Journal of professional cyclists Ian MacGregor and Timmy Duggan

The Roundabout Game

The last stage of Valencia was all you could ask for at the end of an intense week of racing.  It was sunny, quite warm, zero wind, and big, wide, smooth roads.  Perfect for a little chill time at the back of the field and no stress.  My teammate Lucas and I were playing a little game back there most of the day.  Every time we would come to some big roundabout, exit, median, or giant piece of road furniture, we would each follow a different half of the peloton as it split around the obstacle and then saw who came out ahead on the other side.  Gotta make a boring day interesting somehow right?  Deciding which way to go around these obstacles is actually a rather complicated matter, and many things must be taken into account.  You’ve seen this happen if you have ever watched  the peloton scream through a town or intersections from the helicopter view, and you can see how much a riders choice of line can affect him, especially in the finale.  The whole subject is based on the fact that the peloton is rather fluid, but can only fit so many riders through a tight space at high speed with out some bunching up or crashing.  Which is why sometimes it is advantageous to go a different route than the peloton, or a route that only a few riders have chosen.  This way you are guaranteed you will not run into a massive bottleneck and have to either stop, crash, or accelarate extremely hard on the other side.  However , the risk is that you could go off-route entirely or get stuck on the wrong side of some median for several kilometers, and that’s really not fast.  Which almost happened to me at one point.  We exited the highway from a big road and I was on the side of the field, so instead of getting crunched up against the curb I decided to go around the median.  Unfortanately, it really was a highway exit, and if you have ever missed your exit in a car, the rule applies still to bike racing.  Fortunately I could hope over a grassy hill and down of a very low wall back onto the back of the field.  That, I decided, was indeed slower.  In a race in Mexico last fall, another rider did the same thing, and he was stuck on the other side of the highway with a big median in between him and the peloton.  It was funny for a minute as we were laughing and waving at each other, until the road tilted downhill and we were going 55kmh and he was still stuck over there by himself.  Oops.  Also slower.  Yesterday I had a route that was for sure gonna be faster, as only about 10 of us went left while Lucas and the rest of the field went right.  I thought I was gonna win, until the guy leading our little line crashed in the middle of the roundabout.  Slower again. And last week at Tirenno-Adriatico I found a fast route but not without risk.  All week theleft side of the roundabouts had been marked off with tape, but the tape was so high that half the field could just duck under it at high speed with no problems.  So this time I followed a line of guys on the left, and shorter, side of the roundabout, under the tap, and then noticed a giant metal barricade perpendicular to the road, right in the middle.  I saw it in time and was aiming to scoot around me to the left, but the guy in front of me must have had his head down, reacted last minute, and slammed full speed into the edge of the barricade.  The whole thing flew into the air and spun around only inches from me.  I thought we were all toast.  I really don’t knowhow that guy kept it upright but there was definitely an act of god in there somewhere.

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