Results tagged “Alexandre Vinokourov”

I believe that the great jerseys of cycling look best with black shorts. It's good to see that Bradley Wiggins agrees, judging by his decision to wear the Maglia Rosa on stage two with black shorts.

That's a great image by Michel Bakkenes on Flickr. Really love the motion in the picture and the desaturated look.

Pink Jersey, Black Shorts: It's how all the great riders have worn the jersey and how it looks best. It's not a matter of discussion, it's plain aesthetic fact.

Black shorts help frame the jersey properly in a way that matching pink shorts never will. I could criticise him for the matching pink helmet, but in these days of compulsory headgear, it seems an acceptable item to take the crayola to.

Keen-eyed branding watchers will spot that the Team Sky Giro kit is unique this season in that it's the Sky Italia logo on the kit rather than the UK one. There was a press release about it that I can't be bothered to search for.

That would explain the plain black mitts rather than the electric blue ones and possibly why there, thankfully, weren't any pink shorts available to Brad.

Cadel was also suitably restrained in his choice of short today. Vinokourov will have to do some thinking overnight as pink and the baby blue of Astana just don't work.

A lot of people have seen the signing of Oscar Pereiro Sio as simply an attempt to bolster the Astana squad with an experienced rider who can be there when it matters in the high mountains.

His ability to sacrifice his own interests in working for Alejandro Valverde over the last few years will have been a characteristic that appealed greatly to Contador. This isn't a guy who is going to give him grief or take off in search of a stage win while the real battle is happening behind.

That's pretty vital to a guy who has lost his trusty domestique Sergio Paulinho to Radioshack. Contador still faces having to ride on someone else's team with the return of Alexandre Vinokourov to "his" Astana team.

What is so brilliant about signing Pereiro is that it's a very astute political move given the situation.

We can assume that ASO are going to be asking questions about Astana's inclusion on the basis of Vinokourov's presence. They've not forgiven him for his actions in 2007 which essentially amounted to kicking them in the balls while they were out cold after the Floyd Landis debacle.

Now name the only team in cycling with two Tour de France winners on their roster.

The answer is Astana with Alberto Contador and Oscar Pereiro.

The former is the defending champion who was unable to defend his title in 2008 because of the repercussions for Astana of Vinokourov's ban.

The latter is the rider robbed of his moment of glory on the podium in Paris as a result of Floyd Landis' ban.

In pure political terms the weight of their achievements/history combined may be the necessary counter to Vinokourov's disgrace, which still drags like ten tonnes of shit behind Astana.

We know that being defending champion in 2008 wasn't enough on its own to swing the balance in Contador's favour, albeit the politics then included Johan Bruyneel on the scales.

Given the passing of time and their record, the two riders may be enough to convince ASO not to exclude Astana this year.

He's known round our house as "Wee Bert Contador" on account of someone once describing him as "that wee lad who rides with Armstrong" last year.

2010 is going to be a bugger of a year for him if you believe some of the more partisan pieces of criticism of him, such as these two beauties from Versus:

Armstrong vs Contador - Wisdom vs Knowledge - Joe Parkin

Mass Exodus Leaves Team Astana in Shambles - Bob Roll

I can see where Joe is going with his piece, not that I entirely agree. Bob's I've gone long on salt with. Cyclocosm has done a great analysis, thus saving me the typing: Versus' War on Contador.

Which leaves me more time to marvel at the wheels on Wee Bert's new ride in Specialized's promo reel (neat use of CC subtitling btw) which I clocked over on Bianchista

De-badged Zipp 1080s is my guess. An utterly preposterous wheel to be be out on a training ride on. But he's Wee Bert, so he can get away with it.

I really hope he gets to this year's TDF in full form and without all the ball-ache of 2009. Not easy when co-habiting with Vino in a Kazakh team, but it can't be any worse than last year is supposed to have been, can it?

First up, Astana. I think we can dispatch this one pretty quickly.

Is there anything good to say about it? The visual branding is weaker than last year even if the logos are less confused. That's about as good as it gets.

There's just no definition to the colour blocks and it all just goes nowhere. The previous iterations were stronger visually. Perhaps it's an embodiment of a team lacking direction and identity, not to mention lacking strength and depth in the squad.

And now to Quick-Step (found these photos via Maglia Rosa blog although they've been doing the rounds for a while now in various places)

Ignore Tom Boonen in his Belgian Champion's kit, that looks pretty cool and follows a well-worn formula that works: Champion jersey + predominantly black shorts.

And that's where they've gone wrong. Take a look at Tom in last season's abortive "retro look" out on a Paris-Roubaix reccy

The blue up-and-over on the 2010 kit looks like generic cookie cutter kit that any club can get made up by any number of suppliers. Black shorts with white sponsors' names would have worked so much better.

Then there's a concessions to television airtime. The white side panels don't say "guaranteed return on investment while in a break", they say "we're hedging our bets in case our man doesn't win and you can't read the really big logo on his chest".

Both kits also suffer from the poor application of red. In Astana's case it's Specialized; in Quick-Step's it's Eddy Merckx.

Corporate identity is big business, and Specialized have established that red S icon pretty well over recent years. It just doesn't work with that strange cyan and yellow though.

The new Merckx M on the other hand is an absolute abomination. Gone is that incredible EM logo and loving heritage typeface, replaced by another generic re-branding exercise.

It's vile and hateful, but most of all it's typical of the unnecessary need by new owners to make their mark. It brings nothing to the brand at the same time as removing all the acquired heritage value and support.

For the riders, it's the heat, the wind, the Netherlands (WTF?), the mountains and the bleached scenery. For me it's trying to find an angle to write about the damned thing. Well, I managed it in the end:

Read "Has the Vuelta lost its way?" on BBC Sport

That journalistic trick of asking a question then not entirely answering it in several hundred words once again proves its worth and allows me to mention most of the important information that I could knock together off the top of my head in a couple of hours.

I am going to be watching, I'm just not sure how excited I can get about it.

Andy Schleck is, on paper, the odds on favourite based on recent Grand Tour performance but I'm intrigued by an article on Velonews in which Sean Yates says Chris Horner will get a crack at the GC:

Read Yates: 'Horner will get his chance at Vuelta' on velonews.com

Like everyone else I had assumed that Vinokourov had got his Astana bat and ball back and he would decide who gets to play with it.

My lucky girlfriend is going to be in Spain when it passes through the Valencia/Alicante/Murcia stretch so might (if I can figure out before she goes away) get to watch some of it roadside.

From what I remember of the last time I was in Spain when it was on, it's also wall-to-wall on Spanish telly throughout the afternoon when it's otherwise a bit too warm for being outside. But for me it's Eurosport live in the office when I can and highlights in the evening when I can't.

Now Alexandre Vinokourov wants back in on the top flight of cycling. Is there anyone, apart from Jan Ullrich, who hasn't served a ban or banishment from the pro peloton who doesn't want to seek redemption on the road?

You've got Lance Armstrong, Ivan Basso and Floyd Landis all confirmed as returning to the elite somewhere or other, bringing with them the clamour of the arguments on both side as to the rights and wrongs of their being allow back into the sport. It's an empty noise but one which I can't help but add to.

Cycling tends to mythologise its great characters, as heroes and other archetypes found in epic tales. Myth, and in particular epic mythology, has as part of its paradigm the notion of redemption.

Yet, if you believe the hardline opponents of these returns there should be no redemption in the sport - life bans and eternal condemnation are all these riders should face. I totally disagree with this view. What point is there in a world without the possibility of redemption?

The trite cliché is that "to err is human, to forgive divine". People fuck up, or as Jack Lemmon would have it "nobody's perfect".

I'm entirely in favour of riders being allowed redemption after a ban. David Millar has walked that path as have others. We've long since redeemed the reputations of Mexckx, Anquetil and Coppi by inventing relativism in doping,

This is fundamentally where my problem lies with the movement against the modern generation. The credos runs that "EPO/modern doping is so much more effective" and therefore deserving of greater disgust because of the way in which it distorts the sport.

I don't buy this for one minute. You cannot simply reduce the sport down to a bunch of physical symptoms such as haemocrit or power output because there is so much more to it. More often than not it's still the smartest rider who wins the race, not the strongest.

Is the effect of EPO or blood doping any worse than that of the Palfium taken by Roger Rivière which first took away his sensation of pain, allowing him to ride on beyond what his mind and body would otherwise allow, before robbing him of the sensations needed to control his bike on the descent of the Col Du Perjuret? All those riders driven into the blackness and beyond reason by barbiturates, cocaine, opiates, strychnine, a never ending list of medications and madness.

Incidentally, when he crashed, Rivière was chasing Gastone Nencini, a rider who was caught trying to indulge in autologous blood doping back in the 1960s. Hardly a new technique then is it?

I can't accept that the "old-fashioned" doping is any less effective in deciding the course of cycling history than modern pharmaceutical invention. Both allow riders to go beyond the limits of what their being would otherwise sustain.