I had the usual view: crits were a good night out but hardly competitive. But did that mean they weren't important? So I started putting together notes and quotes. Finally I thought I'd better get it off my puter as it just kept growing.
So here it is. Apps for the length. Print it and read bits during the duller parts of the Vuelta. If nothing else, it's food for thought. Behind the Tour de France there used to be a Shadow Tour. One that took place in the weeks after the Tour itself ended but received only a fraction of the Tour's coverage.
Here one day, there the next, speeding yes, in that sense too from this village to that, driving overnight and through the day. In many ways, this Shadow Tour demanded a lot more of its participants than the Tour de France itself did.
David Walsh, when writing his biography of Sean Kelly, decided he wanted to look inside this Shadow Tour. They were too knackered after a month tear-arsing around France following the real thing to be bothered spending another month chasing cyclists again just to report on a series of crappy little crits, most of which were fixed in one way or another. Plus there wasn't as much free food on offer. The only people who really cared about these races were the people in whose towns and villages they took place.
Plus, of course, the riders themselves. Riders will forget the normal rules in the pursuit of money. However, a difference between then and now was in the disparity between a rider's basic wage - the salary paid to him by his team - and the amount he earned independently, usually through appearance fees negotiated by his agent. And, for most of the riders in the peloton , that made the difference between a year in which, financially speaking, they were just getting by and a year in which they had enough cash left over to put something aside for their post-cycling future.
