Ned Boulting is back at work calling bike races!
How will this compacted season be remembered?
“I fear that Tour of Guangxi start list might well look as if the moths have eaten it by the time it wearily starts up”
Setting aside for one moment the epidemiological wisdom or otherwise of holding a series of three-week-long bike races in the middle of a global pandemic, there is much to admire about the UCI’s painfully re-worked attempt to salvage something from the wreck of the 2020 calendar. It remains to be seen just how many of the planned races are seen through to their completion. But the intent is clear: get as many races on as is feasible, in whatever time is left in the year before it starts to get dark at 4pm and the snow starts to shroud the high Alps and Pyrenees.
But, let’s assume for one moment that all these races happen, that we do actually get to call home the winners of all five monuments, plus the Vuelta, the Giro and the Tour de France. Just what will these victories be worth? The sheer number of bewildering overlaps means that you can’t, for example, race both the Giro and the Tour of Flanders (bad luck Peter Sagan). Nor can Vincenzo Nibali hope to impress at both the Dauphiné and Lombardia. If you want to win the time trial at the World Championships, you’d be advised not to bother starting the Tour de France. You can’t do the Vuelta and the Giro; it’s either/or. And, most bafflingly of all, the Vuelta clashes with Paris-Roubaix. That’s right. The Vuelta a España is being raced at the same time as the Hell of the North.
There will, in other words, be significant riders missing from significant races. Even without the copious levels of double booking, there is the matter of fatigue. So much racing in such a short space of time will surely lead to riders burning out, especially since the Tour occupies such a prime spot in the re-jigged calendar, to the detriment of the other races. Everyone who’s anyone will have thrown the kitchen sink at the Tour de France that, by the time the Vuelta comes around, they might only be able to toss a J-cloth in its general direction. And, as for the last WorldTour race of the year, the Tour of Guangxi, a massively overlooked irrelevance at the best of times, I fear that its start list might well look as if the moths have eaten it by the time it wearily starts up on 5 November – if it starts at all.
Let’s say that the Tour produces a real champion’s champion, which it should do. The Giro will be targeted by a few riders who will have been thinking that now’s not a bad year to have a decent crack at it, with most of the ‘A’-listers fluttering their eyelids at Nice instead, and with no one in their right mind contemplating doubling up (there are little over 10 days between the two races this year). Still, a win is a win, regardless of who shows up.
The really random race is, as I’ve already suggested, the Vuelta. This has the potential to throw up a massively surprising result; perhaps a rider from Direct Énergie, for example, who finds himself in a break on stage three that gains 45 minutes. In fact, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. Lilian Calmejane will win the Vuelta. Except he won’t because Alejandro Valverde will. Or Chris Froome. Or Thomas De Gendt. Oh, who knows.
The point is that the record books from 2020 will always celebrate a year of totally anomalous results. And any victor who emerges from this horrible time with a surprising title to their name should feel in no way that their win has been diminished by the context in which it happened. Did Allan Wells ever stop and wonder whether his Moscow gold was any less golden for the lack of American sprinters present? I doubt it, and nor should he have done.
All that I ask is that the races are completed, one way or another. Perhaps it was a sign of things to come that Egan Bernal’s greatest ride on the 2019 Tour was never completed. The day he would have won his first stage and taken the yellow jersey was curtailed by a landslide: a natural phenomenon outside of his control. Perhaps the planet was trying to hint at what it had in store for us all in 2020.