One of my favorite American pro cyclists was cut from the
Tour on Tuesday. Riding in his first
Tour de France, Ted King was caught up in a crash on the very first stage. He suffered a separated shoulder, but still
rode his bike the last 7 miles or so into the finish. After visiting the hospital, he started and
finished the 97 mile 2nd stage, started and finished the 90 mile 3rd
stage, and started the TTT (Team Time Trial) on the 4th stage.
For my non-cyclist friends, a TTT is a special stage where
each team races by themselves over the course (usually less than 40km). They ride in a straight line so each rider on
the team can take a turn at the front pushing through the wind while the others
rest. This type of racing takes a great
deal of coordination and focus. However,
because of his shoulder, Ted couldn't ride his regular TT bike and had to use
his road bike fitted with aero bars.
Because of the last minute switch, the timing chip was not added onto
the road bike.
At the start of the TTT, Ted was dropped almost right away
by his team, and they had to push on without him. He rode his bike alone along the 15km course
at an average speed of 28mph at an average power of 365 watts and finished in
32:24 (with a separated shoulder) per his SRM power meter computer.
Because the timing chip was missing, the race judges had to
base his time on visual observation of when he crossed the line and credited
him with a time of 32:32 (I have yet to see a photo that shows this, but maybe
one came up). The fact that his power
meter showed 32:24 doesn’t matter. To
make the cut, he had to finish within 125% of the winning team’s time. The official time was 7 seconds short.
Ted is a domestique rider. His job is not glamorous, and his function is that of a team player without much personal glory. His job is to sit at the front of the peloton for long periods and keep the breakaway riders from getting too far ahead. This allows his super-sprinter teammate Peter Sagan to swoop in at the finish and steal the win. In a grand tour (Ted has ridden the Giro D’Italia twice), this often amounts to riding as hard as you can for several hours, falling to the back, and then riding up a mountain before you get up tomorrow and do it again.
Ted’s mother and father flew into France and arrived after
the TTT to see him race his first Tour, but he had already been cut and couldn’t
start the 5th stage. Ted’s
father is a stroke survivor, and it is not easy for him to travel to
Europe. In support of his father, Ted
leads a charity bike event every year for the Krempels Center: a nonprofit
organization dedicated to improving the lives of people living with brain
injury from trauma, tumor or stroke.
Although I have absolutely no sense of what it is like to be
a professional bike racer, I always identified with this 30-year-old American who
graduated college with a degree in economics and writes slightly nerdy blog
posts about, for example, a great new recipe for pumpkin soup. Here is someone, I feel, who is representing
us fellow US citizens quite well over in France right around the birthday of
our country.
Happy birthday U.S.A.!
No comments:
Post a Comment