the Tour de France is on at the moment, and its at about this time that anyone who see's the 30-second coverage on telly is all of a sudden an expert on cancer-recovery and elite cycling.
Earlier this week I had the following email exhange with Big-Tom-Henry (a recent cycling convert) on Lance Armstrong's dominance which I thought I'd blog...
String, I've decided that Lance Armstrong is a crock. He simply buys the best team to ride in front of him, protect him, promote him and let him take the glory where it matters. He doesn't ride in any other major events, focussing only on this one race and happy to bask in its glory and think that he's the best cyclist in the world. He's an interloper. He's a pretender. I hope he doesn't win!
...but know that he's probably going to. Pah!
And my highly-informative reply was...
Hehe, that sounds like the sort of diatribe Woodcock would scribe. I know your 'tongues-in-cheek' really, but I know what you mean. The truth is, all teams do exactly the same.
What it comes down to is "who's got the leader that can survive the best, and come up with the goods when he doesn’t have support". And the best dude for the job at the moment .... whether we like to see a yank winning or not, is Mr Armstrong. Indurain, Riis, Ullrich, LeMond all won the same way.
In pretty much every year of the tour there's only one or two 'real favourites', its not as open as something like horse-racing.
It's more like Formula-one, where there aren't too many surprises on the podium. And even if you're sick of Ferrari winning all the time (until recently) you still have to admire the skills of Schumacher.
All the team owners/sponsors care about is victory and exposure of their brand, the only way that can be achieved these days is by buying a decent all-rounder and sheltering and protecting him at all costs. Sacrificing team-mates and other seasonal minor-wins (and everything else really 'is minor' by comparison)
The days of the lone-victor are long gone, and managers don’t give a stuff about the glory of the individual team leader, they just want the job done.
Sport is business !!!
