|
|||
|
|||
Chairman Bill's Blog |
|||
September 15, 2008
The question about the 2008 Tour I get asked most often is some form of, “Was the Tour de France ridden clean?”
My answer is, “Clean enough.”
We can’t really know if the best riders were using banned substances, but the evidence looks good that they didn’t. For me, the most striking feature of the 2008 Tour was the slower speeds at which the riders ascended the giant climbs.
While it is an imprecise tool because road conditions and gradients vary, sports physiologists can measure a rider’s climbing ability by measuring his VAM, or Velocita Ascensionale Media (average rate of ascent). It’s an Italian acronym because Dr, Michele Ferrari, one of Lance Armstrong’s coaches, devised it. VAM is usually given in vertical meters gained in an hour.
Through the late 1990s and early 2000’s, the very best climbers like Pantani and Armstrong were VAMing (if I may invent a verb) at about 1800 meters an hour. In the 2006 Giro d’Italia, winner Ivan Basso VAMed the Colle San Carlo at close to a staggering 2,000 meters an hour. If Pantani had been in that stage, he would have been dropped like a stone.
Early in the 2008 Tour the Saunier Duval (SDV) team of Riccardo Riccò seemed to be riding on another level. Tour favorites Cadel Evans, Carlos Sastre and Alejandro Valverde and the other angels of the mountains could not climb with the astonishing SDV riders. Partway through the Tour Riccò was found to have used EPO and his team left the Tour in disgrace (see my July 18 posting below). It’s generally assumed that the miraculous climbing abilities of the rest of the team can also be attributed to banned substances. Let’s look at the numbers for 2008.
The figures I have are a bit imprecise, but it looks like the rates for Evans, Menchov, Sastre, etc. were significantly slower than either the SDV riders or climbers of recent past Tours. A good example was stage 15 to Prato Nevoso. The group with the good guys, Kohl, Sastre, Valverde, Menchov, etc., gained about 1,500 vertical meters an hour. The highest VAM I can find for a stage that didn’t involve Saunier Duval riders is about 1,650 meters an hour.
Compare those rates to that of stage 10, won by SDV riders who went up at 1,800 meters an hour. Stage winner Leonardo Piepoli (a domestique!!) was actually climbing faster than 1,800 meters an hour, but he had to wait a bit for his teammate.
When the SDV guys were tossed, the race seemed to become one between near equals who raced like normal, albeit gifted, human beings.
For now, I think we are enjoying a rare moment when the dope testers and enforcers have the advantage. The Tour was clean enough for me to feel that we had the pleasure of watching a real bike race. Let’s hope it lasts.
July 18, 2008:
Another charlatan was unmasked. Riccado Riccò, who came in second in this year's Tour of Italy and had already won 2 stages in this year's Tour de France was found to be using a banned drug to steal his victories. He was immediately booted from the Tour, the third such rider in this years edition to earn a one-way ticket home. Unbeknownst to Riccardo Riccò, anti-doping scientists had developed a test for the latest generation of the performance enhancing drug EPO (called CERA or Continuous Erythropoietin Receptor Activator), the drug he is accused of using.
Until recently the dopers were always several steps ahead of the testers. I believe that a corner has been turned. Several teams have vigorous and very expensive internal anti-drug programs. Riccò's team, Saunier Duval, did not and his sponsors are paying the price of having their name dragged through the mud. I am sure that if the team is around next year (which is looking unlikely), they will have an effective system to keep their riders clean
It is important to understand that since the beginning of bicycle racing on high wheelers, drugs have infected the sport. I'll cite my favorite example. Midway through the third stage of the 1924 Tour de France, Henri Pélissier (winner of the 1923 Tour) abandoned. Journalist Albert Londres found him drinking hot chocolate at a train station restaurant. The interview Pélissier gave is still important. After explaining what the suffering racers endured he showed Londres the various pills and potions he took to both improve his performance and mitigate his misery. "We run on dynamite," he said.
After more than 70 years, it's only the types of dynamite that have changed.
Over the years authorities have been helpless in the face of rampant drug use. Now, the tide is changing a little bit. There will always be cheaters. But for now, breaking the rules is a little bit riskier. So, when I see pictures of a racer who has been caught with dope in his system doing a perp walk, I don't wring my hands in agony. I am happy that progress towards a clean sport is being made. It's not pretty, but this is the only way it will happen.
February 13, 2008:
ASO, the organizers of the Tour de France, Paris-Nice and Paris-Roubaix will not be inviting Astana to their events in 2008. This comes after The Giro made a similar exclusion. This bars Alberto Contador, the 2007 winner as well as Levi Leipheimer, the 2007 third place.
Here is the ASO press release: "A.S.O. has decided not to invite Astana on the events that it organizes in 2008, based on the damage caused by this team during the 2008 Tour de France and to cycling in general, both in 2006 and 2007. The Astana team has indeed betrayed, last year, the confidence of the organizers that had invited them based, already, on their faith of a renewal announced by its leaders. However, as the team has once again changed, A.S.O. will remain careful at the efforts that Astana will set up to live a 2008 season without affairs or suspicion, and could then reconsider a possible candidacy for its future events."
This all invites no end of speculation.
Astana has instituted a rigorous anti-doping program. Yet ASO, which is very, very tired of dope scandals, has to be concerned by Astana since it is run by Johan Bruyneel. Bruyneel was an enthusiastic recruiter of Operation Puerto riders. Remember Bruyneel got burned by his signing of Ivan Basso, whom Bruyneel was planning on bringing to the Tour. Contador has been dogged by Operation Puerto allegations as well. One can't help but wonder if Contador had been more forthcoming and given a DNA sample to clear himself instead of making truculent, meaningless defenses ("I don't have to prove everything to everyone") if this very sad exclusion would have come to pass. It no longer suffices to maintain that one has passed all the dope tests. That fairy tale went up in smoke with David Millar.
January 28, 2008:
My Favorite Racer
The word "hero" gets used to describe athletes all too often. When a great sportsman does something great, something that beats all rational expectations, we succumb to calling him a hero. Yet, almost always the athlete is performing magnificently for his own benefit. There is nothing wrong with this and in fact, a person accomplishing some noteworthy deed fits the dictionary definition of hero. To me, however, heroic people should be doing something for the good of others or at least show that they have a good heart and do altruistic things.
That brings me to my favorite Tour de France racer, François Faber, the winner of the 1909 Tour. He was a blessed with every gift. He was big, powerful, and handsome and seemed to possess limitless endurance.
1907 and 1908 Tour winner Petit-Breton said that he was passing the baton to his teammate François Faber. The 1909 Tour would be a worthy test for the big man. Faber was nicknamed “The Giant of Colombes” for the suburb of Paris that he then called home. For the time, he was truly a large man, being about 6 feet (1.86 meters) tall and weighing 200 pounds (91 kilos). Even today, that is huge for a man in the business of winning Grand Tours.
The Alcyon cycling team had finally put together a first-class squad, hiring Faber away from Peugeot. The Alcyon manager, Alphonse Baugé, who earlier had been an inexperienced neophyte, was now a knowledgeable and wily veteran.
The peloton for the start of the 1909 edition was big. 150 riders decided to take their chances. If they had known what they were in for, they might have reconsidered. The riders were forced to compete, even by the standards of the time, under appalling conditions.
Cyrille Van Houwaert won the first of the 14 stages. Then Faber went on a tear. He performed the unequaled feat of winning 5 stages in a row.
The second stage, 398 kilometers from Roubaix to Metz, was ridden entirely in freezing rain. Faber, all power and strength, rode the second half of that stage solo in a magnificent breakaway. He was now leading in the overall standings.
Stage 3 went over the Ballon d’Alsace. Faber took the snow- and ice-covered mountain by himself and finished a half hour in front of Gustave Garrigou. The next rider, Eugene Christophe, came in an hour later.
Stage 4 was another epic Faber adventure. Coming into Lyon, the finish town, he broke his chain. The most famous picture of Faber shows him pushing his bike at a full run on the wet streets of Lyon, his right hand holding his bike by the bars, no chain to be seen. The crowd is thick and deep, all bundled up against the strange cold weather of that July. Even with all this trouble, he still beat the next rider by 10 minutes.
The man was unbelievable. The next stage, which took in the Col de Porte, was held in wind so strong that Faber was twice knocked off his bike. He even had a horse knock him down and kick his bike away. Still Faber remounted and pressed on and again won alone.
He wasn’t done. Stage 6, with the Col Bayard and Côte de Laffrey, didn’t slow down the huge Faber. Yet again he won alone.
Faber had some bad luck in the next few stages, but won again in stage 10. The weather during that first week had been so bad that after 7 stages 77 riders abandoned.
The final stage saw another rider with a broken chain run with his bike for a victory. Jean Alavoine got his crippled bike across the line first for the 13th Alcyon stage victory out of a possible 14. Alcyon took the first 5 places in the final stage and the first 5 places in the final General Classification. Their dominance was more complete than Peugeot’s in the 1908 Tour. Faber’s victory is also notable in that the stages he won were the hardest and run in the worst weather.
The Final 1909 Tour de France General Classification:
So where is the generosity of spirit that I was looking for? When Faber raced, he was willing to share his food with other racers. Strange as it may seem, if there were no food immediately available during the impossibly long stages of the era, Faber would go foraging for sustenance and shared what he found with his competitors.
It was his death that was so sad and so truly heroic. In World War One the powerful giant died, shot in the back while carrying a wounded comrade back to the French lines through no man’s land.
December 23, 2007.
I've promised a lot of my friends that I would be giving them their Christmas presents via my blog and here it is.
Cycling writer and all around good-guy Les Woodland sent me the link to a French site that is an archive of old newsreels, TV footage and videos. The directions in the site are in French, but it's pretty intuitive. You can work your way around it without any trouble. You'll find Tom Simpson collapsing on Mt. Ventoux, Roger Pingeon riding away from the field in the Roubaix-Jambes stage in the 1967 Tour. As Owen Mulholland said to me after I sent him the link, we all knew thse films were stored away somehwere, but none of us ever had any real hope of seeing them.
So here's a link to one of the most interesting and remembered stages in Tour history, the 1964 climb up Puy de Dome.
Stage 20, 1965 Tour de France.
Now, for those want to have the stage put into context:
Anquetil was now the leader of the Tour, ahead of Poulidor by 56 seconds. Bahamontes was third at 3 minutes, 31 seconds. Groussard paid the price defending the Yellow for 10 days, and lost 6 minutes. It was now a 2-man race.
Stage 20, with its finish at the top of the Puy de Dôme, was the scene of the 1964 Tour's most dramatic showdown. The Puy de Dôme is an extinct volcano in the center of France. It has an elevation gain of 515 meters in only 6 kilometers. It averages 9%, but gets steeper as the road approaches the summit. The tenth kilometer is almost 13% before it backs off a bit to between 11 and 12%. The final kilometer is still a tough 10%. With such a hard incline, its total 14 kilometers could transform the Tour. Poulidor was the better climber and a tired Anquetil knew it.
Probably 500,000 spectators lined the roads of the old volcano, sure that there would be fireworks that day. Upon reaching the Puy, Julio Jimenez and Federico Bahamontes took off up the mountain. This was as Anquetil wanted. This break took the time bonuses out of play. Poulidor would be riding for just the time gain he might acquire by beating Anquetil if he were so lucky. Poulidor and Anquetil were otherwise unconcerned about the Spanish escape because neither Jimenez nor Bahamontes would be likely to take the Yellow. They were worried about each other. Instead of sitting on Poulidor's wheel, Anquetil rode next to him trying to gain the psychological edge. Neither felt very well. "I never felt again as bad on a bike," Poulidor said later. Anquetil felt worse.
As they closed in on the summit, Poulidor attacked and Anquetil stayed with him. "All I cared was that I was directly next to Raymond. I needed to make him think I was as strong as he, to bluff him into not trying harder."
Poulidor attacked again. Anquetil stayed with him. There is a famous picture of Anquetil and Poulidor bumping into each other while climbing the volcano, neither giving in the slightest bit; each trying to cow the other; each riding at his limit.
 |
||
| Stage 20: Here they are in one of the most famous duels in cycling history: Anquetil and Poulidor on the the Puy de Dôme | ||
Passing under the Flamme Rouge (1 kilometer to go flag), Anquetil's attention lapsed for just a moment and he let Poulidor go. There was nothing Anquetil could do. He was spent. Poulidor poured on the gas, racing for the finish line and hoping to erase the 56-second deficit and finally don the Yellow Jersey. He waited at the finish, counting off the seconds.
Anquetil crossed the line, limp with exhaustion, 42 seconds later. He had saved his lead by 14 seconds. Magne, Poulidor's manager, believes that Poulidor could have won the Tour that day if he had used a 42 x 26 as Bahamontes used instead of the 25 that he led Magne to believe was the right choice.
There was the formality of the final time trial in which Anquetil put another 21 seconds between himself and Poulidor. With the time bonus, Anquetil won his astounding fifth Tour de France by 55 seconds over Poulidor.
Poulidor said, "I know now that I can win the Tour." He never did. He never eevn spent a single day in yellow.
Final 1964 Tour de France General Classification:
December 16, 2007
I love the smell of schadenfreude in the morning. Last week's Mitchell report documented what had been obvious to almost all of us for a long time, that those giant walls of flesh playing baseball have been taking banned, performance-enhancing drugs. "At last," said several of my cycling friends, "there is some justice. Another sport is in the media's crosshairs and finally cycling isn't the only sport that has a doping problem."
Most fans felt that given the earnest efforts of many in cycling to clean up the sport, the black eye that has seemed to follow bicycle racing for years was unfair. This seemed particularly so given that other sports have been clearly giving doping a wink and a nod.
First of all, the bad doping reputation cycling has is well earned and we shouldn't descend into the swamp of moral relativism, feeling that cycling shouldn't get the attention it has been getting because others are worse and cycle racing is struggling to deal with dope. It is precisely that attention that is forcing the cleanup. Tom Simpson isn't the only cyclist to die a doper's death. We don't know how many cyclists died in their sleep because of overuse of EPO, but we know that it did happen.
The circumstances involving doping in baseball are different from cycling but just as insidious. Baseball management has been working hard to give every possible advantage to offense (the batter). Writer Dave Zirin has noted that after the 1994 players' strike baseball embraced a smaller strike zone, harder bats and smaller ball parks. Add to this a new generation of steroid and human growth hormone-laced batters wielding their bats with unprecedented power and we have, voila, fan-filled stadiums. We love big lumber. We go crazy when the ball gets smacked out of the park. Remember the excitement that Mark McGuire's home-run record chase caused? That was money flowing into the team owners' pockets.
We now know that the players were so brazen and felt so safe about their doping that they were having their drugs shipped directly to their clubhouses. To think that the owners, who are not stupid people (they are brilliant billionaires) were unaware of the change in the size and power of their players and had no clue as to the cause challenges credulity. If I knew why ball players were now so big and strong, the owners certainly did as well. The Mitchell report says that the owners were "slow to act". Of course they were. They were making a fortune off the results of the doping. Baseball's revenues are currently about 6 billion dollars, up from about 4.4 billion in 1994. Why mess with a good thing?
Over the last few years the suspicions about ballpayers' doping has grown into a near-certainty. The owners knew they had to do something, or at least look like they are doing something. Remember, baseball has a congress-sanctioned anti-trust exemption and does not want to lose it. So they commissioned Senator Mitchell to perform his investigation and write his report. It appears to put all the heat on the players and trainers and almost no blame goes to the management except as part of a overall collective failure. Big whoop.
It would appear that baseball's owners are in the same position that bicycle racing was in the mid 1960s when the European governments told racing that if it didn't start trying to clean up doping, then government would. The baseball team owners want to fend off both congressional action and the outrage of the public by doing the absolute minimum necessary to fend off the anger.
By the way, in case you have forgotten what baseball players used to look like, here's the greatest. Scroll down to the picture labeled "The Swing".
See the long rangy, body? He looks a bit like a stick figure compared to today's players. But that's what an athlete is supposed to look like.
So, how does cycling's case differ?
I believe doping in cycling grew out of the staggeringly difficult and almost impossibly long races that were the norm at the end of the 19th century. Riders took strychnine, chloroform, brandy, cocaine; anything to dull the pain and allow them to get through the ordeal. Out of this grew a riders' doping culture that became almost formalized with a code of behavior. No rider, even in retirement, spoke about doping to the press. A code of silence as effective as the "omerta" of the Mafia was imposed. As doping grew in sophistication and cost, the riders continued to behave as if they had a right to dope and intimidated anyone who spoke out (witness the treatment of Paul Kimmage after he wrote "Rough Ride", and Armstrong's intimidation of Filippo Simeoni).
The institutionalization of doping in cycle racing is exacerbated by the management of teams by ex-riders. Team management of doping programs are a natural outgrowth of this process. When asked about doping, the UCI's previous boss, Hein Verbruggen, has talked about the low number of positives (for undetectable drugs!), obviously thinking we have stupid written all over our faces. But again, another member of cycling's elite who has been co-opted by the doping culture.
So, where does that leave us today? Doping detection has been vastly improved. Many teams are paying more than lip service to anti-doping programs. The 2007 Tour, for the first time in years, was raced at a lower average speed than the last several years. Yet...the climbs were assaulted at the same speeds as during the Pantani era when we knew the best riders were fueling up on EPO. Better training and nutrition? I think not.
The explanation for this comes from a doping lab that did a blood analysis and found that the Tour's top 30 riders in GC had a general tendency to have manipulated blood values and the rest of the peloton appeared to be clean.
The domestiques riding tempo at the front all day have the biggest effect on the Tour's average speed, since the captains don't stick their noses into the wind unless and until it is necessary. And those domestiques seem to have decided that the high costs of doping with the necessary and expensive advice and management from a doping expert, combined with the threat of a career-ending penalty if caught, is not worth the risk and cost.
So the grunts go clean and race the best they can. Yet, up at the pointy part of the peloton on the climbs, one's suspicions remain unallayed.
The racers and team managers are in an arms race. If the other teams dope then they either surrender all chance of victory (Telekom's excuse) or join in the needle fest. To today's big-time race promoters, it's a distracting mess that degrades the value of their product. The Tour is just as exciting when raced at 37.5 km/hr when LeMond won as at the 41.5 km/hr of the recent editions. I know, race promoters in years past were not so innocent. Henri Desgrange, the Tour founder, even recommended amphetamines
Things are better in cycling now but it has a long way to go.
Baseball hasn't even started to do serious testing and we haven't heard anything from football, basketball and golf.
When ball players go back to looking like Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and cyclists climb L'Alpe d'Huez at the same speed as Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault, then I'll believe things are clean.
Until then, I'll still watch my favorite sports because they are so beautiful, no matter what the condition of the athletes and I'll continue to hold my nose.
December 8, 2007.
Last posting (directly below), I was partway through the story of the 1924 Giro d'Italia and its most interesting entrant, Alfonsina Strada. If you are coming to this page cold, scroll down to November 30 to get up to speed before reading this posting:
So, Alfonsina was more or less holding her own in the second most important and perhaps most difficult race in the world and Federico Gay was leading in the General Classification:
On stage 7, things tightened up considerably. As the Giro moved north from Foggia, Gay lost 12 minutes on the 304-kilometer stage that finished in L’Aquila.
The General Classification now stood thus:
It was in stage 8, from L’Aquila to Perugia that both Strada’s and Gay’s fortunes shifted. The weather was horrific with hard rain and powerful winds that lashed the riders. Gay lost 40 minutes and the stage winner Giuseppe Enrici assumed the lead. Strada suffered numerous falls and flat tires. Remember, Italian pre-war roads in Southern Italy were almost impassible when it rained. She arrived well after the cutoff time in Perugia after completing 296- kilometer stage. The judges had a fierce argument as to whether she should be allowed to continue, considering her bad luck and courageous riding. She had broken her handlebars in one crash and had used a piece of broken broomstick to make the repair. The disqualifiers won out and Strada was no longer an official classified rider in the 1924 Giro. But Columbo (the Giro boss), still very conscious of the publicity Strada gave the race, let her continue riding, even going so far as to pay for her room and board. I can’t see Desgrange (Tour de France boss) ever considering letting a non-competitive rider complete the Tour after being disqualified. Desgrange wanted his Tour de France pure and nearly impossible to complete.
When Strada came into Fiume at the end of the tenth stage, she was hurt and crying after a bad crash. The cheering crowds lifted her from her bike. Enrici added almost 9 minutes to his lead over Gay.
Enrici maintained his lead to the end, winning his only Giro.
Strada ended up making it all the way to Milan, riding all 3,610 kilometers. She finished 38 hours behind Enrici, not bad when the last classified finisher, Telesforo Benaglia was thirty-eighth, over 20 hours behind. Strada was never allowed to ride the Giro again although she continued to compete all over Europe. In her time, she must have been quite the celebrity. The famous Italian writer Dino Buzzoti wrote that when he was a boy, riding in a park in Milan he saw Alfonsina riding and managed to stay with her for 2 laps before “exploding”. He said that after that she shot of down the path like an arrow.
Let’s raise a glass to Alfonsina, a courageous and fine athlete who only wanted to ride and race her bike. She rode in an era of single-speed bikes where competing in races of staggering length in a country with often abominable roads was the standard for all. It’s a shame she was born 60 years too soon.
1924 Giro d’Italia final General Classification
November 30, 2007
I've been collecting materials for my next book, a history of the Giro d'Italia. One story, which I'll tell later, brought back some memories of racing back in the 1970s.
In the 1970s American women racers were world class. Audrey McElmury became the first American in the modern era to become world champion when she won the women's road championship in 1969. In an era when American men struggled to finish important international races, American women were fully up to the challenge.
I suspect that some of that excellence was because American women were doing a lot of racing with the men. The smaller, slower women's packs of the time could not have give the racers the speed and power training that world-class athletes needed.
Nowadays there is nothing unusual about women racing with the men (women around here will race both a men's race and then the appropriate women's race), but 35 years ago ambitious women looking to improve their game had to struggle with the officials to be allowed to race with men. I remember watching women argue with district reps, begging to be allowed into the men's' fields. I also remember riding the Rose Bowl 1-2 race in the late 1970s. At about mile 75 I was thinking that 24 times up that damn hill was more than I could do. I looked over and saw Jane Buyny smoothly motoring up the hill next to me. My natural male competitiveness put a little steel in my spine. I sucked it up and finished the race. That day I learned how good women can be. That was one tough race.
By the way, not only did ambitious women face official roadblocks, they faced criticism from other women who felt that only by taking part in women's races could the quality of the sport be improved. It's a good argument, not unlike the problem faced by the parent of a child whose local public school isn't very good. Do the parents sacrifice their child by putting him in a poor school and work to improve that school in an attempt to achieve a distant, doubtful outcome? Or, do the parents put their child in a superior private school feeling that their child is not academic cannon fodder. I don't think there are good answers to either question.
The women of the 70s argued that they had racing careers and that they had every right to become as good as possible. The same arguments were made against the men of the 1970s and 80s who went off to Europe to become world beaters. I think the success of the Audrey McElmurys and Greg LeMonds did more for raising the quality of the sport by attracting a bigger pool of riders than anything else.
So, what does this have to do with the Giro? Let me tell you the story of Alfonsina Strada.
At the line in Milan for the start of the 1924 Giro d'Italia were well-known riders such as Bartolomeo Aymo, Federico Gay and Giuseppe Enrici. But the quality of the field was a bit attenuated. Some of the greatest riders like Costante Girardengo and Giovanni Brunero were on bad terms (It was about money, of course) with the Giro organizers and refused to ride. To get the peloton they needed, the Giro, as the Tour had done when it needed riders, offered openings to individuals who wanted to compete. Moreover, the offer came with the added inducement of room and board for the 90 riders they would accept. The food offered included 600 chickens, 720 eggs, 4,800 bananas, 2,000 bottles of mineral water, 750 kilograms of meat plus jams, cookies, apples, and oranges. What racer could turn down an offer to race when the dinner table was heaped so high?
Among the applicants who were accepted there was a starter who was given racing number 72. This rider, who registered under the name Alfonsin Strada, was more remarkable than any of the other gentlemen who planned to ride. Number 72 was actually Alsonsina Morini Strada. Yes, that's right, Alfonsina, Signora Strada. Strada was born on a farm in Castelfranco in Emilia. At an early age she developed a deep love for the bicycle and competition. Her nickname among the locals where she tore around the dirt roads on bikes was the "Devil in a Dress". Although her parents did all they could to discourage her bike racing, she was a strong-willed woman.
Getting married didn't dull her love of cycling as her family had hoped. Her husband became her trainer and gave her a new racing bike with dropped bars as a wedding present. She was very successful, racing all over Europe, even finishing thirty-second (last place) in the 1917 Tour of Lombardy.
Given that she had registered under the sexually ambiguous name of Alfonsin, it seems no one knew that a woman was going to ride the Giro. Once it became clear that they did have a rider without a "Y" chromosome La Gazzetta's director Emilio Colombo decided to keep her in the race. Her presence, not without a touch of scandal in those days, had a great deal of promotional value. At first she did well. In the 300-kilometer Stage 1 to Genoa won by Bartolomeo Aymo, she lost a lot of time but finished well ahead of many others. She came in fifty-sixth out of 65 finishers in the second stage that finished in Florence, 2 hours, 6 minutes behind stage winner Federico Gay. Aymo retained the lead. And when the race went to Rome in the third stage, she finished 2 hours, 33 minutes behind the stage winner and new leader, Federico Gay.
I'll finish the story with my next posting.
 |
|||
| Alfonsina Strada in an undated photo | |||
November 24, 2007
I'm terrible at estimating how long things will take to get done. Case in point, the second volume of our Tour de France history (info about the first volume is on the Torelli home page). Not a day goes by without my getting asked when it will be ready. The book is written, with the story going from the 1965 Tour to the end of the 2007 Tour.
I no longer have the excuse that I don't know who will win the 2006 Tour (Before the start of the race, Raymond Poulidor said he had no idea who would win the 2007 Tour, he couldn't even predict the winner of the 2006 edition.). Now we are in the long, laborious job of fact-checking and correcting my various crimes against the English language. There are lots of facts (and crimes) in a 300-page history and they all have to be verified or repaired. Please be patient. I should have the book to the publisher by the end of December. I even have the cover picture picked out. Here it is, Merckx, of course. It had to be the Cannibal. It's the 12th stage of the 1970 Tour. As you can see, he's in Yellow, alone, going over the Cucheron. It will make a nice mate to the cover of the first volume with Nicolas Frantz going solo in the Pyrenees.
