RACING IN THE TIME OF COVID
1 In January, the talk at the Tour Down Under was of the bush fires that had ravaged South Australia and of Richie Porte not winning on Willunga Hill for the first time since 2013. Nobody at all in the cycling world was talking about a novel coronavirus causing pneumonia-like symptoms in a cluster in Wuhan, China.
That would change quickly. The UAE Tour made it through five of seven days before the race was halted with a spate of cases in the peloton. Weeks later, a depleted Paris-Nice limped as far as the Saturday with a fin-de-siècle mood reflecting the impending feeling of doom, yet also manifesting itself in spectacularly gung-ho racing.
That could have been that. With the information we had in those early days of the pandemic, cycling looked to be badly equipped to deal with it. What other sport moves hundreds or thousands of people around such a large geographical spread? One after another, races through April, May, June and July were postponed.
But cycling somehow managed to muddle through. The calendar was hastily rewritten, and though in packing almost a full year’s worth of racing into three months, it looked more as if the schedule had been ripped up, thrown in the air and the races held in the order they landed, it turned out to be a season like no other, with races overlapping crazily.
It turned out to be safe, at least as far as covid went, though in classic cycling style, nobody seemed to be sure exactly what the rules were. The teams and races operated in ‘bubbles’ that kept the virus at bay. The Giro, with a handful of cases, came closest to breaking point.
2020 was not a perfect season. At times there was
