Alejandro Valverde finished ahead of Alberto Contador in the Ruta Del Sol last weekend. The two Spaniards are rivals but have plenty in common, from nationality to anti-doping bans. What you might not have noticed is that both ride bikes made in the same factory.

But “Alberto Contador rides a Trek and Alejandro Valverde rides a Canyon” you might say. You’d be right. Both companies use a firm called Quest Composite Technology based in Dongguan, China to make some of their premium frames.

Quest’s website, with English pages, is open about this with lots of images of Trek and Canyon product on their pages, as well as the Louisville Slugger baseball bat.

The same company doesn’t mean products by Canyon and Trek are the same with only cosmetic touches like paint or decals. Far from it, looking more into things it even appears that Quest has “silos” of staff with a set tasked with R&D, manufacture and service for Trek; and another silo of staff doing similar roles for Canyon. As such Trek and Canyon’s frames are not the same and let’s put that in bold to make sure nobody gets confused.

The idea of the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) manufacturing parts or even whole goods on behalf of another firm is an established one but normally something that’s kept quiet. Should we acknowledge the shared manufacture more? Probably not if you’re a brand manager needing to separate your product from the crowd. Indeed it’s a surprise to find Quest’s website so full of shared Trek and Canyon imagery.

But it’s not so uncommon in cycling where various frame brands point to outside influences, for example Pinarello boasts of its carbon fibre from Japanese manufacturer Toray just as a vintage steel frame would come with a label from Columbus or Reynolds to show who actually made the tubing. If a brand is willing to say what its frame is made from, then is a the logical next step is to acknowledge how it was made? Here it’s harder because the brand still needs to control the intellectual property of its unique design. The risk is people make the short cut and equate “same OEM” to “same product” when a shared OEM doesn’t actually mean that (hence the bold text above) because it all depends on the specifications, one firm might insist on a superior resin; another uses more hand-made carbon lay-ups; another uses the latest moulding technology and that’s before we get to the design differences like aerodynamics and integration with components. So while it’s true that informed consumers make informed choices, all the info available in public here is the same OEM rather than identical carbon, resins, lay-ups, moulding and so on. Still in a recent Canyon frame review on cyclingnews/Bikeradar the author made a comparison to Trek “perhaps the toughest current rival to the Ultimate Evo is the Trek Émonda SLR 10” which is telling if there are links to the same factory, no? At the very least it’s a commendation for Quest.

Another reason for the hush is that “Made in China” still has mixed meanings. Last year the BikeBiz website had a great article on the production of frames in China and used three labels to describe frame manufacturing in China: cream, competent and cowboy. The cream refers to the likes of Quest, not mentioned by name in the piece but the kind of firm making premium frames at the pinnacle of the market. Competent makers are producing for mid-ranking brands. The cowboys are probably behind those too-good-to-be-true frames you see on websites like Ebay or Alibaba. The Bikebiz article lists various OEM manufactuers: “Keentech Composite Technology, which makes carbon frames for Cervélo. G&M Carbon Components makes for BMC. Pinarello frames are made by Carbotec Industrial of Taiwan and China, in the carbon business since 2004. Scott… …in the Giant factory” and these are all examples of the cream of the crop, for the record Keentech is a subsidiary of Taiwanese firm Topkey which makes some Specialized, Merida and Cannondale according to their website (which means in theory it’ll be possible to have a race with a top-5 all on Topkey manufactured frames). Anyway the point here is you can have some of the best products in China alongside the fakes and fails so the label remains altogether less reassuring than, say, Made in Switzerland.

The “Made in China” label is slowly going up market. Once upon a time the phone in your pocket might have be from a European brand like Nokia or Ericsson, today Chinese smartphone brands like Huawei, Xiaomi or Lenovo proliferate and have plans to tackle market leaders Apple and Samsung. Now that the technology to make these goods is established in China, the Chinese owners of the capital can continue to contract their plant to make goods on behalf of “Western” brands but they’ll look on with envy at the margins and maybe decide to make their own brand frames too. It’s not far-fetched, indeed the likes of Merida started out manufacturing for other brands and now have their own product lines and brands which goes as far as the World Tour. Factor Bikes sponsor Ag2r La Mondiale too and this is an interesting case study of start-up brand without the European heritage but it still needs to sponsor a Euro team.

Conclusion
Made in China? A lot of bikes are. It’s not so common to mention some are made under the same roof in China. You probably saw that Alejandro Valverde and Alberto Contador finished 1-2 in the Ruta Del Sol but the fact that their bikes are made by the same company is something that’s not so widely known. Their bikes are different but it’s a reminder of the silent supply chains behind the sport and it’ll be interesting to see if any of these “cream” manufacturers launch their own brands.

Photos: Vuelta a Andalucia website, Quest Composites website

The date is set and the clock is counting down. If all goes to plan and he can avoid injury along the way then in 50 days’ time Tom Boonen will be on the eve of Paris-Roubaix and retirement, pinning on his last set of numbers. He’ll be missed by many, especially the Belgian media and the Quick Step team who lose their totemic rider.

Boonen’s status in Belgium is above and beyond every other rider. The likes of Greg Van Avermaet, Philippe Gilbert and Sep Vanmarcke are rightly respected but arguably their combined media profiles don’t reach the heights of Boonen’s popularity. “Golden Greg” has gone up a level since his Olympic win but they don’t seem close. There are even several Tom Boonen songs, take your pick from folk to rock to trance. In recent years Boonen has been tracked by the Belgian media every spring. Even an innocuous crash in Oman makes the news back in Belgium as Dutch journalist Raymond Kerckhoffs noted this week when he wrote about the Tom Boonen Circus in his De Telegraaf column. Boonen’s crash wasn’t just “cyclist crashes” clickbait for Belgian sports websites, it made the headlines on the evening TV news bulletin alongside the Publifin political scandal in Flanders and the resignation of Donald Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Boonen’s status owes itself to several factors. A long career helps, he’s 36 now and hit the headlines as a neo-pro when he stood on the podium of Paris-Roubaix back in 2002 (pictured). Along the way he’s packed out his palmarès with plenty of crowd-pleasing results including the world championships in 2005, several national titles, stages in the Tour de France as well as three wins in the Tour of Flanders and four in Paris-Roubaix.

Antoine Blondin once described Eddy Merckx as a the kind of champion “who loses when he doesn’t win” by which he meant that second place in a race might be nice for many but it was a defeat for Merckx. It can be applied to Boonen too, his second place in Paris-Roubaix to Mathew Hayman last year was a good result when viewed against an otherwise disappointing spring season, so much so that it persuaded Boonen to ride on for another year. Yet second place was also seen by sections of the Belgian media (here, here, here etc) as a loss that was preventable.

It’s testimony to Boonen’s status that even as an active rider we’ve seen several names ventured as “the next Boonen” with Guillaume Van Keirsbulck and Yves Lampaert among the pretenders. These “the next so-and-so” labels are always too reductive and too convenient – just as Boonen wasn’t the next Johan Museeuw – but the use of the phrase points to shoes that need to be filled.

Boonen’s popularity isn’t just down to time and wins, there are more subtle issues like charisma and here Boonen doesn’t doesn’t look so obvious, there’s none of the staged stunts performed by Peter Sagan, not even a wheelie let alone a viral musical extravaganza. Yet he’s regularly available to the media and by several accounts charming to interview. His popularity is also notoriety and he’s had his moments in celebrity gossip pages thanks to costly car crashes, cocaine, a tax scandal and a young girlfriend. For good or ill Boonen isn’t just a staple of the sports pages, he’s a national figure in Belgium. This suggests that he’ll retire from cycling but won’t get the quiet life as he’s part of the Belgian celebrity circuit where is private life is tracked by paparazzi. Boonen has expressed interest in a new career in motorsport – he collects supercars – and this is bound to fill column inches for years to come.

Team Building Exercises
Back to cycling and the post-Boonen era brings questions for the Quick Step team. We still see them as the exemplary outfit for the spring classics even if they’ve had many several barren campaigns, or at least not lived up to the high standards expected of them. Boonen has acted as the cornerstone around which to build their tactics, able to charge away solo on his day but crucially he could play the sprint card. This enabled, or perhaps emboldened, Niki Terpstra to win Paris-Roubaix in 2014 when he had the force to ride away from the front group after clearing the last pavé sector because nobody else wanted to chase with Tommeke sitting on. There’s the looser question of identity, the team does have a Belgian core with nine riders but it’s become cosmopolitan with 15 different nationalities. Do the team persist with this footloose strategy or do they try and find a Belgian rider around whom they can anchor the team for April? Not easy, Greg Van Avermaet seems happy at BMC Racing and Sep Vanmarcke has signed with Cannondale-Drapac for two years. Even recruiting a marquee foreigner for the Flemish classics isn’t obvious; team bike sponsor Specialized craves the validation gained from a successful cobbled campaign but has Peter Sagan doing the business over at rival stable Bora-Hansgrohe now.

Among the candidates for internal promotion there’s Zdeněk Štybar who is still a promising rider but also 31 years old and Niki Terpstra is a year older. Yves Lampaert should be back after injury took him out of the spring classics last year after his girlfriend rammed into him with trolley by accident during a visit to the supermarket provoking an Achilles tendon injury. These three could conceivably win Paris-Roubaix this year or the next but none are celebrated, or just rated, in the same way as Tommeke.

Conclusion
Fabian Cancellara’s retired and now the countdown is on for Tom Boonen’s final cobbled classics campaign. His retirement will be a national event in Belgium because he’s more than pro cyclist, he’s a national celebrity. Some cyclists have stopped and taken the media circus with them but there’s no danger of this in Belgium because no other country venerates the sport so much. But Boonen’s retirement will leave column inches bare and it’ll be interesting to see what his team is planning for the coming years without him.

We’ve got action on many fronts with races in Oman, Algarve and Andalucia today. This can be confusing: Which race do we follow? Why aren’t the best riders together in the same race?

Those questions are valid but the answers aren’t so simple. It’s arguably superior to have the peloton spread around the world because it means the best riders only clash from time to time. A bike race is an exercise in hierarchy and if the same riders kept meeting then the results would likely be the same, a result on a summit finish one week would likely be similar the next. It also means a total of 488 riders are working in competition today, not to mention the accompanying management and support staff.

Both Andalucia and the Algarve are on Eurosport this week if you want to watch on TV with plenty of big names in action and also the European debut of Team Manzana, the newly-promoted Colombian team that has joined the Pro Conti ranks. The Tour of Oman isn’t on TV and a blog post from a couple of years ago explains why. If you want to save a click it’s because Oman doesn’t pay for a live broadcast, something many other races do and a reminder that only the biggest events on the calendar can sell the broadcast rights for meaningful sums.

The Aqua Blue team may not be on TV because they’re racing around Oman but they seem to be everywhere: they’re new, Irish and seemingly in every breakaway going. It’s not brought a win yet but there’s a deliberate strategy here. As a UCI Pro Continental team they’re not guaranteed a start in any race at all so they need to convince organisers they’re worth bringing to the start and one way to prove it is to supply more animation than Pixar by going in the breakaways. It’s not brought a win but it’s got them on the podium with a mountains jersey, a best young jersey there and they’re making a name for themselves. They need to because Aqua Blue is a new e-commerce venture with the goal of generating enough business to fund the team, an ambitious aim.

From Ireland to England and one race that’s becoming more valuable every year is The Women’s Tour which has just announced a new London finish. The race name alone is of interest linguistically given its definitive nature, not just a “tour of somewhere” but The Women’s Tour. Boastful? Maybe but also deserved as the race will ride around the British capital in June for its final stage, a symbolic moment and it comes after some selective climbing stages along the way, something that was missing in the early editions. The race now has everything to become the premium women’s stage race on the calendar and you feel the likes of ASO and RCS are missing a trick here, they might run women’s versions of some events like the new upcoming Liège-Bastogne-Liège for women, the Strade Bianche in Italy and this summer’s La Course over the Izoard is promising but the women’s sport is moving ahead faster than these two traditional race promoters want to invest. Dreaming aloud ASO would invest in a women’s Tour of California for May and then turn La Course into a multi-day stage race in July while RCS get behind the Giro Rosa.

Talking of linguistics and businesses getting ahead of the men’s World Tour peloton, once upon a time the phrase “team issue” would imply the highest standard of a product, for example a team issue bike was the flagship model for a range. It still is  in many cases, for example Pinarello’s Dogma F10 as used by Team Sky. But this doesn’t hold now for other brands and recently online direct retailer Canyon, sponsor of Movistar and Katusha, launched two bikes with the new Ultimate CF Evo frame that sit above the “team issue” product. The UCI rules on weight and design are behind this and there’s still plenty of marketing value in a team issue model that makes it through the Arenberg Forest or over the Stelvio but it does pose an existential question for the sport if it can’t act as the shop window for the best products.

Now to something nobody is talking about: the provisional suspension of Giampaolo Caruso. The Italian was provisionally suspended following a retest of a stored sample and this led to the discovery of EPO in the A-sample. This has to be some kind of record as he’s now been provisionally suspended for 547 days and counting, meaning no hearing has reached its conclusion. It’s now nearing a few months short of a two year ban in case the B-sample is ever tested or the case is heard. Caruso’s career is over and aside from the anecdotal curiosity of such a delay it suggests a failure of justice because a case like this should not remain provisional for so long. Caruso was suspended following a re-test of a sample from 2012 so this delay could also impact the UCI’s policy of testing stored samples. A similar story for Jure Kocjan who has also been provisionally suspended for over a year now with a similar retest for EPO on a stored sample.

Remember this? Such a great day for @MATTEOTRENTIN and the team! And a record that still stands. #ParisTours2015 pic.twitter.com/aTn3CAJV8C

— Quick-Step Cycling (@quickstepteam) February 15, 2017

From slow to fast and good to see Quick Step celebrating the Ruban Jaune, the “yellow ribbon” prize for the fastest average speed in a one day race, an almost forgotten award. Created in 1936 by Tour de France promoter Henri Desgrange, the prize mirrored the blue ribbon or ruban bleu prize for sailing across the Atlantic in record time. Desgrange of course used yellow to match the paper of his newspaper L’Auto and the yellow jersey of the Tour de France. A one day race has to be at least 200km long to qualify.

The Amstel Gold Race qualifies but good luck beating 49.641km/h record because the course is too hilly. In fact it’s so twisty you’d have a hard time reaching it driving the route. New for 2017 is a significant change to the finish and the traditional sprint up the climb of the Cauberg is out. The finish will now avoid the descent into Valkenberg and the climb back out and now it will cut across the flat plateau past the apple orchards to Vilt before joining the traditional finishing straight. It makes the course more sprint friendly but paradoxically should force the climbers and explosive riders to reveal their game earlier rather than sit tight for the Cauberg.

A reminder you can support this blog by purchasing a cap, jersey or socks from friendly British-based online retailer Prendas. As well as some kit you help keep the wheels turning here.

Do early wins matter? A lot aren’t on TV and plenty happen far from a sponsor’s target audience so the publicity value is often minimal. However it’s often said that a good start to the season sets up a team for the rest of the year, building confidence that in turn brings more wins. Similarly a poor start can burden a team for the year. Is this true? It’s possible to use data and statistical analysis to test this so let’s have a look.

This topic was looked at early on last year but only looked at three seasons and when revisiting the data to add the outcome of the 2016 season it still made for a small data set. So the numbers for the past eight seasons have been crunched. How? All World Tour teams had their tally of early season success compared to the wins gained later in the year and these two data sets were checked for any correlation. As a proxy for early season results the cut-off was the end of March: count the race days and this marks almost precisely one quarter of the season’s race days. Here the rankings as scatter graphs for the eight years with the season start to March on the X-axis and April to October on the Y-axis in order to show the working:

What does it mean? The data say the Spearman’s rho for the eight year period is 0.58 which is significant but not strong. Here’s the rho for each season:

As you can see the rho has fallen in recent years. It seems, at least going by the first years on the chart above, that early wins did help some teams keep going but this has dropped in recent years. The average still suggests a weak correlation.

In plain English please: early season success from January to March doesn’t correlate very well with the success rate from April onwards. A good start is nice but there’s not much momentum gained out of it; similarly a bad start needn’t be ruinous for a whole year.

Behind the data: when compiling the data it was obvious that some teams that get off to a winning start do just keep on going all year but not because they get on a roll, more because their roster is racked with riders who win often. The old Highroad team began the 2009 season with 13 wins in the period to the end of March, equal or more to the number of wins that several rival teams would enjoy across the entire season and this is largely because Mark Cavendish, André Greipel and Edvald Boasson Hagen rode for the team and remarkably ended the year as first, second and third in the table of individual winners that year. Similarly the team with the fewest wins all year often scores worst for the opening period too. The story of the data here is often one of mid-table shuffling where a team with a decent start can fade and vice versa.

Anecdote: To illustrate this the biggest swing observed was Ag2r La Mondiale in 2014. They’re a perennial low scorer in terms of wins but in 2014 they enjoyed a great start to with nine wins by the end of March including Carlos Betancur’s Paris-Nice success but only eight more for the rest of the year so their fine start was an aberration rather than the start of something.

In summary a winning team is going to enjoy a great start to the season regardless but those teams who take a few surprise wins early don’t tend to keep up the momentum and those teams without many wins by the end of March are not condemned to a dire season.

World Tour breakaway: one thing that the data don’t show is the changing focus of some teams and the overall increase in strength of the World Tour teams versus the rest during the period observed. Back in 2009 or 2010 it was common for the smaller Pro Conti teams to snap at the heels of the World Tour teams, or even bite chunks out of them. For example in 2009 the Pro Conti Androni team took 33 wins and several second tier teams collected plenty of wins to finish the year well ahead of the World Tour teams. Nowadays the World Tour teams tend to be grouped towards the top of the table leaving few crumbs for the lesser teams, to use an anecdote to illustrate this no wildcard invitees to the Tour de France has won a stage since 2012 when it was frequent before this.

If the data suggest early wins don’t bring momentum then the broader question is whether early wins count for anything more than morale and narratives. It’s questionable whether they bring publicity as quantity and quality are not the same. We might think the goal of a team is to win but really it’s to promote their sponsors and if winning the best way to do this, not all wins are equal. Take an un-televised race with a handful of spectators at the finish line where the results end up buried in a local newspaper and yes, you have a win in statistical terms but the value to the sponsors is minimal. Teams want to win but they’re often measured against expectations rather than victory rankings, Team Sky’s big budget and blue chip corporate sponsorship means they have to win the big races that are on TV in the UK, Italy and Germany because these are the key markets for the sponsor. Put simply Sky needs to win the Tour de France. Meanwhile sales of lottery tickets and scratchcards in France won’t change if FDJ storm the Tour Down Under but a win in the GP La Marseillaise does help the sponsor push its brand in the provinces so each team has its own subtle objectives.

Conclusion
Does a team that starts winning early carry on winning throughout the year? In a word “no” say the data sets mentioned above when tested.

There’s a more nuanced story here though, the answer is “yes” for a team like Quick Step today or HTC-Highroad from the past where wins seem to come easy any month of the year and just as weak teams from the past like Euskaltel or Vacansoleil struggled all the time. But it’s outside of these anecdotes that the data debunks the the hypothesis of a good start leading to a good season.

Nationalism, nativism and populism are on the rise across Europe and beyond. Some like it, some don’t but put your take on this aside for a moment if possible because there’s sporting connection to it. Or at least there used to be. Many bike races have a long history of nationalist association, whether as expressions of patriotism or symbolic illustrations of occupying the terrain. Will today’s politics bring new bike races.

Donald Trump hogs the headlines but across much of Europe other political outsiders are trying to make inroads. Each country is different, often very different, but to use a broad brush there’s a shared theme of nationalism and populism across the continent, for example the National Front tops the polls in France at the moment ahead of the presidential elections due in spring; what is Brexit but a reassertion of national identity? There are independence movements in Catalonia, Flanders, Scotland and other places. Nativism is growing from Poland, the Netherlands, Austria and Denmark. Some are in power, most are not.

The route of Stage 7… or the map as a political and military symbol?

Is it history repeating? Certainly these forces are not new. Go back a century and the Tour de France was part of a nationalist streak in France. Race organiser Henri Desgrange is often celebrated as a promotional visionary who launched the Tour de France as a marketing stunt to sell newspapers but we skip over his other side, the one where he labelled Prussians “bastards” and called on his countrymen to “slam the butts” of their rifles into German chests until the blood spilled. For context France had been invaded by Germany so this was a war cry from Desgrange rather than an incitement to murder but it’s shocking to read all the same.

“Strasbourg, nous voilà chez-nous”
Henri Desgrange, 1919

It wasn’t just through his pen or typewriter that Desgrange expressed his national preferences. He designed the course of the Tour de France as an exercise in nationalism, tracing a route to stir national pride with visits to German regions before World War I, lands that France claimed as its own: the symbolism of the Tour de France extending into disputed terrain was obvious. Once the war was over and land ceded to France in the 1919 Versailles Treaty Desgrange wasted no time sending his race to these newly acquired places, declaring “Strasbourg, here we are at home” and delighted in visiting the city of Metz, for years a German military base with a direct rail link to Berlin, so much that it featured every year until 1939.

This idea of a bike race as an exercise in national affirmation wasn’t unusual. The Giro d’Italia was a means to unite a country that was only created in the late nineteenth century, a thread to stitch the regions together. John Foot’s excellent Pedalare! recounts several examples of Italian national pride being played out via the Giro, such as its visit to Trieste in 1946, then a disputed city between fascists and communists, a provocation that required a military escort and the riders were stoned, the full story is a reason alone to read Pedalare. Foot translates an excerpt from La Gazzetta Dello Sport:

The Giro d’Italia has been reborn to transcend a higher duty which transcends itself. Its problems are part of its success. Neapolitains and Turinese, Lombards and Laziali, Veneti and Emiliani… All Italians [all] part of a single civilisation and with one heart they all see the Giro as a mirror in which they can recognise themselves.

Similarly there are many races that used a bike race as a theme to create national unity or even internationalism such as the Peace Race with its assertion of soviet superiority and harmony between East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The Tour of Flanders was created in part to bolster Flemish nationalism.

Protesters await the Giro di Padania in 2011

This isn’t the stuff of the old days and old ways. The Giro di Padania was run in 2012 and 2013 with political backing to promote the separatist agenda of the Northern League and bolster the idea of “Padania”, or a northern Italy but folded after it was dogged by protests. Italian identity works the other way too and in 2011 the Giro’s route was specifically designed as a “Giro that celebrates 150 years since Italian unification, underlining all the specific things that are important for our country, not just sporting but also cultural, social, political, geographical, artistic, agricultural and gastronomic” said race organiser Angelo Zomegnan.

Basque identity but not a politician in sight

There are too many races to list that have had nationalist purposes. Spain has three stages in the World Tour, the Vuelta a España of course but also the Volta Catalunya and Vuelta Ciclista al Pais Vasco. What do Catalunya and the Basque Country have in common? A strong identity and independence movements and this might explain the prominence of these events. But it’s not so simple, these are also among Spain’s wealthiest regions and cycling is particularly popular in the Pais Vasco. Causation and correlation overlap here, these races exist for a lot more than regional pride and nationalist sentiment.

Meanwhile the Tour of Flanders continues to cultivate the Flemish regional identity, celebrates the Flandrien and sees political parties with regional separatist agendas handing out those yellow and black lion flags. This doesn’t make De Ronde a political event, it’s got more to do with sport – and beer – than separatism, but it is a vehicle for those with a political agenda too.

France’s most powerful man in July, and François Hollande

So cycling has a rich history of races which exploit national identity. If nationalism and nativism are on the rise will this be reflected again in the sport? As frenetic as the politics might get these days cycling seems largely untouched and will probably stay this way. A politician, whether mainstream or maverick, needing a stunt or gimmick today doesn’t need a bike race when they can propagate a meme on social media for free. In fact this time it does seem very different because politics and cycling are often distant, see how few politicians show up at the Giro d’Italia these days and even the 100th edition won’t visit the capital in Rome.

Meanwhile on the other side of the Alps France’s National Front sees the Tour de France as a threat rather than an opportunity, denouncing the race’s foreign forays in a press release issued last October after the route presentation:

Year after year the Tour de France finds itself denatured… …while it ought to value the beauty of our nature and the history of our country… France must became France again, and no longer a simple part of the indigestible substrate of Brussels”

The irony is that Desgranges delighted in taking the race abroad, a means of imposing France itself on a foreign landscape. Taking the Tour to Düsseldorf is hardly an act of defiance but it’s still an export of French culture and a valuable export.

Maybe 50 years ago a Soviet trick would have been to rustle up a bike race in Crimea but today there’s nothing of the sort. Even the Presidential Tour of Turkey makes a nod to President Erdogan but it sticks largely to a tour of beach resorts rather than a defiant procession through Kurdish regions to the east.

Instead the political ambitions seem much smaller. A shake-up of local government in France has seen regions merge and races can help in the re-branding, for example the Four Days of Dunkerque stage race in northern France is also branded as the GP des Hauts-de-France, named after the new name for the merged Nord and Picardie regions. But these regional mergers could also endanger races, now that the Poitou-Charentes and Limousin regions of France have been folded into a larger region labelled Nouvelle Aquitaine where will the regional funding for each race come from? Who knows but see how we’ve gone from exploring whether the rise of nationalism will bring more bike races to querying whether regional government subsidies will help keep a few races afloat.

The Giro turned Belfast pink for a day

Perhaps the answer is that bike racing doesn’t matter like it once did. People are not following the race as an expression of their nationality and nor is a race a means to explore and exert national borders. Riders are not marketed as rugged individuals who toil away, sporting Stakhanovites to embody pre-set propaganda values. They’re just athletes now, no bad thing. Besides, stage a race in one country and chances are a foreigner will win given the peloton is so cosmopolitain. Similarly races are not sold as meaningful events of national significance, instead the promotional talking point is live heart rate data. Besides the peloton is so international these days that if one country wanted to turn its own race into a patriotic affair there’s a very high probability it’s won by a foreigner.

Conclusion
Right from the start bike races have exploited a nationalist streak; or nationalists have exploited races. It’s not from a bygone era either, contemporary races can still be used by politicians as we saw with the Giro di Padania a few years ago but it’s rare. Now with nationalist tides lapping across Europe and beyond it makes you wonder if this will lead to a revival of races? Probably not, it’s more likely to bring a rise in racism rather than more racing. The sport no longer seems to be the popular vehicle that it once was, instead business and athleticism come first and any national promotion is of the softest kind, a tourism promo rather than a claims of national superiority. As such it’s a relief that cycling remains a sport without much a political agenda. Yet the fact that politicians don’t see cycling as useful to their ends maybe says something about sport’s diminished role too.

Roger Walkowiak has died aged 89. “Winning à la Walkowiak” is a term still used today for an easy or an unexpected win. It’s used in cycling and beyond, a French politician can triumph à la Walko too. The label seems cruel and Walkowiak felt wronged by it, his triumph in the Tour de France was mocked and this turned into a sadness that weighed on him for years.

Get a map of France, put your finger in the middle and you find the city of Montluçon. It’s here where Roger Walkowiak was born in 1927. The son of a Polish factory worker and a French mother, Roger grew up in Montluçon when it was a busy industrial city.

He joined the Dunlop factory cycling club, the rubber company has long been the town’s biggest employer and today its factory is still working, albeit amid crumbling buildings that signal better days. After completing his military service Walkowiak found work in a local bike shop and resumed racing, getting enough results to turn pro for the local Riva Sport-Dunlop team.

Walkowiak’s first year as a pro  in 1950 was not an auspicious start, he caught a cold six times in five months. Things improved in 1951 and in a stage of the Circuit des Six Provinces – an event later merged into the Critérium du Dauphiné – he crossed over the Col de l’Epine first only to get beaten for the stage win in Aix-les-Bains by Gilbert Bauvin, a name who’d become a thorn in his side later. This and more was enough to get him a start in that year’s Tour de France. While the sport had its nascent trade teams, the Tour picked national teams and regional teams from France. It sounds parochial today but it reflected the vast supply of riders as almost the entire the peloton either came from France, or from countries along its border; plus the Netherlands and minus Germany. The British were seen as exotic and enjoyed the media coverage we see applied to Chinese or Japanese pros today; in 1956 the sole British starter Brian Robinson, invited by a French regional team, was labelled “Phileas Fogg” by the media as if to suggest how far he’d travelled.

Walkowiak’s career progressed with a win here or there and some solid places like second in Paris-Nice – then labelled Paris-Côte d’Azur – and a top-10 in Milan-Sanremo. His ride in the 1955 Dauphiné impressed many, he was almost the equal of France’s best rider Louison Bobet on all the main climbs including Mont Ventoux and finished second overall. But he never made the French national team for the Tour de France that year. Bobet himself said Walkowiak deserved a place in the national team. Yet he wasn’t picked for the French team and rode for regional Nord-Est-Centre team run by Sauveur Ducazeaux and abandoned on Stage 11 with a saddle sore.

1956, the big year that nearly wasn’t
Walkowiak may have won the 1956 Tour de France but starting the race wasn’t a given. Earlier that year Sauveur Ducazeaux was managing the French team in the Vuelta a España, then run in late April, and he picked Walkowiak. Things started well with a team time trial win and then a stage win for “Walko”. But team leader Bobet wasn’t having a good Vuelta and pulled out, other French riders followed and Walkowiak joined the exodus, taking the train home one morning instead of starting the stage. Ducazeaux blew his top and swore he’d never select him again. Come July and Walkowiak again missed out on the French national team and qualified for the the regional Nord-Est-Centre team… managed by Ducazeaux. It took the intervention of Raphaël Géminiani and a handwritten apology by Walkowiak to start the race. He raced but others did not, with Gino Bartali, Fausto Coppi, Ferdi Kubler, Louison Bobet, Hugo Koblet and Jean Robic all absent for varying reasons. Federico Bahamontes and Charly Gaul were tipped to win but the two star climbers had a route ahead of them with few mountains.

The race began as predicted with André Darrigade of the French national team winning the opening stage in Liège and wearing yellow. Bahamontes, the Eagle of Toledo, got plucked alive during the opening days and lost 30 minutes on one flat stage; Gaul surrendered 10 minutes on another flat day. Walko meanwhile was regularly at the front of affairs and Stage 5 placed was part of a group of 20 riders who put ten minutes into Bahamontes and 15 minutes into the field. The next day Walko made another breakaway that put over five minutes into the next group and 11 minutes on the bunch.

“Darrigade, caught in a trap, loses 18’46 and Walkowiak takes yellow”

Stage 7 was the decisive day. On the roads from Lorient to Angers Walkowiak infiltrated a breakaway of 35 riders that finished 18 minutes ahead of the bunch led home by a dejected Darrigade. While Italy’s Alessandro Fantini won the stage, Walko took yellow thanks to time gained from the other successful breakaways in prior stages. Walko was the new race leader but the story was the “Waterloo” of the French team, their crushing loss rather than the regional rider’s gain. L’Equipe’s Antoine Blondin, the playwright who chronicled big sports events for them, labels Walkowiak a “poujadiste égaré dans le Bottin mondain” which almost impossible to translate but think of a “petit-bourgeois lost among aristocrats” and either way Blondin mocks this modest rider leading the great race.

Walkowiak was part of this maxi-breakaway and so were Belgian Jan Adriaensens and Dutchman Wout Wagtmans and each would earn a brief spell in yellow as Walkowiak lost time in the Pyrenees. He got his climbing legs in the Alps and, over the Izoard, matched the best that Bahamontes and world champion Stan Ockers could throw at him. He took back the yellow jersey but Gilbert Bauvin was closing in, especially when Walkowiak crashed on the stage to Lyon and had to chase. Still Walkowiak rode into his home city of Montluçon in yellow with one stage to go. These days the final stage is a victory parade with a criterium at the end but in 1956 they rode from Montluçon to Paris, today a four hour car journey and a nine hour stage in 1956. “Bauvin and Adriaenssens attacked me 20 times” said Walkowiak. Whether the count is exact we don’t know but it shows the fight went to the end.

Walkowiak won his Tour and if the win was unexpected, the result was beyond dispute. L’Equipe praised a powerful Walkowiak who rode better than everyone else in a lively race. Here’s Blondin again in his final column:

“The most athletic Tour de France we’ve ever known… …A moral ending fit to give satisfaction to every reasonable person… His win confirms a fact. Walko was the bravest, the most constant, the most healthy.”

Quite the volte face? L’Equipe and the Tour came around to Walkowiak but was this an appreciation of his ride or a commercial need to promote the winner in order not to devalue the race itself? Blondin, no stranger to a bottle or three of wine, was probably the last person to take the corporate line, in fact his piece praising Walkowiak criticised other aspects of the race. Later on the Tour organiser Jacques Goddet even dedicated his memoirs L’Equipée Belle to Roger Walkowiak to show appreciation for this edition of the race and its winners. Other newspapers, newsreels, radio and television were less generous and Walkowiak began to lament his win, “I felt as if public opinion thought the Tour was too important for a rider like me“.

From Tour champion to tourneur
Walkowiak’s career continued as it had been before: without further crowning success. He returned to the Tour de France in 1957 as part of the Peugeot team only to see Jacques Anquetil emerge as a star, the darling of the public. In a race with a high attrition rate that year he abandoned on Stage 18 becoming one of only six “defending” champions (Froome 2014, Hinault 1980, Thévenet 1978, 1976, Bahamontes 1960, Anquetil 1958). Walko would soon quit cycling too, his career harmed by a parasitic infection following the Tour of Morocco. Out of work he returned to factory where he was once an apprentice and resumed his career at the lathe as a tourneur. He ran a service station and tried his hand at farming too. He avoided the media for decades until an interview with L’Equipe in 1985. “They stole my Tour, they’re bastards” he said about the Parisian media who he accused of underestimating his win and the effort involved.

More recently in an interview with French TV he broke down in tears when asked about his Tour de France win, still hurting at the accusations that he won the Tour de France thanks to a fluke breakaway on a flat stage. He said he never talks about the win with his wife either, the subject was too hard to broach. A more recent interview by Bicycling’s James Startt saw Walkowiak telling the story from his side.

Gilbert Bauvin

What if Walko had lost?
Historians and sports fans share the love of the counterfactual, the “what if?” scenarios if something had turned out different. What if Gilbert Bauvin had won? He was the leader of the French national team but hardly a great champion either. Maybe the Tour would have made him into something bigger but his palmarès prior to the Tour was only marginally superior to Walko’s thanks to a few wins and two spells in the maillot jaune. He too made the maxi breakaway that gained 31 minutes. So maybe we would have a win “Bauvin style”? That said he was still more of a media darling than the modest Walkowiak.

Conclusion
Did Walkowiak get lucky? Yes because for various reasons several star riders did not start the 1956 Tour de France. Yes because he joined a breakaway that to took 18 minutes on Stage 7. But you make your own luck. He was in the successful breakaway for two straight days before the 18 minute move which meant he’d already gained time on rivals including those that made the maxi-break while the pre-race favourites were floundering in the cross-winds.

When the Tour went into the Alps he climbed back into the yellow jersey and was matching the best on the big climbs. His lack of style and his self-effacing modesty didn’t endear him to the media but he won a race with a record average speed.

The race had big breakaways staying away. The yellow jersey changed shoulders eight times with Walkowiak losing the lead only to win back the yellow jersey thanks to some valiant riding. If only every Tour could be as exciting.

• This piece is a reprise of a post done to coincide with last year’s Paris-Nice’s visit to Montluçon last year but hopefully worth revising and reviewing again in memory of Roger Walkowiak.

The season’s barely begun, right? Technically we’re already one sixth of the way through the 2017 season and with a pause this week given the vanishing of the Tour of Qatar and the Tour Méditerranéen it’s a good moment to take a look at the standings so far.

Quick Step step quickly to the top of the table with 10 wins from five riders. Over the years the team consistently won races with many of their riders, last year 18 of their 30 riders took individual wins, ie excluding team time trials. The Belgian team is off to a lucky start this year too in terms of podium distribution with 10 wins and only one second place and one third place.

Orica-Scott are on seven after enjoying Australia’s “summer of cycling” thanks to Caleb Ewan’s four stage wins in the Tour Down Under and two from Damien Howson in the recent Herald Sun Tour, a good win for a rider who has until quietly impressed as a mountain domestique. Magnus Cort Nielsen’s picked a win in Spain already, carrying on from his Vuelta stage wins last year.

BMC Racing are third thanks to a double at the Australian nationals where Rohan Dennis and Miles Scotson won titles and then Richie Porte’s two stage wins and the overall classification in the Tour Down Under add to the tally. Porte is looking like a contender for the podium in the Tour de France but his triumph Down Under isn’t behind this, instead it’s his record in races like the Tour itself and regular wins in Paris-Nice that earn him podium contender status.

Lotto-Soudal have enjoyed a nice start to the season with two wins in Majorca and Tony Gallopin took a time trial win in yesterday’s final stage of the Etoile de Bessèges, his first in a time trial and perhaps a sign of the raw power he’ll need as he switches his focus towards the cobbled classics this year when in recent years he took aim at the Ardennes races. Tim Wellens took two wins thanks to his explosive, daring ways and aided by team tactics with his squad able to mark out rivals.

Among the others FDJ and Team Sky are tied on three wins but different stories as FDJ have seen two of their three leaders win in Arthur Vichot and Arnaud Démare while Team Sky have seen three domestiques enjoy a rare win, even if Luke Rowe and Ian Stannard are classics contenders in the spring too.

Trek-Segafredo have two wins, a pleasing sprint win for Degenkolb to show his recovery from that training crash a year ago and an intriguing win for Bauke Mollema in the Vuelta San Juan. The Argentine race had a bantamweight start list but it was the manner of Mollema’s win that impressed, he almost won the time trial stage and it’ll be interesting to see how he fares this year given he’s notionally second fiddle to Alberto Contador.

The chart includes the teams without a win if only to remind us of all 18 teams in the World Tour. Lotto-Jumbo are all in behind Dylan Groenewegen for wins and they’re bound to get off the mark with the 23 year old Dutch champion who has beaten the likes of Marcel Kittel and André Greipel in straight sprints. Bora-Hansgrohe are waiting for that first win, Sam Bennett came close already in Australia but all eyes are on Peter Sagan. Remember that until he won Gent-Wevelgem last year the story was all about how the Slovak simply couldn’t win a race rather than the nonchalant ease he went on to display for most of the year. Dimension Data were almost relegated last year but won’t suffer on the victory rankings with a sprinter like Mark Cavendish. Astana have lost their sprinter Andrea Guardini but recruited neo-pro Riccardo Minali who has yet to win but has started well and if the name is familiar to some, it’s because his father was a prolific winner in the 1990s.

Ag2r La Mondiale and Cannondale-Drapac are the two that might need more time. The French team doesn’t have a house sprinter and Nico Denz’s mountains jersey from the Etoile de Bessèges doesn’t count as a win but they’ve had two podium places already. The US team has a sprinter in Wouter Wippert but he hasn’t won since June 2015 and the team has yet to have a top-three finish.

Pro Continental Rankings

We might be some way through the season but there are slim pickings for the second tier of teams who have just three wins between them, an obvious sign of the dominance of World Tour teams. Direct Energie took two wins yesterday to propel to the top of the chart thanks to Lilian Calmejane and Bryan Coquard. Fortuneo-Vital Concept have a win thanks to Dan McLay and United Healthcare scored in the Herald Sun Tour with sprinter Travis McCabe. In each case having a sprinter on the roster is good for the wins. But absent from the list so far are Cofidis where Nacer Bouhanni has two second places and a third.

Does a winning start bring success for the rest of the year? There’s the hypothesis that a successful start to the year allows teams to look ahead to the rest of the season with confidence, that success breeds success and those teams struggling begin to get nervous and risk being stuck in a rut. This blog’s done the maths and the correlation between early wins and success over the whole season seems weak but it’ll be worth revisiting the topic again soon with fresh data from 2016 because at first glance last year seemed to suggest a good start did help.

Team victory rankings methodology: all World Tour, HC and *.1 races count as well as national championships. A win is a victory in a one day race, a stage victory or the overall classification in race. Annex competitions like best young rider, the points prize or a mountains jersey don’t count.

Technically we are one sixth of the way through the season, there have been 67 days of racing so far out of a calendar of 435 days of racing. But this is because the UCI starts the new season the day after its annual “gala” held in mid-October last year. So any race taking place after this awards ceremony is formerly part of the 2017 season (UCI rule 2.1.001 in case you need to know). However the rankings displayed on this site are for the calendar year because this is when each team is formed: there’s no point having a set of rankings for teams that have changed composition along the way. This points to the continual absurdity of a season that is defined in opposition to the registration of teams and rider contracts.

After using the Garmin 820 Edge for six months here’s a review of this bike computer. Tech reviews are rare here but this one is partly prompted by glowing reviews elsewhere which seem way too generous for a product that struggles with the basics like usability and battery life.

What it is? A bike computer and GPS navigation device all in one. In the box you also get a wall charger, a USB cable and mounts for your bike, both the small ones that you fix to your stem with rubber straps as well as an “out front” arm which clamps onto the bars with the help of an allen key bolt.

The device is suggested for retail at €399 / $399 / £369 but you’ll find it on sale online for 20% less.

The unit has a medium sized screen, bigger than a watch but smaller than a smartphone. You can adjust the display settings a lot in order to have ten data points on the screen or just one and then you can swipe across to another screen with more data, then another with maps and so on. It pairs with a range of Ant+ and Bluetooth devices and even has Wifi so you can upload your rides to Garmin’s Connect website and Strava in an instant.

The GPS works well, it is quick to find a signal and if the unit can use the Russian Glonass network as well this always felt excessive given the pinpoint accuracy, at least for road use.

Another plus is the processing power, you can upload a long route and it’s reasonably quick to start the course, it’s not instant but it makes good progress. Similarly during a ride the device happily follows a route and your path along on a map is smooth, even during a fast descent the screen scrolls with a mellifluous manner. The memory is huge too, you can pack it with maps and keep many rides and courses on it.

The display: The display is of reasonable quality but still behind the resolution and ease of use we take for granted in smartphones today. This is ok as you’re not oogling photo albums or playing computer games, nobody needs 500 pixels per inch and perfect tones to follow maps or read your average speed. The supplied maps from Garmin or uploaded versions from OpenStreetMap are clear and easy to follow.

So far, so good… but now comes the first of several problems. That display is fine to look at but it’s a touch screen too so you use it for a lot of the operations too and it’s here that the issues begin. A touch screen seems modern and dynamic in theory but the practice is not so perfect. The screen size is an issue, it’s roughly one third of the size of a credit card which is tidy for visuals during a ride but crowded for manual tapping and swiping. The touch needs to be linear and deliberate to succeed, you can’t just drag a finger across the screen, instead you have to pick your start and finish points and press firmly during the manoeuvre. Also the reaction time isn’t always instant so you may tap the screen, think nothing has happened, tap again only for the device to belatedly register two taps. Sometimes it might not register either touches. This isn’t a user issue where an oafish owner swiping like a caveman needs to make make genteel gestures, instead it’s just plain unresponsive. Even if you’re as dexterous as a surgeon or a pianist you’ll still find it awkward at times too. This video found online shows the kind of frustrations involved, jump to 1m20s to see the problems for yourself:

It’s claimed you can use gloves with the screen but the experience varies. Light De Feet ones work, thick Castelli Estremo gloves don’t. Talking of winter use the inbuilt thermometer seems is always wrong. The device reads to one decimal place while it’s consistently off by three to four degrees Celsius. Thanks to the ability to tweak the display once you’ve established it’s no better than your fingers or nose at guessing the ambient temperature you can deselect it but it’s another flaw. Switch climates, or just ride indoors and a drop of sweat landing on the screen can sometimes to confuse the device into thinking you’re trying to operate the screen. Luckily it seems all right in the rain.

Battery life is the next gripe. “Up to 15 hours GPS training mode” says Garmin’s website but chances are you’ll be charging it at much more regular intervals. You can pair the Garmin thto your phone via Bluetooth to get notifications and more but this will use more juice. Even with the wifi and Bluetooth switched off if you leave it on the maps screen during a ride then it’ll run out of battery within five hours, or at least this unit did. Bikeradar’s review fared worse with “just a little over four hours”. You can make it last longer by avoiding the mapping screen and just having, say, your speed and distance, presumably as the plain black and white display is economical and there’s no need for processing power to constantly redraw the map. This means the device is good for eight or nine hours and helpfully the turn instructions can flash up over the display so you can still navigate this way and if you ever need more visual clues you can swipe over to the map screen and check all is well and then swipe back. There’s even a special battery-saving mode that will shut down the display totally only to wake-up just when you reach a turn to give you directions. Handy but this is a GPS navigation device and following a course ought to be a primary function. If you’re out for an all day ride you want to enjoy the moment rather than having to coax the device along the way.

A further problem with this device is it’s crash prone. Since buying the device last summer and updating the firmware several times the unit has had more bugs than a backpacker’s hostel. For example it goes wrong when following a course, not always but it’s happened several times. First was during a long ride on unfamiliar roads in a foreign country and having uploaded a route for navigation, it worked fine for three hours until in the proverbial middle of nowhere where it duly went wrong and began to crash like a Buster Keaton slapstick: no sooner was it reset, told to follow the day’s course and the start button pressed did the screen go blank again. And again. This unreliability isn’t encouraging, a navigational device that gives up just when you need it is frustrating but a reminder that you should always try to keep the day’s map in your mind in case the device wants to DNF during your ride.

The Verdict

Two chainrings out of five. When it works it’s a handy tool, the display clearly shows your route and your ride data and all in a compact device that looks the part as it fits snug on your bars or stem. It has a lot of features and Garmin has its own version of an app store called Connect IQ which lets you add even more features and widgets.

The device seemed to get “very good” reviews (here, here and elsewhere) but sometimes these same sites rate almost everything as exceptional which apart from being a literal impossibility suggests they’re not discriminating enough. How can a device that runs out of battery after four hours when used for its primary task be praised? Firmware updates have tried to improve the touch screen experience but forums are filled with enough complaints to suggest the experiences recounted above are recurrent rather than the result of buying a lemon by chance. Kudos to Cycling Weekly who describe the touch screen as “rubbish”.

For all the add-ons and esoteric extras it’s the basics that let the device down. The screen is great to look at but clunky to interact with. Whereas you can operate any smartphone with ease today, using the Garmin 820 is like having one of those conversations in a foreign language where you talk slowly and worry you’re being misunderstood even if the message eventually gets through. Battery life is another fundamental flaw, no biggie if you don’t ride more than five hours at a time but if you wanted a navigation device for a day’s touring or two recon two Giro stages in a day then you’re going to have to shepherd the device during the day just as you’d plan your food or pacing. If it’s the latest model in Garmin’s bike range it feels ancient, like you’ve unboxed an old Nokia phone. This should not be the case with a product that costs 400 Euros.

After looking at the wealthy World Tour team owners and sponsors last week, they’re merely the people who spend their money building teams in order to take part in the races. So who owns the races? Here’s a chance to look at the millionaires a and billionaires out to earn money from the sport. As ever the point isn’t to gawk at wealth but to offer an introductory “follow the money” piece so you know who pulls the strings.

Wang Jianlin has leapt into the rankings because of his wealth and his role in the sport. He’s the Chinese billionaire behind Wanda, a real estate and entertainment giant in China that’s increasingly shopping abroad. “If they are willing to sell, I am willing to buy Paramount Studies” Wang told the World Economic Forum last week, a familiar phrase given concurrent sources say he tried to buy the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia only to get told they’re not for sale. Wang started out as a Chinese border guard and went on to command a regiment before going into business and owning hundreds of shopping malls, hotels, cinemas and karaoke bars in China and now he’s on a shopping spree around the world buying a real estate, plus a stake in Athletico Madrid football team which will please China’s football-loving President Xi Jinping. Wanda’s bought the Ironman triathlon business, the Velothon gran fondo race series from of Lagardère Sports which also includes several unloved pro races like the Hamburg Cyclassics or the Velothon Wales. Wanda’s also bought Infront, a Swiss sports marketing agency with has a joint venture with another Swiss firm Ringier and InfrontRingier run the Tour de Suisse so this large race falls under Jianlin’s umbrella too. Plenty to chew on but there’s more.

Now he’s launching his own event with the Tour of Guangxi that’s been fast-tracked onto the UCI calendar by a compliant UCI who coincidentally have signed a multi-million dollar deal with Wanda too. As such Wang has taken up a prime spot in the sport. Unlike other billionaires in and around the sport he’s not a cycling fan. He recently told the World Economic Forum that cycling and football offer networking and access, that they “can grant you access to other global business that would otherwise be very difficult to get into” as Spanish newspaper AS put it. A means to an end? Yes but wasn’t the Tour de France created just to sell newspapers?

Christian Prudhomme is often seen as the Tour de France boss and he does rule the race but he’s still a salaryman and real power in the sport resides with the Tour’s owners, not its employees. ASO, a subsidiary of the Amaury Groupe, is a family business owned and controlled by Marie-Odile Amaury who took over the reins when her husband died in 2006, one of only two women in this series. Readers probably know ASO owns the Tour de France and other races in France but it also runs other sports events like the Paris-Dakar rally and they’ve taken 100% control of the Vuelta a España and are about to relaunch the Tour of Germany next year. ASO has been a small cog in the wheel of a larger media empire but the family sold Le Parisien newspaper meaning the Tour de France and sports events have become more central to the business while L’Equipe’s future is uncertain, an irony that the Tour de France might outlive the newspaper that created it. The Amaury family own the firm 100% after buying out minority shareholders a few years ago and the quietly-spoken Jean-Etienne Amaury (pictured) is being groomed for the top job. He trained as a software engineer and spent several years working discreetly on Bloomberg’s IT systems in London before leaving to do an MBA at Stanford University and then assume a role in the family business.

If the Amaury family became rich and famous after acquiring newspaper titles and their subsidiary bike races, across the Alps the Bonacossa family are a wealthy clan of aristocrats who had money long before buying into La Gazzetta Dello Sport during the 1920s alongside other activities in politics and sport. They remain the owners today of the pink paged paper even if they “rent” the paper out in complicated, and apparently private, pact that includes running the Giro d’Italia but not outright ownership. RCS had been the firm running the Gazzetta and the Giro, as well as a larger publishing business with titles like Marca in Spain but last year the group was taken over by Cairo Communications, owned and controlled by media mogul Urbano Cairo. He began work as a protégé of Silvio Berlusconi and ended up with a criminal conviction for fraud but the slate was wiped clean and he launched himself into media and advertising and set about buying TV Channel La7,  duelling with Sky for sports rights and buying football club FC Torino. Now he owns the Giro and we can expect a shake-up of the race, he’s already talked about taking it away from state broadcaster RAI (to La7 of course) but this may just have been a negotiating ruse to bid up the rights.

Wouter Vandenhaute must be a busy man right now because he owns more and more of the spring classics. He’s journalist and TV producer and after making his money and branched out into other activities. He’s got fingers in many pies, literally with ownership of restaurants but also Humo magazine and he recently stepped down from managing SBS television. For cyclists, he owns 50% of Flanders Classics, the business that owns the Tour of Flanders and other Flemish fixtures. The other half is owned by Corelio, owner of, among other things, the Het Nieuwsblad newspaper. Vandenhaute’s been snapping up races to package them under the Flanders Classic label – Dwars Door Vlaanderen of late – and put them on the World Tour. This concentration has allowed extra sponsor sales and other cross-selling tactics like hospitality. If you’re still smarting about the Tour of Flanders moving away from the Kapelmuur to the Oude Kwaremont and Paterberg in order to install VIP zones then here’s the man to blame but he’s bringing business acumen to the sport and while traditionalists rage De Ronde has grown into a huge event in Belgium and beyond.

There are others in the sport who are wealthy and have an active role. James Murdoch, son and heir-apparent of Rupert, is still a keen cycling fan and CEO of media company 21st Century Fox. Last year he rolled up his sleeves with Sky, the UK, Irish, German and Italian television arm of the Murdoch family empire by taking up the role of Chairman at the firm and then launching a takeover bid for the 60% of the shares he and 21st Century Fox don’t own. Murdoch is an active supporter of the Velon venture, his interest in the media and Sky’s transformation of the British football premiership make this natural. But how long does he want to stay in cycling, British audiences must almost expect a Sky win in the Tour de France where to triumph is to repeat rather than to wow. But as hobbies go it’s cheap as Team Sky’s entire budget represents 1% of Sky’s annual marketing spend.

Michael Drapac gets his name on a World Tour jersey. He’s made a fortune over the years as a property developer in Australia and the West Coast of the US and after sponsoring the eponymous Drapac Pro Cycling team has folded this into the Cannondale team to form Cannondale-Drapac. Another wealthy man with so much money he spends it on his hobby? Yes and no as the team is much more than a glorified version of Velogames. He’s long had a keen interest in rider wellbeing with a focus on planning for retirement with riders encouraged to study and to be open about retirement rather than hoping that day is so far away it’s not worth contemplating.

Others…
Mike Sinyard sponsors three World Tour teams (Bora-Hansgrohe and Quick Step) via his Specialized firm but doesn’t venture many public opinions on the sport; John Burke at Trek took over the business from his father and the US firm as seen sales soar making him wealthy not in the league of those above; it’s taken Segafredo to help find the budget to recruit more riders while Burke has more views on politics than bicycling. King Liu has been the boss at Giant after founding the company and turning it into the world’s largest manufacturer of bikes but again it’s a marketing operation without much power or politics and he’s handing over the reigns to his niece Bonny Tu. Doug Ellis has been a generous backer of Slipstream but his wealth doesn’t put him in the same bracket as others above. Bahamian fund manager Mark Holowesko also sponsors the Cannondale team and also George Hincapie’s team, Citadel-Holowesko but he’s not active in directing the team; still it seems he’s helped introduce Citadel to cycling, it is a giant hedge fund run by Ken Griffin who the internet says is worth $25 billion and worth watching to see if Griffin gets hooked. There are more sponsors of course of other teams but they don’t take such an active role in their teams yet alone the wider sport.

Conclusion
Cycling’s long been a poor sport, it’s never attracted the money seem in football, yachting or horse racing but this is changing. The arrival of Wang Jianlin is the big story, he’s effectively taken over the Tour de Suisse and is attempting to put the sport on the map in China again with a new World Tour race and a deal with the UCI and his wealth and reach makes the Amaurys look parochial.

Yet for all the billionaire oligarchs and tycoons surely the Amaury’s are the richest people in pro cycling? Not on account of money or “net worth” but because they own the sport’s prime asset: the Tour de France. Even the riches of Wang aren’t enough to let him buy this race.

The Wealthiest People in Pro Cycling, Part I

The Tour de France has issued its four invitations and as predicted they go to Cofidis, Direct Energie, Fortuneo-Vital Concept and Wanty-Groupe Gobert.

The Giro recently caused controversy by snubbing two Italian teams in order to invite teams from Poland and Russia. In both cases these wildcard picks are too tame, there are 22 teams to chose from yet only a few look capable of finishing a grand tour intact. This is a sign of a structural problem in the sport.

The little guy wins for once

The wildcard invitations are predictable and that’s part of the problem. Once upon a time the sport was such that a small team might have a star in their ranks who shone so brightly they had to be invited. This is rare these days but holds true for Cofidis thanks to the volatile Nacer Bouhanni, one of the few riders outside of the World Tour who beats the big names and big teams on his day. But Wanty-Groupe Gobert? They have a solid roster but no superstars, especially given Lieuwe Westra’s sudden retirement. Only four of their 22 riders have finished a grand tour so far so reaching Paris will be a major, if unstated, goal. Still Guillaume Martin is a promising climber and should be good for a quote give he’s got a masters degree in philosophy, Kenny Dehaes sprints well and they’re bound to fire riders up the road every day just as they tried in the Dauphiné last summer when invited there.

The Little Prince isn’t a big enough name for the Giro anymore

It could be argued that Damiano Cunego is a big name for Nippo-Vini Fantini but he hasn’t won a race for four years. Last year he wore the mountains jersey for much of the Giro before losing out to Mikel Nieve on the final mountain stage, a symbolic subjugation of the Pro Conti invitees to the World Tour’s best funded team. Despite Cunego’s best efforts the team wasn’t a must-have invite for the Giro and we’ll return to the Giro in a minute.

Goliath wins… just

Back to the Tour de France and Direct Energie have Bryan Coquard, Thomas Voeckler, Sylvain Chavanel and the promising Lilian Calmejane. Fortuneo-Vital Concept have suffered the blow of losing new leader Gianni Meersman to an early retirement because of heart condition while Dan McClay was good in the sprints but not a “must have” pick at the moment. Maybe they just got invited back because of Armindo Fonseca. “Who?” you ask. He was the rider who attacked on Stage 3 of the Tour de France last year when nobody else would and did something to enliven an otherwise soporific day.

Breton rider on Breton team attacks in Brittany

Fonseca’s attack is an illustration of howthese wildcard teams are no longer brought in win but to “animate” or enliven the race. This is sometimes a euphemism for a pointless attack and the phrase “cannon fodder” springs to mind, especially on flat stages. We see riders from wildcard teams being forced to waste their energy in desperate attacks that will surely fail but at least they provide visual evidence of a race, as compared to a procession of riders across the landscape ahead of an inevitable sprint finish. In return for these brave bids the smaller teams TV airtime and publicity although how valuable imagery of futile riding might be to a brand is up for debate. Anyway the invites go out to teams with slim chances of a stage win or shaping the overall classification, instead these teams have a utility function to enliven the race.

The race is over but the coverage isn’t

“Content Providers”
It’s not all wasted energy. One unseen aspect for this blog’s English-speaking readership is the importance of local riders. Follow the Tour and Giro in English and you might not get much news about the lesser teams but these squads get decent daily coverage in the local media. RAI TV’s post stage show Il Processo Alla Tappa features Italian riders every day (arguably too much, to the exclusion of a lot of interesting non-Italian riders but that’s another story) so the Giro needs talkative Italians to retain the TV audiences. The same in France where the crowds and TV all want to cheer on “their” riders; it’s also a land where the regional press sells very well – Brittany’s Ouest France has a circulation bigger than national dailies Le Monde and Le Figaro combined – so while you might not see so much of these wildcard teams if you watch via NBC, Eurosport or ITV, these smaller teams are visible on the local media.

This local aspect could be a reason to invite a foreign wildcard team too. If a race wants to cultivate an audience abroad then it can invite a team from that particular market but it’s not obvious. As ever the World Tour creams off the best riders and if you want to grow an audience surely you need winners that the public can get excited about. Put bluntly if Giro owners RCS want to cultivate an audience in Poland then surely they need to ensure Rafał Majka and Michał Kwiatkowski are on the start line rather than the CCC team.

What if some of the Giro’s wildcards are linked to sponsorship, for example Polish shoe shop CCC is a visible sponsor at RCS races. Do teams pay to race? Nobody is open about this, we’re left guessing and if there’s a correlation between sponsorship and invitations it’s not a perfect match: try and find a Gazprom logo at the Giro if you can. Even if it could be proved would it be a bad thing in what is already a nakedly commercial sport? The Giro itself is not that profitable and money is needed to keep the wheels turning. Still there’d be an irony if the poorer teams had to buy their way in while the wealthier teams tap appearance fees for fielding their better riders. All talk of money would be irrelevant if the Italian Pro Conti teams were stronger, for example the Androni team simply doesn’t have a roster to get that excited about and if the team’s Colombian Egan Bernal is promising, he’s only just turned 20 and so perhaps all the more reason to wait before dropping him into a grand tour.

World Tour cliff edge
The problem is that the system of inviting teams suited a past era better. Today the top talent is in the World Tour and the moment any rider from the Pro Continental ranks starts to look useful they’re snapped up by a bigger team. See Hugh Carthy’s move from Caja Rural to Cannondale-Drapac or Lachlan Morton to Dimension Data whereas once upon a time a smaller team might retain a leader as their entry ticket to a big race. Some teams are fine with this poaching, indeed Sport Vlaanderen-Baloise delights when riders “graduate” into the World Tour but for most other teams it must be destabilising to see their best riders lured away. This creates a structural problem where there’s the World Tour and there’s the rest. To paraphrase Lionel Birnie from a recent edition of The Cycling Podcast it’s almost like the World Tour is a breakaway league such is the chasm between it and the second tier Pro Conti ranks. Only the gap doesn’t just exist there, the Pro Conti teams are a big mix with a handful of strong teams with decent budgets and then several more modest teams.

The Future?
There’s still talk of shrinking team sizes down to seven riders for the grand tours. This will have knock-on effects but we don’t know what shape they will take. Will it mean a smaller peloton or will it allow for more teams to be invited? Everything else being equal inviting more teams doesn’t sound so exciting given the difficulty in filling the four berths already. But rule change could have a dynamic effect where riders leave big teams for smaller ones because they’ll be able to ride the Tour de France which makes inviting smaller teams more exciting.

Conclusion
The World Tour teams get automatic invitations to all the big races but who to invite from the Pro Conti ranks? It’s not easy, especially for the grand tours. There are 22 teams to chose from yet the pickings are slim. Some options like Cofidis for the Tour de France seem obvious thanks to Nacer Bouhanni, even if the team hasn’t won a stage since 2008; and Bardiani-CSF have a roster and record to merit a Giro start… but others are a stretch. Being local helps but it’s no guarantee, see the Giro where Androni and Nippo-Vini Fantini are left out. If they can’t win then these teams get praise for trying. Think of them as “content providers”, an ugly phrase but useful nonetheless as they’ll attack when nobody else will and if this doesn’t always bring action it does at least supply a breakaway on those flat days when nothing else is going to happen during hours of live TV. Better still and often unseen these smaller teams have local roots and they’ll bring out people to the roadside and once the stage is done they’ll feature in the regional media.