Preposterous Hollywood wank
Greg LeMond and the inherited victories
There were seven races live on TNT yesterday. Road races. That’s the kind of number that would usually get spelled out in brackets on the Soccer Saturday vidiprinter to let us all know that it’s not a typo.
There were 7 (seven) road races live on TNT yesterday.
I know people grumble about the price of a TNT subscription, but if you’d told me 15 years ago when I was faffing around trying to figure out what exactly the live offering was in Ireland via CyclingTV (anyone remember that?), that there would exist a service for 30-something quid a month where you can watch everything. I think I would have been quite pleased.
This, of course, is all the fault of GCN+ for destroying our expectations of what we should reasonably expect to pay for a service like this.
Definitely not sorry.
Despite the fact there are too many races to watch, it’s a bit of a lull now in my stat cave until the Tour de France. A couple of weeks at stat altitude, breathing in the rarefied information, just keeping the brain ticking over and doing some mental recces on what’s to come.
One of the facts that struck me during the Dauphiné was in relation to the possibility of Matteo Jorgenson winning the race overall. He didn’t in the end although right up to the final stage it seemed a not unlikely outcome. If he had won he would have been the fifth American to win the race. If we consider all 15 stage races that are currently on the WorldTour calendar - even without Jorgenson’s potential win that didn’t happen and even without Lance Armstrong’s actual wins which also didn’t happen - the Dauphiné is the race which has been won most often by American riders:
Greg LeMond (1983), Tyler Hamilton (2000), Levi Leipheimer (2006) and Andrew Talansky (2014)
It was LeMond’s win in 1983 which I found myself most interested in this week. I didn’t really know anything about it. It wasn’t his first stage race win or even his first stage race win in Europe - he had won the Circuit de la Sarthe in 1980 and the Coors Classic in 1981 - but at the age of still just 21, it was his first big stage race win in Europe. The circumstances in which he won it were not typical.
In a time before riders were quite regularly being stripped of victories this was indeed rather unusual. Well let’s straighten out a few things. Pascal Simon was not ‘stripped of victory’ - not explicitly. In those days doping was just a wee misdemeanour, a smack on the bottom and away you go. Pascal Simon tested positive for Prethcamide Micorene - a respiratory stimulant - and his punishment was a 10-minute time penalty.
So instead of finishing 2’12” ahead of LeMond in the final standings, Pascal Simon ended up off the podium in 4th place, 7’48” behind LeMond. Not stripped of any results, simply penalised some time.
What appears to have been lost across Wikipedia, Pro Cycling Stats and most other places where you would expect to find these things is that the Australian rider Phil Anderson, teammates with Pascal Simon on the Peugeot team, had also tested positive on the same day for the same substance and received the same punishment, which dropped him from a potential 2nd place behind LeMond, down to 6th place overall.
There was definitely an air of sheepishness in, say, the 2000s whenever a rider received a victory after the fact as a result of doping. Not so with Gregmond LeMond. This is what he said:
When you win a race that way, it’s a victory clear and simple because the guy who beat you probably wouldn’t have been able to do it if he hadn’t been taking illegal substances.
LeMond went on to finish 4th at the Tour of Switzerland shortly afterwards. This was back in the day when you could ride both the Dauphiné and the Tour of Switzerland in the same year and it was also back in the day when it was called the Tour of Switzerland rather than the Tour de Suisse.
Of course, riders were free to do that this year. For the first time since 2003 the two races did not overlap. This is primarily because the Tour de Suisse is a watered down five-day race now (that’s right Pog, it’s not even a proper Tour de Suisse win - us arseholes will remember this).
And three riders who rode the Dauphiné actually were on the startline of the Tour de Suisse - Michael Matthews, Finn Fisher-Black and Matthew Riccitello. Irritatingly, all three of them failed to finish the Dauphiné which rather takes the shine off the achievement of going to ride the Tour de Suisse afterward.
Coincidentally, the only rider who has ever won both races in the same year was one of our Peugeot pests from the 1983 race, Phil Anderson, who won both in 1985. Pog should concentrate on achieving these kinds of feats if he really wants to impress cycling fans. Enough faffing around at the Tour de France - go and win Paris-Tours and the Tour of Lombardy on the same weekend. Or if he does insist on riding the Tour de France, go to the startline of the Tour of Portugal the very next day and win that, just like Zenon Jaskula in 1997.
In that same Velonews magazine report of LeMond’s inherited win at the Dauphiné came some detail about his next plans:
Next came Hinault’s announcement and immediate pressure to have LeMond, who turned 22 on June 26th, take over as Renault captain in the Tour de France. But he was already riding in the Tour of Switzerland and his schedule had not been designed for the big French race.
In the end, coach Cyrille Guimard sided with him in saying he should stick to his career plan and not ride the Tour until at least next season.
