Road Bike Racing - Tour de France pace lines, attacks, etc...

OK. So my wife gets me the 2001 Tour de France video set for Father's Day. I watched the whole thing right away and it's pretty cool. But there are some things about the race that I don't quite understand.

First, why would a cyclist want to wait for the other riders to "catch up" so that he they can work together? How do different members from different teams work together to pull away from the peleton? Do they work together to create a faster pace for each other? And then once they have separated from the peleton then they can battle it out with each other?

What about in sprints? It seems that at the very end, if you happen to be in the right place at the right time and pour it on, you could win just by happenstance, not by strength. Is that true?

The tour is coming up, and I want to understand it a little better before I watch it.

Thanks!

I'd rather have someone set the pace up a mountain or let me draft anyday. I'll save all my energy for an attack on the steepest part of the climb or when the opportunity presents itself. That's why they work together. Imagine if the TdF was an individual race for time. You'd have to push the wind the whole time and attack yourself on the climbs.

I think Phil talks about waiting to catch up on the tape after Jan Ullrich goes off the road.

Sprinters like super Mario weigh more because their legs are huge. They don't climb as well as a 140lbs Tyler Hamilton but when it comes to sprinting 40-45 mph they win. They are specialists at sprinting. Lance and riders like Tyler are all around great bikers. Great time trialists, climbers and not bad sprinters. Some of us are only good at one (or none) of those things.

Enjoy the Tour,

Cannondale

That makes sense, but how do you know how long each person's turn at the front should be? Is there a generally agreed upon way of knowing how long each person takes in the lead position. Since you are all competing agains each other wouldn't it be to your advantage to take up as little amount of time in the lead as possible? But then everyone is thinking the same thing, so this would be counter productive.... so someone needs to set the lead and rotation time, yes?

I think it's the team with the leader. They want to represent their position in the peloton. Not everyday but some days. So you'll see the USPS guys up there, Team Telekom (last year set the pace a lot), among other teams. That's a good question.

Anyone?

Sometimes the team wearing the yellow jersey will
control the peloton to protect the lead. They will quash any
attempt to break by anyone who is close to the GC.
I believe that you take your pull at the front for as long
as you can and then just rotate to the back. Usually the
guys in a break are after stage wins, points etc. and
not GC, so they will work together until the
primes or the finish.
To see an example of absolute precision paceline watch
the team time trial, USPS who was followed pretty closely
by OLN put on an exhibition. Its like art its so fluid
(no pun intended, even tho it was in the rain!)

Marty

Originally posted by Aerow
That makes sense, but how do you know how long each person's turn at the front should be? Is there a generally agreed upon way of knowing how long each person takes in the lead position. Since you are all competing agains each other wouldn't it be to your advantage to take up as little amount of time in the lead as possible

I guess it varies with the number in the paceline. In a good, fast moving line, the leader might pull for 20-40 revs of the crank and rotate off. The way a break-away operates depends on who's in it. Teams support the break if it's in their teams interest to do so, otherwise they cover the break, which also entails getting team member(s), typically domestiques, in it. They block, but generally are subtle. Take a turn at the front, but slow the pace a little while there. And there are a lot of deals that are made between teams and riders that last only as long as they are expedient. If two people working together can put some distance on the field, it's in their interest to continue to do so until the end, at which point they can settle who is best among themselves.

Originally posted by Aerow
The tour is coming up, and I want to understand it a little better before I watch it.

I've now watched the last 4 grand tours on OLN, never missing a stage (Giro,TdF,Vuelta,Giro). Only now am I beginning to understand some of the nuances of team riding and tactics in a 3-week stage race.

Keep in mind a few things. . .

The draft is HUGE. The guy in front is doing 30% more work than the guys in the peleton. The pros are going so fast up the mountains that drafting a teammate during an ascent is important, too.

A slow-moving peleton is ripe for attack, that is why the team leading the GC likes to set a fast pace at the front. This is also why it's not necessarily good to have the yellow jersey for long periods as defending it takes a lot out of the team.

Sprinters are rarely at the front of the peleton until the final 300 meters. They want the pace fast and furious to prevent attacks in the closing kilometers. Then they let their teammate break the wind into the final few hundred meters where they explode into a blur. Even sprinting has tactics. Let's say that Lombardi is leading Cippolini out for the sprint (they're teammates) and Robbie McEwen is behind Cipo. Lombardi will pull longer to the line so Cipo has a shorter sprint. Let's say Lombardi is leading out, but McEwen has got between Lombardi and Cipo. Lombardi will pull out sooner leaving McEwen in the wind to pull for Cipo. Cipo can then time his sprint and McEwen has been his leadout man.

Some teams are satisfied with a stage win, or 2, and have no hope to contend for GC. Therefore, long breakaways are the norm for the non-GC teams. They're just hoping a breakaway will stick. Long breaks take tremendous amounts of energy, so you'll rarely see a GC contender go off alone on a long flat stage. Most GC breaks are done on the final climb of a killer mountain stage where a GC contender can put several minutes into a rival in, let's say, 5km. In comparison, the peleton would NEVER let a GC contender have a 5 minute lead on a flat stage. They would work together to reel him in.

Enjoy the Tour!!

What does GC stand for?

Sorry.

GC stands for general classification, or the overall race leader and wearer of the yellow jersey.

Woody,

I've been watching this stuff for a while now (couple years)
and I STILL just barely understand all the tactics etc.
I'm wondering if Eddie B's book, or Lemonds might
shed some light on the whole thing for us mere mortals.
Watching Lombardi lead out for Cipo is a thing of beauty.
Another good one was the US pro championship which
had a great finish, saw it on OLN last night.

Marty

One thing that you have to keep in mind is that winning isn't everything in pro cycling. These riders have a job to do, and that job is to get the sponsor's logo in front of the cameras. Notice how winners always zip up their jerseys when they cross the finish line so the sponsor's logo will be more visible in the still photos and newsbytes.

Very, very often, a rider will attack with no intention or expectation of winning just to get his sponsor some free advertising. If he can get away, on a solo or two-man breakaway, early in the race, he can get his jersey on TV hor hours. The peloton can usually reel him in at a moment's notice, but they let him go, since that's how the sport is funded.

Occasionally, one of these promotional breakaways really does get away. I think that's what happened to Denis Lunghi in the Giro this year, and I'm convinced that this is the basis of Jacky Durand's career.

So are we saying that commercialism has corrupted or at least confused the sport? Is it kind of like other sports where the purity of the sport exists in the local community road races?

Hey, I just noticed the classification under my name has changed to "Member." So now I'm "Aerow Member." Is that kind of like the new Austin Powers movie "Gold Member?"

Originally posted by Aerow
So are we saying that commercialism has corrupted or at least confused the sport? Is it kind of like other sports where the purity of the sport exists in the local community road races?
Not at all! Cycling has been about commercialism since the very beginning. The first organized bicycle races were organized by manufacturers in the 1880s and 1890s who wanted to use the opportunity to demonstrate and market their wares.

Almost all of the great races were started by newspapers as a method of increasing circulation figues by having exclusive coverage of an epic event -- Het Volk, La Midi Libre and Le Dauphine Libere are all newspapers. The Tour de France was intended, right from the start, to be the mother of all newspaper marketing tools. The French sporting paper L'Auto [now L'Equipe] started the race in 1903 with one goal in mind: Create an epic event and monopolize coverage of it so that fans would have to buy a copy every day for three weeks to stay in touch.

The reason why the Tour had racers racing in national teams at various points in the 1950s and 1960s wasn't that organizers were dismayed at the commercialism inherent in trade-team racing, but because they didn't want the trade teams' commercialism to interfere with their own.

Pro cycling is an extremely commercialized sport, but it's honest about it. And let's face it, when you have races that snake for 2000 km through the countryside, you can't exactly charge admission, so the teams' bills and the riders salaries have to be paid somewhere. I mean, do you think this sport would have attracted athletes of the calibre of lance Armstrong and Johan Museeuw if it couldn't pay them $1.5-$2 million a year? [This is still a pittance compared to waht baseball and football players get paid.]

The US Postal Service, Colpak [a milk carton manufacturer], the Belgian national lottery, Aqua e Sapone [an industrial cleaning company], Deutsce telekom and the others deserve to get something out of the sport for all the money that they're putting into it. And if that means a rabbit goes out on a suicidal breakaway with no chance of winning from time to time, just to get some free advertising, then so be it. It's a small price to pay... and sometimes these suicidal breakaways turn into very sweet heroic victories...

That's interesting. I had never looked at it that way before. Now I understand it a lot more. So no need to be ashamed of commercialism, instead, embrace it and use it to our advantage. I like it!

Now I just need a sponsor....

Originally posted by velocipedio


and I'm convinced that this is the basis of Jacky Durand's career.

lol...so true! with the exception of his 95 tour prologue win, Durand is such the "opportunist" :D