Month: March 2019

News that the team will keep its massive budget all but ensures its dominance at the Tour de France

When British TV network Sky announced in December that it would end sponsorship of its eponymous pro cycling team, the team’s future instantly became the most important issue of the off-season. Sky is the most dominant team in stage racing, thanks largely to a sport-leading budget of over $43 million in 2017, more than double the average budget of teams in the WorldTour. Aside from its own destiny, the team’s demise or survival would influence cycling’s competitive balance, dramatically shaping how races themselves are won or lost. Those questions were answered today.

In a press release, Team Sky announced that Ineos, a major international chemicals company headquartered in London, will take over the ownership of the team on May 1. (Team Sky is unusual in pro cycling in that the entire operation is owned by the sponsor, instead of a separate holding company. Switching sponsorship means selling the team.) While this is great for the team, it’s decidedly more ambivalent for the health of the sport overall.

The news, rumored for weeks, puts an end to the speculation—a team merger! A buyout by former rival Oleg Tinkov! A Colombian title sponsor for new star Egan Bernal!—that has followed the team in the early part of the 2019 season. Ineos-née-Sky will remain firmly British. Hell, the jersey colors might barely change.

But the biggest news item is the budget. A mid-season sponsor switch is rare in pro cycling, and means that Ineos is assuming Sky’s current contractual financial obligations (which have likely grown since 2017). That is: the team will continue to be the Imperial Death Star of pro cycling, vaporizing the competition with superior talent.

What’s more, some of the stories around Ineos’s impending sponsorship have suggested that the budget in future years might actually increase. So the team will continue at least at its current level, a prospect that is probably not great for the sport overall.

Team Sky is pro cycling’s one percent. They’ve recently dominated the Tour de France, the sport’s marquee event: six wins the last seven years, including a 1-2 finish in 2012 and a 1-3 finish last year. The only year they didn’t win, 2014, star rider Chris Froome crashed out early.

Led by general manager Dave Brailsford, Sky talks a good game about marginal gains and better training, but there are no major trade secrets in endurance sports, no one weird trick that Sky knows that other teams don’t. Sky’s advantage is budget, which allows it to buy virtually any rider it wants, race them sparingly, hire top support staff and hold training camps to build fitness for a few specially targeted events, and then strangle stage races with the inexorable application of brute force over seven to 21 days. (These tactics work less well in the wilder one-day events, a discipline where Sky is far less successful.)

What’s more, Sky’s outsize budget has always strained at the limits of a realistic return on investment, according to some knowledgeable players in the sport I’ve spoken with in the past, like Jonathan Vaughters, manager of the EF Education First team. Team Sky strenuously disputes this and told me last year that independent research from Nielsen shows more than $550 million in exposure the last nine years. But team representatives did not provide any data to support these claims, and measuring value in sports sponsorships is notoriously inexact.

Since Sky’s budget began to grossly outstrip rivals in 2012, I’ve viewed the team as a patronage sponsorship, personally driven by James Murdoch, the former chairman and CEO of Sky. That hunch was largely confirmed when Sky announced, shortly after the company sold to U.S. telecom giant Comcast, that it would stop sponsorship. (Murdoch was always set to leave the company when the sale closed; without him, there was no political will for a $30 million line item for a cycling team.)

Patronage sponsorships are hardly new in cycling. But as a sustainable business model, they’re questionable, depending on the fortunes and whims of sugar-daddy backers. Sometimes, funders get frustrated and leave teams to fold (Tinkov/Tinkoff, Rick Delaney and Aqua Blue). Sometimes, they pass away before a replacement can be found (Andreas Rihs and BMC). Sometimes, they come with uncomfortable geopolitical baggage (UAE-Emirates).

I suspect Ineos is the same. Sure, Ineos is a massive company, with some $85 billion a year in revenue. But the financial realities that made sponsorship unattractive to Comcast are still present. So what accounts for this largesse? Likely two words: James Ratcliffe.

Ratcliffe is Ineos’s co-founder, majority shareholder, chairman, and CEO. He is—or was, having recently moved to Monaco for tax purposes—the richest man in Britain, with an estimated net worth of over $13 billion. He’s also a sports enthusiast and, like a lot of rich people, appears to enjoy owning expensive toys. Ineos bankrolls a sailing team targeting the 2021 America’s Cup (on a $140 million budget) and Ratcliffe bought a Swiss Super League football club in late 2017 (an offer to buy top English Premier League team Chelsea was reportedly rebuffed). Team Sky must have been an alluring opportunity. Sky is expensive for pro cycling, but cheap compared to a yacht club or top football team. And at current budgets, it can almost guarantee a win in one of the most prestigious sports events in the world. That’s quite a plaything.

That’s the bigger problem here. Without some way to level out budgets, deep-pocketed sponsors will always be able to buy success in pro cycling. Team Sky likes to say that tearing the team down for its success doesn’t help the sport; what other teams should do is invest like they have. That’s too cute by half. There are certainly teams that underperform their budget (one of the least-reported stories in pro cycling is the shambolic mismanagement of Katusha, one of the few teams with a budget reportedly close to Sky’s). But given what rival teams like Jumbo-Visma, Sunweb, and Mitchelton-Scott have accomplished on smaller budgets, I guarantee that you if you gave any of them $40 million a year, within two years they’d put Brailsford’s team on its ear. The problem is that that kind of money does not seem to be out there; if it was, other teams would find it. And, at least for corporate marketing departments accountable to a real bottom line, no amount of wishcasting by Team Sky staff will change that.

Think about it: Sky’s success has firmly established the price of entry to be competitive at the Tour, which does not seem in line with financial fundamentals for marketing. That means that companies looking at a conventional sponsorship, tied to, you know, reality, don’t see an attractive opportunity, leaving the wealthy-patron model as the only viable path to a competitive Tour team.

More to the point, for fans, Ineos’s backing suggests that the Tour de France, at least, will continue to be dominated by a single team for the foreseeable future. Yes, Froome and 2018 Tour winner Geraint Thomas are nearing their mid-30s, when Grand Tour performance begins to decline precipitously. But the team is stocked with young stars like Bernal and Ivan Sosa (who was set to sign with another team last year before a late offer from Sky led him to flip). And with their budget assured, they can confidently pursue stars from other teams as well. Short of another wealthy team patron starting an arms race, Sky’s dominance at the Tour looks set for the next season or two at least.

Rivalries are good for sport. Bostonians aside, America gets bored of the plucky underdog New England Patriots winning yet another Super Bowl. But the biggest rivalry in last year’s Tour wasn’t between Sky and another team, it was between Froome and his teammate, eventual winner Geraint Thomas. Dynasties, it turns out, aren’t even always good for themselves.

The new running standards are ridiculously complex. Here’s what that means.

On Sunday, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) issued a press release announcing that it had approved the entry standards for next summer’s Olympic Games. According to the IAAF, athletes will now have “more opportunities” to achieve the standards in their respective events, as the qualifying window had been extended by two months; for most disciplines, it now spans from May 1, 2019 to June 29, 2020. (For the marathon and 50k race walk, the qualifying window goes from January 1, 2019 to May 31, 2020.) What the press release conveniently didn’t mention was that the standards had become significantly harder to achieve. 

How much harder? In the marathon, the qualifying standard for the 2016 Games in Rio was 2:19 for men and 2:45 for women. For the 2020 Olympics, those marks have dropped to 2:11:30 and 2:29:30, respectively. (This dramatic change reflects the fact that the upcoming Olympic marathon fields have been reduced to 80 runners, roughly half the field in Rio.) Meanwhile, in the 5,000-meters, the standards went from 13:25 and 15:20 to 13:13 and 15:10. 

“If this standard was in effect 2016, I would not be an Olympic silver medalist or an Olympian,” the American 5,000-meter runner Paul Chelimo, whose PB before 2016 was 13:21, lamented on Twitter. He added that the stringent new standards were yet another example of how professional track and field was “killing itself.” 

As LetsRun has pointed out, Chelimo’s assertion about not making the team in 2016 might not be entirely accurate. The IAAF only expects about 50 percent of Olympic participants to actually meet the qualification standard. As part of a new “dual qualification system,” the other half of the Olympic field will be determined based on IAAF’s maddeningly opaque World Ranking System. After crunching the numbers, LetsRun determined that Chelimo would likely have qualified for Rio ’16 based on his performances the previous year—despite not hitting the standard. 

Nevertheless, the fact that Chelimo was oblivious to this doesn’t speak well for the bureaucracy that governs the world of professional running. The qualification process for the sport’s most prestigious competition (for better or worse) shouldn’t be so complex that even the athletes can’t comprehend it. 

So how does the process work? Alessio Punzi, IAAF’s Road Running Manager, helped elucidate it for me, via email, using the women’s marathon as an example.

The first step is determining which athletes have achieved the entry standard during the qualification window. For female marathoners, the most straightforward way to do this is to run 2:29:30 or faster on an IAAF-certified course. But in the marathon there are three additional ways of getting the standard inside the window, irrespective of time: you can place in the top ten in the marathon at the 2019 IAAF World Championships in Doha; the top five at an IAAF Gold Label Marathon; or the top ten at a World Marathon Major—i.e. Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. 

From the list of athletes who have achieved the standard, Olympic marathon spots will be allotted with a maximum of three athletes per nation. (Powerhouses like Kenya and Ethiopia are always going to have three runners.) As mentioned, the IAAF is estimating that roughly half the field will get filled up this way. The remaining 40 or so runners will be selected based on their IAAF ranking on June 3, 2020. 

That ranking is based on an obscure methodology which evaluates athletes based on both their time performances and how they placed in various races around the world. It’s a labyrinthine approach that seems likely to cause many athletes to wonder until the last minute whether or not they are going to make the cut.

As others have noted, the new system also dilutes some of the excitement surrounding the U.S. Olympic Trials. In the past, finishing in the top three at the Trials was akin to punching your ticket to the Games, but going forward that probably won’t be the case. In 2016, for instance, two out of the three American marathoners in Rio—namely Jared Ward and Meb Keflezighi—had not run 2:11:30 during the qualifying window. For what it’s worth, these new standards are also likely to impact future Olympic Trials qualifying times—i.e. the vaunted “OTQ”—which amateur runners in this country strive to hit every year. U.S. runners who are on the cusp of making the Trials during this Olympic cycle would hence be well-advised to gather their rosebuds while they may.

Unsurprisingly, opinions in the running punditry world were divided when it came to assessing the merits of the IAAF’s new qualifying system. 

“Under the new qualifying standards . . . there’s going to be less opportunity for the athletes across the board—not just from smaller countries and not just in the marathon—even here in the United States,” a refreshingly pissed off Mario Fraioli wrote this morning’s issue of his running newsletter, The Morning Shakeout. 

Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Nick Willis, himself a two-time Olympic 1,500-meter medalist, defended the new standards on Twitter, arguing that they would up the competitive stakes in marquee track events during the qualifying period. The IAAF, meanwhile, believes that stricter entry standards are necessary to avoid accidentally having too many qualifiers. (The total quota of Olympics track athletes has been reduced to 1,900, down from 2,005 in 2016.) As Nicole Jeffrey, the governing body’s Head of Communications, pointed out to me, the marathon quota for Rio was set at 100 athletes, but both the men’s and women’s fields ended up swelling to between 150 and 200 runners. The “dual qualification” system is supposed to eliminate the issue—albeit at the cost of having a less inclusive Games.

Personally, I hope Willis is right. But it would be tremendous if we could have a system that didn’t require months of analysis from multiple “track people,” as if it were some athletics equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. Paul Chelimo, we feel your pain. 

At a certain point in life, it’s not ethically possible to cheat

When it comes to sports, most cycling-related news stories don’t resonate beyond the insular world of people who wear Lycra—and when they do, they usually involve outrageous tales of cheating. Katie Compton can win her 15th stars-and-stripes jersey and the average schlub won’t read a word about it, but when Femke Van den Driessche gets busted with a motor in her bike, it’s everywhere from ESPN to the New York Times.

So it’s no surprise that when a 90-year-old masters cyclist tested positive for an anabolic agent—after winning a race in which he was the only entrant—and lost both a national title and a world record, the story spread faster than norovirus in a preschool.

As it turned out, the real story was that this guy is a serious badass and the positive result was almost certainly due to the double helping of liver to which he decadently treated himself after setting the world record for a 90-year-old in the 500-meter time trial.

Consequently, USADA let him off with a public warning, but the damage was done. Not only did he suffer the indignity of forfeiting his titles, but through no fault of his own, he reaffirmed the average person’s view of the sport as just one degree removed from professional wrestling. Cycling: It’s the sport so dirty even the nonagenarians cheat.

You can’t blame people for finding the idea of a 90-year-old doper irresistibly absurd (seriously, who’s not gonna click on that headline?), but what’s even more absurd is bothering to test a 90-year-old athlete in the first place. According to USADA, they conduct drug testing in national-level athletes for the following reasons:

• Because performance enhancing drugs can be dangerous and they want to ensure “athletes’ quality of life long after they leave the field of play;”
• Because they don’t want athletes to gain any “unfair advantage over their competitors, which undermines their competitors’ hard work and threatens the credibility of their sport;”
• Because “a performance enhancement arms race could ensue, which could be detrimental to the both the athletes who were willing to drug themselves to win and the clean athletes they competed against.”

All valid reasons to be sure, but all completely and utterly obviated by the fact that the guy’s fucking 90. Quality of life? Leveling the field of play? Undermining competitors? If you’re still racing your bike at 90, then your quality of life is obviously fantastic for your age bracket, you don’t have any competitors because the playing field has already been leveled by Father Time, and the only way you’re leaving the field is in a box. A 90-year-old still driven to compete is everything that’s great about cycling, and short of racing on an e-bike or turning out to be Johnny Knoxville in that Bad Grandpa suit, there’s nothing he could have done to undermine the credibility of the sport.

Even Travis Tygart, the CEO of USADA, thinks it’s ridiculous:

“Cases like this make us bang our head against the wall,” said Travis Tygart, the agency’s chief executive. “They’re not right.”

Tygart pointed out that Grove was tested only because he set a world record.

“No other reason,” he said. “To ratify in cycling or track and field you have to be tested. Athletes are eager for us to test them because they want their world record to stand.”

Perhaps most frustrating, increasingly sensitive drug tests in a world awash with chemical additives leads to sensational stories like this one. Yet when Chris Froome (riding for the deeply problematic Team Sky) turns in a urine sample showing he may have been hitting the asthma meds a little too hard, he’s ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing, making it all seem kind of pointless.

Regardless, drug testing in cycling has become so pervasive that even I, a sub-mediocre 40-something Cat 3 with no loftier goal than to finish the local club race, must pay a $5 anti-doping surcharge when I renew my license in order to help fund the system. So who is all this testing catching, apart from really old guys with a taste for liver? Well, in 2018, USADA announced sanctions against 18 riders in the sport of cycling (not including “athlete support personnel,” including one Johan Bruyneel). Here’s how that breaks down:

• 18 riders sanctioned;
• Of those 18, three were in their 20s, two were in their 30s, seven were in their 40s, and six were in their 50s;
• Only one rider was female;
• Three of the riders were busted at the Vuelta a Miami, making it the bike race that yielded the most sanctions last year, and in turn either the dirtiest or the most thoroughly screened, who the hell knows.

Granted, the numbers above do not take into account the total participation numbers for each age group, as well as other important factors, and I’m not about to claim I’m presenting a thorough, academic-level statistical analysis. Also, in fairness to the 40-something bracket, one of those riders did test positive for cannabinoids—and is from Portland, Oregon, no less, so I think we can all agree that this particular sanction is bullshit.

Nevertheless, on the surface of it, this data do appear to support what many of us have suspected all along: that there are few creatures on this earth less scrupulous or trustworthy than the middle-aged male roadie. Hey, sounds about right to me. In many years of amateur bike racing in New York City, I’ve clung desperately to the back of many fields that it later turned out contained riders who were doping.

When most people think of doping in cycling, they think of the young aspiring rider faced with a moral dilemma: cheat and taste success, or stay clean and take pride in having integrity, even if it means toiling away in poverty and obscurity. And while that certainly makes for a compelling narrative, in most cases the reality of doping is probably closer to a pathologically self-absorbed aging guy with disposable income who gets way too carried away with his expensive hobby. Is it gratifying to see someone like that get caught? Absolutely. Is nailing them worth all the fuss? Maybe, but then again maybe not.

Either way, it’s safe to say that once you’ve transcended the ethical quandaries of the starry-eyed aspirant and the egotistical desperation of the middle-aged male with plunging testosterone—and then your 60s, and your 70s, and your 80s—and you decide you still want to race bikes, at 90 years old, even when you’ve got nobody else to compete against, then subjecting you to a drug test is completely stupid.

At that point, the only Therapeutic Use Exemption you should need is your birth certificate.

Coconut oil’s health benefits are overblown, at best. Here are five healthy alternatives.

In 2003, two small-scale studies claimed that coconut oil could decrease belly fat and increase metabolism. Over the next decade, the newly christened health food blew up in the wellness world. People were cooking just about everything with it, blending it into smoothies, and stirring it into their coffee. Advocates and some research credited it with the power to clear up acne, lower cholesterol, and even improve memory. A 2016 survey of 2,000 Americans showed that 72 percent rated coconut oil as healthy.

But coconut oil contains over 50 percent more saturated fat per serving than butter. In 2017, the American Heart Association released an advisory statement suggesting that people ease off their coconut oil consumption, citing the link between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease. The following year, Harvard epidemiology professor Karin Michels made headlines when she called the oil “pure poison” in a lecture at the University of Freiburg.

Colorado-based Kylee Van Horn, a registered dietitian nutritionist, encourages skepticism about coconut oil’s health benefits. “It’s still hotly debated in the health professionals world,” she says. Pure MCT oil, which has demonstrable health benefits, is often derived from coconut oil, Van Horn explains, so the two get lumped together, but just 14 percent of coconut oil is made up of MCTs. Much of the research cited in favor of coconut oil is actually conducted on purer forms of MCT—including the two studies that started the buzz in 2013.

Other claims—like the idea that coconut oil promotes belly fat loss—stem from small-scale studies or have been taken out of context. For instance, the idea that coconut oil can improve cholesterol levels is misguided, Van Horn explains. It does offer a small boost in good cholesterol (HDL), which our body needs to regulate overall cholesterol levels and clean out arteries, but that bump is far outweighed by a major increase in bad cholesterol (LDL).

At best, the hype around coconut oil is overblown, but you don’t have to throw out your jar. Just use it the same way you would butter or bacon fat: sparingly. In moderation, it can be a fine addition to a well-rounded diet that includes healthy fats from a wide variety of sources. Aim for oils that are higher in monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which help reduce bad cholesterol and are critical to normal bodily functions.

Here’s a guide to navigating the cooking oil aisle. The below options each contain roughly 40 to 45 calories per teaspoon and four to five grams of fat and can liven up your cooking while boosting your health in the process.

Extra-Virgin Olive Oil

Good old-fashioned olive oil is a kitchen staple, and there’s no need to cut it out of your diet. It’s made up almost entirely of monounsaturated fat, specifically oleic acids, which are high in phenolic antioxidants. (Avocado and hazelnut oil are good sources as well.) Van Horn points out that these are beneficial to overall health, thanks to their anti-inflammatory properties. Olive oil has a relatively low smoke point—the temperature at which an oil will begin to burn and change flavor—of 320 degrees, so it’s rarely used for baking, but it’s ideal for most other applications, like sautéing or as a base in salad dressings and marinades. Plus, it’s one of the cheaper oils you can buy.

Avocado Oil

Its smooth, buttery flavor makes avocado oil great in salad dressings and for all sorts of cooking, according to dietitian and ultrarunner Amy Tribolini. Thanks to an extremely high smoke point of 500 degrees, it’s one of the most versatile oils for baking, frying, sautéing, and even grilling. Plus, it’s composed primarily of heart-friendly monounsaturated fat. While avocado oil is a bit pricier than olive oil, it’s the most multipurpose option on this list.

Hazelnut Oil

Hazelnut oil works well for baking and roasting, having a high smoke point of 430 degrees. Try it drizzled on some sweet potatoes sprinkled with cinnamon for a tasty treat. A teaspoon provides 3.5 grams of inflammation-fighting monounsaturated fat. It’s also high in vitamin E. Hazelnut oil has a roasted, nutty flavor and works well as a topper for your morning bowl of oatmeal or a sweet rice dish. Just be sure not to use it in anything you wouldn’t want tasting like hazelnuts.

Macadamia Oil

Macadamia oil boasts an even balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, as well as heart health–boosting antioxidants. Like hazelnut oil, macadamia oil has a slightly nutty taste, but with buttery notes rather than a roasted flavor. The delicate flavor doesn’t hold up well to high heat, but it’s an excellent finishing oil or salad dressing base. Try it atop grilled vegetables or shellfish or as a vegan substitute to mimic butter in lower-temperature sautéed or pan-fried dishes.

Canola Oil

The wellness world overlooks canola oil because it’s typically highly refined and thus stripped of antioxidants and vitamins. Plus, it’s associated with fried food. But of all the oils on this list, canola is the highest in polyunsaturated fat—1.2 grams—and it contains 2.8 grams of monounsaturated fat. With a high smoke point of 400 degrees and a completely neutral flavor, it’s a good choice for frying or baking, but it won’t add much to your salad dressings or sautées. In the United States, an estimated 95 percent of canola oil is made with genetically engineered crops, so opt for an organic expeller-pressed option if you’re concerned about GMOs.

Our favorite recent releases (and a few oldies but goodies) will help you escape for at least a few minutes

January comes with that itchy recalibration of trying to assess your year and your life. It can be exhausting, especially in the face of a 2018 that was… not great for a lot of people and places. For 2019, here’s an invitation to go easy on yourself and the world, if only for a little bit, with some books to fight your burnout by way of escapism.

Burned Out on Human Interaction? 

Consider zombies instead. In The Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World—and Ourselves, Matt Simon looks at zombification, brain-altering viruses and parasites, and the myriad ways mind control shows up in the natural world. It’s fun, weird, and fascinating.

Buy Now

Tired of Resolutions?

Rage-read Nine Perfect Strangers, by Liane Moriarty, the author of Big Little Lies, in which nine strangers end up at a health retreat and things happen. Wellness-related brain candy is self-care, right?

Buy Now

Beaten Down by Politics? 

Seething about government shutdowns and scared for our public lands? Not unwarranted, but not a total anomaly. Historian Jill Lepore’s sweeping, superdetailed look at five centuries of American history, These Truths is a somewhat-reassuring reminder that U.S. politics have always been cyclical and that, if we want to make progress, we’ll have to learn from the past.

Buy Now

Exhausted by Scrolling Through Other People’s Lives on Instagram? 

Perhaps you need a reminder that #vanlife ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Read this wry New Yorker story, then read Nomadland, Jessica Bruder’s book about the three years she spent driving around the U.S. tracing the subculture of people who live in their vehicles and the economic and social forces that brought them there.

Buy Now

Sick of Words? 

Eleanor Davis’s graphic memoir of her cross-country bike trip, You & a Bike & a Road, which is told through line drawings and minimal captions, seems simple, but the sparseness gives her space to cover all the things she encountered along the way, from run-ins with border patrol to battles with her own body and mind. It’s gritty, funny, and triumphant in surprising ways.

Buy Now

Not Excited About the Future? 

The Last Whalers, Doug Bock Clark’s book about the Lamalerans, a small, indigenous whaling population living on a remote Indonesian island, is a clear, beautiful look at a society that’s slipping away as a result of climate change and globalization. Actually, it could make you feel more burned out, but it’ll pull you into a world you’ve likely never seen before.

Buy Now

Burned Out on Burnout? 

Hear ya. How about the most pleasant book possible: Catherine Reid’s The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables, a natural history of the real spots behind the fictional life of your favorite Anne with an E, which will make you wanderlusty for Prince Edward Island. Or go make yourself something good to eat, and figure out how to cook it via Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, Samin Nostrat’s joyful and actually helpful cookbook that reads like a letter from a supersmart friend.

Landscapes Cookbook