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Pantani_lives said:
About ten years ago the Spanish television showed a rerun of the 1988 Tour, won by Delgado. I noticed that I was more captivated by the Tour of 1988 than by the current one - in spite of knowing the outcome. In the past a mountain stage usually meant a selection of ten to fifteen riders would reach the final climb: the ten best climbers and a few helpers. On the final climb there were attacks and the race was really on.
Nowadays a bigger group with more helpers usually reaches the final climb. The Tour has become virtually unwatchable at times because of the domination of one team: first US Postal, then Team Sky. The difference in budget and preferential treatment for one team seem to be the biggest problem. I don't think a different approach to the course selection can change that. The Tour organizers have tried: they did cobblestones, an Ardennes stage, a mur in the first week. At best it gave us one exciting stage without much impact for the GC. Only Nibali took important time in a cobblestone stage, but then his opponents crashed out.
I don't buy the theory that longer time trials force the climbers to attack. Someone like M. A. López isn't going to take the minutes back that he loses in the first time trial, not against five helpers from a strong team. It simply puts him out of contention. I would like to see one long flat time trial and one climbing time trial. Mountain stages should be inspiring to attack. There should be tough MTFs and multiple mountain stages with a really tough penultimate climb. If a climber can't make the difference then, he'll never make it.
I think the problem is mostly with the Tour, but not so much because of the course. The final ten days of the Giro were quite exciting. Just put one or two tough Abruzzi stage in the first week and a finish on Kronplatz or something. Menghen was too far from the finish to lead to much. Of course the broadcasts are too long. In a flat stage you can't expect much to happen 120 km before the finish, but it's already on television.
If someone like Miguel Ángel López can't take back the time they lost in the time trial, it is because they are not sufficiently all-round to merit being a Grand Tour winner; historically only the very very best pure climbers went on to be GT winners if they didn't have an all-round game. The Angel of the Mountains, Charly Gaul, managed to win some TTs, and Ocaña used his TT as one of his strengths back on home roads in Spain. There are very few riders who were climbers and climbers alone who have won GTs historically - people like José Manuel Fuente, Lucien van Impe and Lucho Herrera are about the only ones until recently. People who were all time legends of the mountains like Vicente Trueba, Julio Jiménez, José María Jiménez, Fabio Parra and José Luís Laguía? Never won a GT.
The problem is, the devaluation of the GPM has been two-pronged. Firstly, Virenque's pioneering the king of the breakaways method (previously, yes, a lot of points could be picked up in breakaways, but often these were breakaways exclusively with GC intent, as the pure climbers looked to use their playgrounds of the mountains to win time back), and secondly, the recognition of race organisers especially since TV coverage has gone through the roof as the number of TV viewing options have increased, that mountain stages are the most popular with the audience, and also the improvement in infrastructure of ski resorts etc. and the proliferation of mountaintop finishes (remember, the Vuelta's first genuine MTF didn't come until 1972) mean that nowadays, the rider whose skillset is for climbing and for climbing alone has no reason not to believe they are a genuine GC rider, and not target the GPM like they might have done in the past. People like Ezequiel Mosquera, Domenico Pozzovivo, Fränk Schleck, Joaquím Rodríguez, these are guys that should have won KOMs in the past. In fact, for decades in Spain, the GPM was considered the second most important thing in the entire race, second only to winning. It was better to finish 10th and win the mountains prize than to finish 2nd and not win it. Until Colombia came to the party in the 80s, when you thought of wispy, unreliable but incredibly exciting grimpeurs, you thought of Spain, and that in large part was the reason. With the majority of the national calendar built out of regions like País Vasco, Catalunya and Asturias, climbers were always the biggest stars in Spain. But while that has continued to a large extent to this day (save for a blip in the 90s and early 00s when, post-Indurain, a lot of TT engines came about and the Vuelta was designed with long TTs leading to the wins by the likes of Ángel Casero and Aitor González; even then, however, when Olano won in 1998 in the fratricidal battle with Chava, the fans - and later the team too - sided overwhelmingly with Jiménez, the wispy, unreliable but more romantic climber). But since Moncoutié retired, the GPM at the Vuelta has just sort of been 'there'. 2012's famous three-way battle between the three great Spanish climbers of the day - who won the GPM? Simon Clarke. 2016 with Quintana battling Froome and the famous Formigal raid - who won the GPM? Omar Fraile.
That's not to belittle the guys like Fraile and Clarke, but can anybody reasonably say that they were the best climber in those races? Assuredly not. Balancing the GPM to the way current cycling is is a challenge that the organizers have had for several years, to keep some intrigue in the competition but try to ensure that it goes to representative names.
The Giro for many years had the "arrival" category of mountain, which paid more points than a cat.1 regardless of difficulty, and a one-off Cima Coppi category which paid double the cat.1 points. This generally seemed to work, and the jersey only occasionally went to GC irrelevances in breakaways, and if it did it was because they worked their tails off to defend it, like Fabian Wegmann in 2004, being in 9 BOTD exploits. Otherwise the people winning it were people like Piepoli, and then it was being targeted by riders who were on the outer edges of GC contention, and often riding on the domestic wildcard teams. People like Julio Alberto Pérez Cuapio, late-career Stefano Garzelli and Emanuele Sella. That classification worked so well that the Vuelta, which had been giving a lot of points some way down the line allowing people who got into the jersey to often defend it just by picking up the leftovers once the break had rolled through, cloned it for 2010, although when they went MTF bonanza in 2012, they got rid of the "arrival" category entirely, replacing its points tally with the "ESP" category not existent in the Giro (which itself revamped by introducing cat.4 mountains in 2011). Since the revamp of the points classification, the Giro's GPM has been won by GC irrelevances more often, albeit typically by stronger climbers such as Mikel Nieve and Julián Arredondo. And after winning the queen stage and his performance yesterday, nobody would say Ciccone doesn't deserve the jersey he's worked for in the 2019 Giro.
The Tour, by contrast, had attempted to counter Virenque's method by offering double points to the final climb of the day if it was a cat.2 or higher. This idea seems eminently sensible, but was hamstrung by the simple fact that course design in the late 2000s was absolutely terrible, leading to double points being paid out for climbs that were inevitable breakaway fodder, like Tourmalet in the 2009 Tarbes stage or Aubisque in the 2010 Pau stage - both over 65km from the line. When Anthony Charteau won the polka dots in 2010, they decided they'd had enough and something had to change. I feel bad for Charteau that he got disrespected like that; there were two additional features that settled that GPM in his favour, neither of which were his fault.
- on stage 9, members of the breakaway were instructed by their teams not to interfere with Jérôme Pineau's points gathering on early summits, so that they could guarantee a Frenchman held the jersey into Bastille Day. Among the break that day were Sandy Casar, Christophe Moreau and Anthony Charteau, and Charteau rolled over a few of the uncontested summits behind Pineau (quite smartly), actually taking the jersey for one day after Pineau cracked on the final, double points-paying Col de la Madeleine, but this interfered with the sprint for points behind
- Moreau was interested in the KOM, with the Caisse d'Épargne team having no leader, and got himself into such a position to contend, but in week 3 Radioshack were killing every move that a Caisse rider got in, in order to defend their lead in the Teams Classification, so when Moreau didn't get into the break on stage 17, there was no chance to beat Charteau anymore.
One wonders whether, had Christophe Moreau won the GPM, a fading (38-year-old) former GC hopeful of France, there would have been the same outcry and revamping of the classification. However, the Tour has gone too far the other way, doubling the points for a summit finish only, and having a HC climb be worth 25 points to a cat.1's 10 - meaning that in last year's Tour, taking every single point available in the Le Grand Bornand stage - Bluffy, Croix-Fry, Plateau de Glières, Romme and Colombière - would have netted 56 points, but winning a unipuerto HC stage would net 50 points. Taking every single summit of the 2016 Culoz stage nets 54 points. At first it seemed to work, with people like Samuel Sánchez and Rafał Majka winning (although Majka only targeted it after becoming a GC irrelevance, so how that made it different to when Virenque or Pellizotti won it I don't know), but we've seen it won a couple of times by accident because of those Unipuerto stages - Froome in 2015 most notably.
Now, how to offer a solution to this problem, I simply don't know. But the fact of the matter is, the GPM should be the prize that the pure climbers go for. They should be able to win it while still competing for the GC - but they shouldn't be able to WIN the GC unless they are either an absolute special, one-in-a-million climber like Fuente or Herrera were, or the favourites make errors in dealing with them, like with Rasmussen in 2007. They ought to be able to win the GPM with their attempts to make up the time lost, like people like Fuente used to do and like we have seen from the likes of Chiapucci, Rasmussen, or Jiménez, or as a means to salvage a race which has gone awry, like Landa in 2017 or Majka. But without those deficits, there is never a reason for a specialist climber to be allowed up the road, because they're too dangerous to allow to do that. It's why most of those super stages we've seen where the unexpected happens and the big guns attack from far always happen well into week 3, because they're throwing hail marys. Quintana over Croix de Fer to Alpe d'Huez, Contador on Collado de la Hoz, Quintana and Contador on the Alto de Petralba, Roberto Heras on La Colladiella, Schleck on Agnello, Froome on Finestre. These are climbers pulling off often GPM-worthy exploits reminiscent of the great climbers of the past, reminding us of Fuente to Tre Cime in '74 or Chiapucci to Sestrières in '92, but they are late-race one-offs. The increased control of races has meant time gaps are smaller these days, and while that in many respects is better, it's also in other respects worse as it means the leash people are kept on is tighter, and there isn't room for more than the occasional exploit of that nature.
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