SAD NEWS: World’s Popular Cycling Guru Involved An Accident That Claimed The Lives Of Two Youngsters
La Vuelta a España, this year’s final Grand Tour, has arguably been the most thrilling race we’ve seen this season, despite the absence of cycling’s biggest stars, Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard.
This edition of the Spanish stage race has given viewers edge-of-our-seat excitement that hit a zenith (perhaps not its final one) on Stage 16, when race leader and Red Jersey wearer Ben O’Connor (Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale) suddenly found himself in a race against the clock, chasing the ticking seconds that started the instant Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe) crossed the line nearly a minute earlier.
It was a hold-your-breath moment in a race full of them and one that left O’Connor with just a five-second lead over Roglič in the general classification.
Couple that with the fact that O’Connor is angling to win his first Grand Tour and fulfill the promise he’s long shown as a GC man, that Roglič is racing to win his fifth Grand Tour and fourth Vuelta, and that current third- and fourth-place riders Enric Mas (Movistar) and Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPostNL) are both hanging around within a minute-and-a-half of the two leaders, hoping to dash both of their goals. You have all of the makings of a wire-to-wire nail-biter.
The tension and excitement of this year’s Vuelta raise an intriguing question: Is WorldTour racing better without its most dominant riders? For O’Connor, the answer seems to be yes.
Not competing against cycling’s two most prominent and strongest Grand Tour riders for the Australian rider has made this Vuelta, if nothing else, a bit more fun.
“It’s a lot more enjoyable,” O’Connor told Eurosport after Stage 14. “You feel super involved in the race, which is one of the best things. When those two boys are there, and they are a class above, it can be hard because you never have that opportunity. I’ve had this jersey for ten days now, which wasn’t impossible in the Giro. It’s been a pleasure to be here and have that shot.”
But are O’Connor, Roglič, Mas, and Carapaz at the same level as cycling’s superstars?
Not really.
O’Connor is a competent GC contender who, through his first seven WorldTour seasons, has more often found himself fighting for podiums rather than wins. Carapaz has won a Grand Tour (2019’s Giro d’Italia) but has become more of a stage-hunting climber and KOM heavyweight than a proper GC threat of late. Mas, meanwhile, has shown flashes of extraordinary ability throughout his career, finishing second in la Vuelta three times, but, like O’Connor, has yet to seal the proverbial deal.
The closest any of these top four come to being one of the marquee names in the sport is Roglič, who is perhaps more well known for the Tour de France he didn’t win than the three Vueltas and one Giro he did win. However, unlike Pogačar and Vingegaard, Roglič has never been the kind of rider who is almost certain to win a Grand Tour before the race even begins. His inclusion is not a conclusion.
Beyond Roglič, Maz, Carapaz, and O’Connor are certainly no Tadej Pogačar or Jonas Vingegaard, two of cycling’s most notable names who have, in large part, dominated the sport’s headlines for much of the past several years. They’ve also dominated the sport’s crown jewel, winning each of the last four Tours de France.
But comparing anyone to Pogi and Jonas is unfair, given the fact that they are proving to be two generationally talented bike racers: Jonas in the biggest Grand Tour of all and Pogačar in just about everything on the race calendar.
So much talent has forced fans and pundits alike to ask a similar question over the last few months: Do those guys make racing boring?
Of course, you could ask the inverse of that question. Is bike racing more compelling without its biggest stars?
This Vuelta has undoubtedly made the case that, yes, it absolutely is.
After all, one of the main reasons anyone watches any sport is because we don’t know what will happen. To quote legendary Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, “Reality TV is not reality. Sports is.”
And what Coach K meant by that was the fact that, even in the face of overwhelming odds, you can never predict with one-hundred-percent assurance the outcome of a sporting event (one last non-cycling parallel: the ten-win New York Giants beating the 18-0 New England Patriots, arguably the greatest football team ever, in the 2008 Super Bowl).
However, cycling, especially Grand Tour cycling, is one of those rare sports where the odds are often almost impossible to beat. When a sporting event is as protracted as a twenty-one-stage bike race, the favorites will win more often than they are not.
Going into this year’s Tour, we knew it was a two-man race, even if Vingegaard was coming off a horror crash that left him hospitalized for twelve days. And it very much was. As soon as Pogačar pulled the Yellow Jersey on after stage two, everyone knew that, barring a severe crash, the race was all but over (though Carapaz did snatch the maillot jaune from Pogačar for just one stage the following day).
In the eyes of some fans and pundits, Pogačar’s dominance, coupled with the fact that Vingegaard was the only rider who could realistically challenge him, made the world’s greatest bike race a three-week bore (I disagree, choosing instead to enjoy the fact that we were witness to perhaps two of the most incredible cycling performances ever, but that’s a different story for a different time).
Simply put, over the last four years, O’Connor, Mas, Carapaz, and, to a lesser extent, Roglič have shown that they can’t compete at the level of those two.
Speaking of la Vuelta’s race leader specifically, O’Connor is a big personality—a firebrand whose competitive spirit was on full display in the latest iteration of the Netflix hit series Tour de France: Unchained. His results, however, have thus far failed to live up to both his talent and the expectations he puts on himself as a bona fide GC man.
To Pogi and Jonas, he certainly isn’t. But maybe that’s a good thing.
Because without two of cycling’s Grand Tour superheroes (hell, even without rising star Remco Evenepoel, who silenced legions of doubters, this writer included, with his stunning third-place performance in this year’s Tour de France), we are being treated to one hell of a bike race.
That is, of course, if you prefer watching a bigger group of lesser talents in a closer race to watching a pair of titans doing things no one has ever done before.
In that regard, the question should be posed to the viewer as such: Would you rather watch close racing, or would you rather watch athletes making history?
Given that Pogačar and Vingegaard skipped the Vuelta, we’re lucky to get both.
