Cycling is changing. It’s becoming more and more popular and judging by the evidence we’ve seen during this year’s Tour de France, it is not dealing with its growing popularity very well.

For the most part, cycling fans have a few riders that they enjoy watching with which they may or may not share a nationality. Unlike football fans, up until now at least, the cycling equivalent don’t tend to support a team through thick and thin. One of the major reasons being the nature of the financial structure of cycling teams – the teams themselves don’t tend to stick around for very long for fans to develop any sort of rapport.

Team Sky fans

 

But recently, there has been a tribalism settling in around Team Sky, something which British cycling fans have never experienced before. The team actually has ‘supporters’ who wish to see the team succeed regardless of the rider. This is a behaviour which has been encouraged in the past by Jonathan Vaughters, the manager of Garmin-Sharp.

Two years ago, Vaughters released a 10-point plan outlining changes which he thinks should be implemented in order to improve and stabilise the sport of cycling. One of these points was:

• Consistent, year after year, team branding to develop fanbase

The turnover and renaming of professional cycling teams from one year to the next makes it easy to understand why this may be a desirable change to the sport. But the idea that cycling fans support one team and one team only the way football fans do is not straight forward.

In this year’s Tour de France, Mark Cavendish had urine thrown at him during the second individual time trial. This is not an isolated occurrence, similar unsavoury incidents have happened in the past. The most famous fan interaction is probably when Eddy Merckx was punched in the kidneys on a climb during the 1975 Tour de France.

Fans of any sport are liable to do crazy things and the more fanatical they become, the more maniacal they become. Football fans in stadiums have limited access to the stars of the show on the pitch. The interaction, for the most part, is confined to chanting from the stands. On a weekly basis, fans in England would chant about Luis Suarez being a racist bastard, Arsene Wenger being a pedophile or their desire to murder Malcolm Glazer.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger – the target of chants from rival team fans.

 

The majority of the people taking part in these chants are grown men who probably have children and respectable jobs and who might not usually resort to this kind of behaviour in any other setting. But this is the power of the mob mentality. Is there a minority of rabid football fans who could not be trusted to be within arms reach of the rival team’s players?

Friends of mine often cannot believe when they see cyclists wend their way up mountain passes through a mass of people. How are the riders not pushed off their bikes more often? How are there not more crazy incidents involving fans?

The only answer I have is that cycling fans are respectful of all of the cyclists and they’re not wishing any ill-will on the riders. Would stable, long-term team franchises threaten to destabilise this wall of respect that exists between fan and rider?

Then there’s doping…

What is the difference between Carlos Sastre’s ride up Alpe d’Huez in2008 and Chris Froome’s ride up Mont Ventoux this year?

Sastre finished 2’03″ ahead of everybody that day in 2008. Froome finished just 29 seconds ahead of Nairo Quintana on Mont Ventoux, and seven other riders finished within 2’03″ of him. Yet Froome has had to deal with an inordinate amount of accusations of doping, a problem Sastre, managed by Bjarne Riis, hardly had to deal with at all. So what’s changed?

Carlos Sastre winning atop Alpe d’Huez in 2008

The obvious changes since 2008 are that fans (and journalists), via social media, have been given much more of a platform on which they can air their concerns and shout out their doubts and accusations. There is also the fact that this is the first Tour de France since the USADA reasoned decision was released. It is to be expected that fans (and journalists) don’t want to be blindly led down an alley of deceit once more, so it is only natural that there are more questions now than ever. Fool me once and all that.

But there is a further contributory factor to the shit that Froome has had to put up with during this year’s Tour de France and that is the black and white-ness which some fans are now viewing the sport. Fans of Team Sky are adamant that Froome is clean, this tunnel vision view feeds and antagonises those who think he’s doping, and with equal tunnel vision the cries of doping are shouted louder, which in turn feeds and antagonises the Team Sky fans and it goes around and around and nothing constructive emerges.

This is a dangerous trend which is emerging among fans of the sport. Instead of chanting ridiculous songs about racists and pedophiles, cycling fans can simply cry ‘doper’. Arsene Wenger is not going to be asked in a press conference whether he is or isn’t a paedophile, because it’s preposterous and baseless. But if enough fans shout ‘doper’ at a cyclist, because of the sport’s past, it is probable that he will eventually be asked in a press conference if he is or isn’t a doper, whether it’s preposterous and baseless or not.

A further problem with the fandom model being urged by Vaughters and being realised by Team Sky is that fans have absolutely no say in what goes on in ‘their’ team. The financial model for cycling, even with stable ‘team branding’ does not rely on the fan at all. With football, if the fans don’t like the manager, if they shout loud enough about it (literally) then there’s a fair chance the manager will be sacked. Football teams need fans to buy merchandise and fill stadiums. Being a spectator of cycling costs nothing, managers of cycling teams do not have to pander to the fans the way football managers do.

Fans don’t pay for this privilege

Last week it appeared that Team Sky manager Dave Brailsford caved to public pressure and released some of Froome’s data to L’Equipe for analysis, but this is very much the exception. It appears that cycling teams want fans, but ultimately, they don’t need them.

Currently, many cycling fans have a guarded cynicism which they cannot be blamed for after enduring decades of scandals. Given the fact that fans have not got a long affiliation with any one team, what would happen if a spate of riders on the one team tested positive? Would fans simply jump ship?

Football fans usually support a team because their Dad or older brother supported the same team. There’s a family history involved and a loyalty that to turn your back on would be blasphemous. Dr. Niall Redmond works for the popular game Football Manager and is no stranger to maniacal football fans. He himself is an avid supporter of Manchester United and I asked him if he found out tomorrow that United had been organising a massive team-wide doping programme in the 1990s and all of the 1999 Treble winning team began admitting to taking various drugs in order to win….would he still support the team now?’

“If it were proven, I would be massively upset and very angry, but I would keep supporting them” admitted Redmond “in the hope that it wouldn’t happen in the future, that the team and those in charge would change and it would become something good again.”

But what about football fans by nature being blind in their support? Does this contribute to a complete unwillingness to acknowledge that there’s a chance there might be doping prevalent in their team?

“I’ve talked about the possibility of doping in football to a number of football fans who dismiss it instantly. If you said to any fan, there’s a worldwide doping problem in football, but your team is involved, there’s no chance they would want it to come out. But for me, if it were a rival team, say Barcelona, then I would take pleasure in seeing it come out.”

This loyalty that football fans have toward their own team and the tendency to spite any rival is the reason why the sport is so popular. But it is perhaps also the reason why fans think there is no doping in football. Redmond suggests “what’s happened in cycling, and how the world now views cycling, probably makes it more unlikely that football authorities would ever investigate doping in any significant way”.

Cycling has a conundrum. The doping problem is known but now teams are gaining ‘fans’. There is a very real potential for the sport to grow in popularity but in tandem, the potential is also there for it to degenerate even further into a never-ending game of mud-slinging. Team Sky have had to deal with this problem more than any other team and so far they have yet to find a solution. Endless aspersions is not the price that teams should pay for gaining fans. But currently, this is what the sport is stuck with.

Alan English interviews Paul Kimmage and David Walsh

Earlier this year I had an online conversation with an editor of a popular cycling news website. The exchange involved the idea that journalist David Walsh should have his integrity questioned for not tackling the doping issue earlier in his career. The editor said the following: “David Walsh has done some fantastic journalism down the years, especially on Lance Armstrong. But [he] started covering cycling in 1979-1980. Why did he not pursue the drugs issue pre-Armstrong?” He continued, “the guy was part of the problem for 20 years. His integrity needs to be questioned. When it suited him to look away, he looked away. I know he has done great work, that’s not in dispute. But he pretty much ignored the drug issue for two decades. That needs to be said. It’s not about heroes and villains, it’s not black and white like that. And massive periods of Walsh’s career don’t stand up to scrutiny on the drugs issue”. And he concluded “we need to examine his full contribution, not just the years when he decided to man-up. Drugs in cycling have been very public since Tom Simpson died after using them in 1967. The Festina affair in 1998 came after years of massive drug taking in the peloton. Your refusal to even let someone else question Walsh is very curious. I think he cosied up to Kelly and Roche for years and squeezed the maximum out of them for his own career and decided not to rock the boat to keep everyone sweet. Then when they were gone and he didn’t really need access to riders any more because he was writing about other sports too, only then did he decide to tackle the story he’s been sitting on for 20 years” As the paragraph above suggests, I was in complete disagreement with him. The editor in question suggested I write an article underlining my argument, which is what follows. Walsh’s admission that he was complicit in his early years does not excuse him for it, but in my opinion, it was his actions in the proceeding years that rendered his prior neglect to be rather insignificant…

Armstrong being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey

There aren’t many people who could have felt as vindicated as David Walsh did when the Reasoned Decision containing details of the doping practices of Lance Armstrong and his US Postal team was released last December. Finally, the truth had caught up with Armstrong and he eventually admitted to Oprah Winfrey in a televised interview that he had cheated to win all seven of his Tours de France and had been lying about it ever since. Having watched an unbelievable performance from Armstrong, climbing to victory in Sestriere on Stage Nine of the 1999 Tour, Walsh had spent many of the proceeding moments of his life pursuing this story when most others were happy to let it lie. He wrote two books, ‘L.A. Confidential’ and ‘From Lance to Landis’, which contained many of the details which have since been confirmed to be true by the Reasoned Decision. He has now written a new book called ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ which recounts his dogged pursuit of cycling’s most prominent cheat. But Walsh has been writing about cycling since the late 1970s. Why did he not pursue the drugs issue in the years between then and the Armstrong era? Did it suit him to ignore the tough questions and to use the success of Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly so that he could further his own career as a journalist? Was he actually part of the problem for 20 years? Of course, Walsh was not always a doping pariah. In a public appearance in February at The Pavilion in Dun Laoghaire at an event called ‘Whistleblowers’ where he sat with Paul Kimmage and was answering questions from Alan English, Walsh discussed his attitudes in his early years writing about cycling in the 1980s.

“I was born in Slieverue in County Kilkenny just 18 miles from Kelly’s home town of Carrick On Suir. I was a huge Sean Kelly fan at that time.”

At The Pavilion, the topic was raised of the 1984 edition of Paris-Brussels where Kelly tested positive for the banned substance Stimul and was handed a one month suspended sentence and a fine of one thousand Swiss Francs. Walsh wrote a book about Sean Kelly in 1986 and English asked Walsh to comment on the accusations that he glazed over the doping issue in that book.

“I didn’t glaze over it” said Walsh with a self-deprecating chuckle, “I completely ignored it. I didn’t want to contribute to the story that Kelly was doping.

“At that time, I still found a way of thinking to myself that if I interview guys and I ask about doping, I will not question their answers. I didn’t want to go there.”

When writing the book, simply titled Kelly, Walsh sought the opinions of Roche and Robert Millar about Kelly’s positive test. Millar suggested that Stimul, as a drug of choice for cyclists, would have been absurd as it was ‘ten years out of date’. Roche said “How can they do this to Sean? He has been easily the best rider in the world this season and they accuse him of taking something in a race like Paris-Brussels. I know Sean well enough to know that it is nonsense”. The Irish Cycling Federation also seemed to think it was nonsense as the secretary at the time Karl McCarthy travelled over to Belgium from Cork to attempt to help in absolving Kelly of any wrong doing. Procedural irregularities were blamed in order to get Kelly off the hook. The UCI bought the excuse but they needed the Belgian cycling federation to agree in order to reverse the punishment. The Belgians refused and the fine and sentence were upheld. Walsh defended Kelly in his book. He suggested that because Stimul is a drug which always shows up in tests, surely Kelly would not have taken this drug for a relatively minor race like Paris-Brussels. At the time the top three finishers in a race were guaranteed to face the drug testers, Kelly finished third in that 1984 edition of Paris-Brussels, so Walsh also suggested that if Kelly had actually taken the drug that he would surely have made certain he did not finish in the top three. This twisted logic came at a naive time in Walsh’s career where he admits now that he was willing to ignore evidence which was right in front of him. He writes in ‘Seven Deadly Sins’:

“I tried to make the case that it was hard to believe Kelly had used a substance so easily detectable. I chose to see the ridiculous leniency of the authorities as proof that, at worst, it was a minor infraction. It wasn’t how a proper journalist would have reacted.”

At this point in the 1980s, Walsh had formed a friendship with Kimmage who was busy attempting to forge a professional career of his own. When Kimmage’s own book, ‘A Rough Ride’ was released in 1990 containing stories of doping in the professional peloton, much of it was not news to Walsh. But still, as Walsh admitted in The Pavilion back in February, he was willing to turn a blind eye.

“In the early 1990s, the allure of cycling was very much alive for me. I didn’t want to let go of the Tour de France as a dream. I still had a dream that I would write a Canterbury Tales type book about the Tour” [which he did – ‘Inside the Tour de France’].

Even though Walsh’s interest in the doping had already been piqued in 1988 when Pedro Delgado tested positive on his way to winning the Tour de France, it wasn’t until an incident in 1996, which took place outside the sport of cycling, which would see Walsh’s journalistic radar fully spin toward the direction of the cheats. Michelle Smith had just won four Olympic medals (three gold) for Ireland, swimming at the Atlanta games and stories began to emerge that she had doped in order to do so. Walsh was pursuing the story for the Sunday Tribune while Kimmage was also on the trail for the Sunday Independent. Walsh is careful to acknowledge the role of the sports editor when pursuing controversial stories. He remains grateful to his editors at the Sunday Tribune and Sunday Times who allowed him to pursue these topics when others may not have had the courage. He provides RTE as an example of a media outlet at the time that was unwilling to pursue the Michelle Smith story. An RTE sports reporter had spoken to Walsh about Smith and had decided that she also wanted to report the doping details. However when she approached her RTE sports editor, she was asked ‘do we really want to interfere with the national mood’?

The Festina affair brought doping into the limelight when the Tour started in Dublin in 1998

It takes a certain kind of editor and a certain kind of journalist to decide ‘yes, let’s do it’. Walsh had, eventually, become that kind of journalist.

Not long afterward, the Festina affair erupted at the Tour de France and what had long been left unspoken in cycling was finally emerging. Instead of being buried in back pages and footnotes, doping was suddenly front page news. This gave even more credence to journalists who were willing to write about the difficult stories. What had previously been a taboo subject was now very much on the agenda. Finally, the 1999 Tour de France arrived and Walsh, hardened by the cynicism which had by now escaped from within and materialised, was ready to disbelieve and question what Armstrong was doing on those Alpine inclines. Walsh said in a recent interview with cyclingnews.com

“Maybe I was lucky that Armstrong came along in the right time in my journalistic life. If Armstrong had been there in 1984 would I have asked questions? Probably not.”

There are countless characters in the Armstrong soap opera that require their integrity be questioned. David Walsh is not one of them. To cast aspersions now on Walsh’s probity for not tackling doping in the 1980s is applying the standards of today to an era when the landscape of sports journalism was completely different. He admits that it took him time to see the light on doping, that he was a fan with a typewriter and that he was young and naive.

None of us are naive now, thanks to David Walsh.

To win a Grand Tour at any stage in a career is a wonderful achievement. It is usually the culmination of years of hard work, commitment and sacrifice. Grand Tour winners are usually moulded and shaped by the experience of leading a team and winning smaller races over the course of a number of seasons. The rider’s team-mates must trust that their work will not be for nothing, that they can believe that their leader has what it takes to deliver.

Eventually, when the rider is physically and mentally mature enough and has earned the trust and respect of his team, he may be capable of tackling and conquering one of the sport’s three biggest races.

So to win a Grand Tour having never before won a stage race is highly unusual. But in May 2012, Ryder Hesjedal achieved just this.

Ryder Hesjedal, the first Canadian to win a Grand Tour

The decision by Jonathan Vaughters and the rest of the Garmin team to elect and get behind Hesjedal as team leader for the 2012 Giro d’Italia and to back this belief up with the delivery of overall victory is remarkable.

In an interview in a recent issue of Cycle Sport magazine, Hesjedal spoke about a meeting he had with team management in November 2011 where they explicitly asked him to focus on winning the Giro the following year:

That’s all I could think about from a couple of days after that meeting until winning the race. I think that’s pretty bad-ass actually – I didn’t win the Giro by chance. I set out to; it was my goal in November. That’s pretty special in sport.

It was the first winter that I’d worked for goals coming up in the next season.

 

Hesjedal’s palmarés can testify to that, certainly in terms of stage racing. He had a list of solid but not spectacular results, the highlight of which was sixth place overall at the 2010 Tour de France. But having the ability to win the second biggest stage race in the world? On paper, Hesjedal was still lacking.

He had never before won a stage race, he had never before finished on the podium of a stage race and he had never before worn the leader’s jersey in a stage race. This is why the confidence that his Garmin-Sharp team placed in him last year was risky but exceptional. What is even more unusual is they placed this confidence in a rider who is certainly not ‘one for the future’.

The last rider before Hesjedal to win the Giro d’Italia having never before won a stage race was Franco Balmamion in 1962[ref]Ivan Gotti did not win a professional stage race before his first Giro d’Italia victory in 1997. However he did win two editions of the Giro della Valle d’Aosta prior to this.[/ref].

Franco Balmamion – The Eagle of the Canavese

Balmamion defended his Giro crown the following year, and and amazingly, these were his only two stage race victories in a career which spanned 12 years. He won both races without winning

a stage and he remains the last Italian rider to win back to back editions of the Giro d’Italia. But when Balmamion won his first Giro crown 50 years ago he was 22 years old, Hesjedal won his when he was 31.

In the intervening years between the maiden victories of Balmamion and Hesjedal, of the other two Grand Tours, there have been 12 riders who have won either the Tour or the Vuelta having never before won a stage race. It has actually occurred three times in very recent times at the Tour with Carlos Sastre in 2008 and the two inherited wins of Andy Schleck and Oscar Pereiro. Prior to this at the Tour, there were also Frenchmen Lucien Aimar and Roger Pingeon in the mid-sixties.

Ferdi Bracke – The oldest rider in the last 50 years to win a Grand Tour as his first ever stage race victory.

Unsurprisingly, it is the Vuelta which has had the most stage race winning virgins take home the main prize including the likes of Roberto Heras, Marco Giovannetti and Alvaro Pino.

Two things are notable when comparing Ryder Hesjedal to the others who have achieved the same feat in the past 50 years. The first is that the Canadian is older than all of them were when they won their Grand Tour, apart from Ferdinand Bracke who was six months older when he won the 1971 Vuelta.

The second item of note is that every one of the other riders had competition for team leadership. For instance, Sastre was contending with the Schleck brothers at Team CSC in 2008. Andy Schleck himself was sharing leadership duties with brother Frank in 2010. Pereiro started the 2006 Tour at Movistar with Alejandro Valverde as leader. Giovannetti had Pino, Pino had Francisco Rodriguez, Jose Manuel Fuente had Miguel Maria Lasa.

It is perhaps unprecedented that a cyclist of Ryder Hesjedal’s age was trusted with sole leadership and the full backing of a team for a Grand Tour, having never before proven himself a winner in stage races, and paid back that trust with an overall win.