MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

Ned ponders how anybody ever wins a sprint

There’s so much in a bunch sprint that can go wrong, and does go wrong, that sometimes it’s hard to see how anything could ever go right. Increasingly, when I watch sprints unfold, I almost start to disbelieve that it’s possible for anyone to actually win them. Now, clearly, someone will emerge from the chaos with their arms aloft to take the win. But their passage through the storm will have been plotted as an act of faith, will and providence, not forecasting, planning and tactics.

I recently spent a week out in the UAE watching the quartet of sprints that the UAE Tour stage race offers up. And it struck me that never since I’ve been focused on road racing over the last 20 years or so, has there been such a proliferation of different teams prepared to commit to a lead-out train, and such a number and range of different sprinters who routinely share the spoils. The variation among their number is massive, too. From the frightening bulk of Pascal Ackermann to the slender, electric speed of Jasper Philipsen; the pocket-rocket brilliance of Caleb Ewan to the track-sprinter’s bulk of Dylan Groenewegen. So thick is the Dutchman’s quad musculature that he can scarcely walk normally. The damn things rub against one another and force him to hobble around like a saddle-sore cowboy. All human shapes and forms are found within the current crop of sprinters.

Gone are the days when one rider could dominate, as Mark Cavendish did for so many years in the acid yellow of HTC-Columbia. With the slow fading of his powers (now, of course, fully re-activated), there was a brief period in which Marcel Kittel seemed to be his natural successor, albeit carved from a very different gene pool. The German’s five victories at the Scheldeprijs testify to some extent how Kittel picked up where Cavendish seemed to be tailing off.

But now? Anyone’s game. Even aside from the names I’ve already mentioned, there are others who operate at a similarly world-class level. How about Fabio Jakobsen, miraculously back from life-changing injury? Sam Bennett, who in 2020 was the fastest man in the world, probably. Or the perennially underestimated Tim Merlier, who claimed stages at both the Giro and the Tour de France last year. Then there’s Alexander Kristoff, Cees Bol, Alberto Dainese, Elia Viviani, Arnaud Démare, Bryan Coquard, Nacer Bouhanni, Fernando Gaviria, and emerging talents such as Matt Walls, David Dekker, Olav Kooij… on and on it goes. Each one of these riders could expect to beat and be beaten by any other names on the same list. We truly are in a golden age. And I haven’t even mentioned Wout van Aert, who came to Paris at the end of the Tour de France last year and beat them all.

It all adds to the chaos. Permutations stack up all around the bunch sprint in 2022. Do teams commit to a big lead-out train, or do they play around in the shadows, drifting on the coattails of the other teams, picking a hazardous late path through the debris of the lead-out in the final few hundred metres of the sprint, leaving it as close to the line as possible and gambling everything on their sense of timing. This, in a rudderless, anarchic era, seems to be, by common consent, both the most fashionable and most effective way of getting to the line in first place. But such a tactic might work one day and not the next, and the repeated pattern is that teams flip-flop on a day-today basis, switching their tactical approach through 180 degrees as they grapple for a winning formula.

In the end, it’s mostly about being in the right place at the right time, something which Cavendish masters like no other. The bunch sprint is like the final scene from the film Platoon, where a helicopter gunship of Thing Which Can Go Wrong is trying to gun you down before you reach the line. It’s cruel, chaotic, and captivating to behold. Even if you have to wait 180 kilometres for five minutes of action, it’s worth it. But I still don’t see how winning is even possible, when so much can prevent you.

“Gone are the days when one rider could dominate, as Mark Cavendish did in the yellow of HTC-Columbia”