Day Trip to Flanders

Yay! Go Fabian!

Day Trip? Well, come on, you can't really call it a "Tour", can you? One day? I know Flanders isn't exactly a huge place, but still...

Also known as Ronde Van Vlaanderen, the Unofficial Belgian National Championship started in 1913 and, since changing it's date so as not to clash with Milan-Sanremo, it's become quite a big thing, with narrow lanes, cobbles, steep twisty climbs, and lots of them, all close together. It's the race where you sometimes see pictures of riders pushing their bikes - because if one rider falls or fails, everyone behind him comes to a dead halt and they just can't get pedalling again.  Mmm, think I'll have a go at it.... "not".

So, despite initial disappointment that it was only one day, we settled in front of LLB's tv with big mugs of tea, piles of biscuits and fluffy teddy-bear slippers (*waves to Hippi and Hoppi*) to enjoy watching Fabian Cancellara flatten everyone again, Live! yay!  and here are my Random Thoughts (as Miss FeeDee says!) on the race..

On Eurosport, we started in the studio, with comments and introduction from Rob Hayles, right - this is about the only photo I could find of him smiling - who is a former track star as well as road cyclist, and often has interesting comments to make.

LLB says he ought to be more animated, and I have to agree, he is a bit on the deadpan side, but I enjoy listening to him. Had to laugh, he says "Lay O'Pard" instead of Lepper'd, but we don't know why, and no-one else mentioned it.

LLB and I have speculated in the past that some people are kowtowing to the Lay O'Pard camp for political reasons: Leopard may well decline interviews or not give preference to journos etc who don't pronounce it "correctly".

Side Issue: In my opinion, letting Trek issue that press release was the stupidest thing they did, and whichever PR person thought of it should be shot. They would have been well within their rights to make a statement saying that in Lux/europe generally, it's pronounced Lay O'Pard and that's what they'd prefer to hear, but they should never have tried the ridiculous CAPITAL LETTERS  business.

Leaving that aside, they really should have given some thought to how the rest of the English-speaking world would pronounce it. In the same way, within Luxembourg they call it Letzeburg (with umlauts that I can't easily do) but they accept that the rest of the world calls it Luxembourg. Sometimes they call it Lux too: I seem to remember Andy tweeting about going home to Lux. Not home to Letz.  Oh, that was in the days before I broke Twitter, of course.So, you'd think that they would a) realise that the entire English-speaking world was going to say Lepper'd, and b) accept it.

I still want to be there the first time that a team member calls it Lepper'd!

But I digress. Not a surprise to anyone who reads this regularly.

Our coverage on Eurosport started at 123kms to go, and there was Stuey! At the front! With Wouter Weylandt and Young Dominic, Mr Orange Head himself! Confusingly, Dominic and Wouter were both wearing hideous orange glasses: oh Dominic, keep your hat on, or they will clash!

Once we went to live pics, the commentators changed to David Harmon and Sean Kelly, and David Harmon mentioned that he had been asked to write an article on How To Make Cycling More Interesting To Watch.
Well, here's a suggestion, get some common sense into the team kits: organise some sort of central office who keeps a record of team kits, so when a team is making a new kit, or changing an old one, they can see what everyone else is doing, and can decide whether or not to adjust their kits accordingly. I am certain that if Leopard, for example, knew that Garmin were radically changing their kit to black/white/same shade of blue, making three teams with very similar kits, they would have re-thought theirs.

Also, I think that watchers would be more interested if they could pick riders out for themselves more easily: Sky started it with having the rider's name on the side panel of the jersey: I'd go a step further and ask for the rider's name to be very prominent on the side and on the shoulders as well - so we can see it from the front as well as the side. After all, footballers do it, and there are less than two dozen of them. We have nearly 200 to sort through! Maybe something on the hats could be changed? Perhaps each rider could be allowed to personalise the back section of his hat? All comments welcomed, and the best ones will be forwarded to the UCI.

Talking of the UCI and the race radios ban, we had a lovely gimmick in this race - webcams in four of the team cars, so we could see and hear what they were saying on Race Radio.  The teams were Garmin, Quickstep, Saxo and Omega Pharma Lotto.

Why? When radios are just about to be banned, why bother with this? Were they perhaps trying to prove that they are only used for safety reasons? Well, that backfired, as we clearly heard the Garmin DS telling his guys not to work, while Fabian and Chavanel were storming away out the front. Intriguingly , he seemed to feel the need to explain these tactics: you can read his rather defensive comments here in Velonation, if you are interested. Otherwise the only good part was watching Uncle Bjarne Riis having his head hugged by his driver when Nick Nuyens just made it over the line. Who, we wondered, was steering the car at this point? I was expecting a report at any second to say that several riders had nearly been mown down by an out-of-control team car, but it appears they were lucky. And yes, they were moving, you could see the scenery moving past.

This was a very interesting race from the point of view of Peloton Dynamics (oh dear, I can see you all running away in dismay - come back! I'll put in a picture of Andy!)



Here he is, rolling his own.

Note for non-UK readers, "rolling his own" means making cigarettes by rolling up loose tobacco in filter papers.

Is usually done by men well over the age of 70, and by young "chavs" ( short for "mentally/morally/socially retarded blokes" ) who are trying to look "hard" or "tough" by pretending that they are adding substances other than just tobacco to their cigarettes.

The thought that Our Glorious Leader would smoke roll-ups is just so ridiculous that I don't even need to emphasis that This Is A Joke.

So, Peloton Dynamics. Well, I know a lot about this, as for the first several years that I watched pro cycling, I didn't really watch individual riders at all, I just used to watch the play of colours within the peloton as the teams formed, broke up, reformed, moved up and down, etc.  I'm sure someone has written a very dull paper on the subject, drawing contrasts between Peloton Dynamics and the Brownian Motion that we all remember from school.... but you can clearly see, in the helicopter shots, how the teams form and reform.

Normally, the middle of the peloton surges forward, and people drop off the sides, being re-absorbed or falling right to the back.

But in Flanders, in these very narrow lanes, where the cyclists are all fighting to get to the front, they use the road gutters, the pavements (if in town), even the grass verges, in order to avoid getting squashed and risking falling. So, in the helicopter shots, you can clearly show them making their way fast up the outsides of the peloton! Fascinating stuff. A typical conversation on our settee went like this:

"Oh look, two of them are going round the outside."
"Round the outside?"
"Round the outside."
"Two buffalo boys go round the outside" etc

There was a lovely moment when Joost Posthuma - recovering well from his earlier crash - was in the front of the peloton approaching a tight corner and, along with several others, totally failed to take the corner. Wups! Luckily no-one fell off, but he lost several places in the peloton thanks to that, and it must have affected his rhythm.

On other random thought that has occurred to me before, is to feel sorry for the mobile Marshalls, the ones who stand on traffic islands gesturing with a yellow flag as to which side of the obstruction would be the preferred route. It must take a lot of nerve not to flinch when the entire peloton is bearing down on you, and you are armed only with a whistle and the yellow flag. No wonder they keep their helmets on. Personally I'd be wearing shin-pads and a body-protector as well! I wonder how often they get clobbered?

Actually I quite fancy doing that, if I had to pick a job within a cycle race - that's assuming that several of you have already beaten me to the Wet Sponge option. I mean, you get your own motorbike and high-vis bib, and you get to whizz around in a group, up the back roads from one set of obstructions to another: then you stand there and risk being trampled on for five minutes, then back on the bike and whizz off to the next danger spot. What fun! I imagine they are all fully radio'd up, so there would be cross-chat and gossip during the intervals, and the occasional panic: "Base to RoadRat 15! Get over to [name of small village] immediately, there's a nasty traffic island that needs an attendant!" Yup, that would just suit me.


Talking of roundabouts, had to add this - did anyone else see the, er, incredible roundabout art:

It appears to be made up of dead bicycles, so I'm not entirely sure what it is saying about their committment to pro cycling.

Perhaps it's a temporary thing, and all the townspeople bring their pushbikes along on the day, then come back the next day and reclaim their property.

Possibly an opportunity to upgrade, ha! ha!

At this point I'd like to add a quick word of support for David Harmon the Eurosport commentator at this point, harking back to the double question of making the races more interesting, and the kit conflicts. He was excellent in saying things like "So-and-so riding for Rabobank in the orange and blue" and "so-and-so in the blue with yellow shoulder flashes, that's VacansOleil." On the one hand it's a nuisance that we need this level of help in spotting the riders, but on the other hand, thank you David Harmon!

Finally, I get back to the actual race: what an exciting race to watch! All that narrow stuff, all those streets, and as for Fabian's enormous effort, what can I say? Actually the shouted conversation between the Quickstep team car and the Leopard team car says it all: the Quickstep DS was yelling out of the window, "He's too strong!"   And considering that he's not a sprinter, Fabian did an amazing job right at the very end there. Great ride!

Was it my imagination, by the way, or did Fabian slip a gear on one of the final hills? Drat, I don't know which one, but it was when Gilbert attacked. Fabian went to respond and it looked as though he faltered, just for a moment: he looked down at his bike, then he was up, up and away again.

I'm very pleased to be able to talk about a race soon after the event instead of being a fortnight late.. next week we are recording the Basque Tour - which actually has a really catchy and singable name, what was it again?  (*pause for googling*) Vuelta Ciclista al País Vasco. That was it. Great name... "not". But next weekend we have Paris-Roubaix live on Sunday, so we will be watching that one as it happens. Which means that we won't have enough time to watch all the Basque footage... and Team Schlux are sending a dream team: Frankie, Andy, Jensi, Jakob, Steff'n'd'neff'll, MM, Anders and Little Fab. It's going to be impossible not to read the cycling news this week! Perhaps we'll save it for later in the month when there isn't as much to watch live..

And finally finally: did you know: since 1993 the cobbled ways have been protected by law - and this is all thanks to cycling!