Greatness Going Unnoticed

Philippe Gilbert accomplished something today no athlete before has ever done and no one in America noticed it. Gilbert, a professional road bicyclist for the Omega-Pharma-Lotto team became the first rider to ever win the four classic races of the Ardennes in the same season. To put this in perspective, what Gilbert did is the equivalent of Carl Lewis winning four gold medals in 1984.



Today, Gilbert out sprinted the tandem of Frank and Andy Schelck to win the prestigious Liege-Bastogne-Liege classic to become the only rider to take it along with the Brabantse Pijl, Amstel Gold, and Fleche Wallone titles over a two week period.

However, unlike Lewis who only had to defeat a dozen or so competitors in his events, Gilbert defeated fields of over 150 riders, many whose only goal was to box him in and keep him from being the winner. Gilbert prevailed over the best the world has to throw at him and he did it on four successive occasions. How many golfers, race car drivers, or tennis players can win four successive events without taking a break?

Gilbert's greatness has not been followed in America where professional cycling falls under two categories; the Tour de France and drug probes. However, in Europe, cycling is a combination of the pro golf tour meeting NASCAR with entire cities lined along narrow cobbled streets, often times affording the riders no more than three or four feet to race shoulder to shoulder.

With races covering over 120 miles in distance and filled with punishing climbs and harrowing descents, it takes an athlete who actually enjoys suffering rather than being pampered like American athletes. Racers compete in temperatures from freezing weather on snow plowed roads to summer heat that exceeds 120 degrees on the pavement. If you ride, you will suffer.

Teams select their own designated gunslinger and do everything they can to set that person up to win a race that might finish with an eight mile climb up a mountain road that averages a ten percent gradient or a sprint in which dozens of riders draft and pass one another at over forty miles an hour to win by as little as a tire width.

Despite all of this, there is usually very little coverage of these events by the American press even though we have our share of great riders not named Armstrong. Levi Leipheimer, Chris Horner, and George Hincapie represent the old guard; contemperaries of Lance Armstrong and great riders in their own right. Then there are young guns like Taylor Phinney and Tyler Farrar who seek to add to the glory established by Armstrong and Greg Lemond.

While we can always follow the upcoming Tour of California or Tour de France on an obscure cable Channel, we are hard pressed to find anything more than a sentence in our sports pages covering the spring classics or two other grand tours, Giro de Italia and Spanish Vuleta. It's too bad because we missed out on something that was truly a once in a lifetime accomplishment by a Belgium athlete whose grit, strength, stamina, and courage would serve us all well to pause and appreciate.