Porte hits rivals for six, again
Richie Porte’s annual attack on Willunga Hill at the Tour Down Under is so much a part of the road season’s fabric now that you can set your watch by it. Somewhere around 1,500 metres to go on the iconic South Australian hill, which usually appears on the penultimate day of the race, the Australian punches hard on the pedals, drops everybody and wins the stage. He’s done it five years in a row now, and in 2017 it gave him the overall title.
That’s the opening paragraph of Procycling’s analysis of the Tour Down Under last year. We also went on… Porte was by far the strongest climber on the day, and he duly won his stage as he continues to revel in being back after his 2017 season ended at the Tour de France on stage 9. However, the Mitchelton rider Daryl Impey had been spending the previous four days putting together an insurance policy, bit by bit, and on Willunga Hill, he cashed it in.
Swap the ‘2017’ for ‘2018’,take into account that Porte did come back after he crashed out of the Tour last year to ride the Vuelta, and that Willunga appeared on the last day of the 2019 race, not the second-last, for Porte’s sixth win, rather than his fifth, and the 2019 Tour Down Under was as close to being a carbon copy of the previous year’s edition as it would be possible to get.
The record will show that Daryl Impey won the 2019 Tour Down Under by 13 seconds ahead of Richie Porte. Porte won on Willunga Hill for the sixth consecutive year, a run of success unparalleled in modern cycling. The question is, does it matter that one of the sport’s flagship races appears to be won by
formula and routine, rather than the element of surprise and innovative tactics? Is the Tour Down Under in a rut, or are the achievements of Porte and Impey all the more impressive for the fact that everybody in the peloton knows they are going to happen and still can’t prevent them? If Porte’s wins on Willunga were that cheap, wouldn’t somebody else have tried to undercut him?
The Tour Down Under is 20 years old now. It is still a pup compared to the established European races, but it has proved one of the most resilient of the new races of the modern era. For a decade, it was a warm-up race, hotly contested by local riders and used by a few international teams to give their riders an alternative to training in the cold. It joined the ProTour in 2008, and for a few years was dominated by the sprinters – the race would climb Willunga Hill, but not as a summit finish. And now it has settled into an established groove as a race in which sprinters who can climb and climbers who can climb a little better improvise new riffs on old rhythms. The Impey versus Porte battles of the last two seasons perfectly exemplify that, while the record-holder in terms of wins, Simon Gerrans, now retired, was another punchy climber who built his victories on the accumulation of bonus seconds and the ability to always make the split on the race’s hillier days.
The more you drill down into the results of the 2019 TDU, the more differences you can find from 2018. The first five stages were all contested in sprints of some description – full bunch sprints on days one, two and five, but smaller groups, 20- or 30-strong, on the third and fourth days. The stage 4 sprint in Campbelltown, coming after the climb of Corkscrew Hill, was a key moment. It pitched Impey, who won, against Patrick Bevin of CCC, who was the race leader. Bevin, in fact, looked the most likely to triumph at this point. He had gained bonus seconds in the break on stage 1, then won stage 2, so that he led Impey by seven seconds and the rest of the contenders, clustered in a group between fourth and 18th place, by 21 seconds. Bevin was in the process of doing to Impey what Impey had done to Porte the year before. Meanwhile, Porte himself lurked in that group at 21 seconds. However, Bevin crashed badly on stage 5, and though he would finish, he couldn’t match Impey and Porte on Willunga, nor could Porte put enough time into Impey to win overall. A familiar result, won in a familiar way.
As long as the Tour Down Under keeps its current shape, which seems to entertain the local fans just fine, it will be so. Of the last 10 editions, six have had a winning margin of under 10 seconds, and nine have been contested by 20 seconds or less. However, Porte and Impey’s winning streaks may be predictable, but we’ll miss them when they’ve gone.
Does it matter that one of the sport’s lagship races appears to be won by formula and routine, rather than the element of surprise and innovative tactics?