…& see, as as ex-pat canuck i'm apologizing for saying something that could be misinterpreted…hah !!!…old habits die hard…

…it was good to read your words regarding bauer, because although his list of palmares wasn't glorious, he was one hard man on the bike, in the tradition of the 'flahutes'(i think thats the word i want)…

…& when a man as hard as sean kelly says bauer was one of the riders he respected…well, that says something pretty strong…

…'no one line'…agreed…regrettable incident all 'round & ya, if i'm fondriest, i accept that it will help me sell bikes when i retire, but i never wave the 'world championship' flag too proudly, at least in my heart…

It’s regrettable because if I were Fondriest, I wouldn’t be too pleased with that win. Bauer obviously pulled up when he realized what happened, which was a good course of action – even if there was a solid second of time elapsed between the contact and Criquielion hitting the barrier. It kind of takes the flavor out of victory when, of your two opponents in the sprint, one crashes and the other pulls up. Fondriest wins by default, Criqielion gets mad, Bauer gets blamed. Nobody really wins and the world waits for integrated brake/shift levers.

Yes, we are whimps compared to you Canadians – seriously. Sure, bodychecks and elbows are (I guess, I don’t play hockey) ok on the ice. But in cycling there are other rules. You might think they stink, but they are there. Explicit and implicit. If you don’t like them, go do something else. One of the most important ones is that you don’t go off your line while sprinting, and you don’t elbow your competitors (at least not too much ). If you decide to do so anyway, you get disqualified.

For the rest, some facts about the race: Criq escaped 13 km before the finish – Fondriest was the only one capable of taking him back, be it with some trouble. Bauer only managed to come up front because of the two others watching each other too much and Fondriest, smart as he is, gambled and did not want to take turns leading. Criq did not exactly suck a lot of wheel that day…

Also: had it not been for the too many motorcyclists whose slipstream Bauer could get into, he would not have been there (stupid because the race actually was in Belgium, in Ronse to be precise – so it was actually the Belgian (lack of) organisation that, ironically enough, lead to a Belgian rider not winning).

And Bauer did push Criq into the fence, maybe not intentionally but still – big time world champ sprint or not: a sprinter will try to take as little wind as possible. The righthand side was the only logical place for Criq to go past Bauer. And at the moment Criq dove into the whole, there still was plenty of space to get past.

One final thing: I do have great respect for Bauer, being ‘the best rider who never won anything’ or not – there are many great riders who never won much. Bauer was one of the guys I saw racing right outside our doorstep when I was still… well, younger than today. He didn’t consider himself too good to take part in small time races (because that’s what they were where I lived). So respect for earning his place in the peloton, in a sport which is not always quite open to new things/people and for doing so on the other side of the world.

…’canadensis competitis' as an athlete on the world stage is as driven as anyone BUT there remains the ol' ingrained issue of over-politeness which is a well known nationalistic canuck trait…jeez…even our toughest hockey players, after elbowing you in the teeth & hip checking ya into the boards, will do a skate-by & mutter an understated “sorry, eh ???”…

…joking aside, i honestly think bauer literally checked up & slowed because he knew he was involved in something that had gone wrong & while subconscious, his checking up was a reactive way of dealing "politely" w/ the situation…
…maurizio fondriest was certainly the recipient of steve bauer's self-conscious reaction to criquielion's poor judgement…
…& while bauer moved him over, 'criq' over-reacted & w/ plenty of room (relatively speaking), rode into the barrier of his own volition…

…steve bauer as a bike racer ???…ask sean kelly…he'll tell ya…