Chess on two wheels
It’s not so long ago that naysayers were describing the death of professional cycling as a sporting spectacle, placing the blame largely at the door of Team Sky, with accusations that Bradley Wiggins’ 2012 Tour de France triumph was conducted to the dictates of the power meter. A tedious obsession with power outputs and VAM calculations had replaced blood and guts racing, they said. Hard on the heels of a sensational 2013 season (Ciolek’s victory at a brutal Milan-San Remo, Froome’s heroics on the Ventoux, a four-way duel for the rainbow jersey at a rain-soaked worlds etc), the 2014 Tour Down Under has provided further evidence that the greatest prizes in cycling are to be won by courage, desire, and instinct.
Greipel’s stage four victory owed as much to the iron discipline of the Lotto Belisol sprint train as the failure of Kittel and Giant-Shimano to read an echelon. And today, Old Willunga Hill played host to a high-speed chess match, with Evans, Gerrans, and Ulissi conducing an enthralling battle behind Porte’s unanswerable attack. As the gradient increased, the veteran Evans showed all his experience as he snaked from one side of the road to the other in a bid to deny the shelter of a slipstream to the pursuing Gerrans, who had bridged to his countryman with his own, perfectly judged move. We don’t doubt that the latest scientific training methods play a part in the success of all of the WorldTour riders, but when the chips are down, a competitive watts-per-kilo reading will take you just so far. A racer’s heart is still more valuable than an SRM.
