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the-line-up · 4 years

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Last One Standing

Yesterday marked both the start of the second week of the 2020 Vuelta a Espana and also the rapidly approaching conclusion of this year’s UCI World Tour calendar, with the next scheduled race, the Tour Down Under, due to begin on 14th January 2021. After the conclusion of this year’s Giro D’Italia in Milan on Sunday with Ineos Grenadiers’ domestique Tao Geoghegan-Hart becoming the latest recipient of the Maglia Rosa, the race is now on to find out who will win the overall general classification at the last of this year’s Grand Tours.

For the first time in the history of Grand Tour cycling, due to a severely condensed race schedule brought on by Covid-19 restrictions, the Giro D’Italia and the Vuelta a Espana overlapped for one week, meaning that no riders would have the opportunity to complete a Grand Tour hat-trick this year. In addition, the commencing of the Giro on 3rd October occurred just two weeks after the final stage of the Tour De France, cutting the usual time-gap between the races in half.

This meant that many of those who competed in the TDF chose to forgo a trip to Italy and instead made their way to Spain for the 75th edition of La Vuelta. Those cyclists included Dan Martin from Israel Start-Up Nation, Cofidis’ Guilleme Martin and Alejandro Valverde from Movistar. Also undertaking the TDF-Vuelta double-header this year is Team Jumbo-Visma leader Primoz Roglic who is looking to defend his general classification win from last year and secure a second Grand Tour win after being pipped at the post at this year’s Tour by felow Slovenian Tadej Pogacar.

With six stages down and 1,013.2km, the first week of the 2020 Vuelta a Espana has already been filled with plenty of exciting moments: Roglic, coming off first-place success at Liege-Bastogne-Liege a few weeks previous, took the leader’s jersey on day one after a 173km stage from Irun to Arrate, with Ineos Grenadiers’ Richard Carapaz and Israel Start-Up Nation’s Dan Martin trailing close behind at five and seven seconds down respectively.

Roglic continued to hold onto the maillot roja for the following five stages as the cyclists snaked their way towards northeastern Spain, with support during this time coming from his Jumbo-Visma teammates including Sepp Kuss, George Bennett and Robert Gesink. Unfortunately, the 146.4km Stage 6 route from Biescas to Aramon Formigal proved to be too much for the seven-year pro who was distanced by other GC contenders on the final 14.5km climb and fell back to fourth place, now sitting thirty seconds behind the new leader Carapaz.

Along with the increasingly tight competition between multiple GC contenders for the maillot roja, the Vuelta’s first week saw six different teams enjoy stage success: Movistar’s Marc Soler took Stage 2 after missing out the previous year when he was called back to help then-team leader Nairo Quintana, while Stages 3 and 4 saw an Irish double-header with Dan Martin winning his first Grand Tour stage since 2018 and Sam Bennett continuing his run of success this year after winning two stages, along with the overall points classification competition, at this year’s Tour De France.

Stage 5, a 184.4km cycle from Huesca to Sabninanigo, was won by Belgian Lotto-Soudal rider Tim Wellens, while Astana took the final stage before the first rest day with Ion Izagirre crossing the finish line first after his teammate and older brother Gorka put in the leg work during the final climb.

With the fight for the maillot roja now certainly under way between GC contenders like Carapaz, Martin, Roglic and Hugh Carthy of EF Pro Cycling, and with more teams hoping to achieve stage win success, the Vuelta’s second week was shaping up to be an exciting and eye-catching 945.8km of racing, and Stage 7 certainly didn’t disapoint.

Consisting of 159.7km of racing between Vitoria-Gastiez and Villanueva de Valdegovia, this stage would be a tough course for the riders with almost sixty kilometres of cycling before coming into a circuit featuring two climbs of the Puerto De Orduna, oft-described as one of the most challenging climbs in the Basque Country. Richard Carapaz would be looking to hold onto the leader’s jersey for another day while fending off competition from Carthy, Martin and Roglic, while Jumbo-Visma’s Sepp Kuss would be looking to claw back points in the Mountains classification.

The race started off quite calm and relaxed, with only Deceunik-Quick Step’s Remi Cavagna attempting to distance himself from the peloton before being quickly swallowed up again, with the riders continuing to move at a steady pace for around the next 60km. However, as the first climb up the Puerto De Orduna, a 7.8km trek with an average gradient of 7.7% and maxing out an eye-watering 14%, began to loom, a sizeable sixteen-man breakaway began to form. Some of the riders in this initial group included Kuss, Rui Costa of UAE Team Emirates, Magnus Cort Neilson from American team EF Pro Cycling and Astana’s Alex Aranburu. As this breakaway hit the beginning of this steep climb, they had managed to build up a two-minute advantage over the main peloton, but were still faced with competition from a quickly approaching second breakaway group.

With eighteen riders including AG2R La Mondiale’s Nans Peters and Kenny Elissonde from Trek-Segafredo, along with Michael Woods and Omar Fraile, whose respective teammates Cort and Aranburu were already up the road. Not wanting to be distanced, a trio of riders made up of previous Vuelta a Espana winner Alejandro Valverde, riding for Movistar, along with Mitchelton-Scott’s Mikel Nieve and UAE Team Emirate’s Davide Formolo, also broke away from the main peloton soon after in an attempt to catch up with the groups ahead.

Their efforts, along with those of the eighteen-man breakaway, paid off in the end, catching up to the initial group of sixteen cyclists mid-way through the ascent of the Puerto De Orduna; the three groups eventually merged to form a final thirty-six man breakaway, with those eager to gain points in the mountain classification fighting to get towards the front.

Meanwhile, back in the main peloton teams including Team Jumbo-Visma, Israel Start-Up Nation, Astana, and Ineos Grenadiers were pushing on the pace, with this main group never conceding more than three minutes to those out in front throughout the entire stage. Chris Froome, riding in his first Grand Tour this year after suffering a horrific crash at last year’s Criterium De Dauphine, set the pace for Ineos Grenadiers at the head of the peloton for a time, showing that he is on the way back to reaching close to his prime cycling form once again.

Out in front, Kuss was the first of the thirty-six-strong breakaway to cross the summit of the Puerto De Orduna, picking up the maximum ten points and virtually securing the Mountains Classification jersey. As he and the other riders entered the descent and began heading towards Espejo, Peters and Guilleme Martin of Cofidis tried to distance themselves from the group to catch up with Kuss who was now a short distance up the road. This attempted three-man breakaway was quickly nipped in the bud however, with the thirty-three riders left chasing behind quick to prevent any significant time gap from opening up.

With the thirty-six man breakaway now reconvened, they continued to cycle together until just around the 60km to-go mark approaching Subijana-Morrilas when another trio of cyclists attempted to gain some daylight between themselves and others in the group. Valverde, AG2R La Mondiale’s Dorion Gordon and Stan DeWulf of Lotto-Soudal were those who decided to go the lead; the maneuver worked well for a time as they were able to maintain a modest thirty-second gap between them and those they had left in the breakaway until around 35km to the finish when they were eventually caught by George Bennett (Team Jumbo-Visma), Wellens and Cort.

After being initially caught, French cyclist Gordon once again managed to distance himself from the breakaway as they began the descent before facing the Puerto De Orduna for the second and final time of the stage. Gordon, who turned pro in 2016, kept a thirty-second gap between himself and the chasing group during this latest shot for the line, but found it difficult to keep up the pace once the ascent began and was eventually caught by a sizeable chasing group at 25km from the finish.

As the group merged once again and began to weave their way up the Puerto De Orduna for the second time, EF Pro Cycling rider Woods decided to take his chance at 3km from the peak and made a dash up the remainder of the climb, with the other cyclists behind clambering up the mountain in an attempt to catch up to the Canadian. A quartet of riders, Guilleme Martin, Omar Fraile, Nans Peters and Alejandro Valverde, were the only ones to catch up to Woods, eventually reaching him during the descent with 15km to the finish line; in the process of chasing, Martin also secured the maximum mountain points for this second ascent of the Puerto De Orduna, taking away the polka-dot jersey which Sepp Kuss had virtually secured earlier in the race.

As the five riders out front began to make their way towards the finish in Villanueva De Valdegovia, what followed next was a game of cat-and-mouse, with the cyclists dashing away from the group momentarily to see if anyone would take the bait and chase them down. This back-and-forth continued for the next four kilometres; Woods and Fraile, with 3km left, tried to make a break for it but were soon closed down again by the other three, led by Valverde.

The decisive moment in the race, in fact, did not come until the final kilometre when Woods made a final sprint for the line, leaving the others scrambling to once again close the gap. Their efforts were for naught in the end though, with Woods crossing over the line for his second Vuelta stage victory to go along with Stage 17 win in 2018. Richard Carapaz also managed to hold onto the maillot roja for a second day, with his closest competitors Hugh Carthy and Dan Martin remaining unchanged at eighteen and twenty seconds down respectively.

With another eleven stages to ride until the final 124.2km from the Hipodroma de la Zarzuela to Madrid on 8th November, there’s still plenty of time for more exciting moments to come from this year’s Vuelta a Espana in a cycling year which has already thrown up plenty of surprises.

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mastcomm · 4 years

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The Kansas City Chiefs Waited 50 Years for This Super Bowl Date

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The inside of a typical N.F.L. stadium is inundated with pennants and banners celebrating landmark championships of all kinds.

But at Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Kansas City Chiefs, there is only one such decoration visible. Fluttering from a flagpole at the west end of the stadium’s upper deck, beneath an American flag, is a small, unpretentious white pennant. It was easily overlooked Sunday amid the clamor of the 73,656 fans who assembled to watch the A.F.C. championship game between the Chiefs and the Tennessee Titans.

The modest white flag, dwarfed by the expanse of the stadium below it, is imprinted with these words in block letters: Kansas City Chiefs, 1969 World Champions.

The Chiefs, a building block N.F.L. franchise cosmically linked to the league’s roots as a collection of teams in Midwestern commerce centers, have won nearly 500 N.F.L. games, 13 division titles and have four times played for a berth in the Super Bowl. But for the last 50 years, the Chiefs have declined to celebrate any of their championship near-misses.

They instead have stood behind their lone Super Bowl victory and waited, especially since they had not even made a return trip to the N.F.L. championship since defeating the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV in January 1970.

All that changed Sunday with a 35-24 vanquishing of the doughty, upstart Titans, an outcome that not only liberated Chiefs fans near and far from Kansas City but solidified the ascension of quarterback Patrick Mahomes, 24, who became the first of the A.F.C.’s cadre of new generation quarterbacks to play his way into a Super Bowl.

Mahomes’s elusive, imaginative scrambling on broken plays and deft, extraordinary capacity to throw powerfully and accurately while running for his life, overwhelmed a gritty Tennessee team that led by 10 points until late in the second quarter.

The Chiefs victory, sending them to the Super Bowl against the San Francisco 49ers on Feb. 2, also provided a new opportunity to reshape the legacy of Coach Andy Reid, whose 207 regular season victories are the most for any coach without a Super Bowl or N.F.L. championship. Reid, who on Sunday was coaching in his eighth conference championship game, lost in his one previous Super Bowl game, with the Philadelphia Eagles after the 2004 season.

“Everybody in our locker room wants to win this Super Bowl, win one more game, for our coach,” Mahomes said of Reid. “The best thing about playing for Coach Reid is he lets you be who you are — he lets you play the way you want to play.”

Fittingly, it was a second-quarter play by Mahomes that other coaches, but not Reid, would have advised his quarterback never to try that ended up changing the fortunes of Sunday’s game. The Chiefs had cut the Titans’ lead to 17-14 with less than a minute remaining in the first half and had the ball at the Tennessee 27-yard line when Mahomes dropped back to pass.

Avoiding a sack was a priority since it preserved Kansas City’s chances to tie the game with a field goal. And Mahomes could have safely thrown the football away when he saw his primary receivers enveloped by double coverage. But he also saw room to pick up an additional five or 10 yards by dashing around the end to his left.

“I was thinking about just getting upfield a little and running out of bounds,” Mahomes said.

Mahomes, who saw Reid standing nearby, was asked if his coach had yelled in his direction to slide and end the play and protect himself.

“No, he wouldn’t do that,” Mahomes said with a laugh.

Mahomes evaded one tackle and turned the corner. Titans linebacker Rashaan Evans was sprinting toward him and just feet away. Mahomes gave Evans a little juke, turning his head and shoulders as if about to throw or run that direction. Evans froze, and Mahomes, seizing the opportunity, accelerated toward his own bench, where he tiptoed down the sideline and cut back until he was inside the 5-yard line, where he eluded three more would-be tacklers and pushed into the end zone for the Chiefs’ 21-17 halftime lead.

As Mahomes jogged into the locker room for intermission, the Arrowhead crowd chanted: “M.V.P.”

That Mahomes will bring his transformative skills and on-the-move ingenuity to football’s biggest stage was foreshadowed in last season’s A.F.C. championship game, when New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, then 41, engineered an overtime upset of the Chiefs at Arrowhead. On Sunday, Mahomes said that defeat motivated the Chiefs throughout this season to reach a higher stage of the postseason.

“Having to watch the Super Bowl last year was awful, but we knew we had to work for another year — day after day — to do something about it,” said Mahomes, who added that after last season’s A.F.C. championship loss he had sought out Brady’s counsel.

“Tom told me stay strong with the process of always getting better,” Mahomes said. “And he said to be who I am, but to do it day after day.”

For the Titans, Sunday’s defeat ended a magical run — they came into the game winners in nine of their last 12 games, including consecutive playoff road upsets of the Patriots and the top-seeded Baltimore Ravens.

And early on Sunday, they mixed the power running of their superlative running back Derrick Henry and the downfield passing of quarterback Ryan Tannehill to quiet the Chiefs crowd and jump out to a 10-0 first-quarter lead. But ultimately, the Chiefs defense thwarted Henry, who rushed for 69 yards on 19 carries after compiling 377 yards in two previous playoff games.

Tannehill’s early success was also short-lived, mostly because Kansas City’s defensive front and linebackers repeatedly pressured him while he was trying to throw. Tannehill was sacked three times.

Mahomes helped the Chiefs run away with the game by leading his team to two fourth-quarter touchdowns. The last score was a classic highlight reel moment that displayed Mahomes’s agility and audaciousness. Scrambling from the pocket, Mahomes leaned backward and threw off one foot, heaving the football 50 yards in the air until it fell just beyond the Titans secondary and into the arms of wide receiver Sammy Watkins for a 60-yard touchdown.

The party was on inside Arrowhead Stadium. The Chiefs were returning to the Super Bowl.

After the final whistle, as fans filtered out of the stands and into the acres of surrounding parking lots, maintenance workers pulled the American flag and the 1969 championship flag down from its perch. Both will be in storage for many months.

Perhaps by next season a third flag will be raised.

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/sport/the-kansas-city-chiefs-waited-50-years-for-this-super-bowl-date/

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jodyedgarus · 6 years

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What A Badass Olympic Skier Can Teach Us About Work-Life Balance

Team USA has sent 20 fathers to Pyeongchang, but only one mother: Kikkan Randall. A three-time winner of cross-country skiing’s World Cup sprint title, Randall was part of a baby boom that happened after the 2014 Sochi Olympics, when four of the sport’s top athletes took time off from racing to give birth.1

These women didn’t just return to work — they came back to the highest level of a demanding sport, and all four are expected to compete in Pyeongchang. But Randall is doing so without the same safety net that her European colleagues have. And that’s left her facing the same challenge that many other American women experience: how to balance a grueling career with the demands of new motherhood. A job as arduous as being a professional athlete (or, say, director of policy planning at the State Department) has little room for compromise or scaling back, and that means that much of the parenting must fall to a spouse or outside help.

The 2018 Games will be the fifth Olympic appearance for Randall, a 35-year-old cross-country skier from Alaska.2 In 2008, Randall, nicknamed Kikkanimal, made history by becoming the first American woman to win a World Cup in cross-country skiing. And in Pyeongchang, she has a legitimate shot at a medal.

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Mothers-to-be in most professions take time off after childbirth, but Randall’s situation was different: “I was on my maternity leave while I was pregnant,” she said. Because she remained on the U.S. ski team roster, she retained access to her health insurance, and most of her sponsors continued their support, in exchange for appearances, social media plugs and other publicity. She resumed training about three weeks after her son, Breck, was born in April 2016, with the support of her husband, Jeff Ellis, who parented while she trained. Having a husband who is willing to take on parental duties and, most importantly, to do so “unbegrudgingly” has been “a huge piece of the puzzle,” Randall said.

There’s no such thing as a part-time return to work in elite sports, which usually require multiple training sessions each day, along with naps, massages, full nights of sleep and other recovery rituals. Of course, sleepless nights are almost a given for the first years of a child’s life. And Randall said that knowing Ellis will “take care of those night-time wakings before a race really helps.”

She noted that her peers in Scandinavian countries have the benefit of paid time off for fathers as well as mothers. (Of the 35 countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. is the only one without paid maternal leave.)

Paid maternal leave policies around the world

Among countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2016

Country Length of paid maternity leave, in weeks 1 Greece 43.0

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2 United Kingdom 39.0

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3 Slovakia 34.0

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4 Czech Republic 28.0

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5 Ireland 26.0

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6 Hungary 24.0

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7 Italy 21.7

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8 Estonia 20.0

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9 Poland 20.0

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10 Australia 18.0

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11 Chile 18.0

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12 Denmark 18.0

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13 New Zealand 18.0

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14 Finland 17.5

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15 Canada 17.0

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16 Austria 16.0

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17 France 16.0

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18 Latvia 16.0

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19 Luxembourg 16.0

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20 Netherlands 16.0

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21 Spain 16.0

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22 Turkey 16.0

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23 Belgium 15.0

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24 Slovenia 15.0

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25 Germany 14.0

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26 Israel 14.0

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27 Japan 14.0

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28 Switzerland 14.0

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29 Iceland 13.0

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30 Norway 13.0

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31 South Korea 12.9

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32 Sweden 12.9

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33 Mexico 12.0

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34 Portugal 6.0

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35 United States 0.0

Source: OECD Family Database

Randall’s Finnish peer Aino-Kaisa Saarinen had a child around the same time that Randall did, and she told me that her country has a mandatory four-month paid leave for mothers, which she started a month before her due date. After the baby was born, she and her partner received further benefits, including leave that they could split as they chose between the parents. “In our case, the dad took all that,” Saarinen said. (Not to mention the paid leave that fathers are entitled to.)

Randall has competed in the predominantly Europe-based World Cup without that kind of paid leave but with Breck in tow for the past two seasons. It hasn’t always been easy. Although she emerged from childbirth without any serious complications (not all women do, as tennis star Serena Williams’s story demonstrates), the snap in her muscles didn’t return right away. And during her time off, the U.S. team “had gotten so strong,” Randall said. She sat out the second World Cup weekend after her return because she wasn’t skiing as well as her teammates.

There have been many men who’ve continued competing after adding a child to their family, said Chris Grover, head coach of the U.S. cross-country ski team, but very few women. “Many of these guys are not primary caregivers and tend to come to the races Thursday and head back home on Sunday night or Monday,” Grover said. And while fathers may experience sleepless nights just like mothers do, they don’t need to physically recover after childbirth.

Randall and her husband have built their work and family life around her job. Ellis secured a job as a media coordinator for the ski federation, which allowed him to travel the World Cup circuit with her. “He got the job so that we could see each other in the winter,” Randall said.

Randall breast-fed her son until about a month into the racing season. Realizing that there would be at least four mothers coming to the World Cup with babies, the ski federation worked with the athlete commission, national ski federations and organizing committees to make formal recommendations encouraging race venues to provide a “baby room” with appropriate provisions so that moms can breast-feed and care for their infants as needed. Randall thinks she used these rooms much more than others in her cohort of new mothers. She said that may be because the others live in Europe, where most of the races take place, and can travel back and forth between home and races on a weekly basis.

In Finland, Saarinen benefits from laws that guarantee child care facilities will be available. “The government also pays for most of it,” she said. That’s not all. “We also get child money from the government, which is about 200€ per month, a baby box with 48 items, and free and mandatory monthly health checks for baby and for the mom.”

Things are different in the U.S. According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, 62 percent of parents of infant or preschool-age children report difficulty finding affordable, high-quality child care in their community, regardless of their income.

Because Randall and Ellis are both working while on the race circuit, their parents and some friends have stepped in to provide child care, but paying travel and accomodations for these helpers isn’t cheap. In part because of the cost, Breck won’t be accompanying his parents to Pyeongchang. After calculating that it would run something like $15,000 to $20,000 for them to bring him and a caretaker along, they decided to send him to his grandparents’ house in Canada instead.

As well as things are working out for her now, Randall acknowledges that her current situation is not sustainable. And it probably wouldn’t be scalable to the whole workplace either. Grover acknowledged that it’s difficult to imagine a ski team traveling around Europe with all the coaching staff’s kids, in addition to the team athletes.

Randall plans to retire from racing after this season but will remain in the sport. She is president of the U.S. branch of Fast and Female, a group that encourages girls to participate in sports, and she’s running for election as an athlete representative on the International Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission. After two decades of competition, it feels right, she said. Success in a career like sports requires giving it your all, and that means family life can’t always come first. For a parent who wants to substantially take part in parenting, eventually something must give.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-badass-olympic-skier-can-teach-us-about-work-life-balance/

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