Fabulous Cancellera

How could you not be completely blown away by Fabian Cancellera‘s performance at the Paris-Roubaix race last weekend. In a 145 mile ride race, he pulled away from the peleton with slightly under 30 miles to go, and finished a full 2 minutes ahead of second place… and this was after winning the Tour Of Flanders the previous weekend.

I don’t know how those guys do Paris-Roubaix. The Hell Of The North has to be the toughest one-day ride, if not one of the toughest rides in professional cycling. Sure, some of it is on asphalt, but it’s the sections between the asphalt that tests the riders. The cobblestones and the dust. The pounding those riders endure on the cobblestones has to be just unbelievable and unrelenting, even with the race-specific tires. I can’t ride on surfaces like that at all – the jarring is… well, there’s a road that takes you through Everglades National Park here. I’ve ridden it a bunch of times on century rides and training rides. And the only issue with it is the top layer of asphalt has really deteriorated. So it’s bumpy, quite bumpy… but it’s not cobblestones! And after about 10 minutes of riding on that crappy asphalt , I’m ready to pull over to the side, jump off the S-Works, and throw it as far as I can into the sawgrass and let the gators chomp it into tiny shreds of carbon. So how the pros maintain that for 6.5 hours is beyond me. And that’s not even considering the dust they are forced to inhale on the ride.

As I watched Cancellera’s astounding performance, I thought a lot about the way he rides. Fabian amazes me… he may never win the Tour, but he is an unbelievable Time Trialist – literally the fastest man on two wheels over a TT distance, and clearly one of the best one-day racers too. Now, triathletes have this ongoing debate about cadence. Some triathletes believe you need to turn over at around 95 rpm – a relatively high cadence. And there are those, like me, stump pullers who grind it out at around 72 or 73. I like it because I transition from the bike to the run more easily. That’s just me though. So if you compare Cancellera to a rider like Alberto Contador, last year’s Tour winner, Contador is this highly strung screaming little V-10 – an F1 racing engine that redlines at 19,000 RPMs. Cancellera, on the other hand, reminds me of an engine in a TVR I once owned. With a big beast of an aluminum V8, that had been tuned… not stressed or strained, but tuned, and completely optimized for its design. It was happy to cruise along all day at a low RPM, docile, and very polite, thank you… after all it was British, but if you ever needed to be reminded how much power it had or what lurked under the hood, all you had to do was just tip your right toe ever so slightly and awaken the beast. Cancellera reminds me of that beastly engine when you just stuck your foot well and truly in it… he’s on full song all the time, pulling from a bottomless reserve of torque, but doing it… seemingly effortlessly, and never, ever running out of gas.