I've tried to explain to my non-cycling-fan friends what two seconds means in racing. This morning, for example, someone said to me "Lance isn't doing so well this year, huh?"
Huh? He's down by two seconds! To a guy who isn't a contender!
Now, I knew Dave Zabriskie wasn't going to be in yellow much longer. Discovery is dominant in the team time trial, and going into today I expected them to win, though not without a fight from CSC. I was pretty impressed when I checked out the standings mid-morning and saw this:
16:26 - CSC With The Best TimeAt the 25km mark, the CSC team has set a time that’s six seconds faster than Liberty Seguros. If they can maintain this pace, Dave Zabriskie will hold onto the yellow jersey after stage four.
Then there was this:
17:08 - 2km To Go For CSCThere are less than 2,000m to go for Dave Zabriskie and his CSC colleagues. They have set the fastest time at every check today.
Then in the two seconds it took me to refresh the display:
17:09 - Zabriskie Crashes!Dave Zabriskie has touched the wheels of one of this team-mates. The yellow jersey is back on his bike but he has lost contact with his team-mates!
How long does it take to go down, two seconds, maybe?
The rest of CSC kept going, of course...the time for the team is taken from the fifth man in, so they still had a shot at beating Discovery [as an aside, I just typed Postal] even leaving Zabriskie in a bloody heap. As it happened, they came in two seconds behind Discovery [I just did it again...P...o...perhaps I need an auto-correct macro for this]. I'm thinking that two seconds may possibly have been swallowed up by the team's reaction to the crash. Speculation, of course, but count it out loud...two seconds is nothing. Except for Dave Zabriskie and CSC today, when two seconds were everything.
Graham Watson's Tour de France
Posted by Nic at July 5, 2005 02:26 PM | TrackBack