NED BOULTING
Étoile de Bessèges in February. For others, the Tour Down Under kicks it all off in January.
That’s a race that used to be treated as a largely irrelevant warmweather training block for most of the WorldTour teams, but has become increasingly feisty. And after that, you get a triptych of desert(or money)-based events in Qatar, Dubai and Oman, before Paris-Nice returns with a healthy dose of sleet as a timely reminder to the peloton about the perils of European Cycling.
By now, the season has begun to chunter properly into life. Pretty soon the lunatic oneday specialists will be throwing themselves with unseemly abandon at the edifices of the Monuments, starting with Milan-San Remo, and onto stuff like Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, before another bunch of nutters turn up for LiègeBastogne-Liège and the rest of the Ardennes silliness.
Then it gets all stage-racey for the meat of the season: the Giro, then the Suisse and Dauphiné warm-up acts to the Big Daddy of the Tour de France, when everyone knows that no one can pretend to be saving themselves for bigger objectives.
After that? The Vuelta, Tours of Britain and Poland, then the Worlds, and Lombardia, and who can forget the Tour of Taihu Lake… and then the lighting of the lamps. It is done.
None of it makes much coherent sense. Especially since most of the time, riders are not ‘racing’ but preparing for an unbeknown target further down the line.
From time to time there have been moves to unify the calendar into some sort of World Series, at the end of which we could declare, Formula One-style, that one rider is the winner. But that’s not how Cycling works. Nor is it how Cycling should ever work. I love the stratification and confusion between Classics specialists, sprinters and GC men. I love it most when they collide. In fact, I like the mess of the calendar, where each race has its distinct properties and characteristics.
Take, for example, the Dauphiné. If ever you wanted to be confronted with the muddle at the heart of our grandiose, amateurish sport, then try watching this mini Tour de France, which, it is widely believed, you should never try to win if you want to win the Tour the following month. And yet, it matters hugely in its own right. And yet it doesn’t. But it still does. Anyway, I’ve had enough of 2015. Can we fast-forward to next season when I’ll be needed.