The Rest Day Blues

No Tour de France to watch today? Got a bit of withdrawal from your daily dose of Phil and Paul? Stop on by and read a spell. Maybe it’ll help cure your case of “The Rest Day Blues.”

One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go cat, go…

If Alberto Contador doesn’t win the 2010 Tour de France, it will probably be due to a tactical mistake he made on Stage 15. While debate rages on the etiquette of attacking Andy Schleck, the yellow jersey, after he’d suffered a mechanical problem (Contador could have eased up and waited), it’s a bike race after all. Etiquette may be one thing, but when push comes to shove, the guy with the lowest overall time wins.

The tactical mistake, on the other hand, could play out in Andy Schleck’s favor. Up to now, Schleck and Contador have been shadow boxing and playing mind games with each other on the mountain stages. Schleck clearly appears to be Contador’s match, but the big concern is his time-trialing ability. Can he perform well enough in the race against the clock to maintain a small lead? Well, at the moment, that question is academic. Contador has the slim margin right now. But in pissing off his rival, Contador may have unleashed an energy in Schleck that may well not have come into play had the infamous dropped chain and the subsequent events not occurred. Anger. If Andy Schleck can harness that anger in a positive way, it could fuel his recapturing the maillot jaune. If anger gets the best of him, it could help Contador.

Last night, Contador posted a YouTube apology (complete with subtitles in English). According to Bonnie D. Ford, Contador said that posting the video was his own idea. And he also told Ford that he and Andy Schleck spoke cordially before the start of today’s stage and “things are clear between us.” Sounds like AC is trying to smooth over some ruffled feathers. Looking at Schleck’s Twitter feed just a bit ago, it appears that the two have patched things up — off the bike, at least.

Whether it was a conscious choice or an unfortunate decision made in the heat of battle, and whether Alberto Contador has actually made amends with Andy Schleck, he will have to live with the fallout. Whatever he was thinking at the time, Contador handed Andy Schleck a bit of motivation that could well hurt the Spanish sensation’s shot at a third Tour title by the time the peloton rides down the Champs-Élysées. The saga will come to an end in just about five days’ time.

People are strange, when you’re a stranger

In the ever-ongoing Lance vs. LeMond wars, Armstrong recently told reporters that he hopes Greg LeMond will tell the truth about 1989. For those who weren’t following cycling then, here’s the Cliffs Notes version: LeMond, 50 seconds behind Laurent Fignon going into the final time trial, pulled off one of the most amazing Tour finishes ever. The American beat his rival by 58 seconds in the time trial, winning the overall general classification by a scant 8 seconds. (The 1989 Tour was the last time that a time trial was held on the final day of the race.)

The difference came down to technology. Fignon chose to use a standard time trial setup, LeMond decided to use the latest innovation — clip-on aero bars. Back in the very late 1980s and early 1990s, the consensus was that using aero bars could give a rider as much as a 2 mile-per-hour boost in speed, due to the more efficient aerodynamic positioning it affords — enough of an advantage for LeMond to overcome Fignon’s 50-second lead going into the final stage.

Armstrong, fielding questions about a certain investigation back home, said that he would be happy to cooperate — as long as it wasn’t a witch hunt. And he went on to insinuate that LeMond might have gotten a different kind of boost in 1989 than just the benefit of aero bars. Things are certainly getting uglier in the land of Greg vs. Lance. I guess that’s to be expected.

Other than some vague suggestions in various quarters, no one has ever offered up any serious proof (at least in English) that LeMond wasn’t a squeaky-clean rider back in the day. Just as Lance has never failed an official test (well, except that once, when he got a retroactive therapeutic use exemption to cover his tail end — and maybe that other time when he’s alleged to have made a donation to cover things up — and well … let’s not get into it, shall we?).

I’m guessing it will get uglier before the Novitzky investigation comes to an end.

And if things couldn’t get any stranger…

Alberto Contador actually said something nice about Lance. No, really, he did. Contador told Bonnie D. Ford that “it would have made me happy” if Lance Armstrong had won today’s stage. That didn’t happen, and there are precious few opportunities for the Texan to claim a stage victory in his final Tour. (Or is it?  … Will Lance pull a Favre and come back next year? … I’m just askin’.)

Just one more before we go

Totally unrelated to the other subjects in this post: I ran across this article just over a week ago which offers an interesting perspective on facts and how people may or may not be persuaded to change their opinions in light of contradictory evidence. Joe Keohane, in an article published on boston.com, writes:

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

“Don’t confuse me with the facts,” the late U.S. Representative Earl Landgrebe (R-IN) once said as Congress voted on a resolution to impeach President Richard Nixon, “my mind’s made up.” (Landgrebe was the sole vote against Nixon’s impeachment.) Apparently, Landgrebe was right. Some people don’t want to be confused by the facts.

It seems to me that given the whole saga of doping in sports, and in other aspects of life, what the political scientists discovered doesn’t just apply to politics. Take a few moments to read Keohane’s article. It’s an interesting discussion of whether facts can actually change people’s minds.