AN Y PORT IN A S TORM
Of course, eRacing is no substitute for the real thing - but at least it’s something!
“Things might’ve panned out differently had a pandemic not taken a scythe to the 2020 race calendar”
A little over a year has passed since I was in a strobe-filled studio at BT Sport to witness something of an experiment: the first-ever British Cycling Zwift eRacing Championships. Ten men and women competed for the newest British National Champion’s jersey, strapped into their Wahoo turbo trainers and propelling their avatars beamed onto a giant screen behind them.
It had a lot of what we’ve come to expect from bike racing - big watts, doomed breakaways and even a winner subsequently stripped of his title in a public shaming.
It’s tough, however, for anything new to break through in a sport as traditional and historic as cycling, so it was a fair question to ask if what we were watching was a one-off curio or whether we’d be back next year and the year after that, and so on. Well, no, we didn’t return this year but neither, it seems, was it a flash in the pan. How things might’ve panned out differently had a global pandemic not taken a scythe to the 2020 race calendar and confined a vast swathe of the pro peloton to Peloton. Or their Tacx, or Wattbike, or whichever way their turbo needs are met.
Various versions of indoor racing have had their moment in the sun since some of us were last allowed ours. We doubt he’ll be counting it when he retires, but Greg Van Avermaet finally broke his Tour of Flanders duck on the BKOOL platform, edging out Oliver Naesen. There were also races between pros on the Rouvy platform, a frankly hideous Frankenstein mix of CG riders overlayed onto real world climbs. It lacked any sort of dynamism, with few camera angles, and watching the riders slowly ascend mountains was like watching the horses move along in those Derby arcade games. Only much, much slower.
By far the biggest success was Zwift’s Tour For All, hosted on GCN. It had big-name riders, such as Marianne Vos and Mathieu van der Poel, combined with a slick production from the broadcaster - hats off to Rob Hatch on commentary, who more than earned his fee by unleashing his full verbal repertoire to the extent that if you closed your eyes he could have been calling a Paris-Roubaix finale.
It also had the slickest game, in Zwift, which feels as though it’s emerging as one of those brands that defines a product, like Google. It’s not just a matter of brute force - increasingly, you need tactics and to know how to play the game to do well in it (although nobody told the enduringly classy Vos this, who won stage 1 despite barely having played the game before). It’s hard to know how many people tuned into the race - GCN wouldn’t tell us - but anybody who did would have found people doing their best to fill a bike-shaped hole in their lives. There was much hand-wringing online about it as a viewing experience, that it’s nothing like – or no match for – road racing. On both accounts you can only say, of course, it’s not. Then again, let’s not kid ourselves in thinking that every bike race is must-view entertainment. The Tour de France isn’t the biggest bike race in the world because it always has the best racing - it’s the weight of history that draws us in and has us transfixed, even when the highlight of the last three days has been a helicopter shot of a pretty church near Saint-Amand-Montrond. True, eRacing is much more compelling in the doing than in the viewing, but at least it’s provided us with something to follow over the past few months, and teams a chance to give their sponsors something to chew on - the very sponsors that keep them solvent.
If the swine flu pandemic of 2009 had gone the same way as Covid-19, in the absence of training games and smart trainers back then, the entire pro cycling world would have put into cold storage, leaving a total void. I know which scenario I’d prefer.