Fact and fiction in Tour reportage
More venom from the awful Spiegel Online. "Armstrong foult Mayo" was the totally dishonest headline on a non-story yesterday, which began: "The US Postal captain broke an unwritten law and increased the pace after rival Iban Mayo fell." Bollocks! Here's how someone who knows about cycling and doesn't run every event through an America-hating filter saw it:
"Lance had his men on the front hammering for a long time before the crash even happened. Phonak, T-Mobile, CSC, Lotto-Domo, Fassa Bortolo, and Gerolsteiner all helped extend the advantage to the end, playing a bigger role than Postal on the front of the peloton once the cobbles were over. It was a horribly unlucky day for Euskaltel-Euskadi, but lashing out at Lance and his awesome US Postal teammates for that misfortune is just sour grapes."
That's from the Daily Peleton, where people who know the sport write in a way that shows how much they respect the athletes. The link tip comes via the excellent Tour de France blog, by the way. Meanwhile, at The Guardian, William Fotheringham, put Mayo's misery in perspective, without recourse to the kind of malice Spiegel concocted:
"In normal circumstances, he would have got up and rejoined the peloton, but Armstrong et al were concerned only with getting down the mile and a quarter of cobbled lane as fast as possible. As the Texan's domestiques Viatcheslav Ekimov and George Hincapi頬ed at 40mph, the string behind them stretched and snapped and Mayo and the team-mates who had waited for him could only catch the backmarkers.Armstrong, Tyler Hamilton and Jan Ullrich decided the opportunity to eliminate at least one dangerous rival was too good to miss, and their teams united: the Texan's blue-clad US Postal, the New Englander's green and white Phonaks, and the pink of Ullrich's Telekom. They produced a massive injection of speed in the run-in to the second cobbled section at Gruson, with 15 miles remaining."
Er, how come Jan Ullrich doesn't get to "foul" Mayo in the Spiegel-Online headline? Here's a tip: if you want facts, do not, under any circumstances, rely on Der Spiegel, either in print or online. If you want propaganda, though, it's unbeatable. Maybe all this will change when Der Spiegel switches from German to English. After all, when a world of bloggers will be able to fisk its falsehoods, it might be forced to opt for fact instead of fiction, for honesty instead of bias in its reportage.
