Wheelsucking

[del1962]

I would like to see teams installing a james bond oil slick device for wheel suckers at the back of bikes.
Another option would be to ride on really wide roads. Most country's would be happy to spend millions on their infrastructure to make this happen.
Another solution would be to put a long piece of bamboo sticking out the end of the bike making it impossible to wheel suck.
I would consider teams having a sniper in the team car and taking out any offending riders.

Chris Froome would obviously get a warning due to his intense stem watching but if he does not heed the warning
" take him out"

Froomey could have done with one of those devices when Bertie was wheelsucking him in 2014 Vuelta

 

[Angliru]

I would like to see teams installing a james bond oil slick device for wheel suckers at the back of bikes.
Another option would be to ride on really wide roads. Most country's would be happy to spend millions on their infrastructure to make this happen.
Another solution would be to put a long piece of bamboo sticking out the end of the bike making it impossible to wheel suck.
I would consider teams having a sniper in the team car and taking out any offending riders.

Chris Froome would obviously get a warning due to his intense stem watching but if he does not heed the warning
" take him out"

Froomey could have done with one of those devices when Bertie was wheelsucking him in 2014 Vuelta

As if the circumstances are the same. You know better.

 

[Maxiton]

I would like to see teams installing a james bond oil slick device for wheel suckers at the back of bikes.
Another option would be to ride on really wide roads. Most country's would be happy to spend millions on their infrastructure to make this happen.
Another solution would be to put a long piece of bamboo sticking out the end of the bike making it impossible to wheel suck.
I would consider teams having a sniper in the team car and taking out any offending riders.

Chris Froome would obviously get a warning due to his intense stem watching but if he does not heed the warning
" take him out"

Froomey could have done with one of those devices when Bertie was wheelsucking him in 2014 Vuelta

 

[del1962]

Ha ha, everyone gets upset when Gerro wheelsucks but when Bertie wheelsucks Froome its a different story, of course when on form Chris can drop him

 

[Angliru]

Re:

Ha ha, everyone gets upset when Gerro wheelsucks but when Bertie wheelsucks Froome its a different story, of course when on form Chris can drop him

My bad. I gave you too much credit. You don't know better.

 

[yespatterns]

Wheelsuck usually is a matter of tactical advantage without the benefit of panache. But the record books only remember wins, so to each their own. Personally I think its not the best way to win a race.

 

[The Hegelian]

Re: Re:

If you're the bishop and you take the king, then yes of course it is.

Gimme a straight answer, please, not some apples-and-oranges chess comparison.

Cycling ain't a straight game.

The one with class is he who keeps his head when the pressure is really on in a finale. Could be attacking at the right time, pulling like an ox to keep the break away or 'sucking' like on a mama's tit and hitting the rest in the sprint.

If we go back to the OP, I never saw the stage but I grant GVA class for that.

 

[The Hegelian]

Re: Re:

People want the art of road racing to be a lesson in moral philosophy: go to church if you want virtue! Or they want it to be a time trial where the one with the best legs on the day wins: watch a time trial if you want that!

You're completely missing the point on this. Cycling fans evidently care little to nothing about the morality or turpitude of riders. And they actually usually hate seeing the best man win always, it'd be ridiculously boring. Whatever their other flaws, people hated Anquetil, Indurain, Froome and even Armstrong mostly for how boring they were when they just won the time trial and rode defensively for the win. And that's the word with the triple word score, defensively. Most cycling fans love attacking riding. Which obviously involves tactics. Having someone attack across to teammates in an earlier break is perhaps the most exciting move in cycling, IMHO. Or having someone attack into the descent or slip out of the small group while the other riders look at themselves.

But as far as I'm concerned, if you win by being strategically defensive, it's all good. I was a huge Miguelon fan growing up. His ride up the Plagne was beautiful, amongst other things. When Dege bridged into the leader at Roubaix and sat on the wheels, I loved it. It was an exciting move by him, and the onus was on everyone else to attack him. He rode defensively but he didn't ride negatively, as he didn't make the race boring, quite the opposite. But when you're trying to start a move and someone just latches on and tries to do no work for no other reason than to have fresher legs for the finale it usually ends up being the end of the move. It disintegrates into rash attacks and the move ends. Sometimes they believe his sandbagging or want to win so bad that they'd rather have a 10-1 shot in the breakaway sprint than a 100-1 shot in bunch sprint. So every once in a while the other riders are daft enough to give the guy a free ride to the win

I think that's negative riding, and I hate it. But that's completely subjective. If that floats your boat, fine. At the end of the day a win is a win, bike racing is a competition. And in a free society everyone gets to cheer for who they want: I'll cheer for the stupid aggressive riders, you go ahead and cheer for the savvy wheelsuckers.

I grant you much of this - GC races especially.

The point about one day races, especially big ones with a lot of prestige, is that there are always a myriad of possibilities - and what counts as 'classy' is extremely context dependent. Someone who latches onto a move, contributes nothing and therefore causes its failure is quite different to what the thread is about - we seem to be talking about riders picking 'the' move of the day, contributing little or nothing to it, and then winning the sprint. Aka GVA in TA or Gerrans in MSR.

 

[The Hegelian]

Re: Re:

I want chess on wheels where the pawn or bishop can take the king with one well timed classy move.

Is sitting on a breakaway and refusing to do any work a classy move?

If you're the bishop and you take the king, then yes of course it is.

If I wanted to see the most powerful always win, I'd follow shot put.

And if I wanted to see something pure and virtuous, I'd try and dream about angels. No one is racing out of altruism, whether they pull hard or not at all.

It's not a "classy" move, it is a "practical" move. Notwithstanding that you don't "take" the king in chess anyway, but the analogy doesn't hold. Your argument is effectively that the end justifies the means, because the guy who wasn't the strongest on the day won. That's fine, Gerrans has accumulated a much better palmarès than he might have done otherwise by using that tactic. But if you game the opposition and beat them with a well-timed move, that's different to "sit at the back and expect others to do the work for you then outsprint them".

Now, that may be the best way on several occasions for Simon Gerrans to win a bike race, and that in and of itself isn't inherently bad. It's more that, in order for that tactic to succeed, the other racers have to be either timid or neutralize one another's attempts at breaks, and therefore the races that he can win by that method are typically dull or defensive affairs, and so he becomes emblematic of poor racing. His Liège-Bastogne-Liège win is the ideal example of that - the two riders who'd actually tried to do something in that race were caught at the last by a bunch who just looked at each other, and then a guy who had no business being in the group at that point in the day if they hadn't raced so poorly won without being mentioned all day. Simon Gerrans was the winner that race deserved, and that's not a compliment to anybody who entered that race except Dan Martin and Domenico Pozzovivo.

But when you get a race like the Ponferrada World Championships, THAT is an example to use your chess analogy of a pawn or a bishop trapping the king. Of somebody making one classy move and winning as a result. That man was Michal Kwiatkowski. The one that made the attack and held off the much stronger group behind. Not the guy that sat in the group behind. See, if Gerrans had helped with the chase there, and then won the sprint, it would be a different matter. He could have shirked turns, gamed the opposition, pretended to be weaker than he was but do just enough to keep his breakmates happy to keep working with him until Kwiatkowski was reeled back (and he could try to hold that off until the last minute to stop any counterattacks too), and that's tactical "wheelsucking". Nobody sees a problem with that. But he didn't. He sat on, didn't take a pull, and then when the group didn't catch Kwiatkowski, he whined in the press that he'd had the legs to compete for the win... so why didn't he try to compete for the win?

The more broken up a race gets, the more evident "wheelsucking" gets, which is why sprinters (whose very raison d'être is to only put their nose in the wind for 200m) don't get the same criticism as those who just grind up mountains following wheels (hello Levi) or those who sit in the groups in Classics but never contribute (hello Gerrans). Degenkolb at Roubaix is a good example of doing that without "wheelsucking"; he'd earnt the right to take a rest at the back of the group because he'd just expended the energy of riding across to them. If they attacked him then, they had a chance, once the group nullified other attacks, he can say, well, I'll take you in the sprint, we're close to home.

If Kwiatkowski wasn't up the road and Gerrans refused to take a turn, it wouldn't have had the same negativity - he's backing himself in the sprint, which he's entitled to do. When somebody is up the road and he's saying he won't chase because he will back himself in the sprint, he has no right to be upset that that sprint is for 2nd place.

It's not either/or.

I'm not particularly arguing that the ends justify the means. I'm just saying that class is found in myriad of winning ways, including being patient, sitting on and backing your confidence to win the sprint. There is just as much risk in that - as the Spanish worlds show.

Kwiatkowski's move was genius. Full of class. Who's going to deny that?

But you want it to be the case that the late attacker is always best/most interesting/classy etc. It's not. It's often very predictable and boring: the tt or pursuit guy who knows he won't win the sprint goes 5, 3, 1 km out.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Re: Re:

I want chess on wheels where the pawn or bishop can take the king with one well timed classy move.

Is sitting on a breakaway and refusing to do any work a classy move?

If you're the bishop and you take the king, then yes of course it is.

If I wanted to see the most powerful always win, I'd follow shot put.

And if I wanted to see something pure and virtuous, I'd try and dream about angels. No one is racing out of altruism, whether they pull hard or not at all.

It's not a "classy" move, it is a "practical" move. Notwithstanding that you don't "take" the king in chess anyway, but the analogy doesn't hold. Your argument is effectively that the end justifies the means, because the guy who wasn't the strongest on the day won. That's fine, Gerrans has accumulated a much better palmarès than he might have done otherwise by using that tactic. But if you game the opposition and beat them with a well-timed move, that's different to "sit at the back and expect others to do the work for you then outsprint them".

Now, that may be the best way on several occasions for Simon Gerrans to win a bike race, and that in and of itself isn't inherently bad. It's more that, in order for that tactic to succeed, the other racers have to be either timid or neutralize one another's attempts at breaks, and therefore the races that he can win by that method are typically dull or defensive affairs, and so he becomes emblematic of poor racing. His Liège-Bastogne-Liège win is the ideal example of that - the two riders who'd actually tried to do something in that race were caught at the last by a bunch who just looked at each other, and then a guy who had no business being in the group at that point in the day if they hadn't raced so poorly won without being mentioned all day. Simon Gerrans was the winner that race deserved, and that's not a compliment to anybody who entered that race except Dan Martin and Domenico Pozzovivo.

But when you get a race like the Ponferrada World Championships, THAT is an example to use your chess analogy of a pawn or a bishop trapping the king. Of somebody making one classy move and winning as a result. That man was Michal Kwiatkowski. The one that made the attack and held off the much stronger group behind. Not the guy that sat in the group behind. See, if Gerrans had helped with the chase there, and then won the sprint, it would be a different matter. He could have shirked turns, gamed the opposition, pretended to be weaker than he was but do just enough to keep his breakmates happy to keep working with him until Kwiatkowski was reeled back (and he could try to hold that off until the last minute to stop any counterattacks too), and that's tactical "wheelsucking". Nobody sees a problem with that. But he didn't. He sat on, didn't take a pull, and then when the group didn't catch Kwiatkowski, he whined in the press that he'd had the legs to compete for the win... so why didn't he try to compete for the win?

The more broken up a race gets, the more evident "wheelsucking" gets, which is why sprinters (whose very raison d'être is to only put their nose in the wind for 200m) don't get the same criticism as those who just grind up mountains following wheels (hello Levi) or those who sit in the groups in Classics but never contribute (hello Gerrans). Degenkolb at Roubaix is a good example of doing that without "wheelsucking"; he'd earnt the right to take a rest at the back of the group because he'd just expended the energy of riding across to them. If they attacked him then, they had a chance, once the group nullified other attacks, he can say, well, I'll take you in the sprint, we're close to home.

If Kwiatkowski wasn't up the road and Gerrans refused to take a turn, it wouldn't have had the same negativity - he's backing himself in the sprint, which he's entitled to do. When somebody is up the road and he's saying he won't chase because he will back himself in the sprint, he has no right to be upset that that sprint is for 2nd place.

It's not either/or.

I'm not particularly arguing that the ends justify the means. I'm just saying that class is found in myriad of winning ways, including being patient, sitting on and backing your confidence to win the sprint. There is just as much risk in that - as the Spanish worlds show.

Kwiatkowski's move was genius. Full of class. Who's going to deny that?

But you want it to be the case that the late attacker is always best/most interesting/classy etc. It's not. It's often very predictable and boring: the tt or pursuit guy who knows he won't win the sprint goes 5, 3, 1 km out.

And then there's 5, 3, 1km of interest as the group behind has to organize to chase the attacker, as opposed to if everybody backs themselves in a sprint and the whole bunch rides to the line. In an extreme example you get Roubaix in 2010 when everybody was content to sit on Boonen's wheel so that they could fight for second long after it became clear that was all they were fighting for.

I was pointing out that Gerrans gets more stick than most because he doesn't do any work AND complains when he doesn't get to fight for the win by racing like that. Choosing not to work can be perfectly valid tactics. But when you do it even when it's not beneficial, that's not being the most interesting, and it's certainly not classy. And that's why people take great delight when riders whose tactical nous is based on following wheels and never taking a turn find their tactics fail.

Like hrotha said, the point is not about whether it's legitimate. Of course it's a legitimate tactic. But the fans are equally within their rights to despise such negative tactics and to dislike the people who use those, not just as their primary tactical weapon but as their only tactical weapon.