Is the Giro too hard?
Posted on 27. May, 2008 by Josh in Bike Racing
Enrico Gasparotto (Barloword), Jens Voigt (CSC) David Millar (Slipstream), and presumably other riders were pretty adamant that yesterday’s uphill time trial at the Giro d’Italia, which featured over 5km of dirt roads and grades up to 24%, was too difficult. “Impossible”, said Gasparotto.
But, clearly, the stage was possible. Only 6 riders out 152 missed the time cut, and Gasparotto himself beat over 60 of them. The race director’s response was, “I think that we need spectacular shows in cycling to pull ourselves out of this mediocrities. Without something spectacular it would be normal, and this is something is extra.”
In a sense, he’s saying that it’s not enough just to run a clean sport. He’s right. You also need to put on a show that people want to watch, and this was a great show. Good for the Giro for pulling it off. To be fair, though, most of the complaints were not unreasonable and largely about the toll of consecutive mountain stages and long transfers.
Here’s an idea: let riders drop out of stages without dropping out of the race. Each rider could get an allottment of, say, 200km of the 3,323km total that they don’t have to ride. So you could do the first 32km of Stage 6 then hop in the team car, but you’d have to finish every other stage. Or you could skip the last 40km of 5 different stages. To keep it fair, there would be big time penalties for kilometers skipped, you still have to start every day, and you can’t skip a time trial.
I think it’s a realistic idea that would benefit the majority of the riders without asking the race organizer to water-down the event. What do you think?
via Cyclingnews
