For my first trial, I've decided not to focus on the com-plex situation in baseball or the upcoming turnaround of Virginia football.Rather, having spent most of the summer in Europe, it's only fair to introduce myself by putting the spotlight on a sport that is highly celebrated overseas but gets much less attention than it deserves in our country:cycling.
After studying abroad in Spain for six weeks, I had the honor of attending the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris, the culmination of the three-week event that has come to be the World Cup of bicycling.
Thanks to his four-year dominance of the race, all of you must at least know who Lance Armstrong is, something about what he does, and that he had to overcome cancer. You also probably know that the doctors who treated him gave him little chance to live, much less walk, ride a bike and raise a family.
But Armstrong has done everything of the sort, and that's a story everyone likes to hear. What you may not know is how he won, who he beat to get there and what the real skills and strategies in bicycle racing are.
One might argue it's dull to sit through hours of watching people ride through the countryside, and
well, yeah, it can be. I admit it used to blow my mind that natives of some small French towns would sit on the side of the road or in cafes all afternoon waiting to watch 180 riders whiz by in about 10 seconds.
We don't need to broadcast all of that -- it's like watching the Boston Marathon over and over.
However, watching the race over the past years has taught me one thing: experiencing a mountain stage is fantastic. That's where the leaders start to take over and you can see strategies start to break down as the sprinters separate from the climbers. You also see why cycling is such a team sport.
One of the main reasons Armstrong has dominated like he has is the help he gets from his big Blue Train of U.S. Postal Service riders. When you've got two riders in front of you to break the air resistance up the steepest of Alps, it's a whole lot easier than going up on your own.
I can't think of a better reason for making the sport better known in the U.S. than the fact it has a genuine hero. Lance Armstrong is the man, and there's more proof to that now that the French officially closed their lengthy drug probe on him just this week.
That's right, even after cancer Armstrong was ridiculed and repeatedly accused of using performance-enhancing drugs by the French. Their argument was, how could he win such a physically and mentally grueling event that covers over 2,000 miles in three weeks without some sort of illegal boost?
I can see where they might be suspicious. The old "Winners Don't Use Drugs" reversed itself in May of last year when 1998 Tour de France winner Marco Pantani, always one of my favorite riders and perhaps the best pure climber I've seen before Armstrong, tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in the middle of the Giro d'Italia. My then-21-year-old brother Jeffrey, who idolized the Italian known as "Il Pirata" since the mid-1990s and even tries to look like him at times, saw his dreams crushed when he heard the words "Dopa, dopa" at a caf
in Italy.
Because of France's tradition to look down on leaders until they start losing, Armstrong does not let the French heat burn him out, knowing he'll be revered one day when he finally can't keep off his opponents.
Until then, try to show some support and pay attention not just to Armstrong but the rest of the biking crowd as well. Find out more about Spain's Joseba Beloki, Italy's Abraham Olano, and Colombia's Santiago Botero just as you've done for Japan's Ichiro Suzuki in baseball and Germany's Dirk Nowitzki in basketball.
Whatever you find out is the reason why professional biking is worth getting into, you should agree with Armstrong:it's not about the bike.
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