The Dominance of King Cancellara
Quite simply, the most dominant sports man around. While the traditional media don’t pick up on this, we do here. All hail the king!
The past few years have thrown up several dominant sports star. Tiger Woods and Roger Federer easily rule their respective games but it is much easier to see how the quality of a sports star will emerge from the opposition when it takes so many individual actions to complete. Tiger Woods For instance probably makes 260-280 plays to win a competition. Federer must hit the ball about 6oo times per match (Anyone know how many?). So with this amount of individual plays going on, it is inevitable that quality will win through.
Now with this as a backdrop, let us go on to time-trial cycling. Fabian Cancellara is the King of this pursuit. His victory today at the World Championships was as dominant as it gets. Check out the results down below. He finished a whopping 3.95% ahead of the 10th place man. 10th in the world and not even close to winner. Maybe this is a case of someone actually having to give it 110%!
What is probably a more impressive stat is the he was 1.67% ahead of the second place guy. No one got even near. In the 100m sprint in athletics nobody before Asafa Powell has been able to put such a distance between himself and the field, so given that the two are both of this era, how is this possible given the greater worldwide participation?
The World Champs was not a one-off by Cancellara, the media completely missed arguably the most dominant sports performance of the summer - the Tour de France Prologue. In this stage he completed in 8min 50s he was 2.45% ahead of his nearest rival and 6.03% ahead of 10th place! What was the most amazing thing for me in this performance was his 4.33% margin over 4th place Bradley Wiggins. Considering Wiggins is a track god and was preparing for this race for the last year it was nothing short of shocking. To quote my friend Gordon Kennedy - he had his assed handed to him that day.
So here in lies the question - In what other sport does a person beat his nearest rival by 2.45%? How does one get a such a large margin of victory but perhaps most worryingly of all how does one do it in a sport acknowledged as having such a big drugs problem. Is it the cast of optimising muscle/energy systems for this event and neglecting the other stages. Cancellara seemed to do quite fine in the regular stages too. Quite frankly either Cancellara is a Sporting God in the highest sense or he is taking drugs.
As I’m believer in innocent ’til proven guilty: King Cancellara you rule.
World Time Trial Results: (from BBC)
1 Fabian Cancellara (Switzerland) 55 mins 41 secs
2 Laszlo Bodrogi (Hungary) @ 52 secs
3 Stef Clement (Netherlands) @ 57 secs
4 Bert Grabsch (Germany) @ 1 min 12 secs
5 Sebastian Lang (Germany) @ 1 min 17 secs
6 Vladimir Gusev (Russia) @ 1 min 46 secs
7 Jose Ivan Gutierrez (Spain) @ 1 min 56 secs
8. Andrey Mizourov (Kazakhstan) @ 2 mins 2 secs
9 Vasil Kiryienka (Belarus) @ 2 mins 3 secs
10 Bradley Wiggins (Britain) @ 2 mins 10 secs