Sport

Pidcock Powers to CX Title and Signals Superhuman Season

Posted on by Andy Gardner

On the back of claiming the Cross World Championships, could cycling’s latest superstar now target the biggest one-day races on the road?

When Tom Pidcock crossed the line first in Fayetteville, Arkansas on Sunday to become the men’s world cyclocross champion, he confirmed his status as cycling’s latest superhero – and not just for the way he celebrated his victory.

By adding the rainbow stripes of world champion to his Olympic mountain biking gold, Pidcock has demonstrated superbly the talent he possess across multiple disciplines. A small, punchy rider who packs power beyond his frame, Pidcock has the potential to achieve just about anything in the sport.

Road cycling has already seen numerous elite talents cross over from CX in recent years, with Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert being the standout names, but Pidcock has everything in his locker to compete with the titans of the sport for years to come.

And while MvdP and WvA may have been AWOL from Sunday’s race, Pidcock’s victory still came against a top-class field, all of whom were crushed by the Briton, unable to handle the ferocity of his attack with six laps remaining, and able only to follow his growing dust cloud carry away the top spot on the podium.

A prodigious talent from an early age, the 22-year-old from Leeds won the junior editions of world championships in cyclocross and road time trial as well as Paris-Roubaix, demonstrating his talent for the cobbles, something he may be hoping to repeat this spring.

He is now expected to line up in all the big one-day races in Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands in the first half of 2022, before featuring in Team Ineos’s eight-man squad for the Giro d’Italia in May for his first three-week Grand Tour.

Tom Pidcock crosses the line in style to win the Cyclocross World Championship at Fayetteville, Arkansas last weekend

Going into that hectic spring classics campaign, Pidcock will be confident of going head-to-head with the sport’s established big names, with van den Poel and van Aert joined by the likes of road World Champion Julian Alaphilippe, 2021 Tour of Flanders winner Kasper Asgreen and a man seeking to rediscover his mercurial best, Peter Sagan.

However, with just one win in the pro road ranks to his name, for Pidcock to instantly succeed in the biggest races would still be a surprise to many.

In a potentially strange twist of fate, a horrific crash and subsequent injuries suffered by Pidcock’s Ineos team-mate, Egan Bernal, could ultimately provide the Briton with a boost to his chances of springtime success.

While Pidcock was crushing his CX foes in Arkansas, 2,500 miles away in Bogotá, Colombia, Bernal was recovering from a shocking accident during a training ride that left him in need of multiple surgeries to his spine and, at one point, given a chance of less than 5% of recovering full mobility.

Clearly the priority for Bernal is making a full recovery from his injuries, which also include a broken thighbone and kneecap, before attention turns to his future cycling career. In the short term, his season is essentially over, meaning that Team Ineos will need to pivot their approach to the campaign.

Since arriving on the World Tour scene in 2010 as Team Sky, the outfit led by Sir Dave Brailsford have enjoyed massive success in the sport’s 21-stage Grand Tours, spearheaded by Tour de France wins for Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas as well as further success for Froome at the Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia, where Tao Geoghan-Hart and Bernal have also taken the top step of the podium in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

However, in the big one-day races, the sport’s Monuments, Sky/Ineos have struggled to repeat that kind of success, with only two wins coming their way to date with victories for Wout Poels at Liège–Bastogne–Liège in 2016 and for Michał Kwiatkowski in 2017’s Milan-Sanremo.

Arguably, the team’s focus on winning the biggest stage races, including multiple training camps each season at altitude and ensuring their Grand Tour teams are packed with incredibly talented riders in service of their selected leaders, has potentially diminished their chances of winning more Monuments.

There have still been huge one-day wins for the team – particularly Kwiatkowski, with wins at E3 Harelbeke and Strade Bianche in addition to finishing first in Sanremo – but a squad of their depth and talent could and should have secured more consistent successes to their collective name.

Team Ineos rider Egan Bernal, who suffered a horrific crash during training in Colombia recently

Bernal’s injuries leave the team’s plans for the coming campaign in tatters, with no obvious replacement for the Colombian in terms of climbing ability or General Classification talent – while they might expect Thomas or Richard Carapaz to be able to step up, they surely are some distance from being able to challenge current double Tour de France winner Tadej Pogacar.

Which presents something of an opportunity for the squad to take a different approach and re-focus elsewhere in the season. When Geoghan-Hart won the Giro in 2020, it came as a surprise, clinched as it was on the final stage time trial into Milan. After the dust had settled and the Maglia Rosa awarded, Ineos boss Brailsford reflected on the way that race was won and how it could herald a new, attacking style of cycling for the team: “We’ve done the train. We’ve done the defensive style of riding and we’ve won a lot doing that,” he said, to velonews.com.

“But it’s not much fun, really, compared to this. What we’ve done here, the two Giros we’ve won. First with Froomey’s win on stage 19 [i.e. back in 2018] and the way all of the guys raced here, well, at the end of the day, the sport is about racing.

“It’s about emotion and the exhilaration of racing. And that’s what we want to be now.”

That new approach, taking races by the scruff of the neck, has yet to be seen unequivocally, despite Bernal’s success in the 2021 Giro where the Colombian was never really threatened after taking the pink jersey on stage nine and ultimately winning by a margin of 1’29” from Damiano Caruso.

With Bernal yet to begin his rehabilitation and recovery from breaking as many as 20 bones in his crash, Ineos could completely shift their approach to the 2022 season, throwing additional resource behind a committed bid for wins in Flanders or Roubaix.

Riders such as Kwiatkowski, Luke Rowe and Dylan van Baarle are outstanding competitors with immense pedigree, but who are often saved for deluxe domestique duties with training plans designed to peak around the Tour de France in July. Allowing them to ride off the leash could be a major headache for perennial classics big boys, Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl.

Combined with up-and-coming superstars like Pidcock, Italian powerhouse Filippo Ganna and reigning track Omnium world champion, Ethan Hayter, Ineos have the basis for team that could rival the best in the world.

While van der Pool continues to nurse a back injury from last season and van Aert potentially targets goals as far ahead as the Tour’s Green Jersey classification, this year could be the perfect opportunity for Pidcock to step into the vacuum created and grasp the opportunity it creates.

Targeting the sport’s biggest single-day events wouldn’t be easy as anything can happen on a single day, but with the way he demolished the opposition in Arkansas, cycling’s newest Man of Steel has proved that he has what it takes in the biggest races on the biggest stages.

Glory on the Roubaix Cobbles Confirms Deignan’s Place Among the Very Best

Posted on by Andy Gardner

By claiming victory on the first ever Paris-Roubaix Femmes, Britain’s Lizzie Deignan added another historical page to her incredible career story thanks to one of 2021’s stand-out sporting performances.

Paris-Roubaix is arguably the jewel in cycling’s one-day race crown; it features unrivalled spectacle with the mud or dust (depending on the weather), the brutal cobbled roads and the iconic finish in the Roubaix velodrome.

2021’s edition of the race was its 118th, showing the incredible longevity and tradition that this runs through the soul of this event, one in which is held in the greatest of esteem. Which begs the question – why did it take so long for there to be a female version?

After pandemic postponements in 2020 and spring 2021, Saturday 2nd October saw professional female cyclists finally given the opportunity to tackle the race known as the Hell of the North, breaking down yet another anachronistic barrier perpetuated by sporting patriarchy.

Recent editions of the Women’s Tour, Giro Rosa and Ronde van Vlaanderen have shown that female cycling is, in its own way, equal to or greater than its more established male equivalent in regards to action, excitement and certainly unpredictability. In many ways, as women’s cycling continues to develop in terms of professionalism and organisation, it avoids much of the structure and regimentation that makes male cycling often predictable.

As an event, Paris-Roubaix is best known for the cobbled roads and tracks which make it the ultimate test of strength and endurance. Being the first female edition of the race would add to the element of unknown, as even though the riders and their teams could have carried out plenty of preparatory training rides to understand the characteristics of the surface, there’s no substitute for actually riding in race conditions and handling the fatigue that comes from this kind of situation.

While the topography of this part of France may lack the long, torturous mountain passes of the Alps or the leg-burning gradients of neighbouring Flanders, there is nothing quite like the draining effect of riding through wind, rain and mud combined with the repeated efforts of surfing the cobbles, where each contact with the ground feels like being punched through your front wheel.

This first edition of Paris-Roubaix for female riders would always hold a place in the record books, with whoever won forever being the first winner, but that it should be Britain’s Lizzie Deignan who stood head and shoulders above the other 128 riders was testament to her steel and resolve to continue what has already been a glittering career.

With a total of 17 cobbled sectors on the menu for the riders, it must have come as a surprise to the vast majority of the incredibly strong field, featuring star names such as Marianne Vos, Chantal van den Broek-Blaak, Kasia Niewiadoma, Annemiek van Vleuten, Lotte Kopecky and Lisa Brennauer, when Deignan launched her attack, solo, with over 80km to go and not a single cobblestone traversed.

Moves of this nature are often doomed to failure, with the chasing riders able to work together in order to either prevent a significant lead being built or to allow the breakaway enough licence to accrue a margin, yet never being in danger of losing the race altogether. For a rider to win by way of a long range solo attack is surely among the most revered of sporting successes; the ultimate demonstration of courage, commitment and determination by effectively taking on and beating everyone else. One versus 128.

However, perhaps because of the course or maybe the wet and muddy conditions which saw many riders hit the deck and either lose time, motivation or both, Deignan was able to steadily build and hold a lead of over two minutes, while the field behind her whittled down to just a select few.

Into the final 20km, with the riders’ bike handling skills under stress being increasingly tested, it was perhaps the greatest competitor of them all, Vos, who struck out to try and reel in Deignan, both to eviscerate the remaining chasers but also to make what she hoped would be the winning move.

The race became a classic cat-and-mouse chase, with the Dutch superstar gradually eating into the British former World Champion’s cushion. It was impossible not to keep one eye on the clock, counting down the remaining KMs while also taking in the suffering of both riders, digging increasingly deeper to either hold on or break through. This was attack versus defence in cycling form; a nervy head-to-head, yet one where the two opponents were roughly a kilometre apart and unable to look each other in the eye.

Moments like this are among those which make road racing such a captivating sport. In a race which takes roughly three hours, it’s these periods of action where the outcome is completely in the balance that make this kind of endurance event enduring. Both riders on the rivet, giving everything to try and win the race, to take a unique place in the sport’s history, knowing that the tiniest lack of concentration or something totally out of their control, could derail their effort and hand victory to their rival.

Deignan dug in, keeping Vos at arm’s length and reached the velodrome on her own, able to enjoy the final KM as a victory lap-and-a-bit. Crossing the line and raising her arms in victory gave perhaps the final insight into the effort it took to win this race, known as the Queen of the Classics, showing blood running from open blisters on her hands, worn down by the vibrations through her handlebars. Despite this, her grip never faltered, either on the bars or on the race, as she deservedly became the first ever winner of the Paris-Roubaix femmes.

This was a performance of the ages, one initiated with bravery and audacity but maintained through guts and a refusal to give in. It was fitting of the occasion and history it would create that the inaugural women’s Paris-Roubaix should end this way, with the riders spent physically, faces covered in mud and a field split to pieces, adding to the gravity and spectacle of the event.

Long may Lizzie’s win be remembered and celebrated as a landmark in cycling and female sport.

Crash! Bang! Wallop! Sport’s Fight for Market Supremacy

Posted on by Andy Gardner

Wow! What an incredible spectacle: the world’s finest athletes going head-to-head in a winner-takes-all fight to the finish. Scenes everywhere.

It seems as though a growing number of sports are in their own deathmatch in a quest to claw their share of the television and therefore monetary pie, with triathlon’s SuperLeague being the example that immediately springs to mind.

Admittedly, triathlon is a difficult sport to televise and monetise: there’s three disciplines to cover, possibly closing down a city centre or out-of-town venue with races that range from just under two hours to almost eight hours depending on the format.

One of the perceived troubles with endurance sport is that there will always be long periods of non-action when looking on as a spectator – anyone who watched the entirety of last week’s Milan-San Remo bike race, all 300km of it, would testify to that, with the race only really coming to life in the final 30 minutes.

So why not just get rid of all the boring stuff and condense it down into a YouTube-friendly package? After all, we are constantly told that attention spans are dwindling, social media controls all and people get bored super easily – what fans want is all the action, constant dicing for position and sprinting for the line.

SuperLeague looks to deliver this by the bucket load. Admittedly, the SLT Arena Games, born in the midst of the pandemic with competitors swimming in an actual pool before riding and running in a virtual world, makes the best of a very difficult situation. Large-scale, mass participation events are difficult when trying to control a respiratory virus, so the more controlled the event can be, the better in this respect.

However, SuperLeague was already thrusted upon us before the Coronavirus was even a twinkle in a bat’s eye, with it’s self-appointed role of disrupting triathlon through innovative formats, which essentially translates into making the disciplines a lot shorter and changing their order.

Races are chaotic and closely contested – a natural result of not actually doing much racing and instead doing three times as many transitions. In the outdoor SuperLeague events, athletes are routinely awarded power-ups, such as ShortChutes (shortcuts) or alternatively hooked from the race if they fall too far behind. One wonders if they might occasionally be able to de-rail opponents with exploding tortoise shells.

Each event features multiple rounds, across different formats with points being awarded for positions and ultimately a winner crowned at the end of each race weekend and eventually the season. It’s utterly confusing and almost impossible to know who is actually winning from one event to the next, but put that minor detail aside and isn’t great to watch!

Well, no actually – it’s just a bit different. Not better, just different and well marketed. And considering that triathlon is one of the most inclusive and equal sports going, there’s a separate conversation needed about the different uniforms needed for men and women, with the latter seemingly required to wear eye-wateringly high-legged swimsuits, presumably because more flesh equals more viewers.

This feels like the latest in a line of attempts to reduce sports to just the highlights in a bid to catch the eye. Cricket was probably the first to do it right with the birth of Twenty20, reducing a five-day contest to a three-hour face-off, full of huge sixes and spectacular wickets – goodbye maiden overs! There are similar stories in snooker, pro cycling and athletics as more and more sports seek to squeeze their events further and further to produce an exciting, schedule-friendly product. Latest reports in football suggest that Champions League bigwigs are considering a TV subscription package where customers (fans?) pay sufficiently to only watch the final 15 minutes – who cares about the previous 75, after all?

Except the only thing that all these reductions seem to actually do is make the longer forms of competitions look long and boring. Why would you bother committing a full afternoon to watching something on telly when you could catch up with the best of the action on demand and then get back to some doomscrolling?

It begs the question of where this might end. Why bother with all that tedious football when you can cut straight to a penalty shoot out? Let’s just have a tie break in tennis and make Formula One a drag race.

There’s so much more to sport than the result; it’s the preparation, the discipline and the hours that going into making the start line. It’s the concentration, the camaraderie and the tactical nous on the day itself. Sporting competition is great because it ebbs and flows – you might be winning early, then on the back foot as your opponent regroups only to then find something special to claim victory.

Condensing the action down into a TV-friendly package feels akin to reducing a meal from a Michelin-starred chef into a convenient pill-form, because who has the time to waste it actually eating or socialising? Read a book you say? No thanks, I’ll just skim the Wikipedia page, that should tell me all I need to know and if it’s any good.

The issue stems essentially from the competition that exists for every eyeball and every pound in revenue. The roaring success of football’s Premier League in the last 30 years has forced every other sport, governing body and event organiser to consider their own ‘product’ and how best to ‘develop market share’.

Without meaning to sound like Old Man Abe Shouting at Clouds, what happened to sport for the sake of sport? Competitions and races whose main purpose was the challenge they provided for the competitors or the opportunity for the best to test themselves against their peers.

Perhaps if finances and airtime were shared slightly more evenly without the need to try and steal viewers from the all-conquering football behemoth, there would be more opportunity for sport to breath organically, rather than this stifling quest for self-suffocation.

But where’s the fun in that? Just show me the best bits and send me to the gift shop!

Can Two of Cycling’s Recent Greats Still Mix it with the Golden Generation?

Posted on by Andy Gardner

Men’s pro cycling appears to be entering into a golden age, with Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert crossing over from cyclocross to compete head-to-head with the likes of Julian Alaphilippe, Tadej Pogacar and Primoz Roglic – not to mention other up-and-coming talents like Marc Hirschi, Filippo Ganna and other more specialists riders in the sprint and general classifications.

Cycling’s current talent pool is undoubtedly in a rich vein, making for spectacular competition. Already this season, some of the racing on show at Tirreno-Adriatico and Strade Bianche in particular was incredible, with van der Poel, van Aert and Pogacar all going at it hammer and tongs.

Straight away, the fact that a Tour de France winner like Pogacar is even racing with a burgeoning classics maestro like van der Poel is itself eye-catching, but to see another XC convert in van Aert beating the sprinters in a sprint stage, climbing with the climbers, then out-muscling the Time Trial specialists in a TT speaks volumes for his cross-the-board potential.

Watching races which feature three, four or five of these characters almost guarantees a spectacle to remember. Thinking back a year or so, Alaphilippe’s dashing style and panache made him an instantly lovable character; his time in yellow during the 2019 Tour de France was incapsulating and his attempt to hold the jersey was more than just a romantic ideal; when he won the time trial in Pau, it seemed like he genuinely could go all the way to Paris and break the long-standing drought for French riders in the Tour.

To draw a parallel with another sport, cycling seems to be at the start of a period similar to that still being enjoyed by tennis, where the giants of Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic (and Andy Murray) have shared and dominated the headlines for nigh on twenty years.

However, to continue that reference, before Federer became the world’s preeminent Grand Slam collector, the tennis scene was dominated by Pete Sampras and, to a lesser extent, Andre Agassi, with their rivalry and contrast making for fascinating viewing at times.

Cycling has it’s own Sampras & Agassi – the men who shone for a while and are now in danger of being forgotten in the shadow of the current behemoths: Peter Sagan and Greg van Avermaet.

In the case of Sagan in particular, it seems incredible to be thinking of him almost as being yesterday’s man, but the numbers don’t lie – the man who won three consecutive world championships in 2015, 16 and 17 has won just one race since 2019 – a stage of the Giro d’Italia – and while there are mitigating circumstances, such as injuries and his recent run-in with Covid, he has been conspicuous by his absence from race podiums.

There’s no doubt that Sagan will always have star quality and races do certainly miss his attacking flair and sheer strength of character at the sharp end of proceedings. At the peak of his powers, Sagan is a formidable foe, which may well be one of the reasons his win rate has slumped.

At the heigh of his form, if the Slovakian was on a race start list, it almost felt like it was him versus the peloton. Often you might see a break go up the road followed by a frustrated Sagan attempting to organise the chase, only to be greeted by reluctant opponents, many of whom knowing that helping him bridge a gap would only result in his victory and their defeat. When at his best, Sagan has that versatile strength which makes him almost as good as the best sprinters and right up there with the strongest puncheurs. When given the opportunity, he is a tough man to beat.

In that spell between 2015 and 2018, Sagan was almost untouchable; his approach to races changed the way other teams and riders raced, forcing pre-made plans to be thrown out of the window. While others relied on structured team tactics and lead-outs, he would ride completely off-script, surfing from wheel to wheel in search of the best position in a sprint or attacking at will with an almost playful attitude.

Beyond just his racing style, Sagan once threatened to be cycling’s breakout, cross-sport superstar – the finish line celebrations, the video of him and his wife miming to Grease, the slightly bizarre post-race interviews – in general, his Sagan-ness, which made him a hugely likeable character in a sport mainly dominated by efficient and slightly predictable robots. He was different, eye-catching and vivacious.

Sagan’s nearest rival at the time was undoubtedly van Avermaet, the reigning Olympic road race champion who now seems to have been wearing that golden helmet since the mid-70s. A true Flandrien tough guy, van Avermaet is always there-or-thereabouts in the big races, but definitely lacks the palmares that his ability deserves. True, that Olympic Gold is backed up by a Roubaix cobble, two Omloop wins and success at E3-Harelbeke but without Sagan, van Avermaet would most likely have many more wins to show for his efforts.

Without a win to his name since 2019, van Avermaet is now 35 and the emergence of cycling’s new superstars makes any further major victories unlikely, but he is a steely character who always shows willing to dig in and make a fight of a race.

Occasionally the victim of unfortunate accidents and injuries, such as the 2016 Tour of Flanders where a crash in the final 15kms saw him break a collarbone, van Avermaet always comes back when you think he might be beaten. He’s tough to shake off and refuses to give in.

Having moved to join the AG2R Citroen team this winter, he has a contract that takes him up to the end of the 2023 season, so there’s still time for him to add to his haul. In particular, it would be fitting to see him win on the home roads of Flanders, going beyond his two second places and one third.

With each passing week it seems like another star is born in the men’s peloton, while the likes of van Aert and van der Poel also appear to grow stronger – even Alaphilippe appears to be losing ground to the two XC titans. That makes it increasingly unlikely that we’ll see Sagan or van Avermaet add to their medal collections, but the prospect of seeing even more potential winners in any given race is a tantalising one.

Races right now seem more unpredictable than for years, especially with van der Poel’s penchant for long range or even whimsical attacks. The addition of an on-song Sagan or an unshakable van Avermaet would add an extra dimension to an already complicated race equation, which would only further increase the excitement and action for us as spectators.

Hopefully cycling’s growing golden era still has time and space for two of the sport’s finest recent champions as the whole picture would undoubtedly be richer for their presence.

The Boss: Why One Rider Must Surely Be Seen as the Best

Posted on by Andy Gardner

Last weekend’s World Cyclocross Championship was billed as being a clash between two of the sport’s greats, with Belgium’s Wout van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel of the Netherlands going head-to-head on Ostend.

As these two continue their rivalry on the road in addition to their history through the mud, they are increasingly becoming the Federer/Nadal or the Hunt/Lauda of their sport; two geniuses seemingly driving the other to greater and greater heights, something that we as fans can look forward to for years to come.

While the race itself ended as something of an anticlimax as a result of van Aert’s puncture and subsequent deflation, there was another great to be celebrated over the weekend, with arguably the greatest of all time also taking on the dunes, waves and man-made bridges of the World Champs course.

After all, how many cyclists possess a palmares that includes winning the Giro d’Italia on three occasions, three road world titles, seven world cyclocross wins, victory at the Ronde van Vlaanderen and multiple successes at Flèche Wallone as well as their national championships, in both the time trial and road race. Not forgetting Olympic gold medals and a list of further one-day classics as long as your seat post.

Worked who that might be yet? How about if you add in four wins in the Trofeo Binda and one Women’s Tour in 2014? And she’s only 33 years old.

Marianne Vos wins the 2014 Cyclocross World Championships – her sixth consecutive crown.

Marianne Vos has to be considered among the greatest cyclists ever. Few athletes have enjoyed the kind of longevity she has endured and continued to claim the highest honours across a variety of disciplines – in addition to the above wins, she has also won World Championships and Olympic gold on the track and she has a history of winning mountain bike races too.

In all honesty, comparing cyclists of different eras is wholly pointless as the sport changes so much from one generation to another as to make those comparisons pointless. This is even more true when it comes to comparing men and women; the worlds in which the two sports exist are so vastly different, with resources, support and coverage being just the clearest contributing factors.

If you’re hoping for a straight-up Vos vs Merckx battle to the death, then this article may be disappointing.

After a change of teams this winter, Vos joins the Dutch Jumbo-Visma squad, making their first forays into women’s cycling after out-Skying Team Ineos over the last couple years in the men’s peloton. This will be Vos’s 17th as a professional as a result, in an elite career stretching back to 2002 when she was just 15 years old. Two years after first making an impression on the Dutch cyclocross scene, she won her first international race in 2004, followed quickly by the junior world championships, indicating the precocious talent she was developing.

Having won the senior world cyclocross title in 2005, her breakthrough season was perhaps more arguably 2006, when, still aged just 19, she retained her world XC crown and then followed it up with a series of successes on the road, leading to claiming the rainbow jersey from a stacked field in Salzburg, Austria. That success was then backed up by overall victory in the Women’s World Cup in 2007, second place in that year’s world champs and then two track gold medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

For a rider to be as consistent as Vos across all the different disciplines is incredible. As she continued to dominate her sport through and beyond another Olympic cycle, including winning the 2012 gold medal on the road from Britain’s home favourite Lizzie Deignan, Vos also won the 2014 Giro d’Italia Femminile and the first edition of La Course, having been instrumental in bringing about the creation of a race in France from the organisers of the men’s Tour.

However, as she continued to rack up the victories, it was clear it would take something huge to halt her ascent, something which arguably came to pass in 2015, where a combination of injuries and overtraining forced the Dutch superstar to take an extended break from the sport.

In recent years, there have been several high profile cases of riders taking time away from competition to evaluate their continued commitment and determine whether or not racing remains a high enough priority to justify the sacrifice and the suffering. The latest example being Vos’s fellow Dutch rider and briefly team mate, Tom Dumoulin, who last month announced that he will be taking a hiatus of unspecified length.

Speaking in October 2015, Vos made it clear that taking time away was the right thing to do, even if it went against every instinct she had grown to rely on. She said: “Rest is currently the best way to return as soon as possible on the bike; that’s the hardest race of my career because I have always achieved results by working hard.” To recognise the signs of overtraining and take steps to address that issue goes against the common characteristics of almost any elite athlete, most of which are used to going further and further to achieve their goals.

However, Vos deserves huge credit for the way she approached her condition, recognising that she couldn’t power through and take her usual winning approach to crushing her opposition, due mainly to the unknown and unpredictable nature of recovering from overtraining. “The only thing against it that helps is complete rest. I then, with the doctors, took up to three months to fully rest.

“Overload is difficult to gauge and for me it’s also unclear. It would have been easier if I had a broken leg. That is easy to explain. I do not feel bad, but I simply do not recover from great efforts… It’s frustrating when you want to perform well and you find you are unable to pick up your level.”

As this kind of career break becomes increasingly prevalent, it only serves to highlight the commitment and resolve that someone like Vos must have needed to return from her own time away when she resumed road racing in 2016. By this time, she surely had done everything she could in the sport and on our return the landscape of competition had changed with compatriots Anna van der Breggen and Annemiek van Vleuten now the dominant forces in the peloton, seemingly sharing the big victories between themselves.

It’s at this point that Vos should be recognised for persisting with her return despite not enjoying the ascendency as she did previously. Surely it would have been easy, perhaps natural, at this time to see that her place at the pinnacle was no longer assured, something which would almost certainly have diluted the enjoyment for many others in her position.

However, Vos was seemingly determined to prove that her joy from cycling went deeper than domination, as she has slotted back in amongst the group, taking opportunities to claim wins as and when they arrive, including two European Championships, another La Course and that fourth Trofeo Binda.

No-one doubts that it’s tough at the top of any sport, but being so clearly better than your competition must make the relationship between the work needed and the success enjoyed more straightforward to comprehend. When you know how it feels to win and you understand the pathway to success, it surely makes the sacrifice needed more bearable.

The reverse of this must also be the case when a true great sees their place in the sport’s order upset by newcomers. The temptation for Vos to walk away from her sport completely after her recuperative period must have been vast, but seemingly not as great as the desire to continue competing and, ultimately, winning.

That level of dedication, to come back after physical and mental fatigue and still be among the regular winners after such a long and celebrated career, demonstrates why Vos must surely be recognised as the campianissimo of the sport – the very, very best.

Men vs Women – are London Marathon’s Good for Age Times ‘Fair’?

Posted on by Andy Gardner

London Marathon – always one of the best days of the year, either following friends and loved ones in the race or, a couple of times, actually running it myself. Mid-spring, just as the weather turns bearable, making London a little less grey and smoggy. Except this year it’s October, it’s hammering down and I’m watching the elite-only race on TV rather than from the barriers between mile 13 and 14. Thanks Covid.

Earlier this week I was asked a question that seems to circulate among club runners at least once a year: is it easier for women to get a Good for Age time than men?

For anyone unfamiliar with the idea, a Good for Age (GFA) time is a standard that race organisers set out for qualification to enter an event. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people apply for the ballot to enter London Marathon, so your chances of holding a golden ticket to join the 40,000 starters is slim and for many people, raising the required funds to run for a charity is probably a stretch too far.

So the alternative route to the start line is GFA – for each age category, the organiser defines a set time that permits entry to the race. For instance, as a male 18-40-year-old, that time is currently three hours exactly (they change every now and then – a few years ago it was 3.05). It gets a little more complicated if there’s more qualifiers than available spaces, so you might actually need to go a little quicker than the set benchmark.

For female 18-40-year-olds the GFA boundary is three hours, 45 minutes, which at first glance does always look like a big difference, which is perhaps reflected by the fact that I know more women with GFA times than men.

Looking at the nearest example to home, that of my partner Sarah and I, we take part in sport at a roughly similar level: we spend pretty much the same number of hours training and we’ve been completing races for about the same length of time. We both take it fairly seriously – more than most, but not as much as some. My marathon PB (from 2019) is currently 3.03 while hers, which she achieved earlier in 2020, is now 3.18, so if anything she has nudged ahead of me.

That means I’m currently over three minutes outside the target time for my age, while Sarah is 27 minutes inside.

So, on the surface, I would have to say yes, I do think the GFA time for women is easier than men. However, the more important question is whether or not that’s fair – and again, my answer is yes. Here’s why.

Firstly, one of the stated aims of London Marathon’s race organisers for a while has been to achieve and maintain an event with a 50/50 split between male and female competitors. For a start, that’s a very noble ambition, but that target becomes even more important when you think that this a huge public and televisual event, broadcast in the UK on BBC and watched by millions.

It’s long been said that sport isn’t so much about the winner, but the taking part – I think you can extend that and add a layer of inspiring others. In 2012 when the Olympics came to London and it felt ok to be British, the whole spirit was around watching sport, getting involved and encouraging others to join in too.

In this respect, role models aren’t record breakers and medal winners – they’re the invisible, everyday heroes who are getting up at 5am to log their miles and juggling work, family and training commitments. Seeing thousands of other normal people who look, talk and live just like you encourages others to think that they could do that too.

When I look at the difference in times for men and women, it isn’t as straightforward as the numbers in black and white. At that particularly moment in time, it could be argued that 3-dead for men requires more time training, greater commitment and less chocolate than 3.45 for women, but us men have an advantage we don’t always like to talk about.

When the first London Marathon took place in 1981, it was only 14 years after Kathrine Switzer was dragged from the world’s most heralded 26.2 race, the Boston Marathon. The reason for her ejection was simple – women were not permitted to take part. How come? Because, in the eyes of the race organisers and, no doubt, conventional wisdom at the time, women were incapable of completing the distance.

As I watch today’s elite-only race, 2019’s winner Brigid Kosgei is probably harbouring dreams of breaking either her own world record of 2.14.04 (set in a mixed race) or Mary Keitany’s benchmark of 2.17.01 (set in a women’s only race). Not bad considering barely 50 years ago women were viewed as being so much weaker they wouldn’t make the finish.

Meanwhile, marathon running, athletics generally and, more broadly, sport altogether, have been and continue to be male-dominated arenas. When you look at other sports events, it’s always that way – for instance, when I made my failed attempt at Ironman in 2019, there were 250 women in the entire field of 2,500 – there were more than 250 men in my age category alone.

It’s kind of just accepted that men take part in sport, while women stand on the sidelines cheering, usually cradling the children as the prehistoric view goes.

Right from a young age, there are undoubtedly more barriers, both socially and culturally, that prevent women from taking part in sport, committing as fervently as their male counterparts and going on to enjoy incredible achievements.

While men might look at the GFA times and think ‘ok, I might need to train a bit more, recover a bit better or cut back on the chips a bit’, that’s nothing compared to the vast majority of women who have generations of misogyny and patriarchal patronisation to overcome. Factor in the near-certain judgment of friends, colleagues and strangers, often bewildered as to why a woman would want to be out in the cold and rain on a Sunday morning when they could be nursing a hangover or pretending to like their in-laws, and it becomes clear that the challenge for female runners is far greater than just x number of miles within a given period of time.

By positioning the goalposts for entry in a way that facilitates a 50/50 split, London Marathon should be celebrated – I would hazard a guess that running clubs up and down the country now look a lot more equally populated than athletics clubs did a few years ago and it’s the concept of equality that should be focused on here.

Often when people talk of equality, they think of giving everyone exactly the same access to something as everyone else – a completely open ballot system, regardless of age, gender or ability. Except that isn’t really equality – if anything, especially in an environment so skewed traditionally towards one particular group, white men, it only serves to exacerbate the status quo and keep the doors locked to everyone else.

In my mind, equality is less about treating everyone the same and more centred on creating opportunities that provide everyone equal ability and facility to participate. In this particular case, if that means a seemingly ‘easier’ timeframe to allow the same number of male and female runners to be there or thereabouts for qualification, then so be it. Over time, if that encourages more women to take part, the sport will see a raising of the bar and narrowing of the time gap in order to maintain a 50/50 split and that cannot be a bad thing.

So, going back to the original question: Do I think the GFA time for women is easier than men?Yes. But do I think that’s fair? Yes – yes I do.

Long Live the Long Form

Posted on by Andy Gardner

The clamour for further decreasing the length of sporting events to fit busy scheduling demands and appease decreasing attention spans has taken something of back seat in recent weeks with longer form events and sports roaring back into the collective conscience.

At the risk of sounding like someone’s dad, the increasing appetite for shorter and shorter representations of sport to supposedly satisfy the YouTube generation of spectators seems to be continually gathering pace. More and more sports and their organisers seem to be exploring ways of creating their own version of cricket’s Twenty20 format, reducing longer encounters to action-packed face-offs designed to appeal to casual viewers.

However, this summer has seen the extended, more traditional versions of sports making waves and demonstrating that it really can be worth investing time and attention to the slow-burn drama and tension that builds through time in the action.

Headlining the re-awakening for the longer sports was the Cricket World Cup Final on Sunday 14th July; an incredible, scarcely believable rollercoaster of a game, which genuinely could have swung either way on numerous occasions but ultimately resulted in a win for England over New Zealand by way of a Super Over – who even knew that was a thing?

Admittedly, the World Cup itself is not the longest form of the game, nor the perceived ‘true’ format of cricket, a title which is held by the five-day, test version, but it was nonetheless refreshing to see the 50-over, day-long variant of the sport making headlines around the world rather than the TV-friendly Twenty20 setup.

It’s easy to understand why short form cricket has steadily taken hold and, in some ways, become the prime format of the game. It fits nicely into schedules, competing with sports like football and rugby which don’t require a full day’s time to achieve a result This definitely makes it a more appealing package in terms of promotion and marketing, taking all the most exciting and dramatic moments from a match and concentrating them into a handy, three-hour package.

This has the further advantage of levelling the playing field somewhat – it should come as no surprise that while the big three in international cricket – India, Australia and England – continue to dominate the test arena (and the financial rewards that come from it), there is a far greater chance of success for historic powerhouses such as South Africa or the West Indies, who find it increasingly difficult to compete in the longer formats.

Nestled neatly in between the two extremes is the 50-over format, the World Cup of which came to England this summer and culminated in that final at Lord’s in July.

The match itself may not have been the anticipated all-action classic, with low scores on both sides and a focus on preventing free-flowing, aggressive batting with pragmatic, safety-first bowling. On the surface, that hardly seems like the recipe for high drama and an unforgettable outcome, but as it turned out, the drip-drip nature of the play only added to the tension of the occasion.

When it feels as though not a great amount is happening on the surface, the moments of action, arriving like bolts from the blue, become even more dramatic when they do arrive, adding to the excitement and joy for the spectator. 

While the cricket creeped towards its frankly ridiculous outcome, another ubiquitous summer sport was toiling away on a different channel, seeking its own share of the spotlight. Across London from the Lord’s cricket ground, the men’s singles final of Wimbledon saw two of tennis’s all-time greats, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, going head-to-head once more.

The match ultimately finished three minutes short of five hours, making it the longest ever Wimbledon final, with Djokovic eventually claiming victory over Federer by way of the competition’s first final-set tie break in the championship match, with the scores level at two sets all and 12 games each in the fifth.

This was another encounter that looked like it could could easily go either way. Federer undoubtedly enjoyed the greater support on centre court, but Djokovic’s ability to stay in the tie and actually lead 1-0 and 2-1 on sets, despite being second best for much of the play, demonstrated why he too is one of the game’s most successful players and a serial winner.

Trying to watch the cricket alongside the tennis was almost impossible; flicking over to Wimbledon to check the score repeatedly led to complete engrossment for an extended passage of play, before switching back to the cricket, only to learn that a wicket had fallen or a six clubbed into the grandstand.

This experience highlights one of the factors that makes long-form sport so encapsulating. In the 21st century, this could be described as FOMO – fear of missing out – something cycling’s biggest three-week party, the Tour de France, demonstrates perfectly. In amongst the epic, six or seven hour tests of endurance are sometimes tiny moments of drama that populate the six-minute YouTube highlight reels later in the day.

Perhaps the best example of this came on stage eight of the Tour, a hilly parcours taking in 200km from Macon to Saint Etienne. Eventual winner Thomas De Gendt took a shade over five hours to reach the finish line, having originally led a four-man breakaway group from the off before eventually grinding down his fellow escapees to take victory.

Back in the main pack, surprise race leader Julian Alaphillipe, who would go on to make headlines for his swash-buckling defence of the yellow jersey, re-claimed the overall lead of the race after attacking the main group of favourites in the final kilometres, joined by fellow Frenchman Thibaut Pinot, who effectively staked his claim for the overall win.

Coming right at the end of a long day where, to the uninitiated, nothing much was happening, this moment of action created a frantic, pulsating finish to the stage, as heroic breakaway artist De Gendt dug deep to claim the day’s win and hold off the two home heroes. Watching the gap ebb away on the TV broadcast was unmissable viewing, with multiple questions to be answered before the day was out – would De Gendt claim the deserved win? Would Alaphillipe re-capture the overall lead? Did this mean that Pinot was the most likely to claim overall victory in the remaining stages of the race?

As it turned out, this was just a skirmish in an ultimately classic war – further highlighting the difficulty of condensing three week’s action into a single package and the joy of following the theatre throughout its entirety.

There is a lot to be said for the accessibility of taking sport’s best bits and presenting them in a way that appeals to a wider demographic. Expecting everyone to want to sit down and commit to hours and hours in front of a TV screen or in a crowd might be a thing of the past, creating an understandable fear of declining audiences and reduced advertising revenues as a result.

However, protecting the extended formats of sporting occasions remains essential to maintaining their significance, and hopefully 2019’s rise of the longer occasions will go someway towards stemming the tide of further T20-ising among sport administrators and marketers.