December 17, 2009
Training wheels
Recently, it has become my habit to scan various cycling media outlets several times each day in hopes of finding news. In this era of reading the news as it is happening, the race to get a story up on the web is just about as intense as the racing itself. It is fun for me to watch the chips fall, if you will, and to see what country or language will break the story first.Tuesday, as I glanced at the headlines on various different sites I came up with a story about riders from the Omega Pharma – Lotto team crashing during their training camp, which is happening Spain, as we speak.
Yesterday, I read another story about a rider from Liquigas who crashed while training and suffered a double collarbone fracture.
Let me summarize here for a second – professional bike racers are crashing during training rides. Ladies and gentlemen, I need your help to figure out what exactly is going on here? Have the world’s best bike riders forgotten how to ride their bikes?
Seriously, I thoroughly searched the inner recesses of my brain and came up with exactly 2 instances where I witnessed a training crash – that’s 2 instances in my entire career! The first of these crashes occurred on a training ride in 1990 with the ADR-Tulip team, when a convoy of trucks drove past and blew one of the climbers on the team into another rider from our squad. The second was when I personally rode handlebars-first into a slow-moving yet oncoming truck during a training ride with part of the Tulip team in 1991.
According to Belgian sports news site, sporza, several riders from the Lotto team crashed on a training ride because of rain and wind. Cyclingnews.com reported that Liquigas rider Maciej Bodnar, Poland’s national time trial champion suffered a double fracture of his collarbone after unsuccessfully negotiating a roundabout.
If you told me that a bunch of cyclo-tourists hit the deck while celebrating neon windbreakers in the rain, you really wouldn’t surprise me all that much, but for riders from a Belgian team to be crashing in the rain … during training camp … something is wrong. I don’t know about any of you, but I have Belgian weather come up each morning on my iPhone, and guess what … it rains there. It’s windy too.
To be fair, it is quite possible that the riders in question aren’t Belgian and don’t have a lot of experience riding in the rain and wind, but still … aren’t these guys supposed to be the best bike riders in the world?
The fact that the Polish national time trial champion crashed near a roundabout isn’t really all that surprising, since I’ve known several good time trialists who can only be described as “stiff” on their bikes, but it is still a giant red flag. We’ve tossed the topic of all of the crashing that seems to be happening in professional cycling here before, but I’d like to bring it up again.
Race fans, what in the hell is going on? Why are there so many more crashes happening? Has everyone forgotten how to ride a bike, or did they simply never learn?
Crashing is a part of racing and will never divorce itself from the sport of cycling completely. I remember seeing some of the most massive pile-ups during my days in Europe, but most of them seemed to be caused because something close to 200 crazed lunatics attempted to occupy the same tiny section of road at the front of the peloton all at once. Last year, however, I saw too many crashes that just didn’t make any sense, and it seems like we might be off to a flying, I mean crashing start for the 2010 season as well.
Are the riders just not racing enough anymore? Sure, it is quite possible that the 130-plus races that I did per year were too much. Now, however, riders are competing in as few as 30-40 events per year, and 70-plus is considered to be a heavy schedule. I am sorry but group rides are no replacement for the nervousness of a large group of racers all trying to make a buck … or Euro, as the case may be. Personally, I think learning how to race – by racing – is equally as important as ultra-specific training. The racing climate shifted when Greg LeMond first started targeting just the Tour de France and since then Lance Armstrong has perfected that art, but these two dudes are otherworldly, and should not be compared with normal racers.
Are the bikes too light? I know that my 16 lb carbon fiber dream machine is a hell of a lot more responsive than the 22-26 lb wonders that I rode back in the day. I am no way in favor of going back to those days, weight-wise, but do we need to start making all of these dudes pass a skills test before they are issued a license? A racing driver needs to meet certain requirements before being issued a competition license, so perhaps cycling should take a look at implementing a similar mandate.
In aviation, many accidents are caused because successful individuals with the means to buy a nice airplane get in over their skill level and crash. In other words, they buy too much plane for their talent level. Is that what's happening with cycling these days? Is everyone becoming a perfect pedaling machine but forgetting to learn the steering part?
Sure, there are plenty of riders in the pro peloton today who can do some fairly amazing things on a bicycle, but when half the kids in town ride around almost effortlessly on fixed-gear bikes, as if the bike was an extension of their own body, I get the feeling that too many of today’s top riders are training too much and riding too little.
Is helmet use a precipitating factor? No, I am not suggesting that we move backwards, but I know from personal experience that I feel safer as soon as I strap a modern helmet onto my head. With most pros wearing helmets out of competition as well as in, are they relaxing a little too much? I may be grasping for straws here, since a large portion of riders in the peloton have grown up wearing helmets for both training and racing, but it’s still something to think about.
As the sport of cycling has become more advanced and more popular, are its athletes becoming more, umm, bike-handling-challenged? I was first drawn to cycling because of the fact that the rider is both engine and pilot, but more and more it seems that too many of these pilots need their licenses revoked. Let me know what you think.
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14 Responses to “Training wheels”
Really, only two training crashes in the pros?
Were there drills your team did for handling skills?
I tend to avoid assumed nostalgia – longing for a good old days that I have no actual experience with – so I’m not suggesting that this is the case, but I’m wondering if you think that ultra-specific training might be to blame. I was planning this question even before I got to your sentence about how racers might be training too much and riding too little. Do you think that maybe we’re seeing some of the top folks being athletes-who-ride-bikes instead of cyclists? A fine and contentious distinction, to be sure, but – maybe?
I think about it in terms of athlete resistance to the omnium, too, over in the track world. Now, it does seem that the UCI and IOC bungled their move toward equity, but if all one is good at is training to be the best at going real fast for 4,000 meters (and that’s it!), how good of a *cyclist* can one be? Good enough? Maybe not?
Just how important is being well-rounded, over-trained, and flogged halfway to death by a 100+ race per year schedule?
It’s said that experts become experts by doing something for 10,000 hours. Maybe ultra-specialization takes away from those crucial hours on the bike, and gets racers too strong too soon.
But I don’t know, and this was supposed to be a question to you, Joe…
Well Joe, when they spend half of their life riding around griping something that resembles an extended stem no wonder they have no handling skills.
And I think we can thank LeMond for the venture off into that handlebar world of wonder.
-B
There always seems to be a few riders that have an affinity for crashing. And from riding with them, they seemed to be skilled enough. But more often then expected, when you heard a crash in the group, they would be in it. Remember Nelissen?
actually, i wonder if training wheels is the problem. half the team camp pictures i see seem to show hot shot carbon wheels and cars packed full of spares – on training rides. no shallow section aluminum clinchers with nice braking capabilities and cross-wind tolerance. maybe equipment is indeed getting the better of these guys.
I think Galen has got something. It’s much easier to get blown away (literally) When you only weigh in at a buck fifty with your bike. I have a Cromoly frame with a stupid rake on the fork (just like the old days) and some bomb proof Wolber wheels. It rides like a tank. It’s slow and heavy, but at least it always goes forwards and not sideways. I’m not saying that the pros should train on dinosaurs, but equipment changes may have just as much to do with it as the training regimes and discipline specific style of racing now a days.
Galen – but if they trained on stuff that braked better and was more predictable in wind, wouldn’t that make them *worse* bike handlers since they’d be *racing* on equipment that reacts in ways they’re not familiar with?
if it’s true handling skillz the pelican lacks, then perhaps they should spend a few Wednesday nights in Mpls. A skill that can not be over-emphasized is vomiting off a rolling fixed gear while riding in traffic….Seriously, we need more John Tomac’s in the mix, fewer specialists who train but don’t ride.
This might be an opportunity for the development of a collision avoidance system for a bike. It’s the latest craze in the auto industry. Attention deficit accounts for a large majority of accidents, regardless of the task at hand. Focus and concentration are two skills that should be taken more seriously and developed to increase your awareness of your surrondings. My 2 cents
The modern riders of today may not train on a fix-gear throughout the winter or on cross tires on snow and ice as they once did in the ’70s and ’80s. In the ‘8os when I lived in Belgium, the road riders either trained on cross tires in the snow and ice on the Belgian roads until they got across the boarder to Holland where the bikepaths were keep clear and dry throughout winter, or trained on rollers (alot) or rode the indoor track in Gent. I saw some great bike handeling in races and some real stupid mistakes as well.
I have seen and experienced the same thing. I’ve been at this racing thing for 27+ years and in the olden days the we did TONS of fast group rides and the older more experienced riders “taught” the newbies how to ride. That doesnt seem to happen anymore. They were constantly saying things like; ‘bend your elbows’, be smooth, pedal round, relax, look ahead, etc… They also would bash us around if we got out of line and rode dangerously. We were taught proper riding and pack manners. Some of that came from learning to ride rollers. One team mgr I had would not let anyone ride for his team if we couldnt completely remove and put back on, tights, jerseys, arm warmers while riding rollers and without falling over.
Nothing doing, Joe. It’s math. And the internet.
You saw two in your 20 year career. (Your own and someone else’s). That’s one in 10 years.
Now how many bike riders are there? Let’s say 50 pro teams of 10 riders who’d make the news in any year.
By my (lousy) math, that’s mean 5 training crashes each year which could possibly make the internet news feeds for you to read about.
Most tires are made with synthetic rubber now days which do not grip nearly as well as tires made with natural rubber.
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