Pro Cycling Is So Different from Other Sports

There’s no Super Bowl, World Series, Stanley Cup or other play-off championship in cycling. It may seem like the Tour de France is cycling’s championship event, because it gets the most attention. But it comes in the middle of the season, not at the end. It is one of three "Grand Tours," along with the Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) and the Vuelta a Espagna (Tour of Spain). Other countries also have their own multi-day national tours, and there are dozens of regional multi-day races throughout the season. In addition there are lots of single-day races. Many of these "smaller" races have long histories and enormous prestige within the sport. Some, like the Tour of California and the Tour of Utah, are newer, but are gaining in prestige and are attracting the best riders and teams. Each race has its own character. Because it is three weeks long, the Tour de France has more variety than most races, and every year it follows a completely different route, so even the Tour itself is completely new from year to year.

There’s no fixed time or number of innings, quarters or sets in each contest in cycling. It’s not like golf where you play the same 18 holes for four days. Or bowling with its 10 frames and 300-pin perfect game. There’s no standard-size court or diamond or pitch or field. There’s no single way of scoring, such as a basket, a goal, a run, or a touchdown. In cycling there is not just one single format for every contest. For example, a time trial is a race against a stop-watch over a certain route. It may be as short as 5 miles; or it may be as long as 35 miles. It may be an individual time trial, where the riders leave the start one at a time separated by 2 or 3 minute intervals, and their finishing times are compared to determine the winner. Or it may be a team time trial where the team rides together and they all help each other because their time is measured by the finishing time of the 5^th team member across the line.

Another kind of stage is a criterium. In this day of racing the route is fairly short and encircles a town or a part of a town. The riders all start together, and ride that same route over and over for a set number of laps, or for a set amount of time, such as two or three hours! A criterium is fun to watch, because the spectator can stay in one place, watch the riders pass many times, and experience the whole drama of the race as it unfolds.

In most of the daily stages of the Tour de France, all of the riders from all of the teams start together in one giant bunch (called the "peleton"), and they ride for more than 100 miles. The route may be relatively flat, or it may be in the mountains with several long and steep climbs. The drama of any long bunch race like this (including a criterium described above) is to see if any rider(s) can jump ahead of the main swarm of the peleton and maintain that separation clear until the end of the race. A team with a rider in the breakaway will be happy to let the escape succeed, in hopes that their rider can win the stage and bring glory to the team. A team with no rider in the breakaway will try to lead the peleton and increase its pace enough to "reel in" the escapees, so that one of that team’s sprinters can burst forward from the peleton at the very last minute and win the race.

The point of this post was to illustrate the many different formats for cycling contests. This is a feature that distinguishes cycling from other sports. In the next post, I will explain the many ways to score points and to "win" in a race like the Tour de France.

Tour of Utah 2010, Criterium in Park City.  Levi Leipheimer (Yellow Jersey) followed by Paco Mancebo.