Froome19 said:
I also believe people struggle to accept that the European culture of cycling is being invaded by the British and with Sky's success the European fans are certainly not appreciative. Sky fans on this forum and generally may rub it in and that is certainly not appropriate yet I believe that the love of Sky is something which is not all that disimilar from many other fans yet it is being taken out of proportion to the reasons above.
Yet I agree that the forum has been damaged by it but to attribute it to the Sky fans solely is incorrect and misleading. Another point is that many of the fans who may not know that much about cycling on this forum come from Britain and support Sky and this adds to the resentment as they are considered by some to be spoiling the forum and intruding.
To start with the last part, I actually am not that bothered by the Team Sky fans, there aren't that many. They can be a bit ignorant sometimes, but one cannot expect new followers of cycling to understand every part of it immediately. I think we should embrace new fans. Often, they come in fanatically supporting a team, but once they're in, they will embrace cycling itself, and not only a team or rider. Personally, I think the ascent of the appreciation/depreciation threads illustrated the downhill path of this forum for the last year or so. They're gone now, so we will see, who knows...
You're absolutely spot on in your first paragraph about my feelings. I love cycling, I love the stories, the heroics and the unpredictability. Of course, we've had Armstrong and Indurain in the last 20 years, who were also methodical and probably boring, but they both showed their class multiple times, going on the front themselves and all that. Then Armstrong left, we got a few good years, I will never forget 2006 stage 17, that has to be the most brilliant stage I've seen in my life. It was everything what cycling is about. Now though, we're back in 2000, but worse.
It's Team Sky, pushing on the front, other contenders falling away, and the way team Sky operates feels... inhuman. I hate the marginal gains theory, I hate the helmets they introduced. Not because they're bad things, but because for me it's not cycling. Cycling is the one man winning in the face of adversity, not streamlining and perfecting a team to send the rest into oblivion. I hate seeing cycling go the corporate way. Ironically, Anglo-Saxon countries introduced the "there is no I in team" ideology, whereas European cycling was much more about the lone warrior. It's ironic, because the society structure is exactly the reverse. I like the lone warrior more, the mountain goats going off the front, winning races in spectacular fashion, the guy that no-one would've thought had any chance winning a stage, etc etc.
I feel it's all going away, and the corporate teams of BMC and Sky are some of the main reasons for this. It makes me sad, and it makes me angry at the same time. That's, to be honest, the reason I'm cheering for much of Euskaltel, because they seem to be the team that still embodies the nostalgic feeling, the passion and the spirit that was there, once.
Maybe I'm being silly, maybe I'm the one that should move on, together with cycling. I'd rather have cycling come back to me, though.
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