movingtarget said:
GraftPunk said:
The guy is basically a leech. No class, no panache. I don't hate him, but really there are way classier riders than him to defend.
The history of the sport is full of so called leaches who were successful and never had the amount of criticism Gerrans has had. Bernard Hinault actually use to call Jan Raas (the leach). Interesting that three of the most criticized riders on this forum over recent years namely Porte, Evans and Gerrans are all Australian. Rogers also came in for special treatment. The only other rider I would put in that category since Lance would be Wiggins. Food for thought.
A lot of the Anglo thing has to do with the fact that many of those riders have been raised into the sport via the track program, so it often produces riders who are specialists in time trialling and sprinting. The fact that until fairly late in the day Classics racing had little currency in non-traditional nations compared to the GTs, and specifically the Tour, means that targeting these races came with much higher value to those with interests in the audience share in these countries.
And even those riders who don't come from the track background often share certain characteristics as stage racers - those who hang on in the mountains and make their gains against the clock, and as a result are perceived as adding little to the race. You can add the likes of van Garderen and Rogers to your laundry list as well, if you like, although there are many reasons to dislike Rogers beyond that (only some of which can be discussed in this part of the forum). And the new, moneyed teams from those countries are often the most associated with stifling techniques - HTC-Columbia's race-strangling sprint train, using people like Martin and Grabsch to prevent the break ever getting more than 3 minutes away, and setting the maillot jaune to work in the leadout, Sky's mountain train in the vein of US Postal, and BMC having a GC hydra-head led by two of those riders renowned for following and not leading. Orica have a less negative stigma than that, and it's more for the less mountainous one-day races that they are criticised (where the likes of Gerrans and Matthews are their targets, not the likes of Yates and Chaves).
In this respect it's not a deliberate setting out of an anti-Anglo thing, but it has worked out that way because of the nature of many of those riders and/or the characteristics of those teams. And with some riders, it's to do with that individual, specific rider (hello Mick!). You certainly haven't been paying attention if you haven't seen a similarly negative reaction to all things Valverde over the past few years. And the forum's most notorious explosion of rage over the success of negative racing was not an Aussie, although it was admittedly another Anglo rider, Levi.
Another factor with the Australians is that for many years this forum had a number of myopic "Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!" fans of varying degrees. The vast majority of cycling fans would agree that while Evans had a negative stigma for not contributing or making the race for much of his career, after his Mendrisio win he was a man reborn and he seemed determined to make up for lost time and fill in the palmarès that his talent deserved. At the same time, Evans actually ceasing to be the "eternal nearly man" meant that we no longer had to endure so many increasingly desperate excuses from his fans, nor were they being relentlessly needled so much, so people could just get on with watching the man race.
The problem is, Evans raced in quite a negative way, and it
hurt his palmarès. It hamstrung his achievements, and made him unpopular. When he got over that mindset, he reaped the rewards both in respect of results and popularity. Gerrans used to be a moderately interesting stagehunter (although as hrotha notes, that Tour stage with Egoí Martínez showed an early form of the template he has used to achieve his greatest successes), but he became too threatening to allow up the road. He then went through a period where his greatest strength was the ability to finish somewhere between 7th and 15th on most puncheur finishes, before entering his mid-30s he developed his sprint to the point where it was enough of a weapon that he could employ the technique that he has now reached infamy for.
Calling Gerrans a tactically smart rider negates a very clear point: those tactics
only work because he is usually the strongest sprinter left at the point when it works, and they
only work if at least one of the following two things happen:
1) other racers race timidly
2) other racers act as if lobotomized when attacks happen, and chase them down without weakening the best sprinter in the group allowing that sprinter to then sprint against them.
If other racers ask Gerrans to contribute, he freewheels or half-asses his turns if he even bothers doing that, and expects others to pull him to the leading group. Now sure, if they're stupid enough to do that, then fair enough, but it's not much fun to watch, which is why he becomes unpopular. And when he then whines afterwards about not winning the race because he had the legs for it, it becomes doubly frustrating because the big thing is, if you're the best sprinter in the group, you've got great legs for the day, what have you got to lose by contributing to the chase?
As a counter-example:
Remember the women's Olympic road race? Mara Abbott is off the front, after van Vleuten's horror crash. She's not a known time trialist and she's being chased by a trio of van der Breggen, Longo Borghini and Johansson. But the gap is quite big and might hold. Anna VDB and ELB are strong time triallists, Emma J is not, but Emma J is by FAR the best sprinter in the group. Now, Emma J worked her backside off contributing to that chase so that they caught Mara close to the line... but because she had gone so much deeper than the other two in the chase, because TTing isn't her thing, she didn't have the strength to use her sprint and lost out. So it's a gallant near miss, she went for gold and came up short. Now, if Emma was Simon Gerrans, she would just sit on the back of the group or do minimal turns, knowing that she has a better sprint and just blindly hoping that Anna and Emma can pull Mara back to give her the chance to win. If Emma raced like that, she'd probably still have got a silver medal, because she'd have outsprinted the other two at the end. But she wouldn't have had the chance to win the gold, because it was only because all three of them were contributing equally that they managed to catch Abbott. If Emma gets a silver medal like that, and then, in an additional nod to Simon Gerrans, complains to the media that Anna and Elisa didn't give her the chance to win gold, the fans are going to look at her silver medal differently. No?
At the end of the day, we fans do not owe the riders, or the teams, our support. We choose who we like and dislike based on a variety of things. My negative view of Gerrans is rooted entirely in his racing, for example, and not a reflection on him as a person, whereas my negative views of Sagan, or Albasini, are rooted entirely in them as a person and not to do with their racing.
Cycling is not professional wrestling, and for the riders out there, it is their career, and their job is to do their bit to help the team win bike races, either themselves or in the job they do for the team. The aim is to win, not to be entertaining (though the latter can help in the case of sponsor visibility of course, and be a part of a rider's job too). But the thing is, most of us are fans, and we watch the sport as entertainment, as enjoyment. It's not our job. As a result, it's only natural that when races and tactics identified with a particular rider or team don't entertain us, that we react negatively to those tactics and the riders or teams employing them.
and don't think highly of Gerrans nor of how he's accumulated his results. I've raced, I still ride a bike and I appreciate riders like Sagan, Contador and Nibali. I can also appreciate and respect Valverde. Gerrans just rubs me the wrong way. To complain about riders not riding aggressively being the cause for his not being in the mix for a victory when his basic MO is to shamelessly benefit from the work of others is comically sad and explains why he is held in such low esteem in spite of his results.
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