15 July 2010

Tour de France Drama

Otherwise known as: sports blogging about a sport you don't care about.

So I'm a Tour fangirl. My dad's a cyclist, and so we've watched the most highly publicized race in professional cycling since I was a young girl. The Tour de France takes place every year during the month of July and isn't strictly located in France, though much of the action does take place there. This week, there's been some flatter stages as we move out of the Alps and into the Pyrinees.

It's been a few good years for American cycling. This year, there are four American-run teams in the race. Team BMC is the one that George Hincapie, Marcus Burghardt, and Cadel Evans (who already spent a day in the maillot jaune - as race leader - during this tour) race for. Team Radio Shack is Lance Armstrong's team, and he's joined there by Chris Horner, Levi Leipheimer, Sergio Paulinho, and Yaroslav Popovych.

But those aren't the two teams I'm going to be talking about today. There's Team HTC Columbia, whose members include Mark Cavendish, Adam Hansen, Tony Martin (who spent some time in the white jersey, signaling he's one of the best U25 riders), Mark Renshaw, and Michael Rogers. And then there's Team Garmin Transitions, and they have Julian Dean, Tyler Farrar, Robbie Hunter, and Christian Vande Velde. (The color coding is to help you when I start telling the story.)

So HTC Columbia and Garmin Transitions have not always been the best of friends. In fact, they're the closest thing the Tour has to rival teams. Last year, when George Hincapie was on HTC Columbia, the chase action by Garmin Transitions is what cost him a shot at the maillot jaune - by five seconds on the day. So there's some bad blood there. Basically, each team races first so that they'll win, and then when that doesn't happen, they'll race so that the other loses. And that's not good sportsmanship, especially for the Tour de France.

Of course, there was drama today - sprint finish, both teams have good sprinters. Julian Dean is the leadout man for Tyler Farrar, so Tyler will launch from Julian's back wheel as the line approaches in the hopes of winning the stage. Mark Renshaw is the leadout man for Mark Cavendish. They obviously both wanted to win the stage today, so it got a little heated out there. Julian Dean went from the center of the road and started drifting left, into Mark Renshaw's line. So what did Mark Renshaw do to keep his place intact? Headbutted him. He headbutted the guy five times. I mean, rule is, you can't take your hand from the handlebars within so many km of the finish, but still. Five times. (If you're not hearing that in Principal Rooney's voice, I didn't do my job right.)

So Mark Renshaw keeps his line, and he launches Mark Cavendish just like he's supposed to. Except after he launched his man, Mark Renshaw didn't keep his line. And I don't just mean that he drifted a little bit. You can clearly see on the tape that he looked behind him, saw the orange and blue jersey of Garmin Transitions on the shoulders of their sprinter Tyler Farrar, and aimed right for the guy. It looks like Renshaw was about to slam Tyler into the boards before Tyler put a hand out on his hip to tell him he was there.

For his actions today, Mark Renshaw was disqualified from this year's Tour de France.

This normally wouldn't be such a big deal, except for the fact that HTC Columbia and Garmin Transitions are huge rivals. The thinking is that the race officials wanted to cool down the rivalry and thoroughly punish one of the teams, because to tell the truth, there were other ways to penalize Mark Renshaw for what he did. Normal protocol would be that he'd lose his place in the sprint, get relegated to last place/last time, and his team would be fined. But to be DQed? This is also the first non-drug DQ. Ever. Ever. It just drives home that this was a Very Bad Thing.

Especially since this might be an issue that divides the whole peloton. Nobody's going to want to help HTC Columbia with anything now - they deserve no respect. But some riders may feel that the officials were too hard on Mark Renshaw, and that may turn the whole group into a grudgematch between HTC Columbia and Garmin Transitions - which is exactly what I think the officials may have been trying to avoid.

I'm thinking George Hincapie was right to jump ship and move teams before this got so heated...

1 comment:

  1. A sport I don't care about! Yay!

    Ooh, you can write things in COLOR! Blogger doesn't allow me to use the right tags in comments...

    Headbutt? Like Zinedine Zidane?

    Who's Principal Rooney?

    Also, from what I understand, the Tour de France has a long, long history of drama and cheating. Especially in the early years. But, hey, it's a sport I don't care about -- we already established that. Kind of like soccer -- I can go back to not caring about that for another four years.

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