Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Here's an idea I think is really cool but that has absolutely no chance of ever being implemented even a little bit. If you’re not a person who follows cycling you’ll likely find this blog a bit mind-numbing and uninteresting (even more than it usually is) but I have to get this out there in print so that I can say that it was my idea first.

As you may know, cycling as a professional sport is in some serious doo-doo (that’s the technical term). Between the doping scandals, the arguing between governing bodies and event promoters and the general bullheadedness of European “intelligencia” when sticking to a position it looks as if the sport over in Europe is teetering on collapse, explosion, implosion or some combination of the three (I’m guessing all three with some serious intestinal distress thrown in for good measure…I mean, one look at Dick Pound’s face…yes, that’s the real name of the head of the World Anti-Doping Association or WADA…and you can’t help but think of intestinal distress). Now some might look at this as a disaster of unmitigated proportions. Others see it as a welcome end of years of old, washed up European aristocrats and their posturing. Me? I see it as an opportunity of the sport of cycling to move to America for a fresh start and really big burritos.

How’s that going to happen? Well, we’ve already got a couple of the best races in the world already with the Tour of California and the Tour of Georgia and a couple more stage races that have a chance of stepping up to that level with the Tours of Missouri and Utah. What is needed now is a really big event. Something so audacious that even Texas will go, “Damn!” Fortunately, someone has an idea for this: The Tour of America. Now, at first glance the idea is pretty dumb actually. It’s a thirty day stage race patterned after the Tour de France with stages that are too long, transfers between stages that are too complicated and implementation strategies that are too vague. Given that doping in Europe is primarily caused by too much racing at too high a level for too long in things like the aforementioned Tour de France this is a receipe for more of the same with less viewer interest. So let's really shake up how we think about stage racing. Here’s how we do that by starting with the Tour of America; 30 stages plus a prologue, no rest days (stay with me, you’ll see why), large payout purses and lots of variability and strategy.

First, enough of this only having 9 riders on a team. Each team gets to have 15 riders who will participate in the race. Each team must start at least 60% of its riders up to a maximum of nine. This means that each day, some of your riders will not ride the stage (which leads to built in rest days-on average there will be about 9 of them). The strategy comes in on which riders ride which stages. The team directors don't have to tell anyone until thirty minutes before the stage starts at sign in. It'd give Phil and paul something interesting to talk about for the first few hours of the race when there's not much going on.

Second, stop timing every single stage. We all know how sprint stages are going to turn out in general terms. We also all know that the sprinters will crumble and die in the mountains. Let’s create some stages that are only worth points (like in an omnium race), some that are only timed (no sprint points are awarded) and some that both have points and are timed. Riders who wish to compete for the points jerseys (sprinter and mountain) must compete in all stages with those points and riders who wish to compete for the overall win must ride all stages that are timed. The team’s strategy will determine the rest. All stages will have big monetary payouts so there’ll be a lot of incentive for teams to try to win stages.

What’s good about this second point? The GC guys no longer have to ride in abject error that their race will come to an end because one overzealous idiot takes a corner too fast or unclips from his pedal at the wrong time. If they race the stage for fitness they can tail off the back in the last couple of kilometers and let the sprinters duel it out. That’s all we, the spectators, really want to see anyways. No more one stage tours for guys like Leipheimer or Valverde. The sprinters no longer have to worry about elimination in the mountains. We know that their going to get dropped and when they’re eliminated because they finish outside the time cut the makes the later sprints all the less exciting. Too many times the best sprinter's jersey doesn't go to the best sprinter. This fixes that. No sprint points for the hardest montain stages so the sprinters can take the day off and recover.

Third, there should be four time trials: three individual and one team. The individual TTs should be the short 10 km prologue that starts in a big city like Chicago on a famous boulevard, a medium one hour ITT (40-50 km flat or 20 km uphill) and a long two hour sufferfest designed to reward laots of raw power (80-90 km). No points on these, just time. The Team TT will happen really early (stage four or five) and you can ride as many guys as you want. You still take the time on the fifth guy but the course is really long, maybe 100-120 km. Make it really, really cool: pan flat, wide, straight roads, all the best technology allowed. Everyone has to race in the prologue.

Fourth, if the stage is called a mountain stage it has to end on an uphill finish and it only gets timed. I hate these stages where someone takes a big risk and makes the big effort to get away on a climb only to be caught on a descent by a group of five chasers because they have better aerodynamics. Mountain stages should have uphill finishes and some of them should be really, really hard. Brasstown Bald hard. Mt. Washington in Vermont (or wherever) hard. If there isn’t a 20% section on the final climb or the climb isn’t relentlessly long the stage should finish elsewhere.

Five or six jerseys: Yellow for GC, Red for sprinters, White for young rider, Blue for Mountains, Iron Grey for the MVD (Most Valuable Domestique) and Purple for most aggressive. Maybe a jersey for the pervious stage winner; something polka dotted I think; maybe a jersey for some sort of combination rider category for the most consistent rider for the all-arounders. The MVD and all-arounder jersey might be based on a combination of how many stages the rider started and the average placing the rider finished at.

Anyways, these are some of my ideas but not all of them. Let me know what you think and if you want to add anything. Maybe we can come up with something to send to the Tour of America dude that’ll make his idea really workable.

Thanks for Reading.

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