Hushovd outwits fellow sprinters to take stage
ST BRIEUC, France, July 6 (Reuters) - Norway's Thor Hushovd powered to his sixth victory on the Tour de France when he won a mass sprint to snatch the second stage on Sunday.
The Credit Agricole rider, who won the prologue in Strasbourg two years ago, outwitted his fellow sprinters in a nervous finish after 164.5 kms from Auray to St Brieuc.
He beat Team Columbia riders Kim Kirchen of Luxembourg and Gerald Ciolek of Germany.
It was not enough, however, to take the overall leader's yellow jersey off Alejandro Valverde's shoulders as the Spaniard of the Caisse d'Epargne team finished safe in the main bunch.
"I knew it was a sprint that could suit me but it was hard, with the wind and this turn towards the end," said Hushovd, who had his first Tour stage win in Bourg en Bresse in 2002.
"Tactically, the team did a good job with Jimmy (Engoulvent) and William (Bonnet)," said team manager Roger Legeay.
France's Sylvain Chavanel and Thomas Voeckler broke away after a few kilometres of the stage to build a lead of five-and-a-half minutes but their advantage started to melt before they reached the intimidating Cote of Mur-de-Bretagne, a 1.5-km ascent at an average gradient of 8.5 per cent.
Compatriots Christophe Moreau and David Le Lay, who was born in St Brieuc, joined them at the summit.
The Francaise des Jeux team, defending Philippe Gilbert's green jersey for the best sprinter and the Caisse d'Epargne, protecting Alejandro Valverde's overall lead, increased the pace with 50 kms remaining.
Gert Steegmans's Quick Step team, anticipating a mass sprint, joined the effort as the bunch caught up with the breakaways less than two kms from the finish.
Swiss Fabian Cancellara, a time-trial specialist, tried his luck alone with one km to go but he was soon caught by Filippo Pozzato, a winner in St Brieuc four years ago, and the peloton.
Hushovd waited for the last 100 metres to burst out of the bunch, proving the smartest of the field to claim his sixth win of the season.
Last year's best climber Juan Mauricio Soler, who injured his arm and wrist in a crash on Saturday, was dropped out of the peloton 25 kms from the finish, his face a mask of pain.
guardian.co.uk (c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Tour de France won't invite Astana team despite Giro's change of heart
PARIS - Tour de France organizers will stick by their ruling to bar 2007 champion Alberto Contador and his Astana team from this year's race despite the Giro d'Italia's decision to let them enter the Italian event.
Italian organizers changed their minds last week and afforded Contador's team a spot in the Giro, which starts Saturday.
But the Amaury Sport Organization, which owns the Tour de France and other stage races including Paris-Nice, said Tuesday it will not change its decision to bar the team from all its events in 2008 following a series of doping violations.
"Our management took a decision. We will wait for one year," ASO spokesman Christophe Marchadier said by telephone. "One year to wait and see, and we will have another look next year."
ASO excluded Astana because of serious doping violations at the last two Tours.
Last year, Alexandre Vinokourov was caught blood-doping during the race and Andrej Kashechkin tested positive for the same offence in an out-of-competition test in Turkey a month later.
In 2006, several riders on the team - then known as Liberty Seguros - were kicked out on the eve of the Tour after being linked to the Operation Puerto blood-doping scandal in Spain.
In an interview with The Associated Press last month, Astana sporting director Johan Bruyneel called ASO's decision "extremely unfair, illogical, ridiculous and arrogant," saying other doping-tainted teams did not receive similar punishment.
Astana's riders also include former Tour runner-up Andreas Kloeden and Levi Leipheimer. The team is also scheduled to take part in the Spanish Vuelta, which begins Aug. 30.
Contador joined the Kazakhstan-backed Astana team in October after his previous team, Discovery Channel, disbanded.
Copyright (c) 2008 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved
CAS hears Mayo case
Iban Mayo has his day in court today, when his case will be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport. The Spaniard tested positive for EPO at last year's Tour de France.
The problem, however, was with his B sample, which made a round-the-world trip before being declared positive. His A sample was tested in the French Anti-Doping laboratory, which was closed for holidays when it was time to test the B sample. It was sent to a lab in Gent, Belgium, which returned an inconclusive result. Subsequently, the lab in Sydney, Australia, called the sample negative. This led the Spanish Cycling Federation to declare him innocent and it dismissed all charges.
The UCI requested that the French lab in Chatenay-Malabry test the B sample, and in December the lab reported that it was positive for EPO. The Spanish federation declined to reopen the case against Mayo, and the UCI appealed that decision to the CAS.
Copyright Future Publishing (Overseas) Limited, a Future plc group company, 1995-2007. All rights reserved.
CPA's Vasseur polling riders
All professional cyclists are currently being polled by the Association of Professional Cyclists (CPA), headed by its President, Frenchman Cedric Vasseur. The CPA wants to get riders feedback on the use of race radios and it needs to have the names of riders representing each ProTour and Professional Continental team.
Vasseur, on his way to the 4 Jours de Dunkerque, informed Cyclingnews of the CPA's progress on selecting team representatives. "In the next day, the teams will receive a questionnaire to determine who will represent them," Vasseur stated, regarding the placement of one rider to represent a team, an idea that was put in place at the CPA's meeting in Liege on April 25.
"A lot of teams already have a representative, in Liquigas it is Manuel Quinziato, in Cofidis it's Stephane Auge and in Francois des Jeux it's Philippe Gilbert. When we have answers from all of the ProTour [and Professional Continental] teams we will make the names available. We expect this by the end of May or the end of June."
The association, with representatives from each team, will have the ability to request a vote any time there is a key issue.
"This will allow us to have specific riders when we organise meetings," added Vasseur. "We can have a meeting with all the representatives from the teams that will race the Tour de France for example."
As it was in the April meeting, the use of race radios is a key topic. For this issue the CPA is polling every rider in the ProTour and Professional Continental ranks.
"Yesterday morning, all the riders received a questionnaire to determine if they are for against race radios. We sent this to all the riders, not just the representatives," Vasseur stated. "We believe that for the radio this is the better option. On a team we can have 10 for the radio, 15 against and maybe five who don't care. Again, this is all the riders in the ProTour and Professional Continental teams.
"I want to hear their answers and then, by the end of May, we can organise something for the Tour de France. The Tour is trying to organise stages without radios and, with the riders' responses, we can say which stages we would like to have the radios or not have the radios."
Copyrigth Future Publishing (Overseas) Limited, a Future plc group company, 1995-2007. All rights reserved.
On yer velo
Claire Armitstead takes a tour round France with the Ondaatje prizewinner
Saturday May 3, 2008
The Guardian
In 1869, a cycling magazine was launched in France. The masthead of Le Vélocipède Illustré featured a voluptuous Lady Progress astride a bicycle. In his manifesto, the editor intoned: "The velocipede is not a fad born yesterday, in vogue today, to be forgotten tomorrow. Along with its seductive qualities, it has an undeniably practical character. It supplants the raw and unintelligent speed of the masses with the speed of the individual. This horse of wood and iron fills a void in modern life; it responds not only to our needs but also to our aspirations."
Graham Robb echoes these sentiments in his introduction to The Discovery of France, which this week won the Ondaatje prize for the book published in the past year that best evokes the spirit of a place. "Ten years ago," he writes, "I began to explore the country on which I was supposed to be an authority. For some time it had been obvious that the France whose literature and history I taught and studied was just a fraction of the vast land I had seen on holidays ... There was the familiar France of monarchy and republic, pieced together from medieval provinces, reorganised by the revolution ... and modernised by railways, industry and war.
"But there was also a France in which just over 100 years ago, French was a foreign language to the majority of the population. I owe my first real inklings of this other France to a rediscovery of the miraculous machine that opened up the country to millions of people at the end of the 19th century."
Robb owes to the bicycle not only his research methods, but the whole structure of his book, which is as profoundly indebted to the nature of cycling as Cobbett's Rural Rides was to the clippety-clop of the horse.
The Discovery of France is a book of two halves. Robb writes: "The difference between the two parts, broadly speaking, is the difference between ethnology and history: the world that was always the same and the world that was always changing." Through this structure he can show a land "in which mule trains coincided with railway trains, and where witches and explorers were still gainfully employed when Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris".
Robb first began his research to alleviate the boredom of cycling for days on end, on holidays with his wife. He started by printing out 19th-century texts, such as John Murray's 1854 A Handbook for Travellers in France, and the earliest Larousse encyclopedia, which gave detailed local histories explaining small changes in the landscape. This led him back to guides produced for 17th-century stagecoach travellers, "which would say you go round a corner and there's a nice view from the top of the hill where the gallows stand".
Originally, his research had no structure other than a travel itinerary, but bigger patterns began to emerge, which demanded to be collated into a book. In a chapter on the "Tribes of France", for instance, he traces the cagots across the country: these were France's untouchables, who could be found throughout the west of the country as far back as AD1000. Permitted only to work as rope-makers or carpenters (or, if female, as midwives), they left their trace in place names and in stone faces carved into special church doors designed to keep them away from the rest of the congregation. Unlike Romanies, they had no unifying language or culture.
By tracking them around village by village, Robb is able to dismiss many of the theories about their origins or identity, concluding, in a typically brilliant insight, that "the distribution of cagots is not primarily a population pattern but the footprint of a prejudice".
Although the bicycle is central to the book, Robb does not draw attention to his own travels and travails in the tradition of much English cycle-travel literature. "In British books, there does seem to be an idea that it's a bit cranky to ride a bike, so self-deprecating humour tends to be the mode," he says, though he is respectful of the insights of such writers as Edward Enfield, whose comic travelogue Downhill All the Way took him from La Manche to the Mediterranean.
But neither is this a work of conventional scholarship. Having written well-received biographies (of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud), he meant it for a different reader - not necessarily a literary one, but someone who might be interested to know that the bicycle has been credited with increasing the average height of the French population by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations.
The two big challenges that faced him in writing the book were to decide what, of the almost infinite source material, to leave out, and how to make the absence of change interesting when most history is written to chronicle pivotal events. In this, he follows in the tyretracks of the great French historian Fernand Braudel, who pioneered a bottom-up, interactive form of history that looked at humans in their landscape.
The unifying concept of the book is mobility - or, in many areas of provincial France and for most of its history, the lack of it. Therein lies the irony of being a cyclist historian of the 21st century: in its early days, the bicycle was all about speeding things up, about making distances seem smaller, and communities closer. Now, in the era of transnational autoroutes, its great virtue is slowing things down, enabling the researcher to note the particularity of people and places; to savour the knowledge that the water-preserving granite of Brittany meant that for thousands of years nobody ever had to leave their home village, whereas the limestone of Provence leeched water, forcing shepherds to herd their animals for hundreds of miles of seasonal journeys to escape the droughts.
As Mary Cadwalader Jones wrote in 1900 in her book European Travel for Women: "You must always keep your eyes open if you are cycling."
guardian.co.uk (c) Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
Cruz back to normal training
American Tony Cruz (BMC Racing) has had a first 2008 season of ups and downs. After racing the Tour of Qatar in good form, he fell ill with a chest cold and sinus infection. Bouncing back from that, Cruz attended the Redlands Bicycle Classic in top shape, but then he broke his collarbone at the GP Pino Cerami in Belgium and underwent surgery. Now, Cruz is back to normal training sessions, hoping that fate will be on his side again in the next few months.
"Everything has been going smoothly," the American said about his recovery from the crash. "I took a little under a week off the bike. After a couple days I rolled around my neighbourhood a little, but decided it didn't feel quite right. So not wanting to take any chances, I decided to give it almost a week. The first three days I rode I managed one and a half hours of training. I then took a day off and the next day was able to do 3 hours. Last Saturday I did six and a half. So now I am back up to my normal amounts. The only thing I am holding off on is sprinting: that intense of an effort still bothers me. Give it another week, and I expect to be up to full speed again."
Fortunately, Cruz has already experienced periods of top form this season, and will thus be able to come back to good shape more easily. "I have either been feeling really well or I have been sick or injured," the former Discovery Channel rider added about his roller-coaster first part of the season. "I was really going strongly at Qatar and felt like I was really competitive, and then I got so sick that I had trouble at California and couldn't race the early Belgian races that the team did. After I recovered, I was flying at Redlands and felt like I was definitely going to nail a couple of races, but then almost immediately I broke my collarbone. But at least I have had fitness peaks. Some seasons for whatever reasons, you never feel like you hit your stride. And this year I have already had two good periods. I know I will be able to build on those."
The next-up race for the sprinter, who considers himself a good all-rounder, will be the Tour de Picardie in France. Ambitions are high. "I'd definitely like to do well there and hopefully win a stage," Cruz said. "And then Philly week will be coming in the first week of June. That is a huge objective for our team and I have won there before, so I know I have a chance again. It is just a matter of being healthy."
Copyright Future Publishing (Overseas) Limited, a Future plc group company, 1995-2007. All rights reserved.
Tour de Georgia brings fans to Road Atlanta
By Ashley Fielding
afielding@gainesvilletimes.com
POSTED April 25, 2008 12:26 a.m.
BRASELTON - Cyclists and couch potatoes alike turned up to see what professional cycling was all about in the Tour de Georgia's first visit to Road Atlanta, a track usually reserved for motorsport events.
Some spectators, like Fred Towers, arrived skeptical that a quality team cycling event could be held on a racetrack. But Towers, who timed a visit with his daughter in Norcross to coincide with the Tour de Georgia, left the event pleasantly surprised.
"Really, it was very much better than I had expected it would be," Towers said. "I had a few misgivings about what it would be like, but it proved to be a super venue."
Towers, who expected to have to sit far from the event, said he liked being able to mingle with cyclists in the track's infield or sit on the grass next to the track.
Towers said he found that the 12-turn, 2.54-mile track in southern Hall County was a "lovely circuit" with hills that created challenges for the cyclists and a good vantage point for the spectators.
Towers traveled from Birmingham, England, to catch the last three stages of the Tour de Georgia. Coming from a part of the world where professional cycling is much more established than in the United States, Towers said he was not only surprised by the quality of the venue, but the quality of the American cyclists. He said teams like Symmetrics, Toyota-United and Slipstream-Chipotle that he did not see much in European races had a strong showing at Thursday's Stage 4 of the Tour de Georgia.
"You have to admire the smaller North American teams, as you can imagine they are dealing with significantly smaller budgets," Towers said.
Fans from as far away as California and Minnesota or as close as metro Atlanta cheered for their favorite blur on a bicycle or rode their bikes Thursday
afternoon across the infield of Road Atlanta.
Jennifer Katz, a first-grade teacher from Fort Myers, Fla., stood on a concrete barrier next to the track dressed as a "Levi's Angel." Katz, a cyclist herself, and her family came to see favorite cyclist, Levi Leipheimer, in the timed team trials with Team Astana. She has plans to watch him race to the top of Brasstown Bald today, and finish the Tour on Saturday in Atlanta's Centennial Park.
Katz, who became interested in cycling events after reading Lance Armstrong's books, said she dressed like an angel, because she saw mountain spectators dressed as devils and other interesting characters while watching Le Tour de France on television.
"I figured if I'm coming for a couple of days I might as well dress like an angel," Katz said.
Even those who only traveled a few miles down Ga. 53 to see the world-class event said it was exciting to have the Tour de Georgia at Road Atlanta.
"It's neat being (here) the first year its held at Road Atlanta," said Chad Truelove, a Gainesville resident and avid cyclist.
Truelove, who bikes recreationally, said he enjoys getting the chance see the pros do it first-hand when the Tour de Georgia comes through the area.
Truelove, like many others at the event, brought his own bicycle as a good source of transportation to the track's two miles of vantage points and the booths in the infield.
"It's just exciting seeing all the professional guys up-close," Truelove said as he watched Team Astana warm up on stationary bikes in the infield before the team had to hit the track for its timed trial.
While some sat as close as they could to the action, others set up tailgate parties in the shade, enjoying the view from a comfortable distance.
Tim Hansen and his daughter, Marta Hansen, relaxed in their lawn chairs next to the fence, not too far away from the action, after a long ride to Braselton from Onalaska, Wis. The father-daughter duo favored different cyclists - she a member from Slipstream-Chipotle and he, an athlete from the rival Team High Road - but both said it was the success of American cyclist Lance Armstrong at Le Tour de France that whetted their appetites for cycling.
The two said they spend Saturday afternoons cycling 30 to 50 miles through the Wisconsin countryside.
Both Hansens said they were looking forward to seeing the cyclists climb more challenging heights in today's stage of the race.
The four members of the Young family are spending the latter part of their daughters' spring break from a Charlottesville, Va., elementary school following the last three stages of the Tour de Georgia. Cathy Young, mother of Hannah Young, 7, and Kelly Young, 5, said the event provided a good springtime diversion for her daughters. They sat on the ground surrounded by free coloring books, stickers and towels they had picked up at the children's health expo after riding their bicycles through the track's infield.
"Here, you can see them come around a couple of times," said Cathy Young, who said she decided to make the trek from Virginia with her husband after he had experienced the Tour de Georgia several times without the family.
Contents of this site are (c) Copyright 2008 The Times, Gainesville, GA. All rights reserved.
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