Like a can of peaches [cringe], the Tour de Georgia is on the shelf. It’s been the best in North America from a pure racing standpoint, although they have had financial trouble in the past. The dismal economy obviously isn’t helping their cause, but I don’t think that’s really the problem. It’s that bike races always cost a lot to put on, but the value for sponsors depends on where the event is held. Unfortunately, the Tour de Georgia is probably too big and expensive to stage in small towns like Dahlonega, Georgia (Pop. 3,638).

Without a significant TV or web audience, the best thing a bike race like the Tour de Georgia can monetize is feet on the ground. A lot of people would say media coverage too, but I think the value there is more about marketing the event itself than delivering direct benefits to the sponsors. In any case, small towns in Georgia can’t send a lot of foot traffic through the expo and have little value for corporate hospitality. Atlanta is a good location for the final stage, but apparently not lucrative enough to offset spending $150,000 a night on hotels in places like Tybee Island.

Sure, the Tour of California costs a lot more to organize and sponsor. But look at the large and bike-loving Nielsen DMA’s it will run through in 2009: #2 (LA), #6 (Bay Area, twice), #20 (Sacramento), #28 (San Diego). This year’s TdG, meanwhile had one day in #8 (Atlanta) but the next biggest market was #96 (Savannah).

I think the lesson is that you need to tailor your bike race to the to revenue potential of your local market. Or, if you have your heart set on running a UCI 2.HC stage race, you need to find a really big market.

(image: Ben Jacques-Maynes on Brasstown Bald, 2006 Tour de Georgia)

In 2006, the UCI commissioned two studies “to provide a better understanding of the different aspects of doping: the roots, methods, mechanisms and practices.” One was a qualitative study by a French consultancy, AlteRHego; the other was more quantitative (although the size of the data set is not disclosed) by Professor Xavier Sturbois of the University of Louvain.

Apparently there’s a more detailed report that will only be made available to national federations but the summaries that they’ve made available here consist of mainly of vagaries and truisms. To paraphrase both: “There are many causes of doping, so a multi-faceted strategy is needed.”

That said, the reports contain some interesting bits. Perhaps most importantly, both conclude that the current anti-doping strategy is focused too heavily on enforcement and not enough on prevention:

“A programme of governance to deal with the phenomenon of doping in the sport of cycling must be humanistic, deploying a combination of repression, education and training on an equal footing” - Sturbois study

“Any policy aimed at preventing doping therefore implies strengthening the key motivations of cyclists, which revolve around stimulation- enjoyment and mastery of the activity, whatever the discipline practised.” - AlteRHego study

In other words, we should start thinking a lot more about how to make pro cycling a rewarding personal experience for the 179 guys that don’t win the Tour. I suppose that means creating a culture that places less emphasis on winning. However, neither study shows much confidence that such an atmospheric change is possible and both take as a foregone conclusion that the fight against doping is ultimately not winnable.

“Doping is a social aberration and could only be defeated if all other social aberrations were to disappear –which is an illusory proposition” - Sturbois

“… a realignment is in fact necessary to emerge from what could become “a race without end”: this means accepting that a world without doping or cheating will never exist, but acknowledging that it is possible to limit these phenomena”- AlteRHego

Ultimately, what they’re saying is that the best we can hope for is that cycling’s stakeholders won’t be lying when they tell us that the sport is doing everything it can to fight doping. Seeing as the UCI paid for this study in the first place, what does that say about what we’ve been told up to this point? Personally, I’m willing to believe that the UCI, ASO, WADA, AFLD et al. are giving close to their best efforts at testing and suspending even if much of that effort is devoted to infighting. However, we’ve seen nothing yet like the prevention strategies that both studies recommend.

(here’s a column I wrote for ROAD in early 2007 with a similar thesis)

VeloNews.com is reporting that the folks at Barloworld have changed their minds about the decision to withdraw from their team sponsorship following a positive doping test during the Tour de France. As I wrote for ROAD, you can’t fault a sponsor for dropping or sticking with a team; both have their pros and cons. Here’s what I find really interesting about Barloworld:

“That decision [to drop the team] was made in the heat of the moment. Afterward, they had time to reflect and even before the Tour was over, they had intended to return,” team spokesman Claudio Masnata said Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

I can’t think of another time that a company reversed such a visible decision that was neither causing a public outcry nor losing money. No one likes to admit that they made a mistake and companies are especially loathe to acknowledge a bad decision. But it happens and I hope that this decision by Barloworld is part of a larger trend (and I’m not just talking about bike racing sponsors).

Everyone has heard that to err is human, but the second part of the adage is less well known: “…to forgive is divine.” So I admire Barloworld for swallowing their pride, even if they were going to be writing the checks regardless.

1974 Modesto Criterium:

2008 Menlo Park Grand Prix:

Thanks to Casey Kerrigan for scanning and putting some old NCNCA stuff online here.

Perhaps my favorite sportswriter, Salon’s King Kaufman wrote a couple interesting pieces this week about what it means to be a fan. His point, in a nutshell, was that the idea of “hardcore” vs. “bandwagon” fans is misguided. Both groups are just consumers of sports entertainment, where a winning team is a good product. Some consumers buy tickets and hats and stuff whether the product is good or bad, but most only buy when the product is good.

King was talking about American team sports, primarily baseball, but it’s an interesting thing to think about relative to cycling. Of course, cycling fans realize that teams are crucial to how the sport functions economically and tactically. But the emotional experience for fans is about individual riders or national identity, but rarely about the concept of “team”.

Stefano Garzelli fan club by Mike Knell

Of the spectators at major races like the Tour who are actively rooting for anything specific, a lot cluster in official and unofficial fan clubs of certain riders. This is more common among people from the traditional cycling nations who have a lot of riders to choose from, and a lot choose to support a rider from their home region whom they follow from team to team. On the other hand, plenty of fans, especially from non-traditional cycling nations, support their country in general; you’re more likely to see Norwegians waving their flag than waving a poster of Thor Hushovd.

So where to do teams fit in? Some have loyal fan bases, but I think that’s most often about nationalism as well. Euskaltel-Euskadi and Rabobank are perhaps the clearest examples. CSC and Garmin-Chipotle are two other cases, although much of the loyalty they engender comes from their anti-doping programs and progressive images. Still, they have strong national identifiers. Even though CSC started only one Dane at the Tour, Bjarne Riis is a major hero in Denmark and his incoming co-title sponsors (Saxo Bank and IT FACTORY) are both Danish. Garmin and Chipotle are both American companies, and the team’s identity as a whole is clearly an American one.

Columbia has the same new-school persona and anti-doping ethos, but they’re a formerly German team run by an American and that started riders from 8 countries at the Tour. Are they too multi-national? Are they not mono-national enough? They’ve been through enough rebrandings lately that it’s probably to early too tell, but wresting the mantle of “America’s team” from Garmin won’t be easy.

If you accept that having a loyal fan base is having a good thing for a team, it seems like playing on national pride is the way to go… as long as you’re good enough to embody that pride.

I got an email from CSC-Saxo Bank’s list a couple days ago that this was their fourth consecutive year as the #1 team in the world. Extremely telling is that they’re referring to Cycling Quotient, a comprehensive but entirely unofficial ranking site run by a few Belgian fans. Now that we’ve got the UCI’s ProTour and the Historical Tour run by the Grand Tour organizers, Cycling Quotient will be the best system out there for the foreseeable future. Ah, politics.

Starting with some pointed questions at Lance’s Interbike press conference and continuing in an interview with Cyclingnews, Greg Lemond has been touting an anti-doping plan that would return a positive test when a rider’s power output exceeds what his VO2 max indicates as possible for him or her.

It’s more of a concept than a detailed proposal, but it seems to be based on the idea that power output can be manipulated by doping while VO2 max cannot. Although the logic behind the Lemond plan is sound, implementing it would ask as many questions as it answers.

What if WADA and AFLD can’t agree on an exact number for the ratio of power to VO2 max that separates clean from dirty? I can’t envision either one of those organizations giving in to the other, but a compromise would mean that politics are adjusting the science. If they each run their programs with a different set of numbers, then there’s the possibility that a rider could be considered clean by one agency and dirty by another. Although the recent UCI-ASO peace treaty gives the UCI drug testing authority of the Historic Calendar, the AFLD still has legal authority to test anyone competing on French soil. It’s a controversy waiting to happen.

And when do we raise the threshold, and by how much? Fans in any sport always think that their era’s athletes are the best, but every sport gets more competitive when training evolves, equipment improves, and the talent pool grows. All of those things are happening in cycling, so we can’t have a system that doesn’t allow for tomorrow’s clean athletes to be better than today’s. But it’s impossible to know when that leap forward happens except in hindsight, which means that some riders will have to be wrongly punished in order to keep the system up to date. “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette” is not a good basis for a system that’s supposed to ensure fairness.

Team Inferno is going pro next year as Kenda Pro Cycling presented by Spinergy and touting an “100% American” roster (including staff). I know and like those guys, but the flag waving seems really out of place with cycling culture. Internationalism is part of the sport’s appeal.

From their press release:

“While the program will miss its international contingent dearly, the concept is one that Inferno believes is important. Many teams have collapsed in this pained economy and as such, fewer teams will exist domestically in 2009. This means American racers will be without a home, and to have talented racers from abroad take the few openings that remain simply is not in the best interests of American cycling. This sport is experiencing resurgence in America, and Kenda Pro Cycling p/b Spinergy aims to have Americans at the helm.”

From South Park:

At least for the foreseeable future, it’s over. Not surprisingly, the Grand Tours got what they wanted. Although there will still be something called the ProTour, there will also be something called the Historical Calendar including all events organized by ASO, RCS, and Unipublic. These organizers will keep full control over team selections and presumably won’t have their TV rights bundled in with the ProTour. I said a long time ago that the best the UCI could hope to get from ASO would be to handle drug testing, and that’s pretty much what they got. They also get to say that they “sanction” the HC races, which in practical terms doesn’t mean anything.

Furthermore, allowing the UCI to hang around means that the headaches of drug testing, global marketing, and athlete development for HC races are subsidized by the rest of the cycling world. Then again, the rest of the cycling world owes much of its existence to the Tour de France.

The UCI will claim that the ProTour still gives them the opportunity to expand globally, with the Tour Down Under, the Tour of Sochi in Russia, and the Tour of China that will eventually  get off the ground. That’s not insignificant, but the US market is has the most potential outside of western Europe and ASO remains the gatekeeper here because of their partnership with AEG and the Tour of California.

Pat McQuaid has said that he expects the teams to re-up on their ProTour licenses now that a settlement has been reached, but I’m not sure why they would. The license offers no guarantee of starting the Grand Tours or any cut of TV revenue, but still requires teams to send riders and staff all over the world to markets where their sponsors might not have any business interests. I don’t see the incentive.

Velonews.com has the projected calendars.

On my way to watch the San Francisco Twilight on Saturday, I stopped at the top of Fillmore St. and made this little video, thinking back to the San Francisco Grand Prix. Then I shot some photos and video at the race.

 
Fillmore and Broadway from josh kadis on Vimeo.

Before Cyclingnews, this was all the information you’d get about the Vuelta had until VeloNews came in the mail. (It’s on the left, next to the WNBA box score.)

Now that I’m commuting on BART, I get free coffee but no cell reception most of the way, so I’ve been looking at actual newspapers.

So, it’s true. But will it be with Astana? They denied it very strongly at first, but have since softened their tone a bit. Still, Lance is saying pretty clearly that he’s returning to “launch a global anti-cancer strategy,” not race for free on behalf of Kazakhstan’s state-owned oil companies.

My guess is that his announcement on September 24 will be that he’s forming a new team or taking over an existing sponsorship with Livestrong branding.

(I had Lance’s video from the Livestrong site embedded here, but it starts playing automatically which is really annoying.)