As most of you are prob­a­bly unaware of, start­ing on July 1^st and run­ning for a good three weeks straight is what cyclists con­sider to be “the super­bowl” of cycling, or as it is more prop­erly iden­ti­fied, the Tour de France. Now for any Amer­i­can, the Tour de France has tra­di­tion­ally been a source of pride. Our cycling hero,Lance Arm­strong, kicked cancer’s ass and then went to France to win 7 con­sec­u­tive Tour de France titles, which was not only sweet because he won the world’s great­est cycling com­pe­ti­tion, but more so because he embar­rassed the French each and every time he did so.

In fact, the only other ath­letes who have embar­rassed the French more are those com­pris­ing the  Men’s 4X100 Freestlye Relay at the Bei­jing Olympics. Those men quite lit­er­ally gave France the lead for 99% of the race only to snatch vic­tory from French hands within the last hun­dredths of a sec­ond. In tra­di­tional Amer­i­can fash­ion, they also set a new world stan­dard by swim­ming the fastest 100 Freestyle split ever to be recorded, just to make vic­tory that much sweeter. But I digress, when Lance Arm­strong announced that he was return­ing to cycling next year Amer­i­cans every­where were expect­ing another French ass whoop­ing. Not only would he beat the French seven times in a row after beat­ing can­cer, but he would also beat them after retir­ing for a few years and aging past his prime, just to remind them how badass we Amer­i­cans are.

Lance almost did it too, he got third place in his come­back tour behind Andy Schleck and the win­ner Alberto Con­ta­dor who are not only the post Arm­strong era’s best cyclists, but also some of the best cyclists of all time. While third place cer­tainly wasn’t the ass whoop­ing we Amer­i­cans were look­ing for, Arm­strong assured us that such a plac­ing was only because he was prim­ing him­self for an even more epic ass whoop­ing at this year’s tour.

For a while things looked good for Lance. He had bet­ter fit­ness start­ing off this year because he had par­tic­i­pated in a vari­ety of grand tours and other races from his come­back sea­son, and if that wasn’t enough he even hired cycling’s most pro­lific (though ques­tion­able) sports sci­en­tists in Allen Lim. To put a cherry on top, Arm­strong even for­mu­lated his “Team Radioshack” team, or “Team the Shack” team or what­ever the hell they call Radio shack nowa­days com­pletely around him. He hired the best sup­port cyclists pos­si­ble and it made it very clear to them that their job was to ride for him to win. It seemed as if Arm­strong was cov­er­ing every angle in order to get every com­pet­i­tive edge to kick­ass this year,  but like a really crappy white bas­ket­ball player who also hap­pens to be blind, Lance dropped the ball.

On the first stage Arm­strong started off “well”. He got fourth over­all in the pro­logue and was five sec­onds ahead of his arch-nemesis rival evil twin coun­ter­part Alberto Con­ta­dor. Now, in the months lead­ing up to the tour every cycling pub­li­ca­tion built up the rivalry between Arm­strong and Con­ta­dor mak­ing it out to be the biggest clash of forces ever. Con­ta­dor is cur­rently the world’s top cyclist, and Lance Arm­strong WAS the world’s top cyclist.  It was the ulti­mate show­down, and of course the media ana­lyzed every lit­tle bit of inter­ac­tion between the two in order to per­pet­u­ate the rivalry as much as possible.

In fact on the day of the pro­logue, Bicy­cling magazine’s ded­i­cated Lance Arm­strong ass-kisser cor­re­spon­dent, Bill Strick­land imme­di­ately decided to praise Arm­strong for his minus­cule lead over Con­ta­dor, prac­ti­cally claim­ing him the vic­tor by writ­ing “But it’s the small­est time gap — the five sec­onds between Arm­strong and last year’s win­ner, Con­ta­dor — that has the biggest mean­ing.” Now I don’t know about any­one else, but five sec­onds isn’t a hell of a lot of time. That gap is lit­er­ally the dif­fer­ence between tak­ing a cou­ple of sips of water or not, and in a race that lasts three weeks and goes through­out the coun­try of France, five sec­onds does not have any mean­ing at all.

After that one ini­tial pro­logue race, every­thing went down hill for Arm­strong. He crashed in Stage 2, had an untimely punc­ture in Stage 3 and in the fol­low­ing stages his posi­tion in the over­all stand­ings slowly eroded lower and lower. Then came stage 8. Stage 8 was really the first climb­ing stage of the tour and as such, it was the stage when the men began to sep­a­rate from the boys. As the pace of the pelo­ton was about to ramp up on one of the major climbs, Arm­strong fell after he clipped his pedal on a round­about. Obe­di­ently his team dropped back to bring him up to pace only to have Arm­strong nearly crash again and lose con­tact with the pelo­ton. By the end of the day, Arm­strong was 11 min­utes behind the lead­ers and had vir­tu­ally no shot of win­ning the tour.

As Bill Strick­land wrote “The Tour hadn’t destroyed a cham­pion like this since 1996. Back then, Miguel Indurain had won five Tours in a row (the first to ever achieve that many con­sec­u­tively).” What baf­fles me is the fact that peo­ple seem to blame “the tour” for mak­ing Arm­strong lose the race. Instead, why don’t we blame the per­son who actu­ally lost the race, Lance Arm­strong. With all of his Allen Lim ther­mo­dy­nam­ics probes, Chris Carmichael train­ing, and tai­lored domes­tique team, Arm­strong still man­aged to some­how screw up what could have been one of the great­est come­backs in cycling his­tory. Now I under­stand that crashes and “mechan­i­cals” hap­pen in cycling, but that’s STILL NO EXCUSE for los­ing. For instance, wind, rain, heat, and snow all affect the game of foot­ball and they do change the course of the game. When a team loses in foot­ball on a par­tic­u­larly snowy day, they don’t blame it on the weather, they blame it on their inabil­ity to tai­lor their game­play into an effec­tive strat­egy given the weather con­di­tions. Like­wise, Arm­strong didn’t lose because he crashed, he lost because he couldn’t recover and change his tac­tics even with one of cycling’s great­est sup­port teams built around him. Quite frankly, if Arm­strong let some­thing as “com­mon­place” in cycling as a crash ruin his tour, then he didn’t even deserve to win in the first place.

Now what was great about this whole sit­u­a­tion was the dam­age con­trol that Bicycling’s Bill Strick­land tried to put into place. At first he wrote about Lance’s new strat­egy which was to  ride sup­port for his team. See­ing as how Lance is kind of a prick, he decided against that. Instead he chose to get his ass handed to him on the fol­low­ing stages because he wanted to con­serve his energy until he felt he could attack on a stage that he could win. This strat­egy totally sucked because Arm­strong didn’t even win in the stage that he was mak­ing his main attack on, which in turn made his time loss in the over­all stand­ings a com­plete waste. Real­iz­ing that Arm­strong had noth­ing left, Strick­land tried to jus­tify Armstrong’s suck­i­ness by sug­gest­ing that  it would be noble for Arm­strong  to actu­ally fin­ish last.

Arm­strong should achieve the feat of not win­ning in a flam­boy­ant, record-setting and con­tro­ver­sial way that befits his legacy: He should sum­mon his leg­endary willpower and sprint back­ward through the GC to become the first Amer­i­can Lanterne Rouge. I shit you not, appar­ently the French are so used to com­ing in last place at the Tour de France that they decided to make becom­ing last just as impor­tant as win­ning first. Not only is this logic in and of itself absolutely absurd, but for Strick­land to sug­gest that the great­est and most accom­plished cyclist in his­tory fin­ish last, is sim­ply insulting.

Then of course on the final stage of the tour, after doing absolutely noth­ing for his team other than mak­ing them come back to save him time and time again, Arm­strong made his team wear dif­fer­ent jersey’s in order to mar­ket his Live­strong foun­da­tion. Now I’m all for sup­port­ing can­cer aware­ness, and fight­ing against it, how­ever chang­ing jersey’s like that is against the rules and no mat­ter how jus­ti­fied the action was, or what the rea­sons were behind chang­ing them, it was still against the rules. Obvi­ously, its a very silly rule but I’m the kind of per­son that believes rules should be fol­lowed out of respect for the peo­ple that put them in place. If your friend doesn’t like you to walk around with shoes inside his house, you take them off right at the door. Sure it’s stu­pid, but if you don’t do it, you’re just being a prick for no rea­son, and that’s exactly what Arm­strong was being when he decided to make that decision.

At the end of the day, Lance’s tour sucked. He got into stu­pid crashes, made his team come save him time and time again like an abu­sive father who hap­pens to be alco­holic pes­ter­ing his sons to buy him beer just so he can get drunk and beat them again. Ulti­mately, he got his ass handed to him by his great­est neme­sis rival in the uni­verse, Alberto Con­ta­dor. As always, in a post tour write-up Bill Strick­land was quick to come to the res­cue with some dam­age con­trol. He wrote about all of the other cycling greats who even­tu­ally col­lapsed dur­ing the tour.

In 1986, the five-time win­ner Bernard Hin­ault went back on a promise to help his team­mate Greg LeMond win the Tour (the year before, the clearly supe­rior Lemond had sac­ri­ficed a cer­tain vic­tory to aid Hin­ault) and repeat­edly attacked the Amer­i­can in the moun­tains, lead­ing to one of the ugliest—thought greatest—Tours in his­tory. When LeMond won, Hin­ault first claimed he’d rid­den so aggres­sively and self­ishly in order to wear down oppo­nents, then later said he’d done so to ensure that every­one would have no doubt LeMond was wor­thy of the vic­tory. That was his last Tour.

While it is nice that Strick­land found like five exam­ples of this, it still doesn’t jus­tify or explain why Lance Arm­strong lost. Lance Arm­strong lost because he was entered in the race way past his prime, and I per­son­ally don’t think he trained up for it prop­erly. In the weeks lead­ing up to the tour Alberto Con­ta­dor trained in the Pyre­ness moun­tains, and the cob­bles of Paris Rouibax, all aspects of the tour that he needed to work on. What did Arm­strong do? Enter a bunch of shitty races like the Tour of Cal­i­for­nia, that stu­pid Gila race that doesn’t let you actu­ally ride for your pro team, and a bunch of other weak sauce races. Of course to make up for this, Arm­strong had super sports sci­en­tist Allen Lim to close the gap for his lack of train­ing, but at the end of the day, Arm­strong didn’t want to put in the hard work rac­ing and train­ing to win the tour, and it obvi­ously showed when he got destroyed this year.

Bet­ter luck next year Lance, oh wait.