Just imagine:

You wake up on a glorious Wednesday in spring in time to log on the CTV to watch Gent-Wevelgem. You think to yourself, "This race can't possibly match Flanders. I'll spend most of my time doing some cleaning up and chatting on PdC while the race unfolds. Besides I know its gonna come down to the final bunch sprint... I got time."

So you go about your chores, though the funny/snarky comments on Podium Cafe slowly draw you away from other things. With about 30 km to go you sit down in front of your computer for the last time to watch the race play out. The breakaway looks interesting... it might possibly succeed.. the Kemmelberg did some interesting sorting out... Hincapie and a couple others are pushing hard...

20 km to go and the peloton looks like its gaining on the break... yeah they definitely are. That break sure ain't gonna stay away by the looks of things as that peloton means business with several teams chasing: Quickstep, Liquigas, Cervelo among others. The chatting on PdC is heating up with various posters noting that there's quite a sprinters field here: Boonen, Benna, Cavendish, defending champ Oscarito, Thor, Ciolek, McEwen, Wiggins... geez nice field! Mark and Brian are talking a lot about a Cav-Wig rivalry.

10 km to go ad the catch happens just past the 5km mark. You and everyone else here at PdC have moved to the edge of their seats as the finish line approaches. 3km and you start to see a Columbia train form with Cavendish this time where he's supposed to be- right behind Greipel. But at the same time on the opposite side of the road is the Quickstep train with Boonen behind Alan Davis and Wouter Weylandt. But neither train has the lead as other teams fill in the space between the two sprinters teams... You see next to Greipel his old teammate Roger Hammond, this time leading Hushovd. Some one on PdC has spotted a group of fast guys including Rojas, Bennati, Dean and Wiggins just a bit back and the chat gets quite lively.

2km to go and there's been an Oscarito sighting by Elvisgoat along with both Steegmans and McEwen in the Katyusha kits... This is getting serious! 

1500m to go and no one has the advantage. CTV is getting quite loud as everyone realizes that this is THE sprint! Its like the Last Supper and everyone's invited! You are totally on the edge of your seat now as most of the lead out guys have pulled away... you pray for no crashes and for once your prayers are answered!  This is incredible! No one appears to have an advantage with 1 km to go!!!!! You've been waiting for a sprint finish like this for two years now and here it is! You're screaming at your computer by now and...

Ha! tell me how this ends! Who do you think is gonna win? In the comments, give me the order of finish between Cav, Boonen, Ciolek, Benna, Friere, Thor, Rojas, and McEwen! Tell us how the race will play out.

The other day I was tooling around Cycling Quotient (Too bad CQ isn't a MMO. That would be cool.) and I realized that they post five years of stats for each rider.  See here for instance. Actually though they have seven years of stats- you have to click on the lowest "Results" to get the years 2003 and 2002.

So I decided to figure out which rider has earned the most points during both the last five and last seven years- it's two different riders. So before I give you a top-25 listing I'll give you pictures of five possible riders. Could it be:

via www.moonbattery.com

Or:

via www.lancelhoff.com

Or, jump!

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The Vélo d'Or, THE end of season award in cycling, was just won by The Accountant for the second year in a row. I happen to love this award as I love all of these types of end of season awards that are decided by journalists. To me these types of awards (MVP awards, Golden Boot for Euro soccer player of the year, etc.) tracked over the years, tends to give a good snapshot of who is dominating their given sport during any time period.

But these awards show more than just which player is at the top of his/her game, they also show a maturity in the sport, and a sense that the sport has a certain level of infrastructure in the society that its based in. That Velo magazine can get a bunch of cycle journalists from different countries to vote for rider of the year is not as simple as it sounds. It implies that there is sufficient interest in the sport from the public allowing the publication and selling of enough cycling magazines in turn providing jobs for enough journalists who can concentrate on following the sport we love 24/7. 

The history of the Golden Bike also shows that cycling is a new sport. Its much younger than the larger, more established sports, going back only to '92.  Yeah I know that various races are 100 years old or more. Most every sport today goes back 100 years or more, sometimes much more. But there's always a gap between when the sport was first thought up and having the infrastructure built so that millions of people can enjoy watching the best participants excel and for cycling that gap is quite long. And its interesting that In spite of the doping scandals, cycling has seriously grown in the past 50 years, allowing it to move beyond a provincial Euro thing to a worldwide sport, followed by millions. And it continues to grow as blogs like this one attest. Speaking of blogs...

Having said these high faluttin words, the Golden Bike of course comes after our award of Rider of the Year and its interesting to see how closely we agree once you throw out the differences between the awards: The Podium Cafe voting included women cyclists, while Velo magazine's award includes cross,  track, and mountain bikers as well- but no women evidently. Here's how the voting went for both awards:

Obviously PdC has an America/English bias; that's to be expected. Otherwise the voting is similar. Maybe they just copied us. ;)

So who might win next year?

In one corner you have Oscar Freire, the sprinter par excellence who can climb a bit. Twice Milan-San Remo champion, Thrice World Road race champion.  Won the Green Jersey at this year's Tour. Seemingly could win the Blue Jersey at the Vuelta anytime if he would just finish the race instead of doing more World prep. Has won several other Classic wins and individual stage victories, including three stage wins (and the points jersey) at this years' Tirreno-Adriatico against many major sprinters.

In the other corner you have Alejandro Valverde. This year's Liege-Bastogne-Liege, San Sebastian, and Dauphine Libere winner. Numerous other first places over the years, particularly in the hilly Ardennes. Has an unusually wide skill set combining climbing, sprinting, time trialing in a way that's unmatched by any other rider.

Both Freire and Valverde though have greater unfulfilled ambitions.

So the question I have is this: which will happen first:

1) valverde winning a Grand Tour or,

2) Freire winning a hilly classic: any of Flanders, Amstel, La Fleche, LBL, San Sebastian, or Lombardia?

Fill out the poll below and lets see some comments: totally wild assertions, accusations, whatever!

Face it.  You've been thinking of VDS next year.

Where is the bicycle and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this? Where is my VDS team?

via www.arandor.com

Well?

From Velo News comes a well received story from my neck of the woods: Samuel Sanchez is ditching his Tour wanderlust and is going back to what made him so successful in 07: Pais Vasco and The Vuelta a Espana. All together now:

Yea!

As you can see form the article, he's not totally happy with his decision to leave his affair with the Tour de France but he recognizes what's best for him and his team and that's home cooking. Ah yes, that Tour, she's a hottie, but in the morning she'll just kick you in the head. To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, Samu had to learn the hard way to let her pass by.

As for the rest of his schedule, he's not saying but I wouldn't be shocked if he does the same thing he did in 07 to such success:

- Warm-up with Comunitat Valenciana, then Paris-Nice (where he got 9th in 07 and could easily improve on that), Pais Vasco (3rd in 07),  The Ardennes triad: Amstel (15th), La Fleche (26th) and LBL (12th), Catalunya (15th),  Euskal Bizklel, San Sebastien, Burgos (Vuelta prep), Vuelta a Espana (3rd), Worlds, Lombardia (3rd).

As for the Vuelta itself, I can imagine a mostly similar field as 07 had: No Sastre, but with Sam San, Menchov, Evans, and Mosquera, Anton, etc. (Gesink? Kreuziger?) with the wild card(s) being what Astana and Contador do. With it very possible that the mountain stages not being as tough as this year Samu will be one of the principle favorites. I'm cool with that.

This afternoon, perusing Chris' post, Sprinters Statistics: A First Crack, I got the impulse to expand his table starting with other sprinters from the past year; see how Freire and Hushovd, Haussler and Ciolek measured up. So I started by looking at a couple of riders... Oi. Eventually I will add to that table but first I had to define- who was a sprinter? I mean it seems obvious, right?  Well let me give you two short bios of sprinters for the past year:

Sprinter A: After warming up in the early season Tour Mediterranean and a couple single day races, I started my season at Het Volk with a podium finish. Not bad. I didn't do so well in the next day's K-B-K but hey, it was the next day and I don't cherry pick races as a rule: I much prefer stage races to one day Classics even if I can't keep up in the mountains. So after K-B-K, I hit my first stage race, Paris-Nice,  which I began with a bang, winning the opening prologue (as I often do). The next two flattish days in the driving rain I didn't fare quite so well (chapeau to Gert Steegmans navigating in that driving rain!) but I did well enough to win the Points competition. 

With no stage races pending I did make an effort in my favorite Monument, MSR- I almost won it! (came in 9th in the trailing pack), then Flanders (tough race) and finally Gent Wevelgem where I came in 15th but never was really in it- too flat!

After that my season was strictly stage racing for me starting with 4 days of Dunkirk then Catalunya, Dauphine Libere, and the Tour de France. I hoped to go to the interesting and hilly Olympic course and the hilly Worlds RR but I got sick at the end of the Tour. I tried to give it a go at Deutschland but I didn't have any more in me so I shut down for the year. I had my share of successes- the Points jersey at Catalunya, 4th on Points at Dauphine, but my big goal- the Points jersey at the Tour I just missed coming in 2nd.

Go to the jump for the next bio

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On the Barloworld thread below this one, gavia made the comment, 

"also, if you're bored...

 

most of the major teams have announced their official rosters now. feel free to start exploring ;-)"

Well that fits me to a T, so I now resolve to explore new territory! Onward ho! I must confess that I haven't paid much attention to the Russian Rockets this summer so what follows is my first impression of their roster as shown on the CQ transfers page. Here goes...

What stands out the most?

Just to be contrarian here, there's no GC hope for an Grand Tour and only some hope for any week long stage race. Potentially there some decent support for a GC rider: Colom, Karpets, Gusev, Botcharov, Ivanov, Pfannberger- all could be of help- but there's no leader here.

That said, this team fairly explodes with breakaway guys: they truly are Tiinkoff on steroids. In addition to most of the riders in the last paragraph, you can add Brutt and Trussov, both holdovers from Tinkoff. In fact I can't wait to see this team enliven the Giro.

What will be interesting then will be how they race tactically. They do have a rider or two who have a history of success in week-long stage races (stand up Karpets!) so will they have the discipline for contending for the overall in places like the Swiss Tour?

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And I have no idea when part deux will happen. This post is more to lay out the terrain or terrane, whatever.

But I've been mulling over in my head various things (besides Jennifer Grey):

- Of the top 15 VDS riders (you know- the list that doesn't include Greipel) only five of them spent any time at all on the Belgian cobbles. 

-How did the God of Thunder earn 922 VDS points when I rarely saw him beat any of the top sprinters?

-Are there any races that attract the top riders that aren't in the VDS?

- And is sandbagging like porn- you can only define it by seeing/reading it? 

So I looked at the races- VDS and various top other races to see who raced where to find how many of the top riders raced against each other. Look for the results on the flip but first, Jennifer:

via www.rockhillbikes.com

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At long last!

Late summer and fall brought some interesting team shuffling as you can see- but certainly not at the top: last time we checked, CSC was just way too far ahead to be worried about any team composed of mere humans.

So on the break you'll see the final 2008 Team Rankings followed by commentary for the 10 best late season teams. If ya want read what I said about all the teams post-Olympics go here.  Without further words...

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