If you are following the Tour de France, you probably heard about the revised Team Time Trial rules long before the Tour started. Originally, I understood that a team’s losses would be limited to three minutes relative to the winning team’s finish time. If this had been the case, I would have expected that no individual rider would have lost more than three minutes yesterday, unless he abandoned or was eliminated by failing to actually arrive by the time limit.
First thing yesterday, I heard that the rules were not what had been discussed on television. The actual rules were that the second team to finish would lose no more than 20 seconds, while the third and subsequent teams would lose no more than 10 seconds versus the previous team to finish. The stage results basically reflect this:
- US Postal Service, +0:00
- Phonak, +20 seconds
- Illes Ballears, +30 seconds
- T-Mobile, +40 seconds
- etc.
After the stage, however, I learned that there was another significant wrinkle in the rules that I did not know about. The time loss limitation only applied to the riders on each team finishing in the “same time” as the five riders setting the team’s time for the stage. In other words, if a rider finished more than a couple of bike lengths behind the fifth rider from his team, the later rider did not receive his team’s time. Instead he received his actual time relative to the winning team. Are you confused yet?
Gilberto Simoni of Team Saeco crashed near the finish line of the Team Time Trial stage. Although he remounted and finished the stage six seconds after his team’s fifth rider, he lost 2 minutes 42 seconds instead of the loss of 1 minute 30 seconds that five members of his team scored. This is confirmed in the stage results and the VeloNews news roundup for the stage.
In any other stage I can think of, if a rider crashed within 1 kilometer of the finish, he would receive the same time as the riders around him who did not crash. Because the rules were different for the Team Time Trial, it appears that the Saeco team would have been better off if they had all stopped within sight of the finish line, and waited for Simoni. If only they had known.
I don’t love or hate Gilberto Simoni or the Saeco team, but I think they got a raw deal. I realize that the Team Time Trial rules were written to blunt the advantage that the US Postal Service team had in last year’s Team Time Trial. But, the rules unfairly penalize Simoni, Stefano Casagranda, and the Saeco team.