The Daily Muddle

So I’ve been paying very close to attention to the Tour de France this year (Live Coverage).  It is has very quickly been something I really look forward to each day and if I had to redo my Top 5 Sporting Events – this would easily kick something off.  There is a lot I enjoy about it, but I don’t need to bore you with that.  What I realized halfway through this years tour is that I really didn’t have any clue what was going on.  I would pick up stuff here and there, but still didn’t have a firm grasp on it.  I’ve talked to several people who were in my shoes – really liked watching it, but no idea what was going on!  I luckily have awesome friends.  Two of them are very much into cycling (one of whom actually cycles for a team – Jenks you can comment on this post as to the details because I don’t know them).  Anyways, I asked them for a synopsis of what was going on and it was exactly what I needed.  It was so good that I thought it deserved a wider audience.

From Dave L:

What I love about biking is that there are a million variables, and the strategy can be incredibly complex. Instead of having two teams, or two individuals, competing against each other like in most sports, there are 20 teams and 180 riders (at the start). That means there are nine riders per team.

With almost no exceptions, each team has one rider that is the leader of that squad, and most of the rest of the guys on the team have one job – to help that guy. He’s usually a great climber, since that’s where it’s easiest to distance yourself from the rest of the group. Some of the team leaders are also really good in time trials (an event I’ll explain later), but normally they just have to be good enough there not to lose too much time to anyone else.

What’s interesting about the Astana team this year is that they started the race not knowing exactly who their leader was. They had Alberto Contador, a 26-year-old Spaniard who won the race in 2007, and also Lance, who won from 1999-2005. Both guys wanted to win the race this year, so neither one was the accepted leader, at least until Sunday, when Contador did way better on a stage with a lot of climbs, and put some time on Lance. After that, Lance said that he would be content to help Contador win.

I realize that what I’ve already said may raise a few questions. So I’ll try to start at the beginning.

One quick note about biking is that drafting - which is getting really close behind another racer so that they’re fighting the wind resistance and you’re doing less work – is CRITICAL. If there are two riders, one right in front of the other, the front guy is doing about 30% more work than the other guy. If you’re in the back of a big group, you aren’t doing a whole lot of work.

This is why you’ll see long, straight lines of riders – this is a train, and basically the guy in front is doing all the work, and when he gets tired, he drops to the back, and the next guy works. You can basically cycle through like that and go way faster than you could on your own.

ANYWAY, the Tour consists of 21 stages, of a few different types.
- Normal stages
- Individual time trials
- Team time trials

The winner is the guy that has the lowest cumulative time through the 21 stages.

The regular stages, of which there are 18 out of the 21, are basically like big road races. Everybody starts at the same time in a huge group (called the peloton). These races can play out a bunch of different ways, but it depends on how hilly the stage is. What almost always happens is that a “break” or “breakaway” goes out ahead of the peloton, and they try to stay away from the big group and win the race. This is really difficult because, based on wind resistance and the amount of people doing work in the peloton, it’s way easier for the peloton to go fast than a few guys in a break.

So what often happens with a break is that they get caught by the main group with a few miles left in the race, since the peloton is going faster.

Races also depend on whether or not it’s a flat stage or a mountain stage. In mountain stages, often the peloton sticks together but a few really good climbers (in the Tour, these are the favorites to win the overall race) go out in front and climb like maniacs. Whoever is the best climber on that day will win the race (especially if the race ends at the top of a hill), and these stages are where the favorites really put distance on everyone else in the race.

On flat stages, often the whole group will stay together, and this results in a sprint finish. Each team usually has a guy who is a really good sprinter, and they’ll try to position this guy near the front, but not too near, so that he can draft off his teammates until the very end, when he accelerates like a crazy person and wins the race.

That’s a brief description of how the races go down, but the teammate stuff and strategy can play out in a million different ways. Some quick examples:

- The team leader, the guy that the team thinks has the best chance to win it all, is protected by the rest of the guys on his team. That means that if he crashes or has a bike problem, they’ll wait for him, and then he drafts off his teammates until they catch up to the peloton. It also means that if there’s a big mountain stage, one of the teammates will let the leader draft off of him until he just can’t go anymore, then the leader is on his own. There are a bunch of ways that teammates help the leader.

- Let’s say Jenks and I are the leaders of our teams. If Jenks is in a breakaway, and I’m in the peloton, often my team will get to the front of the peloton and work really hard until we’ve caught Jenks, just so that he doesn’t gain any time on me.

- Similarly, let’s say I’m at the back of the peloton and Jenks is at the front, and then the group gets split, Jenks and his teammates will know that I’m in the back, and they’ll start accelerating really hard to try to gain time on me.

- If it’s a sprint finish, teammates will lead out their best sprinter, by forming a line in front of him near the finish. Then they’ll work really hard, with each teammate dropping off until the sprinter goes by himself at the end. If they time it right, the sprinter is going 50-55 mph at the very end.

Teammates are also really important in the Team Time Trial, which is a really cool event. Basically, the 20 teams all go off at different times, and you have to stick together and go as fast as you can as a group. This means that the whole team will stick together, in that long line, alternating who does the work for the whole thing. The time that everyone on the team gets is the time that the 5th guy on your team finishes with – so if you have four fast guys and five slow ones, you’re screwed. It’s a cool event, but there’s only one stage like this, and it already happened.

The Individual Time Trials are cool too. In each one of these, the racers go off one at a time and no drafting is allowed. Basically you just bike your butt off for the whole race – this is the most painful thing ever. Guys that are good at this are total badasses.

Okay, final thing.

There are four different jerseys that are special.

1) The Yellow Jersey
This one is famous – the rider in first place wears it. It’s a huge honor to get it, even for just one day, and it’s a big deal for your sponsors to have their name on it.

2) The Green Jersey
This is worn by the best sprinter – the guy who has the most sprint points. Points are awarded at various spots throughout stages (usually flat ones) – and so you’ll see random sprints during some stages. There are also sprint points awarded at the finish line too – so more than just winning the stage, you’re trying to finish near the front to get points. Points are awarded to the first few people that cross the line, so you’re also rewarded for going out in a break, since you’ll have less competition to fight for those points.

3) The Polka-Dot Jersey
This is worn by the best climber. Similar to the sprint, except this time the points are awarded at the tops of mountains. Again, being in a break helps you with this, so good climbers like to get out in front on days when there are mountain points to be worn.

4) The White Jersey
This is for the best young rider in the race – under the age of 26.

There are also other special jerseys that guys wear, like if they’re the national champion of their country, they wear a special jersey. Also, there’s a special group that decides which rider was “most aggressive” in the previous stage, and the next day he wears a special white-on-red number (as opposed to the normal black-on-white).

So I think that’s about it. I hope this helped. I’m now going to go back to pretending to work, but actually watching the replay of this morning’s Tour stage.

Jenks, what did I forget?

From Jenks:

Dave covered everything except:

(1) Team classification.  In each stage, add the times of the first three riders of a given team together, that is the team classification time for the stage.  Add up all the team’s team classification times for all the stages so far and you get the overall team classification.  Lowest is best, current leaders in this category wear Black on Yellow numbers.  This classification used to carry a lot more weight back when a team’s entry into next year’s Tour was guaranteed if they placed well in the team classification.  Nowadays, it’s pretty much a consolation prize (I think the team that wins gets EUR25000).

(2) Money.  There is money for everything.  EUR400000 for the winner of the Yellow/GC/Overall at the end.  EUR50000 or 25000 for the rest of the jerseys.  Money for winning an individual stage (these are very prestigious wins, too, and can turn a rider on a EUR40000/yr contract into a EUR300000 contract).  Money for intermediate sprints.  Some of the small towns along each of the stage routes often set up informal intermediate sprints where they award small sums to the winner of the intermediate sprint (e.g. EUR1000 or EUR500).

I think that’s it.

What most laymen fail to grasp is that the Tour is more than the yellow jersey.  There’s something for everyone.  Of 180 riders, about 165 know they have NO SHOT WHATSOEVER at winning the yellow jersey.  Suicide moves like 200km breakaways rarely work, but on the occasions they do, pay big for the winners and it also gives good TV camera coverage to the sponsors.  For a “sprinter” type of rider (e.g. Thor Hushovd, Mark Cavendish, Tyler Farrar, Allan Davis, Oscar Freire) the most prestigious things in the Tour are (a) wearing/winning the green jersey and (b) winning individual stages and (c) most important of all is winning on the final stage on the streets of the Champs Elysees in Paris.

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