During the stage to Aix-les-Bains, Laurent Jalabert and the ONCE team dropped out, followed by Banesto and Riso Scotti. Jean-Marie LeBlanc pleaded with the riders to continue. When they eventually finished the stage, the police tossed more hotels and more teams went home. Know one knew for sure if the Tour would even make it all the way to Paris, which it eventually did with about half the field remaining.

So, what were the riders actually protesting?

From the New York Times:

“They treated us like criminals, like animals,” said one of the Dutch team’s members, Jeroen Blijlevens. “They took Bart out of the shower, made us sign some papers and took us away,” he continued, referring to his roommate, Bart Voskamp. The riders were held more than four hours for the tests and released half an hour after midnight.

Blijlevens’ lament was the common theme. Bjarne Riis added, “The riders are not against the investigations, but they are against the way they are being treated. We have some dignity.” Of course, the subtext was clear.

There had been doping in cycling for as long as anyone could remember. The team-sanctioned programs “exposed” by the Festina Affair were so pervasive and so well organized that they couldn’t have existed without a lot of people looking the other way for a long time. Even TVM had gone on with business as usual for four months after French police had found “a huge quantity of illegal performance-enhancing drugs” in a team car.

And then the political winds changed, and guys couldn’t even have dinner after a 204km mountain stage before they were arrested and forced to provide blood, urine, and hair samples. The riders chafed at the hypocrisy, and that’s why they protested. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

Where are we now?

12 years and one Puerto later, conventional wisdom would have us believe that Festina-like team doping programs are a thing of a past. Most people in the sport seem to think that when riders dope, they do so as individuals. And reports have indicated “an overall lowering of the performance level in the Tour compared to the last 2 decades.”

Let’s say it’s all true. It’s also true that riders today generally accept as a necessary inconvenience a level of constant surveillance and testing that would have been shocking in 1998. Does that mean they’ve have gained the “dignity” they sought back then? It’s hard to argue that they have, although a more accurate statement might be that they’ve come to feel differently about their rights and the sacrifices they’re willing to make.

Postscript

On July 29, 1998, I was getting my ass kicked by some of world’s best juniors at the Tour de l’Abitibi in Quebec. I spent that week riding for a composite team sponsored by the local cycling club in the host town of Amos. All the riders stayed at the high school, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, one team to a classroom. In the evening, we crowded around a television in the school’s student lounge to watch the nightly 30-minute Tour de France recap on ESPN. Some of the top riders must have recognized that a wrench had been thrown into their future career plans.

I had no idea what to think.

Although I hate the pompousness of the Jeep ad, Chrysler deserves some credit for admitting that they made crappy vehicles for a while and making a reasonable-sounding claim about their product (“It is well made and it is designed to work.”). On the other hand, GM merely evokes a history that has nothing to do with their cars while ignoring the five decades (and the $49.5 billion bailout) that have come and gone since then. Cynically, they also perpetuate the false impression that “Made in America” means “Made by middle-aged white men”.

A counterpoint

I’m really proud of this spread in the 2010 Zipp catalog. Instead of just waving the red-white-and-blue, Zipp wanted to talk about the practical benefits of making their products in America. And instead of only showing workers who look like their customers (who also happen to be middle-aged white men), Zipp gladly showed the Latina women who are an important part of the company’s workforce.

It might not have sold a ton of wheels, but I think this spread says a lot about the people I get to work with at Zipp.

WELCOME TO SPEEDWAY. About halfway between Kona and l’Alpe d’Huez sits a flat little town with a world-famous auto race. Admittedly, Speedway, Indiana is far removed from the annals of cycling and triathlon lore. But for over 20 years, our hometown has been a hotbed of the motorsports composites industry and continues to attract advanced technologies and talented engineers. So it’s no accident that Zipp was born and raised here, or that every Zipp wheel is still made by individually trained Zipp employees in our facility in Speedway.

So, when we talk about where Zipp products come from, it’s not about politics. It’s about the advantages of integrating manufacturing with design, engineering, and testing. Doing everything in-house gives us flexibility to develop new products efficiently and release them with shorter lead times. It allows us to keep a close eye on quality control and provide superior customer service. Ultimately, having all these functions under one roof enables Zipp to make the world’s fastest wheels and components.

A side note

I really enjoyed this ad for the Nissan Leaf. I can’t remember the last time I saw a sponsor portray Lance in a way that regular cyclists can relate to.

THAT ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT

Let’s say you’re Alberto Contador. You’re 27 years old and you’ve already won the last four Grand Tours you’ve started. Your 2010 season is humming right along with GC wins at the Volta ao Algarve, Paris-Nice, and the Vuelta a Castilla y León. If everything goes according to plan, you might have another 3 or 4 years as the hands-down Best Rider In The World and another 3 or 4 after that when you’re still a threat to win every race you enter. Currently, you’ve got less than a year left with Astana. Then what?

Alberto’s best bet could be to build a new team around himself. Then he’s got all the financial upside, he can run the program the way he wants to, and he can control the risks to his liking. Actually, that’s probably a good approach for any major star in any team sport, except that in most sports it takes several years, a new stadium, and hundreds of millions of dollars to get in the game. And even then your expansion team will probably stink for at least a few years.

But among pro cycling’s many quirks are its low barriers to entry into the highest level of the sport. If you’ve got a PowerPoint presentation and connections, you can have a world-class team in the Tour de France in about a year. All you need is a title sponsor. Not that signing a multi-million dollar deal and starting a cycling team is a piece of cake, but it’s a lot easier than, say, starting an NBA franchise. Just look at the fast starts of new programs like Cervélo TestTeam, Team Sky, and – to a lesser extent – BMC Racing Team. When RadioShack separated from Astana, the addition of another team to the population was one of the least controversial aspects of the split.

So it would be pretty easy for Alberto to have his own team on the road next year and there have been rumors to that effect involving Formula 1 driver Fernando Alonso bringing Banco Santander as the sponsor. Also, it’s worth noting that Specialized’s personal contract with Contador was negotiated separately before the team deal with Astana was finalized.

But what are the benefits to Alberto of going it alone, compared to just signing the huge long-term contract that Astana reportedly offered? If you presume that Alberto’s image is the key selling point for most of the potential sponsors during the rest of this career – i.e. consumer brands, not Central Asian governments – there’s an economic efficiency to having his own team. Want to sponsor Alberto? Sponsor Team Alberto. Plus, eliminating the “middle man” role of the traditional team management gives the sponsor an assurance that the team’s main attraction won’t bolt unexpectedly a là Brad Wiggins. From an operational standpoint, there’s an appealing level of clarity in a team focused on a single rider. Everyone knows their job and is handpicked to do it.

The major financial upside of the star-centric team is the ability to negotiate personal endorsement deals concurrently with team sponsorships. The obvious case study is Lance Armstrong becoming the advertising face of The Shack while launching his own Team RadioShack. Meanwhile, other riders have to make do with whatever sponsors their team managers already have on board.

Of course, there aren’t very many riders with the star power to pull something like this together, let alone with willingness to accountable for actually running a team. Beyond Contador, the Schleck brothers reportedly have been mulling a similar venture and I could see it working for someone like Fabian Cancellara.

This summer’s Tour de France is the last in which the old crop of ProTour teams are guaranteed a spot. Starting next year, a new system will be in place. The more open it is, the more rider-owned teams I think we’ll see.

Now I see this ad differently but I’m still not convinced.

Despite the formidable legend of its namesake, Eddy Merckx Cycles NV is a small company. When Sobradis NV acquired a majority stake from Eddy in October 2008, the company had annual revenues of 6 million Euro (about 8 million USD at the time) and 20 employees. The brand has grown since then – now with 25 employees and soon moving to a larger facility – but it’s hardly setting the bike industry on fire.

But they’re competing with companies 50-100 times their size, so what’s Merckx supposed to do? They could run ads with studio shots of a bike or a picture of a sponsored athlete winning a race. But if you flip through a few back issues of VeloNews and ROAD like I just did, you’ll see that just about every ad for a bike brand follows one of these formats. There’s no way that Merckx could take the typical approach and hope to stand out meaningfully from the crowd.

If you’re small, you do what you have to do to get attention.

In this new campaign, Merckx has opted for shock value and done a good job of executing the main visual element. It freaked me out at first, but now I’m warming up to its sincerity. Merckx clearly understands that they have no choice but to shake things up. Plus, my friend Michael Tabtabai is a fan. But what is the ad actually saying? The combination of “I Am Tiger Woods” and “proud sponsor of blah blah blah” communicates nothing about why anyone should buy the bike.

WE’RE ALL CANNIBALS falls into the trap of telling consumers that pro cyclists are just like us. I’ve written before about what I call “postmodern road cycling”, which is basically the recognition that the average cyclist experiences the sport in a way completely different from, say, Tom Boonen. In fact, I think most of us experience pretty much everything differently from Tom Boonen.

Now imagine if the tagline said WE’RE STILL CANNIBALS. Changing that single word adds a promise to keep tradition alive and a respect for the consumer (“we know that you know that Eddy sold the company”) without implying the falsehood that my riding experience is anything like Tom Boonen’s . WE’RE STILL CANNIBALS would relaunch the brand with a stronger sense of history and an aggressive outlook to the future.

I don’t know about you, but that’s what I want to see from the company founded by the greatest bike racer of all time.

I also had a chance to interview one of the most influential, modernizing figures in pro cycling, Bjarne Riis.

And finally, there’s Joao Correia – the former associate publisher of Bicycling Magazine who’s now racing for Cervelo TestTeam.

On the website for its clever People For Bikes campaign (sign the pledge!), Bikes Belong – the industry’s sponsored lobbying and advocacy organization – says, “Bikes keep us healthy, carry us from point A to point B, save us from high gas prices, and make our air cleaner and our roads less congested.”

But Schwinn and its parent company, Dorel, apparently aren’t trying to change the world. Says Andrew Coccari, Chief Marketing Officer for Dorel Recreational/Leisure, “Our core message is that life is hectic and stressful, and Schwinn products are designed to help you get back on a slower track, enjoying time with family and friends in a healthful and restorative activity.”

Within this vision of bicycling, there’s nothing wrong with hopping in the Hummer and drive half-a-mile to pick up a carton of milk. But then again, Schwinn isn’t your average bike company. Most of its sales come from mass retailers like Wal-Mart; IBDs (bike shops) are a smaller part of its business, even if Dorel is planning to increase it.

But getting back to the ads – which will run in magazines like Parenting and on cable TV – they’re quite good. Dorel and their agency, Cossette New York, have clearly done their homework. The campaign is targeted at women 25-54 because, according to Coccari, “while purchase decision and ability to really connect with family aren’t feelings exclusive to women, women are the chief purchasing officer of the family.” If that’s the goal, I can see an ad like this working pretty well.

The online portions are weaker, in my opinion. RideSchwinn.com shows the brand’s entire line but some models fall outside the whimsical, nostalgic, suburban nature of the campaign – i.e. the fixies are out of place. The “Bike Finder” could be a lot simpler. Social media links are out of date and off-topic; the latest blog post is from November 2008 and the YouTube channel is focused on electric bikes.

Still, it’s a solid campaign overall, even if it’s not exactly the bicycle revolution dreamt of by many in the industry and the advocacy community.

At the most basic level, his thesis is that the bicycle industry should emulate the general consumer products industry and shift from “exclusive” to “inclusive” products. In support, he draws the following analogies:

Although his presentation compares bicycles to everything from iPods to electric shavers, Sanders himself wrote in a comment on BikeRadar that one of his preferred yardsticks is the humble microwave. That, he claims, is what the bicycle should be like: functionally simple, readily available, and designed for everyone.

In a sense, what Sanders is calling for is less about changing the product than it is about changing the culture and distribution of the bike industry. Instead of focusing innovation resources on high-end bikes sold to enthusiasts through specialty retailers, the best technologies and the brightest minds in the bike industry should be working on improving the low-cost bikes available through mass-market channels.

Some really smart, innovative people are quite taken with this idea, and I’ve had the opportunity to interview and work with a couple of them (Antonio Bertone and Rob Forbes). In those conversations, the impression that’s stuck with me is that the number of people for whom bicycles make sense represents a much, much, much bigger market than the number of people who will ever think of themselves as “real cyclists”.

Or as Sanders puts it, “There are no microwave enthusiasts.”