What A Difference A Year Makes

The 2010 TdF route was announced last week and, ou est la! It largely involves a long, hard bike ride around France.  Yes it has different features and towns and mountain passes, and yes it lacks a Team Time Trial and Mont Ventoux and so on, but if you step away from all the plusses and minuses, what’s clear is that winning next year’s Tour won’t be about the route.  Nor will it be about the bicycles or the other gear, because all the teams who get invited have the finest gadgets on the market.  So the question that remains, is whether it will be about who brings the best team, or who brings the best rider.

Let’s step back and look at Lance’s 7 consecutive wins.  Arguably he came each year with a great support team, and in a few years he had the absolutely indisputably best squad to serve his goals.  And that’s what they were there for.  The strategy was simple: It was all for one, not one for all. The fact that in seven years on only one occasion did a teammate of Lance’s win a single stage, shows clear evidence of that.  Anyway, it worked, and there’s nothing wrong or insidious about such a strategy.  Anyone who belly-aches about it has to be suffering from overwhelming pangs of jealousy.

But then a funny thing happened.

Just as Lance left the sport to chase around marathons and female celebrities, young Alberto Contador made his own spectacular debut by winning any and every major Tour he bothered to show up for.  He won the TdF and Giro the first time he’d entered either of them.  Then he won the Vuelta Espana to complete the hat trick.  His name and palmares starting climbing the record books faster than he rides uphill.

But then an even funnier thing happened.

Apparently Lance figured out there was no way he would catch the fastest people in the marathons, or maybe he got tired of so easily conquering starlettes, but for reasons we may never fully appreciate he decided he wanted to race bicycles again.  And, will ironies never cease, he plops himself down as the new head or co-head or presumed-head or honorary head or whatever, of the very squad that would otherwise be lead by Alberto Contador.

Now, we’ve written with unique laser-focused insight (for example, read this beauty or this one) about the interesting chemistry that played out as a result of conjoining these two very strong but polar opposite athletes and mixing them thoroughly with a batch of other very strong athletes, AKA the Astana Squad of 2009.  What the public saw was latent energy.  It was like watching a nuclear reactor.  You don’t see much more than clouds of white steam poring out the roof, but it scares you anyway.  What went on within the team, was probably not so unlike the inside of said reactor, with uranium rods (AKA, Lance) throwing off atoms so powerful they’re capable of producing temperatures found on the surface of the sun, and lead rods (AKA, Contador) absorbing such energy, more or less, but undoubtedly getting fried in the doing.

Forgetting all the fission taking place inside hotels and onboard the team bus, their interactions on the race course were even more interesting.  Lance quickly showed that he remains amazing fast on the bike, and even faster at sending out caustic Tweets about the shortcomings of his teammate.  Not once did he do so about other riders on the Astana squad, or riders on other squads.  In fact, he spoke to the press during the race about how people inside the peloton seemed to be playing more nicely with him than they did prior to his hiatus from the sport.  Oh yes, he was a veritable love machine toward 189 of the 190 starting riders, himself included.

But of course there was no love in store for Alberto Contador.

Now, many, or lets just say every, rider that has faced Lance’s focused scorn over the past decade, has found a way to promptly implode.  He gives them “The Look,” and they dutifully start riding for second place.  It’s been that simple.  And that’s because Lance is a master at sports psychology and playing mind-games that would make a waterboarding CIA interrogator claim “not fair!”

But somehow Lance couldn’t figure out how to crack the shell of this so-called mama’s boy named Contador.  When harsh words and harsher looks failed, Lance divided the Astana squad into two parts:  those that would faithfully support Lance’s efforts to win, and those that wanted to find work outside the sport of cycling.  So young Alberto found himself sitting alone, while Lance and his gang of hangers-on heaped scorn and derision toward him.

Most of us would have wilted under this barrage.  Most of us would have begged to bow at the knee of Lance and be allowed to serve his majesty.  Most of us would have gotten in line, zipped our lips, and done as told.  What Alberto Contador said in response, he said with this legs.

Lance rode dazzlingly, and earned his way back onto the podium, which we wouldn’t have bet on.  It was just too big of an ask after too long of a sabbatical.  But he did it and we salute him.  Nevertheless, no matter how hard he rode, Alberto Contador rode harder.  Contador won in the mountains and he won in the individual time trials — both parts of the race that Lance dominated in his heyday.  As tellingly, Contador beat Lance without the support of the Astana squad, which cowered behind Lance.  Lance Tweeted about Contador such silly things as, “there’s no I in team,” to which we scoff because that’s all there ever was at Postal/Discovery, and he scoffed about apparent tactical blunders by his teammate — but Contador proved that he could sustain himself against Lance’s legs, Lance’s mouth, and Lance’s Astana-clad goons.

Now We Look Forward to The 2010 Tour

Even before the 2009 race was concluded, Lance started licking his wounds and plotting the next battle.  His first move was to announce that he and his goons would start a new squad and virtually everybody at Astana would be invited in.  However, suffice it to say that Spanish will not be spoken on the team bus, and anyone who can read Espanol would have noted on the invitation that they weren’t invited.

On the face of it, that leaves Alberto almost singlehandedly riding in 2010 against Lance and Astana.   As we described above, there would be nothing particularly new about that arrangement.  And while Alberto’s situation at Astana, a team that is only vaguely defined at this time, is less than ideal, it is almost certain he’ll arrive in France in July with a much friendlier and more supportive squad than he had around him in 2009.

As such, Alberto uniquely brings the mental toughness to win the Tour again, notwithstanding all the rocks and bombs Sir Lance may cast his way.  It should be an extraordinary event and a wonderful battle to watch, and we’re already looking forward to July 2010.

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