Another Way To Look At Astana's Tour Problems

Imagine what Riis could do with this team. Hordes of Astani in all major finales.

P.s.
I love the redundancy in your “too much redundancy” remark. So fitting!

my one divergence would be that I’m not sure Johan is to blame on over-emphasizing the Tour. Blame the fans, the sponsors, etc. who make the Tour as financially rewarding as the entire rest of the schedule combined.

I’m no fan of focusing everything on the Tour, but I’m hesitant to blame Bruyneel for following the money. (Those who know me are likely surprised that I hesitate to blame Bruyneel for anything.) My defense says that Johan isn’t focusing on the tour as much as focusing on where the money, attention, and sponsorship opportunities are. If the cycling world were focused on the Ronde, The Vuelta, or the Mild Raas, I think JB would be there focusing on winning it.

Besides that, I completely agree that he’s wasting an awful lot of great riders just to chase breaks in July.

(and consider this the sort of defense mounted by a court-appointed attorney for a murder suspect in TX .. . . and consider that that attorney has a loaf of bread to take out of the oven in a few minutes):

1. JB’s trained in marketing. His major responsibility is to himself (i.e. at the end of the day, he owns the buses, owns or leases the service course buildings, pays the salaries of the riders, etc.). So, when push comes to shove, his over-riding responsibilities array themselves in the following order: generating revenue for his business, providing exposure for sponsors (current and potential); producing a competitive or winning strategy for bicycle racing.

2. It could be argued—is that the smell of a crust burning?—that JB played his hand to early in the confrontation with the Kazakhs and was hoping that as of 31 May he wouldn’t have to include the Kazakh option in the Tour team.

3. It could also be argued that we are looking at the problems that occur when the General Manager is forced to make decisions that ham-string the sport director and competitors.

 Why on earth would Levi ride a steady Tour? Maybe top 15 but that’s it. Same problem with Kolden. I think he can be happy if he rides top 20. Than still they have a super team with Zuberbeldia, let’s see first after his lost Tour last year, and Lance and Contador. They only can lose. Their problem. The only man who can handle that is….

Lance…

I now want to ask, is it better for the team to:

- Focus almost completely on the Tour as that race is that dominant in terms of publicity and thus money coming into the team or

- Could they have, before the season tried to capture all three Grand Tours and told/negotiated with each of the riders then what races they would be in?

I guess it’s obvious that I think the later could have happened. And I think winning all three Grand Tours would have pushed the publicity even further than just the Tour due to its uniqueness. The risk would have been greater of course. But I think Bruyneel really missed out on a special opportunity and in that missing out caused more tension in the team. I say that even with my feeling that Contador will win this Tour because I think this severely damages this team long-term. Still-why not try for all three?

in this case, i don’t see a scenario where either lance or bert would have given ground on the tour being their assignment.

I get the Bruyneel is a marketing person angle. Makes sense to me. So answer me this:

Why is Bob Stapleton seemingly doing the opposite? Why is Bob focusing on wins and not Tour de France victories? I’m not sure that I believe that it’s simply because he doesn’t have a Grand Tour threat. I do think Stapleton is very concerned about marketing. So what gives? And how come his team seems pretty content with itself? (I’m not sure but I can imagine Stapleton saying to Greipel that the Vuelta is all his and he’ll get support.)

But as I recall they looked pretty good going into the Giro, and would have looked even better had not Lance’s injury set him back. Obviously they still look good for the Tour. The Vuelta, I dunno, but if they have TOO many good riders for that race, as the original post suggested… then surely they’ll be tough there too.

Seems to me the big monkeywrench (so far) was simply Levi’s underperformance at the Giro. I really don’t buy that he was using it as training for the Tour. Whether he peaked too early, wasn’t suited to the course, or just isn’t that good… well, that stuff happens.

So in reading what you folks are saying let me pose a couple of possible truths-and you tell me if they make sense or not.

- Bruyneel and Armstrong (BA) when they started out together did something in the world of cycling that was different than what had happened previously. They focused on one race- the Tour- to the exclusion of all the others. They basically turned their backs as much as possible on the older idea that a racer raced everything or close to it to be considered a champion. What resulted was wild success and a certain transcendance of the sport. Armstrong became large than the sport. Then Lance retired.

Now Bruyneel still had that template; he didn’t at first have a rider. Then came Contador. But seemingly that wasn’t enough (Johan and Alberto just don’t get along as famously as Johan and Lance) and he and Lance let Disco disband.

Then Astana came along almost immediately with their petro dollars and Johan, already missing the sport, was tempted back. Since it was so close to Disco disbanding he could keep Bert and Levi and various support riders (though not, importantly, Popo) and Johan went about resurrecting the old BA paradigm/marketing strategy. The ASO exclusion thingy of last also I think kept Johan going, as conflict often does.

But again, Johan and Bert don’t quite get along. Just different personalities I think. (I like how David Millar deconstructs Lance and Bert here.) And when Lance decided to come back last year, at a time (mid-Vuelta when Bert was solidifying his #1 status in the peloton) when (to Lance) nothing was going on (as in the Vuelta is not the Tour) Johan just leapt at the chance to finish what they had prematurely ended.

And now we come to that end. This Tour. And for BA all other hassles they have are just a price to pay for the immortality they crave via the Tour. And I agree with Millar that Lance is best served by losing valiantly.

But while we have been transfixed in the past decade by this drama, there has been a natural reaction to it. That reaction (a post modern reaction?) is lead by Columbia and Garmin and CSC/Saxo and their emphasis on winning stages and one day races as opposed to the GC of stage races. (I do think Stapleton is purer in this po-mo stance than Vaughters but they are in essence cousins. Riis is also family but intellectually isn’t quite at the forefront.) And they go about it by defiantly changing two ways of doing things: 1) Clean racing and 2) team emphasis (everyone wins). Together both are a paradigm shift away from the BA way of using the old methods to do fantastic in one race using the old methods. I am saying this quickly here but I’m thinking that the management style of Stapleton basically turns the wild success of BA on it’s head. It remains to be seen if Stapleton can also transcend the sport too without any one particular Hero like Lance. Or if Vaughters can use the same methods with Bert (if he eventually gets him) as the top of his spear as Bert has no interest it seems with the whole Lance Hero thing.

Is this making any sense? Or if I was playing basketball on the playground and the ball had bounced over to another court- a little help here?

or, any sport, really:

is the measure of an excellent coach that they force athletes to mold themselves to one system, or that the coach adapts the system to fit the available athletes? (I suppose there’s the Phil Jackson option of creating a system that is easily adaptable to a variety of athletes . . .)

Major topic shift with the transition blurred:
What if Bruyneel and Stapleton are using a similar vehicle (professional cycling) to pursue different marketing strategies to reach differing target audiences?

Now, you could argue that Stapleton and Bruyneel (and Riis) alike are REALLY only marketing to the NEXT big sponsor (and the current sponsor is really catered to mostly insofar as they are the most likely target for renewing the deal). But beyond that level, the main sponsors seem to imply differing target audiences. Astana’s sponsors—well, isn’t this sponsorship really a big vanity project whose ROI would be measured in the same way you measure the ROI involved with a big collegiate booster “supporting” a college football program?

Now, you could make the same argument about Stapleton or the Garmin guy—but there the lines of influence are straightforward: one booster, who also happens to be a team owner. For Columbia, though, their target audience involves a slightly ‘niche-ier’ approach than that taken by Bruyneel, who seems to go for the short-term saturation approach. My guess is that Stapleton convinced the Columbia folks that thanks to sites like this and you tube and other sorts of new media, that there was enough ‘leverage’ involved with a team focusing on a full racing year instead of focusing on one charismatic athlete in one race a year.