princes besieged

volta a catalunya stage six

It is raining. At the start in the coastal town of Salou, it’s anything but beachy. Puddles collect in any small depression that will let them. Men zip up their gilets, make little conversations among themselves. These conversations are probably tense, for this is a tense situation. It is tense because, as it stands, the top ten in the general classification of the Volta a Catalunya spans an exceedingly narrow thirty-five seconds from the leader João Almeida of UAE Team Emirates to the 10th place of UNO-X’s young Norwegian, Torstein Træen. Almeida himself and Arkea-Samsic’s Nairo Quintana will start the day locked in combat over a single second, snagged the previous afternoon by Almeida during an intermediate sprint. Indeed, this is perhaps the closest GC to be found in a one week stage race in recent memory — one can’t get much narrower than a single second deciding who will wear which jersey. Without a time trial to fight over or the Slovenes present to inflict their punishment, the Volta a Catalunya seems, quite frankly, very open.

Yesterday at E3 Harelbeke, Wout van Aert and Christophe Laporte of Jumbo Visma pulled a Paris-Nice stage one, finishing arm and arm together in a Mapei-esque display of complete and utter dominance. But today, we are looking at a different Jumbo Visma — here in Catalunya, they’ve all but disappeared. Here in Catalunya, hierarchies have, in some ways, tumbled. This season, we are beginning to discern two categories emerging in professional men’s road cycling. If one category of cycling, the Tadej Pogačar-Jumbo Visma variety show, has (with the exception of the torturous antics of Primož Roglič) gotten pretty old, then the other category, call it the B-reel or what have you, seems much more exciting.

One expects a UAE Team Emirates roster with João Almeida, Marc Soler, and the Spanish boy-wonder Juan Ayuso to comfortably smother things, yet this has not come to fruition in Catalunya. Even the once-formidable Ineos Grenadiers who, this time last year, were claiming entire podiums for themselves at these stage races, have been somewhat put in their place. The constant parade of sicknesses and absences and general carnage in terms of DNFs and DNSes only serve to make things more and more narrow. Men like Simon Yates or Alejandro Valverde — big ticket favorites for this race — have already checked out. Is this a strange and in some ways artificial turn of events? Yes. Does it matter? For entertainment purposes, no.

Thus in Salou, there is an aura of palpable desperation. The Volta a Catalunya is a considerable prize in its own right, bizarre (and perhaps disappointing) circumstances be damned. It is an open competition. It is a very close open competition with only two days left to make the difference. This day is not hard, but it is tricky: two climbs in the opening half, followed by a long journey of hiccups and descents, culminating in another climb near the end. In the rain, this is a parcours that could claim people. If it stays together, the race will all come down to tomorrow’s infamous circuit that punches again and again and again in a long battle of attrition.

Today, however, something remarkable happens in order to avoid that fate. Remarkable and unexpected, perhaps even unheard of since the days of cycling where such things were frequent, the heady days of midcentury which our sport is increasingly imitating in direct contrast to the mountain-train micromanaging of the last decade. Off camera, with 132 kilometers left to go, three riders escape at the crest of the Coll de les Llebres. Not an unusual situation by any means, well within the narrative script of a lumpy stage like today’s. Except the three riders are Ineos Grenadiers’ Luke Plapp (not unusual, he’s 44 minutes down), Richard Carapaz (9th in the general classification and 27 seconds down) and Sergio Higuita who is 3rd in the general classification, a mere seven seconds down from Almeida. At first, this appears to be a quotidian sprint for the bonus seconds at the top of the climb. But then the trio eke out a gap. On the descent, winding through the shadowy sage foliage of the Catalan coast, that gap grows until it reaches the steady state of a breakaway.

This, on its face, is a bit absurd. It seems almost stupid. It is stupid. 132 kilometers is a suicidal distance for a three-man breakaway consisting of two general classification riders. On the second climb, this should come back, right? Everyone expects this to come back. But the only change is that Plapp is dropped. Higuita and Carapaz, now all alone, have claimed for themselves a minute and twenty-three seconds. That’s not a terminal, critical distance, mind you. The peloton, in theory, have the capability to keep Higuita and Carapaz in check. It’s a matter of physics: dozens of men have far more firepower than two, no matter how good the two South Americans may be.

But those dozens of men have to be organized.

a machiavellian interlude

Cycling is a tad Machiavellian.¹ It is a game of energy and strength disparities (i.e. a game of war), but it is also a game of politics and diplomacy. In a Machiavellian framework, one can understand each team as a principality and each team leader as a prince surrounded by ministers. “Nothing,” Machiavelli wrote, “makes a prince more esteemed than great undertakings and showing himself to be extraordinary.” Carapaz and Higuita are two such princes. In fact, a passage from Chapter 21 of The Prince so accurately describes the ambush these two princes are in the midst of pulling over João Almeida and UAE Team Emirates — the more powerful yet losing principality — it is worth quoting in full²:

“A prince is also respected when he is a true friend and a true enemy: that is, when he declares himself to be on the side of one prince against another, without reserve. Such a policy will always be more useful than remaining neutral, for if two powerful neighbors of yours come to blows, they will be of the kind that, when one has emerged victorious, you will either have cause to fear the victor or you will not. In either of these two cases, it will always be more useful for you to declare yourself and to wage open warfare.”

In other words, Carapaz and Higuita can either wait neutrally in the peloton for their teams and the teams of their shared enemies to duke it out in the finale, with much narrower gains to be made, or they can conspire and choose open collaboration, open warfare. They take the second route. The job now of João Almeida and his team is to work, which they do, albeit with little cohesion. No one will help them do this. Everyone has their own interests, their own reserves of energy to protect. Their own conspiracies. João Almeida is the race leader; as the prince of UAE Team Emirates, it is his responsibility to get things under control. There is no way in hell second-place Nairo Quintana’s Arkea Samsic will be putting people in the wind when UAE are right there.

Machiavelli is a useful source for sportswriting, partially because he is witty and very quotable. One of the wittiest Machiavelli-isms is the one about intelligence, which is as follows: “There are three kinds of intelligence: one understands on its own; the second discerns what others understand; and the third neither understands by itself nor through others. The first kind is most excellent, the second is excellent, and the third is useless.” Higuita and Carapaz possess the first kind of intelligence — they know themselves, their task, their strategy and their odds of achieving it. Nairo Quintana, Arkea-Samsic and the other competing teams — including Bora Hansgrohe and Ineos Grenadiers, whose riders are escaped — possess the second kind of intelligence — they are playing the game of manipulation, making inferences, acting in self-interest based on the interests of others. Rather unfortunately, UAE Team Emirates, as we will see, possesses the third type of intelligence. And they are useless.

the endgame, or: whither juan ayuso

This situation — this remarkable, unexpected, and beguilingly stable situation —persists for one hundred kilometers. Nothing changes until a mere 40 kilometers to the line. At a certain point, it becomes clear to the other princes that UAE Team Emirates is incompetent at bringing this back. Now it becomes a concern for other GC men like Quintana, Bahrain Victorious’ Wout Poels and Uno-X’s Tobias Johannessen, who have to limit their own losses. Quintana’s team won’t work no matter what because they are counting on the other teams being chaffed enough to take up the chase, and in this they are correct. Uno-X decide to take a pull. Then Bahrain. The final climb approaches. The time gap has gone down to around two minutes. If Higuita and Carapaz are able to hang on just a little longer, they will pull this off. The scales are tipping ever in their favor. But the rain has made the roads slick and treacherous, the cold has made the two men stuff newspapers up their shirts. They are wet and shivery and miserable and so very alone.

UAE Team Emirates are forced to retake the front on the final climb. The rain splatters everywhere. Things are growing fractious in the race leader’s principality. Nineteen-year old Juan Ayuso assumes the head of the race. On the descent, he pulls out a little gap. It turns into an attack. Juan Ayuso has done this before to his own teammates, in Trofeo Laigueglia, where he placed second in an all-UAE podium. Ayuso is a Machiavellian actor³ , but whether he is actually acting in his own interests against those of the prince Almeida is up for interpretation. In the beginning, it certainly seems like it because Ayuso is screaming down this descent almost without regard for his own life. He is riding furiously. He is splitting things up, and Almeida himself is on the wrong side of that split. Ayuso may have made a rookie mistake and panicked. He may have arrogantly taken the race into his own hands, frustrated with the efforts of his team. He may have been so tunnel-visioned by adrenaline that he didn’t realize Almeida wasn’t, in fact, in his wheel. Regardless, he acted like a fool.

All alone in between the two up front and his team behind, Ayuso appears confused, as though having been woken up from a particularly bad dream. He approaches the neutral service bike and begs them for a time gap, but they know nothing. He taps into his radio. He is clearly distressed. He sits up, zips up his jacket, and waits for his team. The road flattens out. The chase becomes organized, because the Australian sprinter Caden Groves of BikeExchange has hung on and is starting to think about the win. They claw back time in small fistfuls, but owing to simple mathematics, it never really comes back.

We’ve seen lots of pairs riding across the finish line arm and arm in cycling lately — once a rare phenomenon, this has become surprisingly (and perhaps unsettlingly) common. But the two princes out front still maintain their own interests. Their allegiance has proved fruitful, but generosity has its limits. It’s a sprint a deux, and Richard Carapaz takes it on the line. Higuita claims the leader’s jersey, having stolen nearly a minute from Almeida. Carapaz sits just sixteen seconds behind, more than ready to pounce in the final day. Caden Groves gets his sprint for third.

All of this is terrible for UAE Team Emirates.

When Primož Roglič uttered his aphorism, “no risk, no glory,” at the Vuelta last season, he couldn’t have known that the entirety of cycling would take it as its motto. Cycling — whether in the form of what we’ve seen today, or in the insane descent of Matej Mohorič at Milan-Sanremo, the gall of Pogačar at Strade-Bianche, the guts of Simon Yates in the final stage of Paris-Nice — has entered an era of profound risk taking. With massive payoffs. It is every man for himself.

The Slovene poet Edvard Kocbek⁴ once wrote:

No war knows pity
and no peace knows permanence,
victories are worthless
and pacts prevail without love.

So too it has been in cycling. What that means for future races is, judging by what we’ve seen so far, mixed. Dominance is expected where it exists.

Where it doesn’t — as in Catalunya — one can only expect chaos.

1. Niccolò Machiavelli, for those wondering, was a Renaissance diplomat and philosopher often credited with being the father of political science. He served as an advisor to the powerful Florentine Medici family, and was famous for his somewhat cynical treatises on realpolitik, specifically The Prince.

2. Machiavelli Niccolò, and Peter E. Bondanella. “Chapter XXI.” The Prince (Oxford World's Classics), Oxford University Press, New York, New York, 2005. Ebook.

3. “When you see that the minister thinks more about himself than about you, and that in all his deeds he seeks out his own interests, such a man as this will never be a good minister, and you will never be able to trust him.”

4. Simic, C., Taufer, V., Scammell, M., & Kocbek, E. (2004). Nothing is Lost: Selected Poems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 139.