ON THE HOP
An algorithm can’t solve cycling’s predicament
“How much Tour de France is required for it to be a Tour de France? Six stages? Ten? Fifteen?”
Asignificant part of the whirlwind of change that 2020 has wrought on all of us is a new understanding that it’s okay to change your mind. Governments in Europe discovered this back in March, going from, ‘Everything’s fine, it’s just a sniffle and anyway it’s in China’ to ‘Nobody leave the house’ within a matter of days. These governments have not been toppled for their staggering incompetence because none of us really know what to do in the case of a pandemic, as none of us have ever had any experience of one. As a result, we understood that our democratically elected representatives were making it up as they went along.
Sport was by no means exempt from having to improvise wildly, tearing up pre-existing dogma and reimagining the way the games work. Only, it seemed, the Wimbledon championships had seen Covid coming. They cancelled themselves with unseemly haste while most other sporting events, including the Tokyo Olympics, were still pushing the margins of credibility by claiming that they could still somehow go ahead. The reason that Wimbledon was able to act so quickly was simple: money. They had taken out pandemic insurance and were completely alone in that act of prescience.
Cycling was caught on the hop. Its sheer fragility meant that the impulse to push ahead with the races in the face of common sense was simply irresistible. Such is the hand-to-mouth nature of cycling’s fiscal reserves that it takes just one raceless year to threaten the viability of all future races henceforth.
But credit where it’s due. One must applaud the UCI, RCS and ASO, as well as other more regionalised race organisers, for getting their heads together and reimagining the cycling calendar. Yes, there are huge and obvious problems with it – such as the timeshifting clash between Classics and the Giro, as well as the long period without a race of any description for the Women’s World Tour in the month between Strade Bianche and the GP de Plouay. But, on the whole, it’s been a success; races have started and finished, and the world has kept turning.
I write this column as a hostage to fortune, given that it’s the eve of the Tour de France. By the time you read these words, you may already be able to tell me that the whole race fell apart somewhere near Clermont-Ferrand, when the French government announced a full lockdown and an immediate ban on any form of cycling. I do hope that hasn’t happened. I do hope the race gets to Paris.
Before the race got underway, I became obsessed with a particular problem and scoured the UCI regulations to find the protocol to follow if it were curtailed. After all, pre-lockdown, both the UAE Tour and Paris-Nice had been shorn of a stage or two. However, in both cases, enough decisive GC days had already been ridden for legitimate winners to emerge in the shape of Adam Yates and Max Schachmann.
But those were week-long races, not Grand Tours. How much Tour de France is required for it to be a Tour de France? Six stages? Ten? Fifteen? The answer was a surprise: nobody knows! It’s for a panel of commissaires, in conjunction with the race organisation, to decide whether a result stands or not.
At first glance, this appears like a nonsense. But on reflection, more by accident than by design, they might have hit upon the only possible answer to seemingly insoluble dilemmas. The only way to square such a circle is to sit down and talk it through, face mask to face mask. There’s no cricket-style Duckworth-Lewis system applicable to cycling; no way of predicting how many seconds Egan Bernal may have lost or won on the final time trial. The might of the algorithm has been called into question.
For as much as cycling is a muddled enterprise, its human foibles might just be exactly what is required to navigate the permanent state of improvisation in which we find ourselves.