Best
Rides of 2000
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Results
Votes (UCI ranking)
1 Lance Armstrong 48.42% (4)
2 Johan Museeuw 16.41 (59)
3 Jan Ullrich 5.41 (6)
4 Andrei Tchmil 5.33 (9)
5 Erik Dekker 4.64 (17)
6 Vjatceslav Ekimov 4.42 (67)
7 Leontien Zijlaard-Van Moorsel 3.88 (4)
8 Axel Merckx 3.24 (20)
9 Erik Zabel 2.28 (2)
10 Oscar Freire 1.52 (11)
11 Andrea Tafi 1.45 (130)
12 David Millar 1.33 (120)
13 Francesco Casagrande 0.99 (1)
14 Marco Pantani 0.69 (177)
Notes: The final vote was somewhat skewed, and we expected it would be. Many of our readers are from the US and are big fans of Lance, and the statistics are reflected in the poll. Actually, a large proportion of them (about 40%) *didn't* vote for him, which was reasonably impressive. The results of the poll, excluding US readers, would have still resulted in a win to Lance however. Even in Belgium, Armstrong tied with Tchmil and Museeuw for first place!
Cyclingnews.com's picks for 2000
Cyclingnews.com webmaster Jeff Jones' picks for the best of the year: Male road rider
Erik Zabel. The most victories (17), two classic wins (Milan-San Remo
for the third time, and the Amstel Gold race), as well as fourth in
Ronde van Vlaanderen, third in Paris-Roubaix, fourth in the HEW Cyclassics.
Zabel also took the Tour de France green points jersey for a record
5th time, and won the Dortmund Six. Damned consistent and extremely
versatile!
Female road
rider
Leontien Zijlaard-Van Moorsel. 42 wins. Double gold in the Olympics
is a good start, but she also won numerous stage races and rose to number
four on the UCI rankings. Joane Somarriba deserves a mention for winning
the women's Giro and Tour, while Diana Ziliute won the overall classification
of the World Cup and finished World Number One. However, Leontien gets
my vote again because of her consistency.
Male track rider
The Olympics is the pinnacle of track cycling, so the nod goes to Robert
Bartko who has been at the top of pursuiting for a couple of years and
was part of the sub 4 minute German pursuit team. Scott McGrory deserves
a mention as well, considering the trauma of losing a child. All the
sprinters shared the glory around throughout the year, hence it was
hard to pick a standout.
Female track
rider
Felicia Ballanger was unstoppable in any race that she did and capped
a brilliant career with double gold in the Olympic Games. Van Moorsel
also rode well at the Games, but did not race on the track for the rest
of the year.
Male MTB rider
Miguel Martinez. World Champion, World Cup Champion and Olympic Champion.
Enough said.
Female MTB rider
Margarita Fullana. World Champ, third in the Olympics behind Blatter
and Pezzo, plus three World Cup wins. Blatter was good too: three World
Cup wins and the World Cup overall, second in the Olympics, fourth in
the World's. Pezzo's single-mindedness in taking a second consecutive
Olympic gold also deserves a mention, though the rest of her season
suffered for it. A close call...
Male cyclo-cross
rider
Richard Groenendaal: World Champ, World number one, and likely winner
of the SuperPrestige and World Cup for 2000/2001. Mr Consistency.
Female cyclocross
rider
Hanka Kupfernagel. Women's world champ. She almost never gets beaten
in a women's 'cross race.
Male team
Kelme-Costa Blanca. Winners of the team classifications in the Giro
d'Italia and the Tour de France. They were ranked as high as three (behind
Telekom and Mapei) in the UCI rankings, and Roberto Heras won the Vuelta
- a first for the team. Kelme demonstrated some very exciting and attacking
riding in the Tour in potentially "slow" stages. They weren't going
to let Lance Armstrong walk away with it. All this on a budget approximately
half that of normal division one teams...
Female team
Acca Due O. The dream team of Diana Ziliute, the Polikeviciute twins,
Marion Clignet, Zulfia Zabirova, and Tatiana Stiajkina. Some races they
utterly dominated like the Women's Tour de Suisse, and they finished
on top of the UCI team rankings by a long shot. Farm Frites-Hartol did
quite well too, but they had less versatility than Acca Due O.
Best ride of
2000
I confess a little bias here, but: Jan Ullrich in the Olympics because
of the pressure and the way in which he did it. Everyone was peaking
for that race, and Jan was clearly the strongest on the day. Lance Armstrong
in stage 10 of the Tour was pretty awesome as well, but he didn't win
the stage (Javier Oxtoa did). Museeuw in Paris-Roubaix gets third in
my vote.
Most significant
non-race event
Nicole Reinhart's death. A terrible loss. Other noteworthy events also
had a negative air: the Festina and Pantani trials. On the upside, the
development of a test for EPO, even though it has yet to be fully accepted,
brings hopes of eradicating this form of doping.
Tomas Nilsson, our European correspondent for much of the year, adds his thoughts:
Greatest moment
of the year
It might not have been the ride of the year but I had the
pleasure of reporting live on www.cyclingnews.com from a number of great
events during the season of 2000, and the moment to remember came on
the 19th stage of the Giro d'Italia, on the penultimate climb of the
day up the Col d'Agnello. Not just any climb, this was the highest passage
of the whole race and thus designated "Cima Coppi" as the most prestigious
mountain prime.
Marco Pantani's Giro had been a training ride from Rome for two weeks and more in his first serious race since he was taken out of last year's Giro with a high haematocrit level. (His early season attempts in Spain might as well be forgotten.) On all previous mountain stages he had been left behind early. And also so today. But then, on the Cima Coppi, he returned and caught the group with the top overall riders, including team mate Stefano Garzelli who had a very good chance to win the Giro.
We all wondered what he was up to but Pantani's answer was immediate: He rode up to Garzelli and handed over a water bottle.
That, ladies and gentlemen, was the greatest moment in 2000. A fallen star rose and paid respect to all the unwritten rules of cycling. Subsequently Pantani aided Garzelli for the rest of the stage and then went off to take second spot in Briancon and showed that he was back in top level racing. What ever you might say about Marco Pantani he has always paid respect to cycling as a unique sport with all its myths, legends and traditions. The handing of a water bottle is a gesture that means for more than just being nice to a thirsty team-mate.
All the Nominations
Notes: the number of nominations is not the same as the number of votes. The following were all the names received up to December 18, 2000, when we closed off reader submissions. From there, we chose the top 15 and collected readers comments into individual files, allowing you to vote with via the online form. Several thousand votes were collected during the time period of the competition.
Name Nominations Lance Armstrong - Tour de France 31 Johan Museeuw - Paris-Roubaix 26 Andrei Tchmil - Tour of Flanders 19 Jan Ullrich - Olympic Games 14 Erik Zabel - World Cup 10 Vjatcheslav Ekimov - Olympic Time Trial 10 Axel Merckx - Giro d'Italia/Belgian Champion 9 Marco Pantani - Giro/Tour 9 Andrea Tafi - Paris-Tours 8 David Millar - Tour yellow 8 Francesco Casagrande - Giro/Abetone 8 Leontien van Moorsel-Zijlaard - Triple Olympic Gold 7 Erik Dekker - Tour de France/San Sebastian 6 Oscar Freire - 10 wins as World Champion 6 Chris Boardman 5 Kelme team 5 Alex Vinokourov 3 Andreas Kloden 3 Romans Vainsteins 3 Scott Sunderland 3 Stefano Garzelli 3 Tyler Hamilton 3 David McKenzie 2 Gord Fraser 2 Jason Queally 2 Jeremy Yates 2 Laurent Dufaux 2 Marty Nothstein 2 McGory and Aitken 2 Nicole Cooke 2 Niklas Axelsson 2 Roberto Heras 2 Telekom 2 US Postal team 2 Alistair Sponsel 1 Andrei Zintchenko 1 Armstrong, Zabriskie 1 Brad McGee 1 Championship of Zurich 1 Clara Hughes 1 Danilo Di Luca 1 Dave Bruylandts 1 David Plaza 1 Euskaltel-Euskadi team 1 Evgeni Petrov 1 Floyd Landis 1 Frank Vandenbrouke 1 Gary Neiwand 1 Genevieve Jeanson 1 Gethin Butler 1 Gian-Matteo Fagnini 1 Gilberto Simoni 1 Henk Vogels 1 Saturn Women - HPLJWC 1 Javier Otxoa Palacios 1 Jerome Chiotti 1 John Lieswyn 1 Kai Hundertmark 1 Kam Po Wong 1 Ken Muhindi of Kenya 1 Linda McCartney team 1 Livingston, Hamilton 1 Marcel Wust 1 Mari Holden 1 Mark Renshaw 1 Miguel Martinez 1 Nico Mattan 1 Nicole Reinhart 1 Olympic - German team 1 Paola Pezzo 1 Pia Sundstedt 1 Piotr Wadecki 1 Richard Virenque 1 Santiago Botero 1 Saturn Women 1 Stefano Zanini 1 Steffen Wesemann 1 Stuat O'Grady 1 Mercury team 1 Thomas Frischknecht 1 Trevor Lister 1 Victor Hugo Peņa Grisales 1 Yvonne McGregor 1