60 | July 25, 2019 | Cycling Weekly
FLAMME ROUGECyclists delight in their inferiority to the heroes of the WorldTour but the
Doc’s struggling to understand their inverted triumphalism
Dr Hutch
N
ot long ago, a friend told
me about his ascent of A lpe
d’Huez. It was the day before
the Tour de France got there
in 2015, so his tale featured the obligatory
beered-up Dutch contingent shouting
encouragement, as well as the inevitable
embarrassment of being overtaken by a
nine-year-old.
(Everyone who rides up a classic climb
in the day or two before the Tour gets to
it is passed by a child — it ’s just a law of
nature. If you’re lucky it ’s a child on a road
bike. If you’re not, she’ll be on a My Little
Pony BMX, and you will never be the same
again. These children train all year for this.)
“It was horrific,” he told me. “I was so
hot that sweat just streamed off me. I was
over-geared, so I started to cramp when I
was only about halfway up, and my legs felt
like they were going to literally explode.
I’ve never suffered so much in my life. It
was the most horrendous thing I’ve everdone.” He meant “horrendous” in that
special way cyclists use it.
“But the best bit,” he went on, “was
when the pros rode up. Do you know how
much faster than me Nairo Quintana was
the next day?”
“Forty minutes?”
“ Yes! A nd do you know how much
faster than me the absolute slowest Tour
rider was?”
“About half an hour?”
“Yes. Isn’t that brilliant?”
I can certainly see why Quintana might
like this — as a serial non-winner of the
Tour, thrashing a middle-aged hobbyist up
A lpe d’Huez would be something to look
back on in retirement with a small swell
of pride. For my friend, I’d have thought
the feelings of glorious achievement from
being at the soggy end of this equation
ought to be a little more muted.
But my friend is not alone. There seems
to be nothing that most hard-training,[email protected]Great Inventions of Cycling
1910 The break
The break, or breakaway, only came into
existence when bike racing got fast enough
for aerodynamics to play a major part, and
the riders formed bunches. Before this, it
was every man for himself, and a typical
race would feature dozens of riders
scattered all over the countryside, as often
as not looking for rural stations at which
they could catch a sneaky train while they
waited for someone to invent EPO and
other more subtle ways of cheating.
Originally, the first big break of the day
was where you expected the winner to
come from. All the way to the 1960s,
getting in the break was what you did if you
wanted the win. This is still the case in most
amateur races, where as a general rule assoon as the break forms and gets a gap, the
rest of the riders give up chasing it and
spend the rest of the race bickering about
who let it go in the first place.
In many professional races of the older
era, the break was hand-picked by the
patron of the peloton, and told how fast
they were allowed to go, depending on
whom the patron had in mind for the win.
In recent years the early break is more
anarchic, but usually less important. In
hillier races and stages, it can still provide
the winner, but it rarely plays a major role in
the overall result of a stage race.
In flatter races, the break exists to give
the race structure and excitement and to
provide Cofidis with something to do.We’re long past the golden
age of the breakaway