It’s a sunny 23°C (74°F) day in Brisbane today (like almost any other winter day) and a good time to talk about Northern Classics. Specifically, about The Lion of Flanders (De Leeuw van Vlaanderen), a title Flemish cycling fans christen badass riders with when they do badass heroics in Flanders.

The Flemish though, a people who understand and appreciate cycling the best of all people on earth, have not called anyone De Leeuw van Vlaanderen since Johan Museeuw who retired from the sport in 2004 with a badass ride in Paris-Roubaix, blowing up the breakaway he was in at Auchy-Lez-Orchies, catching Jaan Kirsipuu, then being caught by the chasers, dropping another bomb at Carrefour de l’Arbre which left only five men standing and losing it all because of a puncture with six km to go.

Doesn’t get anymore badass than this.

That was that and we haven’t seen another Lion of Flanders since. At least, the Flemish don’t think anyone deserves the title.

Six years ago I wrote a post where I asked why the Flemish keep the Lion of Flanders crown in a safe these days.

Just like with “The Next Eddy Merckx” moniker, it’s not about the number of wins.

Fabian Cancellara won Ronde van Vlaanderen and Paris-Roubaix three times and just as many times E3 Harelbeke (for good measure). No one called him The Lion of Flanders.

It’s not about being a Flemish. Tom Boonen is Flemish with four Paris-Roubaix, three Ronde van Vlaanderen, and five E3 Harelbeke wins. No one called him The Lion of Flanders either.

The Flemish called Fiorenzo Magni, who won Ronde van Vlaanderen three time in a row (1949-1951) The Lion of Flanders though. It’s not about nationality then.

So, What’s the Deal with The Lion of Flanders?

I spoke to a Flemish reader of my newsletters about it and he confirmed what every cycling fan who loves watching the racing mayhem in Flanders every spring knows already — the Flemish give the Lion of Flanders title to badass riders only who do badass shit on road bikes.

It’s that simple. A simple truth from the simple people (writing this sentence, being a Russian, I feel a weird connection to the Flemish, but let’s not explore this rabbit hole for now).

There’s more to it though, some insights the reader shared with me I didn’t know about.

To start with, it’s all about the Ronde van Vlaanderen. Forget Paris-Roubaix (The Lion of Flanders Fiorenzo Magni proves that). I like that.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Paris-Roubaix (who doesn’t?) but, if you stop for a second and think, the title is about Flanders, a badass dude doing badass shit in Flanders in a badass race designed from day one for badass riders. You gotta do your batshit shenanigans in Flanders, not France. That much is clear.

Next on the list is weather. To earn The Lion of Flanders title, you gotta win your Ronde in a batshit weather. I mentioned the 23°C late winter weather in Brisbane with a view to set up a contrast to batshit weather in Flanders at this time of the year and all the way to April when they run Ronde van Vlaanderen in Belgium.

No one is saying, not my reader anyway, winning the Ronde is easy in dry, sunny weather but to spark the awe of the Flemish crowd, you gotta deliver the win when the cycling gods throw everything at you, including the weather. You gotta deliver a badass victory in badass conditions. Failing that, you’re a Ronde winner, maybe even a three-time winner and this is great but you’re not a Lion of Flanders. Sorry. Try again.

This weather talk reminds me of Andrei Tchmil, a badass Russian rouleur who won Paris-Roubaix in batshit weather but drew an unlucky dry weather card on the day he won Ronde van Vlaanderen. I wonder if we could travel back in time and swap the weather, would the Flemish call him The Lion of Flanders? He raced with a Belgian passport after all.

As an aside — his surname should be spelled Chmil, as in ‘choice’, because that’s the correct Russian pronunciation. There’s no T, the T confuses foreigners and makes it harder to pronounce this surname.

Another checkbox to tick on the Lion of Flanders list is a badass attack catapulting you to a solo victory. This is simultaneously classy and badassy. Double points for this. Oh and the attack has to come from a small breakaway of about 10 other badass rouleurs who barely stand on their feet at this point in the race.

You do that kind of thing because you’re a badass rouleur slaying a bunch of other badass rouleurs at their own game. This is badass. This why the Flemish will call you The Lion of Flanders after you cross the finish line. Alone.

Finally, some nice-to-have touches, optional but beaucoup valued by the Flemish (sorry for my French) — you gotta crash in the race or have a flat at least. Make it count, Flemish love that. Cross the line bleeding. You can’t go wrong here, the more blood, the better. A bloody face — you’re in. Just ask Tchmil (wait, wrong race).

Now on to the “the next Lion of Flanders, please stand up” part of the monologue.

My Flemish correspondent submitted the obvious candidate — Wout van Aert. He’s got it all. I won’t explain what he’s got, you know what he’s got. It’s all lined for him including an archrival in Mathieu van der Poel.

If all goes well, the stage is set for a slaughterhouse showdown between these two in years to come. We just need a batshit weather on one of those days and we might have a new Lion on the books.

Small caveat though. Wout is from the Antwerp province and a bona fide Lion should come from either East or West Flanders (Bruges and Gent regions). But, if the Flemish called an Italian The Lion of Flanders, I doubt they’ll mind too much a badass Wout van Aert from Antwerp.

The number two (there are only two) name on the list is Yves Lampaert. He’s a farmer’s son from West Flanders. Tick. You don’t want him in a breakaway with you after racing for six hours in Flanders because he’ll chop your head off the moment you think he’s dead. Guys like Yves, they’re never dead. And even if, per chance, Yves is dead he’ll chop your head off anyway because he’s a hard core Flemish. They make you earn your bread the hard way because they earn their bread the hard way.

This is it, just two guys for now. Time will tell. We want a new Flandrien though.

Correction — we want badass rouleurs slaughtering each other in batshit weather and if you, the Flemish, call one of them De Leeuw van Vlaanderen, we’ll thank you for that.

Postscript

I’d like to acknowledge valuable insights my Flemish reader, Jan De Smet, gave me for this post.

Post Postscript

If I got any of this Flemish stuff wrong, feel free to a) refer me to the Velominati Police and b) send me an educational email. I’m all ears.

Here’s a Top 10 list I compiled 2 years ago in a post where I argued why Remco Evenepoel is not the next Eddy Merckx:

• Tom Boonen
• Peter Sagan
• Wilco Kelderman
• Edvald Boasson Hagen (c’mon)
• Damiano Cunego (yes, Cunego)
• Johan Museeuw
• Claude Criquielion
• Frank Vandenbroucke
• Eric Vanderaerden
• Freddy Maertens

It’s okay if you didn’t click on that link to read the post. Here’s the TL;DR summary of the argument:

Remco is (mind you, this was 2 years ago, and still true today) too young to declare him the next Eddy Merckx. Let’s wait to see him win a couple of Grand Tours, the Ronde and things like that.

Since then, I have revised my opinion on this whole “The Next Eddy Merckx” idea. I based my argument on how many Grand Tours, the Monuments and whatnot a guy must win before bloggers and cycling journalists should declare him The Next Eddy Merckx without looking stupid.

I asked (and answered): What does the next Eddy Merckx mean anyway? Here’s my criteria as it stood 2 years ago. I wrote:

For me, the next Eddy Merckx would have to win:

• all Monuments
• all Grand Tours plus at least one double
• at least 5 Tour de Frances
• at least one road world championship
• more than 3 Northern Classics
• a bunch of lesser Classics
• cherry on a cake — Hour Record

Notice how it’s all about the wins. This is wrong.

Take Mark Cavendish. Last year, he scored his 34th Tour de France stage win to catch up with Merckx. This is great except Eddy won his 34 stages in every way possible: uphill and downhill, at the top of the mountains and at the bottom of the mountains (after eating everyone alive in the process), solo and from the bunch sprints.

Mark, without a doubt a great sprinter, won his from the bunch sprints off a well-oiled leadout train. Nothing wrong with that. A win is a win.

For me though, and you may disagree, the number, as much as it is impressive, has no weight when you drop it next to Eddy Merckx. Mark Cavendish might, and I think he will, go on and win more Tour stages.

Bloggers and cycling journalists will declare Eddy’s record fallen, champaign and beers will ooze down the throats but Eddy’s Tour wins will remain untouchable, at least for now, no matter how many Tour stages Mark wins.

A number, on its own, has no meaning. Mark’s 34 bunch sprint wins don’t come anywhere near Eddy’s 34 wins. Apples and oranges.

(As a pro, what would you take — 5 sprint wins nobody will remember or an epic annihilation of everyone still standing on the Alpe d’Huez? I’m thinking of Christophe Riblon’s 2013 win as one example. They climbed d’Huez twice that day, just a casual mention.)

This brings me to the meat and potatoes of this post — the latest next Eddy Merckx, Tadej Pogačar (accent on the last syllable, please).

At least this time around, bloggers and cycling journalists didn’t look as stupid comparing Pogačar to Merckx. When they thought Edvald Boasson Hagen was the next Eddy Merckx and asked him what he thought about that, he said he didn’t know who Merckx was.

That was a red flag. They should’ve stopped the press and wrote about a new bike model or something. They didn’t.

I’m writing this in August 2022 and we all know what happened in July. In July, Pogačar learned a valuable lesson delivered to him by Jonas Vingegaard, free of charge.

The lesson was — do not underestimate your rivals. Merckx knew that (which is why he was Merckx) and Pogačar didn’t (I hope he does now).

From that point of view, he still has to learn some ropes and realise it’s not always just about the legs in the Tour de France.

Another problem for the next Eddy Merckx crowd counting wins and other stats — Merckx won his 5 Tours in a row. Pogačar might do that and end up with 7 wins but not in a row as Lance did but nobody has so far mentioned Armstrong’s name next to Pogačar so we can forget about 7 for now.

Finally, the reason I think all this next Eddy Merckx babble is a waste of bandwidth (except this one) is the path today’s professional cycling is on.

When Merckx went on to win everything under the sun, not a single pro had ever thought to focus on a single race in the season (thanks Lance). No one would ever allow them to even think about it. They had to race and to race a lot.

This is how Merckx won so much in the first place — by racing all year whatever was on the calendar. Grand Tours, Classics, Monuments and everything in between.

That’s how it used to be. Not anymore.

Those counting wins and stats are on the wild goose chase because the stats won’t ever reach Eddy’s benchmark the way today’s pros structure their calendars. Not possible.

What is possible though is for Pogačar to make his own benchmark. He’s got the engine and, equally important, the panache of a great racer, a great racer of the Merckx quality who has an appetite for every race under the sun.

Just like Eddy Merckx had.

And funny bikes.

Let’s Start With Some History

Picture a 14-year-old cyclist who heard about 6-speed freewheels but never saw one. Picture me watching on color TV how our team in red skinsuits and white aero helmets smashed the Germans in gray skinsuits and white aero helmets in a 100 km team time trial on bikes that looked strange to me.

I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them until the commentator said something about aerodynamics and then I saw it — the red Colnago bikes had a small front wheel. Didn’t make any sense to me but I assumed the guys who rode them knew their business.

After that I watched Sergei Sukhoruchenkov blow the road race apart with a long range solo attack. Plays like this one, you remember it for the rest of your life.

This is when a new word entered Russian cycling slang to describe a bike with bullhorn bars — rogaty. Same word you’d use to describe a husband if his wife is sleeping around and everybody knows this except the husband.

By 1984, when I made the Soviet national team, Reginald Vorontsov, the Soviet version of Dario Pegoretti, made a dozen rogaty road bikes for the national team and this is what we won the junior worlds TTT on that year.

Then in 1985, Ernesto Colnago sent us his masterpiece — a TT machine with 2 Campagnolo disc wheels, the standard time trial equipment everyone wanted by then.

In 1989 Greg LeMond gave us the clip-on triathlon bar and bike manufacturers married it to the existing TT bikes and that’s what we have today. That’s a quick history overview.

Now the Argument Against TT Bikes

We all know why time trial bikes have evolved the way they did — to make you go faster although I don’t know how much faster the bullhorn bikes made us in a time trial. My guess is, not a lot. But once we’ve added the triathlon bar, it changed the time trial racing like nothing else did before, not even disc wheels.

This innovation took the TT bike to its own league compared to the road bike, creating a massive advantage.

Advantage: The Word I Want to Zoom In On

If you search for something like “tt bike watts advantage“, you’ll find scores of different claims about how many watts a TT bike will save you vs a road bike (meaning — no one knows for sure).

I remember BikeRadar, I think (can’t find this article now), claimed the advantage a TT bike gives you is 60-70 watts at 40 km/h, that is, it takes 270-280 watts to ride a road bike at that speed and 220 watts to ride a TT bike.

Translated into seconds, a TT bike gives you 9 seconds per kilometre advantage. This is 6 minutes in a 40 km time trial.

Insane.

Although I don’t believe the TT bike’s advantage is that staggering, it’s obvious you’d be stupid to race a time trial on a road bike if everyone else is on a TT bike. That much is clear.

What’s not clear is this:

If everyone saves 60-70 watts, or whatever the watt number is, why bother with a TT bike at all? It seems to me the point of technological innovation is to have an edge, a marginal gain over your rival. If everyone has the same edge, it’s not an edge anymore.

Picture car racing: if everyone races a production car, does it really matter if all cars are powered by 300 hp engines or 320 hp engines? They’ll drive faster with more powerful engines, yes, and maybe the show will be more interesting because of that extra power but cycling time trials are nothing like car racing. A rider leaves the gate and races alone against the clock except now he rides faster on a TT bike.

Every single racer does.

Unlike the drama of the 1989 Champs-Élysées time trial where Fignon might’ve had a chance against LeMond had he rode with a tri-bar and wore an aero helmet, today racing on a TT bike doesn’t affect the end result because everyone takes advantage of a TT bike.

And that’s it, there’s nothing more to it — everyone gets a faster time on the results sheet. That’s what TT bikes brought to the sport — faster times on the result sheets.

Something else they brought: headaches, broken bones and ruined careers.

Let’s start with broken bones.

TT Bikes Are Dangerous

It’s like someone sat with a pen and paper and asked himself: How do I make a road bike dangerous to ride?

This is the list.

Step 1

Reduce control of the road bike to a minimum. Start with bike position. Move your body forward to load the front wheel and make it harder to manoeuvre.

Step 2

Now that you’ve loaded the front with your body weight, finish the job and place your elbows next to each other on the handlebar. This way, you now have even less control over the bike and can only go straight or at best lean into a wide curve. When you need to turn, you’ll have to get your hands off the tri-bar and grab the bullhorns.

Step 3

Brakes ruin aerodynamics so when you design a TT frame, forget about brakes and focus on speed and aerodynamics. When you finish the frame design, tack on something somewhere that looks like brakes to pass the UCI definition of a road bike. Don’t worry if brakes don’t work properly, you don’t need brakes in a time trial.

Step 4

Finish the package with aero wheels. Put on the front whatever you can get away with to keep the rider on the road against wind gusts. Every time trial, pray that when a rider takes the elbows off the tri-bar to lean into a corner flying at 55 km/h, a sudden wind gust doesn’t blow him off the road.

Sounds farcical because it is. It’s farcical and tragic at the same time. Tragic because TT bikes ruin careers and break riders’ bones. Ask Chris Froome.

This is how David Brailsford described the crash when Froome broke a femur, other bones and damaged internal organs:

He came down a technical descent and on to a straighter piece of road with houses either side he signalled to Wout that he was going to clear his nose, he took his hand off the bar to do that and a gust of wind took his front wheel, he lost control and went straight into the wall of a house.

A gust of wind and the dream of winning a fifth Tour de France is just that, a dream. Do you think he’d have gone down on a road bike? Do you think he’s that clumsy on the bike? The guy who rode away from the peloton on the descend to Bagnères-de-Luchon in 2016 Tour de France is clumsy?

Or look at Alejandro Valverde’s prologue crash in the Tour de France. Wet road, yes but this is an old pro. Wet or dry, he knows what to do yet it looks like he doesn’t control his bike at all.

Michael Rasmussen was on his way to win 2007 Tour de France (except he didn’t) when he crashed twice and came close to another one or two as he kept going. Remember how sloppy he handled the bike before each crash? This is a former UCI world mountain bike champion and these guys have superb bike handling skills. Not a clumsy rider.

And here’s the Montpellier TTT stage in 2009 Tour de France. A bit of a circus.

TT Bikes Require Extra Training

Because TT bikes radically change your position on the bike, you have to spend hours and hours of training to adapt to this queer position.

Before a Grand Tour, mucking around on a TT bike is a major pain in the ass as you’re trying to tweak your form and at the same time ride your TT bike to keep the bio-mechanics tuned in.

TT Bikes Add Extra Expense

A TT bike is an extra bike a team can do without if they didn’t have to ride them a few times in a season. They take extra storage room on the road and at the team base.

More bikes — more money for organisers to spend on transfers between stages inflating the cost of the race.

More bikes — more cars, trucks and buses to move them around and more fuel to burn. More cars and buses, you need more drivers and more fuel — more expenses.

World Tour teams hire between 24 and 30 riders. This is another 40 or so extra bikes mechanics have to look after (some riders have 2 TT bikes, plus spares). You probably need to hire an extra mechanic to handle this extra work.

To take advantage of a TT bike, you need to spend time in a wind tunnel adding more expenses. Some teams do not have money for wind tunnels and this lack of funds penalises them against teams with bigger sponsors and bigger budgets.

Marginal gains, hey.

The Edge, Where Art Thou?

Because everyone races on a TT bike in a time trial, no one gets the edge on the rivals from the TT bikes themselves.

By design, TT bikes are dangerous to ride. No one, even a skilled, experienced rider, is safe from a crash, nasty injury or an end to a racing career because a TT bike is a dog to handle at high speed on the road.

To take a full advantage TT bikes offer, you need to spend extra time to train on them. TT bikes add expenses to the teams and the organisers they can live without if UCI bans TT bikes from the sport.

Ban Ban, I Hit the Ground

The UCI will never ban TT bikes because bike manufactures sell probably 40% more bikes with this con. The riders will keep crashing. The Grand Tours will continue to lose major favourites because bikes manufactures want to sell more bikes.

It’s how it goes.

I don’t think the technology is quite where it needs to be yet for road cycling.

Whoa.

When was the last time a rider of Froome’s caliber openly said a new technology bike manufacturers want everyone to buy now is not “quite where it needs to be”? I know what “not quite where it needs to be” means in straightforward kind of English — this thing you put on my bike sucks. That’s what it means.

I hope no one dares to cancel Froome. Well, this being 2021, you never know.

Remember the Campagnolo Delta brakes? The then latest & greatest in brake technology? Back when pros spoke their minds and had the balls to put their money where their mouth was, the peloton flipped a bird to Campagnolo and told them to shove their lousy brakes where they belong — in a bin.

The Delta’s marketing spiel pitched Campagnolo’s innovation as a “center-pull brake with an articulated parallelogram”. With what? Articulated parallelogram, stupid. Oh, you don’t know? Okay then. Articulated parallelogram “allows braking power on the brake shoes higher than the power applied to the lever” the spiel went on to clear up.

Gotcha.

We’ve been braking with side-pull brakes just fine. Why the 1950s center-pull technology now? Aerodynamics, apparently. Center-pull design, again, apparently, is more aerodynamic or so Shimano said when they brought their Dura Ace AX Aero to the market.

It didn’t work. No one wants shitty but aerodynamic brakes. It didn’t fly for Shimano and it didn’t fly for Campagnolo except with Campagnolo, dominating the peloton at the time, the pros got involved. Same result though — go away with your shit.

Notice the pattern and the rationale. In the presence of adequate technology soundly suited for the purpose — in this case, stopping a bike — two major market players, in fact, the only two that counted at the time, come along and push products that neither solve a problem (how to stop a bike) nor improve on the current solution (side-pull design to stop a bike).

Worse, their new center-pull brakes don’t work as well as the existing side-pull brakes but they want us to buy them anyway because of articulated parallelogram and aerodynamics.

Compare this to 1952 when Mafac gave the pros the center-pull brakes and soon everyone wanted a pair because the brakes worked better than anything the pros ever tried. Sponsors shmonsors, just give us these brakes, we want them.

It’s how markets work. People coming up with solutions to solve existing problems. In planned economies, it’s the other way around. Solutions first, find problems later. No problem for a solution we just came up with? Make everyone use it anyway. Force it if you have to.

So, what was the problem disc brakes solved?

Not the braking, surely. Rim brakes work and they work great. Compared to 25-30 years ago, modern side-pull rim brakes improved so much that when I ride my 1990s steel bike, I’ve got to remember my modern Dura Ace calipers are not with me right now.

Marketing crowd and their talking heads tell us disc brakes give us more stopping power and great performance in the rain.

True and true.

The talking heads, they don’t tell us no one was asking for more stopping power. No one was asking because quality rim brakes 1) worked and, 2) continued to improve performance with better materials and design.

What else the talking heads don’t tell us?

If we asked Froome, he would say they don’t tell you about, and I quote:

the constant rubbing, the overheating, the discs becoming a bit warped when descending for longer than five or 10 minutes of constant braking, you’re going to get one piston that fires more than another, you’re going to get these little issues…the pistons [don’t] quite retract the way they’re meant to all the time…quite often it’ll work on the stand and when the mechanic sorts it out, but once you get onto the road, it’s a different story.

The brakes might work on the stand after a mechanic spends time on them. On the road, it’s a different story.

Chris Froome says that, not I.

But, the talking heads would say, there is that awesome stopping power and braking in the rain where instead of learning how to dry your rims with a bit of planning ahead, you buy a new bike with disc brakes and never worry about braking in the rain again.

Awesome. That trumps the actual, real problems we didn’t have before but now have to deal with. And yet, the disc brakes are everywhere now. What happened?

They started their life like any other new product on the market. People who liked them, bought bikes with disc brakes. Everyone else ignored the fad.

It would have stayed that way if not for this caveat — you can’t buy just a pair of disc brakes and install them on your bike. If you want them, you need a new a bike. And who wants to sell more bikes?

This is where the sponsorship angle came in. Make the pros use disc brakes, spin some marketing bullshit about stopping power and rain and boom, sell more bike.

It started to work (ride what pros ride card always works) until the UCI stepped in and said — and this is just me imagining things — pay up boys or we won’t allow these brakes in racing.

This is just me imagining things — the boys paid.

At the 2019 Tour de France all but one or two teams paraded on bikes with disc brakes on the early stages. By the time they got to the mountains where you’d think you need disc brakes the most (per the bullshit spin), a lot of riders switched back to rim brake bikes.

Did anybody notice it? Don’t know. I did. My guess is, people who tell the talking heads what to say noticed this too because when the 2020 Tour arrived, everyone read the memo and played accordingly. No more options, disc brakes it is.

Except for the INEOS Grenadiers team who 1) could afford to decide what equipment suits them best and, 2) practice marginal gains approach more than other teams.

And so it went — a solution to a non-existent problem fueled by the need to ramp up corporate profits.

It’s the same principle, minus the profit, the UCI used just days ago to stamp out some aero positions riders use in races. Instead of solving real problems that cause crashes (just yesterday, a spectator took out Matteo Jorgensen at the Tour de la Provence in the last 100 meters of the race), they go around dishing out solutions no one asked for.

If you’re not on disc brakes already, Chris says, it’s only a matter of time until you’re made obsolete in a way and forced onto them.

It’s right there in the open how things are done these days — force onto them. I think I have seen this movie before and I know how it ends.

Philippe Gilbert, quoted by VeloNews, said as much: “I have already ridden more than 1,000 races in my career and there was perhaps one without a crash.”

Philippe knows what he’s talking about. Sitting in front of a TV watching pros race, it puzzles me why these skilled dudes crash so much. It puzzles me because when I look back at my time racing in Soviet Union, I remember crashes. Big crashes, small crashes, nasty, bloody crashes, and one-offs when someone slides on a corner without taking anyone with him.

It happened but not at a rate I see on TV in professional racing. We didn’t crash that much. I could go an entire season without a crash. Many of my teammates did too.

Skill? Not it. A pro rider is a pro rider. Before reaching that level, the pros spend years in the saddle, thousands of hours. Racing in all conditions. Sun, rain, sleet. Snow even. Good roads, bad roads. Cities, open roads. You name it, they raced it.

Not skill.

I would be an idiot pretending the Eastern Bloc system bred better-skilled racers. This is stupid.

Commentators, those who know what they’re talking about and those who don’t, like to mention road furniture. They have a point. When the guys in front of you split left and right and a traffic dome pops in your face at 50km/h, you go down. Hard. 

Road furniture doesn’t explain all crashes though. Not even half. Maybe 10%? Who knows. I don’t. It’s a problem but not the problem.

In the USSR, road engineers didn’t care about road furniture as much as the Western engineers do. Different priorities I guess. Road furniture didn’t bother us, we had to deal with something worse — potholes and traffic.

In the road furniture vs potholes contest (the Soviet roads’ potholes), the potholes win. In my opinion anyway. They win because the ratio is about 20 to 1 — 20 potholes vs 1 piece of road furniture. The potholes win because 1 out of 10 of those potholes could swallow a truck and if you hit it at full speed, not only will you say goodbye to your wheels and possibly the frame, but maybe your face too as you know it. Breaking a collarbone would be like hitting a jackpot. Your lucky day, pal.

And then traffic.

Road closures? What road closures? You’re telling us you want to run a bike race and shut down road traffic? Don’t think so. What is this, the Olympic Games or something?

The organizers used a rolling road closure. So called. They’d send a copper in front of the peloton and he’d order upcoming cars and trucks to get off the road. Some, only some, seeing something is going on would stay put and wait for the peloton to pass. Others would take off as soon as the cop swished by and kept on driving. If the peloton, because of where the wind was coming from, rode in the left lane or took over the two lanes, you’d be looking, if you saw it, at a car or a truck charging toward you.

Picture a peloton shrinking to one side of the road as if a bomb blew up next to it and the commissaire’s car trying to stop the missile with flashing headlights, honking and gesticulating hands from the window.

It worked, somehow. A lot of things in Soviet Union that were not supposed to work, somehow worked. Most of the time.

And those parked cars on the side of the road. Good citizens parked on the shoulder, if there was one, but most swerved a meter or two off the road and thought they gave us enough space to squeeze by.

Picture a cross wind, a typical feature of a typical road race in Soviet Union. It’s hammer down from the gun and before you know it, you’re in a string, eyeballs out trying to hang on with the first echelon. 

Those eyeballs, you focus them on the rear wheel in front of you. Not so much on a wheel but on the tire because you want to stick to it without touching it. You can’t see shit in front of you. It’s just the tire and everything else, the world to your left and to your right, the tarmac below, it’s all blurred. You want that tire. You want the road to change direction. You want more slipstream. 

And then you see that wheel lean to the side. Sharp. A swing. And like a fish pierced by a spear, you swing too. You have to because if he swings and you don’t, or you’re too slow to react, you hit a parked car. You know this because you see that car a split second later as you pass it.

This corrida never stops as long as the wind blows from the side and the hammer is down. You’re on a knife’s edge saving your ass from a shit result and from breaking your bones, all in one package.

And yet, no one hits anything.

Skill and experience, sure, it helps. In junior races, I’ve seen people hanging their front wheel on someone’s rear derailleur and going down when they didn’t react on time but at the high end of the hierarchy, this was rare. You learn. You learn with your own skin and by the time you reach the big boys’ league, you learn to trust the wheel in front of you. It’s not a ticket to a life without crashes, but what else can you do riding blind when the bets are off and you have nowhere to hide from the wind? Follow the wheel. He swings, you swing. It’s how it goes.

The shit pro riders in Europe have to deal with to stay upright is real. The road furniture, the foul play in the sprints, the stupid barriers the organizers erect without thinking, all of these things take riders down, but there’s more to it.

One other reason they crash so much is the aero wheels. These darlings of bike manufacturing wobble your bike in the wind. The stronger the wind, coming from the side, the more your bike wobbles. It’s physics. Nothing you can do about it.

I get it. The deep-section wheels give you extra speed, okay. Simple enough. But they also throw you around when a gust of wind hits that tall rim from the side. And when it does, you jerk. It’s a sail, that’s what it is. And when you jerk, you may or may not stay upright. It depends. At this point, it’s mathematics. The more riders get hit with a gust of wind, the more chances of at least one of them losing their shit and going down.

It’s that Tyler Durden’s maxim again, reversed. On a long enough timeline of cross winds, the rate of crashes goes up as long as the wind hits enough sails that also act as wheels.

To be fair, I don’t see as many 80mm wheels in a pro peloton as I used to see in the past. I guess the riders have wised up. The danger of these wheels outweighed the speed gain for them. Not worth it.

And by the way, it’s not just the wind that causes trouble for deep-section wheels. If you own an old school, 32- or 36-spoke wheels and deep-section wheels, try this. Grab an old school wheel, hold it by the skewers and spin it as hard as you can. Lean it left and right and notice how hard it is to do it. Then do the same with a deep-section wheel. You’ll see it’s harder to lean the deep-section wheel.

I have no idea what causes this effect. I suck at physics. All I know, from riding, the faster the speed, the harder it is to change direction on deep-section wheels. And the deeper the rim, the stronger the effect. 

This may explain riders stuffing up corners on fast descends. If you watch enough pro racing, you see the stuff ups all the time. They stuff it up again and again for no obvious reason. Guys with 10+ years of racing in the bag. It’s just bizarre. Rim brakes, disc brakes, doesn’t matter. They go too wide and then either fix the problem at the last moment or hit the rails when it’s too late to fix it.

As an ex-racer, it hurts me to watch it.

I don’t have a solution for this. I don’t even know if what I’m talking about is true. It’s me talking out loud with you. If this is true, what is a safe rim’s depth for professional racing? 30mm? 40? 50? I don’t know.

If we had an F1-like governing body that cared for riders’ safety, which we don’t, they’d test these things to death before letting them experiment and throw their careers, and sometimes lives, at these experiments.

Until then, the blood bath will go on.

If you want to do well, or hope you will, you pile up your kit next to your bed the night before. On a nightstand if the room has one or on top of your travel bag next to bed. 

Pin the numbers. Fold a centimeter on each side and crease the race number against a table’s edge to make a cut rectangular. Then pin it. Four in the corners, another 4 in between. Eight pins all up, 16 for 2 numbers. You want them to stick to the jersey. You don’t want them to flap. Not a Fred. 

Check if you didn’t pierce the pockets with the pins. Freds and idiots do that.

If it’s a new jersey you had never worn before, lay it on the floor and walk over it. Once or twice. Appease the cycling gods, it’s not new now, don’t crash me tomorrow. Please.

Lie down in bed and stare at your bike. Tomorrow, we race. Tomorrow, we show them what we can do. Tomorrow.

You wake in the morning from an alarm clock, wash up, brush teeth and go for breakfast. Could be an oatmeal or rice pudding, mashed potatoes or macaroni with meat patties. Barley meal. Follow up with cottage cheese and 2 tablespoons of sour cream, sugar or jam. Cup of black tea and bread with a chunk of butter covered by a slice of cheese.

Back in your room, boil a jar of water, add 4 teaspoons of tea and brew it. Watch the tea leaves saturate with water, watch them drown. A teafall in a jar. Watch the water darken from the tea leaves losing the tannin.

Check the time.

An hour or two left before you have to leave, you go back to bed and rest. You don’t want to walk or do anything. Lie in bed and rest. Don’t move your muscles. Digest the food and rest. It’s a magic time. It’s not a war you’re going to, but it’s kind of a war.

This hour before you start putting your kit on, suck it in. In peace. Because 2 hours from now, everyone minus the 5 teammates will hunt for your head if you dare to get in their way.

Stare at your bike from the pillow pressed against the wall. 

The guy 2 meters away from you, your roommate, he’s sleeping. He sleeps anywhere, anytime. A python.

Check the time.

Fifteen minutes to go. Get up, take the clothes off, wake up your teammate. Gotta go bud, we gotta go.

Undershirt first then the knicks. Pick up the jersey, arms up, slide it on. A tint of rubber smell inside from the lycra fabric. This is when you know it’s a race day, that smell of rubber inside the jersey. It’s when the first dose of adrenaline kicks in. You feel it in your blood and the heart starts to knock but only for 2 or 3 seconds.

Pull out a 3-kilo sac with raisins from your bag. Grab a handful, put them in your jersey’s right pocket. Another one.

If it’s a long race, grab 3 oatmeal cookies. Maybe 4 just in case. Put them in the left pocket. Food sorted.

Now the socks. Snow white for when you know it won’t rain or something shitty, a pair that had seen dirt before when you suspect it might.

Tight the shoe laces and tuck the knot inside the shoe, a trick you learned from your first coach. It looks neat and the laces will never loosen.

Fill the bottle with the black tea and add 4 teaspoons of sugar. Drop in a tablet of ascorbic acid for flavor. Pause and think if you need a second bottle. Probably not.

Pick up your Cinelli helmet and shove it in the middle pocket on the jersey.

Gloves. These leather gloves, you hate them. You don’t want leather between your skin and the handlebar. Getting those raisins from the pocket with gloves on, pain in the ass. And you can’t wash them because you know if you do, they stiffen after you dry them these bustards and rub against your skin for at least 5 rides. You don’t wash them and now they stink from the sweat they sucked in.

Put them on in case you crash and land on your hand. New jersey or not, you never know.

Grab the bike by the stem, cock it on its rear wheel and walk to the door and listen to the freewheel’s tik tik tik song.

Tik tik tik. It sings for you.

You’re on.

People love to compare great athletes from different eras. What if Bernard Hinault raced against Eddy Merckx? How would that go? Or how would Wayne Gretzky and Valeri Kharlamov go against each other if both played in the NHL? Bobby Fisher vs Garry Kasparov?

At any rate, this is not a what if post. I’m not going to bore you with speculations about what could have happened if…

I have an opposite goal in mind – I’ll try to argue why comparing contemporary athletes separated by political barriers is a fruitless exercise.

This post was “inspired” by Lucio, a Facebook friend from Lombardia who asked me some time ago if, in my opinion, Sergei Soukhoruchenkov would have won Tour de France or Giro d’Italia had he turned pro at 23 instead of 33.

Some Background On Sergei Soukhoruchenkov

I realize there’s not a great deal of information available about Soukhoruchenkov (known as Soukho in the West), so I’ll sketch something for you with one hand.

I watched my first Course de la Paix (Peace Race) in 1979, the year he won it the first time. I was 13, he was 23. If there was a sports hero for me at the time, he was it.

I don’t remember how exactly he won it. All I remember was one long, crazy solo attack he did some time during the race, got the yellow jersey and never let go of it until the end.

Next year we had the Olympic Games in Moscow and as you probably know, it was boycotted by the United States. The rest of the Western world boycotted it too but allowed their athletes to go to Moscow on their own.

I don’t know how the boycott affected other sports. In my opinion, it had little impact on road cycling.

The main players were all there including some from Western countries such as the then current world road champion Gianni Giacomini, the 1978 world road champion Gilbert Glaus, Steven Roche, Adri van der Poel, Marc Madiot and of course all the heavy hitters from the GDR, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

My friend and I watched the live broadcast at my sister’s because she owned a color TV (we didn’t).

I remember that race pretty well. The tough Krylatskoye circuit was purpose-built for the Moscow Games. I raced on it 5 years later and left some skin and sweat on those roads. It’s a crazy loop with banked corners and walls to climb.

Anyway, the break went early with Barinov, Lang and an Italian guy who crashed soon after.

Soukhoruchenkov bridged to the break and the trio rode away from the peloton. Two Russians and a Pole. With about 50 km to go, Soukhoruchenkov attacked and soloed to the line. A textbook win.

Everyone expected him to win Course de la Paix again in 1981 after the Games but he didn’t – he finished second while Shakhid Zagretdinov, his team-mate, won.

This is when things went south for Soukho – he didn’t make the team for 1982 Course de la Paix, went off the radar in 1983 and then somewhat miraculously re-emerged in 1984 to win Course de la Paix again.

These are just some highlights of his career.

The UCI recognised him as the best cyclist in the world in 1979, 1980 and 1981 (at the time, UCI governed amateur cycling and a different body governed professionals).

He was often compared to Bernard Hinault – tough, stubborn, not a pure climber but impossible to get rid of even on steep climbs if he refused to get dropped. And because of that, a lot of people wondered: what if ..?

No Ifs, No Buts

Now, even though it’s clear Sergey Soukhoruchenkov was made from the same kind of dough as Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault have been made from, there’s really no way of knowing how things would have unfolded for him in professional cycling because:

(1) Amateur cycling, as tough as it was, never had anything even close to a professional racing calendar.

For example, Course de la Paix aside, there was nothing even resembling a Grand Tour. Course de la Paix itself, without taking anything from it as the mother of all amateur stage racing, lacked the Alps, the Pyrenees and hors catégorie climbs.

There are some hard climbs in Tatra Mountains but there wouldn’t be 5-6 high mountain stages in a single edition. It was a hard race, but you can’t really compare the Tour or the Giro with Course de la Paix.

There were no Classics either. This is because about 90% of amateur racing was domestic. Each country had its own domestic calendar and this is where most of the racing happened.

This, in turn, meant that international amateur calendar was pretty thin and it was thin because only national teams and well funded clubs could afford travel to international races.

A thin international calendar leads me to the next point:

(2) With world championships, Olympic Games every 4 years and Course de la Paix as the only major battleground between amateurs, it was hard to know where the best riders stood on the international arena.

Apart from these three and a couple of other bigger races (Tour de l’Avenir, Milk Race or Giro delle Regioni), the peloton’s makeup at other international races was a hodgepodge – a mixture of 2-3 top national teams racing against local teams in whatever country the race was in.

Had these meetings been ongoing against more or less the same rivals as in professional cycling, the fans and the racers would know where everyone stood in the pecking order. Everyone knew the stars, outside of that, the peloton’s makeup was different at every international race.

Speaking of racing against inferior opposition, here is my next point of why comparing amateur stars with professional stars is nonsensical:

(3) Eastern Bloc amateurs were not amateurs in any meaningful sense of the word – they were professionals.

Not only they were paid to race, they also had all the time in the world to train and prepare for racing while most European amateurs had no such luxury. These guys had real jobs to do at home.

It doesn’t mean winning the Tour de l’Avenir was easy, it wasn’t, but it does place Eastern Bloc domination of amateur cycling in a proper perspective when these things are considered.

And finally, the race dynamics:

(4) The Soviets were the only riders in the world who valued team classification more than an individual in a stage race.

The socialist ideology, enforced by the State, elevated collective effort over individual.

Applied to road cycling, it meant that the Kremlin expected the Soviet national team to chase team classification first with individual one being an icing on the cake if or when it happens. If you can do both, great, but don’t you dare to lose team classification to the GDR.

If you look at the statistics, you’ll see the Soviets won the Course de la Paix in team classification 20 times while the 2nd best team, GDR, “only” 10.

The individual classification is 12-10 in GDR’s favor.

This approach led to some awkward tactics on the road with everyone puzzled about what the Russians were up to.

For example, a typical situation might have been where the Soviets would shut down a break because it was hurting their team classification even though the break favored their individual standing. Except the Russians, no one else knew what was going on.

This partially explains why the Soviets were hopeless in major one day races like world championships (only 2 gold medals in the history of the USSR). Most of the time, they lacked the intuition and skill to throw all resources at one guy and drive him to a win.

This flaw showed later when Soviet Union collapsed and its elite riders started signing professional contracts in 1988. Only a handful of them, naturally more aggressive than others and hungry for individual success, such as Tchmil or Adbujaparov, made it to the top of professional cycling.

As for Sergei Soukhoruchenkov, when he signed with Alfa Lum as part of the first wave of Soviet riders to go pro, he was 33, way past his best years and nowhere near the level he needed to be at to race against the likes of Lemond or Indurain.

He had been heard and promptly echoed:

I suspect no one, except the inner circle of the UCI, knows why UAE Tour exists.

Pat Lefevere, being Pat Lefevere, came out and spared no punches calling the UCI a dictatorship.

Not in relation to the UAE Tour, more like: by the way, UCI is a dictatorship taking money from an emergency fund, bankrolled by teams, to pay Euro lawyers to shut up teams who gave this money to be spent on good causes and not against teams who gave UCI the money in the first place.

The Climb

If you have never heard of The Climb, Michael Covino’s 2019 feature film, don’t worry — me neither.

The film appeared in 2018 at Sundance Festival as an 8-minute short. People with cash (Sony Pictures) and taste (Trafalgar Releasing) liked it so much, they bought it and paid Michael to make a feature-length film.

It’s a story of two friends, a kitted-up Mamil on a $15,000 bike and a dude in sleeveless t-shirt, rock climbing helmet and clown socks riding in keds, overgeared, up what looks like some Euro col.

The rock climbing helmet opens up and tells the Mamil his undying affection for his ex-girlfriend at which point the Mamil, no doubt in a sharing mood too, confesses — he slept with the keds’ ex.

Typical cycling story.

The Climb will hit the big screens on 20 March.

Remco Evenepoel asked the media 2 years ago to stop calling him the next Eddy Merckx.

Or is it the next next Eddy Merckx?

One advantage of being old is you remember things (and then you don’t). I remember a bunch of gifted riders, some Belgian and others not so much, being labeled the next Eddy Merckx.

Here is the list:

• Tom Boonen
• Peter Sagan
• Wilco Kelderman
• Edvald Boasson Hagen (c’mon)
• Damiano Cunego (yes, Cunego)
• Johan Museeuw
• Claude Criquielion
• Frank Vandenbroucke
• Eric Vanderaerden
• Freddy Maertens

I get it. As a cycling journalist, you want to spice your story. And in this digital marketing age, there’s click bait to take into account. But, Cunego the next Merckx?

What did John McEnroe say about this?

Let’s recall: Eddy Merckx won everything under the sun and then some. He was the next Eddy Merckx before he became Eddy Merckx.

He started with Milan-San Remo in his first year as a pro and never stopped winning.

Remco Evenepoel?

Last year, after he won the Clásica San Sebastián, Merckx said:

He is ready for the big job. Can he follow in my footsteps? Maybe he will even get better. Remco has all the qualities to make it happen.

He does have the qualities, no doubt. But so did Tom Boonen at about the same age.

What Does the Next Eddy Merckx Mean Anyway?

For me, the next Eddy Merckx would have to win:

• all Monuments
• all Grand Tours plus at least one double
• at least 5 Tour de Frances
• at least one road world championship
• more than 3 Northern Classics
• a bunch of lesser Classics
• cherry on a cake — Hour Record

This would be somewhat close, not exactly the Eddy Merckx, but good enough.

Right now, we’re talking about a 20-year-old kid. Massively talented but a 20-year-old still.

Let’s come back to it and discuss after he bags a couple of Tours, a Giro and the Ronde.

How about 7 Milan-San Remos? Or even 5?

On that day, Auguste and Louis Lumière screened the first projected film in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris. The 3 50-second films show workers leaving a photographic factory.

Nothing remarkable (apart from historical value of the footage).

What caught my eye were some workers with bicycles. That’s right, the first ever cinema screening and we have bikes in it.

Bikes and people. Not cars and people but bikes.

There’s also a dog.

Bruce Bennett, the author of Cycling and Cinema, writes:

In pushing their way past their co-workers and riding out of a photographic factory, the cyclists introduced 19th-century viewers to three-dimensional cinematic space, showing them the new ways of seeing the world offered by the cinema. Cycling is not an incidental element here; rather, the presence of moving bicycles in this film demonstrated the unique formal properties of this revolutionary medium: it is cycling that makes this film a film. In short, the first film is a cycling film.

Let me repeat this again: the first film was a cycling film.

Leave it with you for this thought to sink in.