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| 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.
