Tour of California Crash Lands in Santa Rosa

The Tour of California started with a bang on Sunday, by having some unknown American on the Slipstream Team scare the big boys with his prologue time trial run. It took the very last rider, Discovery Channel's Levi Leipheimer, last year's winner, to beat the suprising time by about a second. Now why is this little tidbit important to the crash that ended Stage 1? Levi won last year. He's a big name in the sport. Also, Santa Rosa is his hometown, which was where the finish was for Stage 1. There is a 3 km rule for crashes at the end of a race, where anybody caught in a crash and the pile-up within 3 km from the finish line, get the same time as the winner. There's also a stage neutralization rule, if the commissaires (race officials) cannot guarantee the safety of the riders by maintaining road conditions, which was hampered because the course was not cleared of ambulances after the crash, but before the leaders came around the circuit again. But, the judges of the race are the final arbiters on the rules. So, what happened? No neutralization, and everyone caught in the crash got the same time as the sprint finishers, even though the crash was closer to 5 km away from the finish.

I'm actually going to agree with the judges' decision to apply the crash time rule. Here's why: the crash affected more than half of the field, causing a gap of more than a minute. During a three week Grand Tour, a loss of a minute at the start of the race is no big deal, but during a week long tour, that time gap means you're out of contention. Sponsorship and ratings motivations rear their head in this case, since only "unknown" riders would now have a chance of winner overall. Also, this decision is the same as the Tour de France judges nullifying the time-gap disqualification rule during the alpine stages. That particular rule says that riders must finish within a percentage range of the stage winner's time or be disqualified. The percentage range is determined by the difficulty of the course; sometimes its 10 percent, I've seen it go as high as 15 percent. But the percentage cannot be changed once the race starts. If the judges did not nullify this rule during certain stages of the Tour de France, we would have only 30 or so people actually finishing the race. Sprinters' legs are just not conditioned to climb mountains. The California judges made a similar decision.

But what about the neutralization of the race? Also a bad decision because then the sprinters would have less chances at picking up points. Again, one race out of 20 stages is no big deal, but when you only have 7 or 8, and one of them is an individual time trial, and a few stages are designated as climbers' stages, then the big sprinter boys don't have a chance to shine as well.

Detractors will criticize the "hometown" bias, or complain that their team has the "real" overall leader. That's fine. But in cycling, the Big Boys really do have an advantage, and it doesn't come from doping. If that decision was not made, then the rest of the race would have garnered much less attention, and the only story to come out of the international coverage would have been summed up in one picture:

photo: Graham Watson

For more coverage of Stage 1, excellent notes and reactions can be found at VeloNews.