:
-Rabobank: Maarten Tjallingi was the last survivor of the original 8-man break that went clear after 100km. Add in 158.9 more kilometers and Tjallingi somehow survived to take third. And Lars Boom not only put on a clinic of riding skills but also showed that his transition from cyclocross to road has some serious promise.
When they get Breschel back to full health, they’ll be formidable next season.
-HTC: The winningest team in the world isn’t often overlooked but at Roubaix it had no clear favorites or leaders. Instead, it played an aggressive role, with Lars Bak jumping in the second break and holding on for fifth and young neo-pro Jonathan Degenkolb a promising 19th after sitting right on Hushovd and Cancellara’s wheel in some of the heaviest moments.
-FMB and Dugast: Left for dead by enthusiast cyclists years ago, tubulars are on the rebound, spurred by both modern carbon wheel designs and the resurgence of handcrafted art by the likes of Dugast and FMB.
Neither company sponsors a pro team but at Roubaix their tires are everywhere. Simply put, nothing beats the ride and feel of a high-quality tubular. And, as Van Summeren showed, it’s also possible to ride 5km on a softening tire – a clincher would’ve cost him the race.
Final thought: Here’s Van Summeren’s Garmin Connect log for the race. It doesn’t include power, but two figures stand out. 1) Who knew there was 4,600 feet of climbing in Roubaix? and 2) Summie burned almost 10,000 calories.
Source: http://bicycling.com/blogs/boulderreport/2011/04/11/garmin-demonstrates-team-power/
No comments:
Post a Comment