Polarizing Champions – Wiggins and Vino

Wiggins followed by Vinokourov during Stage 3 of the
2010 Tour de France. Photo used with permission
from Graham Waston and velonews.com 

Road cycling at the Olympics is sadly over. It would make me very happy if there was a stage race the second week but everyone knows that is never going to happen. Still, we have our two Olympic champions and both of them are polarizing. Oddly enough, they are polarizing in completely opposite ways. Let me explain.

In Time Trial Champion Bradley Wiggins, we have a champion who is everything we could ever want off the bike. No doping (he threw his Cofidis jersey away and vowed never to ride for the team again after they were thrown out of the 2007 Tour de France for a doping scandal involving another team member) that anyone knows of. In fact, Wiggins is one of the harshest critics of doping in the sport of cycling. He trains and trains hard, talks to media candidly (if somewhat abrasively at times such at during the Tour de France when he used a particularly offensive obscenity starting with a c) and generally conducts himself in a sportsmanlike manner.

Still, there are criticisms. And most of those criticisms are for his style on the bike. Critics accused him and his Sky teammates of killing the Tour de France this year (it wasn't the most entertaining race in the world, but Sky did what it had to do to win the Tour and the route wasn't especially kind to potential challengers from other teams, especially once it became evident the biggest challenger to Wiggins was his own teammate). They also accused him of being boring on the bike (which is true). Wiggins is a time trial specialist and diesel climber. He's never going to explosively attack in the mountains like Alberto Contador, Andy Schleck and even Vincenzo Nibali (a poor-man's version of the other two to be sure but still an entertaining attacker). He's going to kill the time trials and hope to limit his losses in the mountains. Given that, of course he is a boring rider. If you've ever watched an entire time trial, you know it can be the most boring thing on Earth. Someone whose goal is to win by time trial and strangle the race in the mountains to win is going to be boring. That was the case in the early 90s with Miguel Indurain and it was the case with Lance Armstrong too (though Armstrong attacked in the mountains a bit more).

On the other side of the coin, we have Road Race Champion Alexander Vinokourov. Vino is everything we could ever want on the bike. He attacks, relentlessly. His most famous quote to the press is “When I feel good, I attack. When I feel bad, I still attack.” For most of career, Vinokourov has won fans by that attacking style. In a lot of ways, he is the crazy mad-scientist wild card that can blow up a race at any time. On top of that crazy style, he gets results. He is the only non-sprinter in recent memory to win the Champs-Elysses stage of the Tour de France (he attacked and made the breakaway stick, somehow). He has won Liege-Bastogne-Liege. He has won mountain stages of the Tour de France. The guy has a list of results that most could only dream of.

Still, Vino is extremely unpopular. Why? He is everything wrong about the sport off the bike. He was thrown out of the 2007 Tour de France (the same one where Wiggins trashed his Cofidis jersey) for having a blood transfusion during the race allowing him to recover superhumanly and win both a long breakaway and an Individual Time Trial after crashing early in the race. Vino was famously unrepentant and tried every way possible to get around the doping suspension including retirement. It didn't work. Vino still is unrepentant about his doping. Going back further, Vino was a part of the notorious T-Mobile team led by Jan Ullrich. Of course that team was notorious because of the culture of doping that existed there, led by Ullrich himself who is still banned from competition despite having been retired since the Operation Puerto doping scandal erupted just before the beginning of the 2006 Tour de France. Vino himself, though not implicated in Puerto, was excluded from that Tour by the scandal as the Liberty Seguros team he was on lost so many riders that a legal team could not be fielded and the sponsors left the team in mid season. Even further, Vino has been accused (and admitted previously) of paying other riders off in breakaways to win races. All of this along with the farce that was the 2000 Olympic Road Race (T-Mobile teammates Ullrich, Vino and Andreas Kloden destroyed the entire field and then finished in that order because of orders given by the trade team, not the National Teams the riders were supposed to be riding for) gives Vino a horrible reputation off the bike, one that caused the British sector of cycling fans on twitter to boil over after he won the Road Race on Saturday.

Still, the races gave us two very different polarizing champions. For Vinokourov, there is likely no way to repair his reputation. His off bike transgressions are quite long and awful and he is retiring anyway. For Wiggins, he is boring on the bike. There is no doubting that. Still, continuing to be outspoken against doping and continuing to win races will give him more fans. There is no doubt there. While both are polarizing figures in different ways, Wiggins has the opportunity to exact some real change in cycling, mostly because the only way to effect real change is to win without doping and be outspoken about. Vinokourov, while presumably clean now, was never interested in that, just winning at all costs, like nearly everyone in the sport from the end of the Indurain era to right now, when cycling seems to be coming out of the doping abyss for the first time in a very long while.