Yesterday’s stage win by George Hincapie in the 2005 Tour de France was, barring something quite remarkable in the final week, my highlight of this year’s (excellent) Tour. In fact, it may well be the highlight of quite a few Tours!
Road racing like the Tour is held together by a very complex network of social interactions built on rich interactions of competition and trust, as well as decades of tradition. It’s full of shifting alliances and challenges, many of which lend themselves to a Prisoner’s Dilemma style analysis.
Hincapie has supported Lance Armstrong for years, being the only rider to be on his team in each of Lance’s 6 (and now very likely 7) Tour victories. Yet, until yesterday, George had never won a Tour stage. He’d had considerable success in other races, but never a Tour stage. In fact no one on one of Lance’s teams (except, of course, Lance himself) had ever won a Tour stage. Yesterday was the reward for all those years of hard work and loyalty. Like the best rewards, though, it wasn’t a gift – Lance didn’t “let him win”. Sure, the team allowed him to remain in the breakaway, and you can bet they would have told him to wait if Lance had found himself in difficulty. But it was George that stayed with the leaders throughout an absolutely killer series of vicious climbs, and it was George that took the sprint at the end. When you have over 100 extraordinarily talented cyclists in the race no one, not even someone as powerful as Lance Armstrong, can promise, ensure, or dictate anything. No one could give this to George, which I’m sure makes it all the sweeter.
To see the emotion on George’s face when he crossed the line, and the embrace when Lance came in a bit later, was right up there (for me) with great moments like The Look.
Lance has never won a Tour without winning at least one stage, and I think there’s always (almost always?) been at least one mountain stage win. The mountain top finishes are done for the year, and Lance has yet to win a stage, so the most likely remaining opportunity will be the final time trial. I suspect, though, that even though Lance will probably be disappointed if he doesn’t win at least one stage on his way to a historic seventh Tour victory, yesterday’s win by George Hincapie will come damn close to making up for it.
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