gregrowlerson said:
In regards to the excellent recent post on Anglophones vs. Continentals, I think that there is a feeling amongst many that British riders don't belong here, that they belong on the track, type of sentiment. It's also the invading aspect.....France, Italy and Spain host the grand tours and their riders have historically always had the most success. Hence their current day riders are given more credibility by some as being more naturally talented than their apparently donkeyesque counterparts.
I went through at great length why Sky and their riders attract more a) suspicion and b) distaste than others without recourse to nationality last year, and don't want to repeat myself any more than is necessary, but in summary I disagree with this. It's not that British riders 'don't belong', after all we don't see the same distaste to a great extent around British riders outside of the Team Sky umbrella - the Yates twins, albeit with Simon having stuck his head a little above the parapet in the Giro, or Hugh Carthy for example - and even some riders from within it who've had some reasonable success too - Ian Stannard, for example. Even Thomas himself, while he was a Classics man, attracted less attention in the Clinic for his achievement level than you might have expected.
Now, one point that I think does need raising is that the countries you mention have much more established national calendars, amateur and espoir scenes and so forth, which means it's easier for a young rider to emerge and show the kind of results that give them that perception of credible natural talent. For example, an 18-year-old Romain Bardet was top 5 in the Tour des Pays des Savoie, a 19-year-old Mikel Landa won the Subida a Gorla, a 19-year-old Nairo Quintana was 7th in the Subida a Urkiola against seasoned pros. That kind of result is much harder for a Briton to obtain as there is very little in the way of climbing races on a very sprint-heavy British national calendar focusing on crits and TTs for them to discover such talents. As a result, transitioning to climbing on the road can often be a slower process, or require fleeing the British cycling nest, like Dan Martin did and Hugh Carthy and Dan Whitehouse too. Simon Yates won a HTF in the Tour of Britain in 2013 before turning pro, at which stage Thomas was riding the Tour with Barloworld, but with no attempt to really do anything more than survive which is fair enough at that stage (he's not Egan Bernal); the flip side of having fewer calendar races is that the globalisation drive means more chances to jump up to the pro level - a French equivalent of Russell Downing does not get to the WT in 2010, for example - and with Barloworld having a strong Anglo influence, riders who were at a lesser level than many still in the domestic scene in Italy, Spain or France were riding at the World Tour level, so some of the prospects from those nations were still developing domestically meaning they have a more instant success level when they make it to the top level rather than being visible whilst clearly not ready for a couple of years furthering the impression of them as a no-hoper (at the same time, see the mention a few weeks ago of Indurain's first couple of Vueltas, as a teenage pro-am rider). However, because of riding as a stagiare with Saunier Duval and getting an international calendar with Barloworld, it's not like Thomas didn't have the opportunity to show some climbing ability young, that might take some of the suspicion off his latter-day transformation now. You can't even argue "but he was aiming at the track back then" because Peter Kennaugh was a Team Pursuit guy too, and he was on the podium of the Girobio, including matching Richie Porte who's four years older than him on Monte Carpegna, at 20. Thomas wasn't even trying to be a climber at that point, because it was antithetical to his aims.
But that's what causes the "you don't belong" attitude. Not that they're British per se, but that they're just deciding to be a different type of rider one day, and then becoming one of the best at it. Like Laurent Jalabert after his crash with the policeman suddenly turning into a GC climber, it is a lot harder to swallow from people like Thomas and Wiggins, who have completely different specialisms that they seem perfectly built and prepared for, and then just change tack completely. Saying they had gold medals from the track can only take us so far; Joaquím Rodríguez had all the class in the world as a road cyclist, but if he took on the hour record and beat Wiggins' mark, you bet people would cry foul - because Joaquím Rodríguez was a puncheur and an explosive climber, and built accordingly, and that build was completely disadvantageous to the kind of skillset required to be a track pursuiter or time trialist, two key skills required for the Hour. It's not a claiming that Thomas was not a skilled cyclist before, because he was. He was a damned good classics man, in fact, whose propensity for crashes was the only thing that stopped him racking up a formidable palmarès because he'd frequently be super-strong in those races. However, one-day racing is a lot harder to reduce to formulae than stage races, because the longer the race, the less impact each misstep or mishap has as part of the overall whole, and the more easy it is to control as a result because if you keep it to minimal numbers of mishaps, you've got maximum available time elsewhere to compensate for it. Perhaps that's why he moved to the stage racing side of things.
Now, also, if Thomas had won the Tour in the fashion of, say, Ryder Hesjedal in the 2012 Giro, by being underestimated and hanging on in the mountains early on and taking advantage of the bonus time he got in week 1 thanks to his prior skillset, and then defended in the mountains like he's Melcior Mauri or something, or if he'd done a Giovannetti and got a big lead thanks to his Classics skills and then dropped back slowly but not quickly enough for the competition's liking in the mountains, he might have been easier to stomach. But that isn't what we saw. We saw him breathing through his nose and happily riding away from the lightweight specialist climbers, time after time. We saw him winning the queen stage on a mythical mountain by outclimbing the best. It's not that he doesn't belong because he's British. He doesn't belong, in the eyes of the sceptics, because we haven't seen him emerge after a short period of deciding what type of rider he wants to be, but instead we've seen him for a decade, we've learnt what type of rider he is, what his strengths and weaknesses are, and his current style and achievements are so completely out of line with that that it is difficult to accept.
Of course it doesn't help that he has one thing against him that hurts him more than anything else: Dave Brailsford. Thomas is a Brailsford lifer. His entire career and everything that he's achieved is linked to Brailsford. It doesn't matter that Thomas is very personable and has handled himself very well throughout this - you appear with Brailsford, suspicion is on you like white on rice. This is a point where Britain does have a perception problem, because the fact that the sport does not have the same level of grass roots and established national and amateur races that France, Spain, Belgium or Italy have means that the vast majority of their successful riders have come via some level of contact with Brailsford. But that's not a problem that leaves the implication that Britons don't belong, but rather that in the eyes of many fans it is Sky's way of doing things, with its sanitized, propagandized PR, its bludgeoning race tactics, its competition-strangling budget, and its continued charm offensive in the face of repeated examples of a complete lack of integrity, that does not belong, and unfortunately because of the central role Brailsford has had in British cycling and how centralised that has been for the last couple of decades, that means that very few of the péloton's Britons are spared that interpretation.
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