The 2012 Giro d’Italia isn’t a week old yet and Mark Cavendish has, perhaps unsurprisingly, already won two stages. But his first Grand Tour stage wins of the year are even more distinguished than usual, because he has taken these victories while clad in the rainbow jersey of world champion.

As tiny nuggets in the annals of cycling history go, winning a stage of the Giro d’Italia as world champion actually isn’t that uncommon. Cavendish’s wins means this is actually the 22nd year in which this has occurred. As it’s only been possible in 79 different years, it’s better than a one in four chance that any given world champion will win a stage of the Giro.

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Stage Three of this year’s Giro d’Italia ended in a massive crash caused by Roberto Ferrari. The two highest profile victims of the crash were the leader of the points competition Mark Cavendish and the leader of the entire race, Taylor Phinney.

The young American looked to have seriously hurt his ankle in the fall and actually didn’t cross the line with his bike to finish the stage. But he did climb out of an ambulance at the stage finish to collect his third Maglia Rosa of this year’s race. It remains to be seen whether Phinney will recover sufficiently to take part in the Stage Four team time trial. The rest day tomorrow will be of great benefit to him, but on viewing the pictures from the finish line, it does not look good.

Should Phinney be forced to abandon the race as a result of his injuries, the pink jersey would pass to the second placed rider on G.C., Geraint Thomas. It is not the way Thomas would ideally like to wear his first Grand Tour leader’s jersey but it seems the most likely outcome.

A similar series of events took place in the 2005 Tour de France when race leader David Zabriskie crashed during a team time trial and was forced to abandon. Lance Armstrong was the Geraint Thomas this time, sitting as he did in second place overall. In one of his more noble gestures, the Texan offered not to wear the yellow jersey the following day, but the race organisers insisted.

Regardless, of the decision of the race organisers this time around, because the first three days have all taken place in Denmark, Phinney is facing the unlikely scenario that he will have worn the leader’s jersey during the Tour of Italy but will have never actually gotten to wear it in Italy. So, attention all cycling nerds, has this ever happened before?

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An article appeared in Q magazine a couple of months ago about the band Coldplay. The article in question showed a human, vulnerable side to lead singer Chris Martin which doesn't usually come across in interviews (or in their music).

Martin described how he constantly doubts the quality of his work and whether the band deserve the success that they've achieved. He went on to divulge that as soon as he steps on stage he forgets all those fears and in his head, for the duration of the gig, he thinks that Coldplay are 'the best fucking band in the world'. But as soon as he steps off the stage, the questioning and self-doubt return.

The accompanying headline that the magazine decided to run for this article was:

We're the best fucking band in the world

Needless to say, the decision to extract this sentence out of the context in which it was spoken completely misrepresents what Martin was saying and misrepresents the entire article. It wrongly and grossly fueled the stereotype that Martin and Coldplay are up their own arses.

The point is, the author of the article didn't come up with the headline, a sub-editor did.

The same could be said for William Fotheringham's recent piece on the Guardian website which was given the headline:

Alberto Contador ban clears Olympic and Tour path for Bradley Wiggins

This headline suggests that the only thing standing in Wiggins's way of winning the Tour de France and an Olympic gold medal was Alberto Contador, conveniently ignoring all other likely challengers like Cadel Evans, Andy Schleck, Tony Martin and Fabian Cancellara.

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Over the years there have been some incredible exploits in Grand Tours where one rider has dominated the entire race. The most overwhelming of these was probably the Tour de France debut of the greatest cyclist ever, Eddy Merckx.

In 1969, the great Belgian finished the race in the yellow jersey while also winning the green points jersey and the mountains prize. In addition, he won the combination jersey and his Faema team won the teams classification. In those days, there was no prize for the best young rider, but aged just 24, Merckx would have won that too. He won six stages that year, three time trials and three mountain stages and finished almost 18 minutes ahead of anyone else – total domination.

Other famous total victories in Grand Tours are Freddy Maertens’ win in the 1977 Vuelta a Espana where he amassed a tally of 13 stage wins. There’s also the 1929 Giro d’Italia where Alfredo Binda won eight stages in a row on his way to overall victory. A win that was so dominant that he was paid not to compete the following year.

While there are many stories surrounding these and other famous victories, there are many less heralded Grand Tour champions who nevertheless remain on the roll of honoour in the history books.

It is unfair to suggest that any Grand Tour winner is undeserving of victory, after all, every ride in the race faces the same route, but there have been some riders who achieved victory in a thoroughly underwhelming fashion.

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Alejandro Valverde won Stage Five of the Tour Down Under last week finishing first across the line at the top of Willunga Hill, just ahead of Simon Gerrans. Contrary to what Phil Liggett would have you believe, this was not the Spaniard’s first race in two years. He actually rode until May of 2010 but his ‘two-year’ suspension was back dated to January 2010. Consequently, it was his first race in 19 months.

Valverde won the stage thanks to the strength of his team. For the two laps of the circuit which brought the race over Willunga hill, there was a Movistar rider constantly at the front of the race, or thereabouts.

Before the decisive last two kilomtres, Valverde had Jose Ivan Gutierrez, and Angel Madrazo up the road.

The plan was for Valverde to bridge the gap to the front, then be aided by his team until the time came to launch the sprint for the finishing line. Which is exactly what happened. Valverde bridged and was shielded by Madrazo until the final few hundred metres where he latched on to Gerrans and sprinted by him for the stage win.

But the Movistar team cheated.

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In the 2011 edition of the Vuelta a Espana, Juan Jose Cobo won by a margin of just 13 seconds over runner up Chris Froome. It’s unlikely that you’ll find a report of this race anywhere which doesn’t state that Froome actually completed the 3,300km distance in a faster time than Cobo.

The Spaniard ended up winning the race because of time bonuses. He accumulated 32 seconds more in time bonuses throughout the race than Froome. Thus, the Team Sky rider actually rode the race route 19 seconds faster than Cobo.

But did he really?

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[Ed: Fantastic discussion, thanks IP!]

Eight months before the Olympic Time Trial takes place in London, Fabian Cancellara was out around Surrey doing a recon of the 44km route, as revealed in the latest Cycling Weekly magazine. When one of his entourage suggested that they skip a small part of the route, the Swiss time trial specialist replied "we’re doing it. We are riding every single metre".

This is what champions do. They recon routes in the depths of winter. They attach a helmet cam to their heads as they do it. They watch the route video over and over in the days before the event. Then when it comes to the day itself, they are able to draw on all of the extra knowledge they’ve gained, thereby giving them a crucial edge over those opponents who are not willing to go to these lengths in their pursuit of victory.

Fabian Cancellara has won the World Individual time trial title four times and he is going to London to defend the Olympic individual time trial title he won in Beijing. Cancellara is a champion.

Andy Schleck is not.

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One of the most interesting things about cycling compared to most other sports are the different disciplines that any given rider can take part in – road racing, time-trialling, mountain biking, track racing and cyclo-cross.

Stephen Roche once said that “maybe it is a view of a dreamer but I have always believed that a complete bike racer should be able to ride on the flat, in the mountains, in the time trials and on the track.”

Not long after Roche finished third in the 1985 Tour de France at the age of 25, he rode the Paris six-day race on the track with the British rider Tony Doyle. Roche crashed and hurt his knee, an injury which would plague him for the rest of his career.

But his sentiment about being a master of all trades remains:

The crash I suffered towards the end of the Paris-Six in November 1985, which led to such disappointment in 1986, has not altered my belief about the complete bike rider.

It’s strange that Roche doesn’t include cyclo-cross in his list of requirements for the complete bike rider. He was the Irish national cyclo-cross champion in 1979 so he appeared to have that skill-set in his locker too.

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By winning the World Championship road race in Denmark, Mark Cavendish became only the second British rider to wear the rainbow jersey after Tom Simpson in 1965. But this coming weekend the world’s best sprinter has a chance to achieve what no rider, Brit or otherwise, has ever achieved – win Paris-Tours as World Champion.

Unlike most other one-day races, the World Championships road race takes place on a different route every year. Often it is won by riders who could be classed as ‘sprinters’. To illustrate, recent winners of the rainbow jersey include Mario Cipollini, Oscar Freire, Tom Boonen, Thor Hushovd and now Mark Cavendish.

So it seems surprising then that no rider has ever won the Worlds and gone on to win the sprinters’ classic directly afterward. Conversely, on a number of occasions, a rider has won the Worlds and gone on to win the other Autumn classic directly afterward, the Tour of Lombardy.

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A few months ago, the Garmin-Cervelo directeur sportif published a list of ten things he would do to change the sport of cycling. These suggestions ranged from rider rankings to television broadcasts, but the one that really caught my attention was his suggestion that there should be "long-term guaranteed entry to the Tour de France for professional teams".

If this suggestion were realised, while it would be welcome news to the teams already at the elite level, it could potentially have grave consequences for teams starting out at lower levels with ambitions of progressing through to the top of the sport.

Shortly after Vaughters released his list of suggested improvements, the lads at Cycle Sport magazine issued a rebuttal on their website and they had this to say about the guaranteed Tour entry issue:

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A world record was set yesterday. Ten stages of a cycling race in a row have been won by riders from ten different countries. This record was set when Francesco Gavazzi of Italy crossed the line to win Stage 18 of the 2011 Vuelta a Espana.

The previous record of nine stages won by nine different nationalities in a row had in fact been achieved on three different occasions. The 2009 Vuelta, 2007 Tour and perhaps surprisingly, it happened as far back as 1989, again in the Tour de France.

It's even more surprsing that this record has been set in the Vuelta which has traditionally been a major stomping ground for the Spaniards just as the Giro has for the Italians. Whereas allcomers tend to target the Tour de France.

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Leopard-Trek are due to merge with RadioShack to form yet another ‘superteam’ in the world of pro cycling. While it’s exciting times for all the major players in the merger such as Johan Bruyneel and the Schleck brothers, many riders are being left in the lurch.

Consider RadioShack rider Fumiyuki Beppu’s coy tweet on the day that the merger was announced:

They Don’t Care About Us"..Music By Michael Jackson

Beppu was not one of the riders announced in the press release who will be making the move from RadioShack to the new hybrid team.

Another rider left to sort out his future is Philip Deignan, who had this to say in an interview with cyclingnews.com, who I hope will forgive me for the extensive quote:

We’re all pretty shocked about it… It wasn’t something that we were expecting. We know that it was strange that there were no signings in August… So we were expecting changes but I don’t think anyone was expecting the team to stop. We’re shocked and disappointed that the management have left it this late to tell everyone about it.

We haven’t heard from them and we’ve not had any explanation. We’re all pretty disappointed. We had no explanation but the obvious reason seems down to money. But the riders are in the dark the whole time, we’re the last ones to know about these things.

I’ve had a really bad season. I had an injury and viral infection all season…We’re all just trying to cope as best we can. We’re all trying to stay focused but it’s difficult. A lot of the staff here have families and mortgages and there’s over 50 people involved.

What is the most depressing thing about these quotes from Deignan is that these comments weren’t made in the wake of the Leopard-Trek/RadioShack merger.

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Mark Cavendish had a chance to make a bit of history this week. There have only been three riders in the history of the sport who have won a stage in all three Grand Tours in the same year, Miguel Poblet (1956), Pierino Baffi (1958) and Alessandro Petacchi (2003). Having already won two stages of this year's Giro and five stages at the Tour, Cavendish had only a stage of the 2011 Vuelta to cross off his list to complete the hat-trick.

But, as we now know, Cavendish abandoned and in doing so forfeited his chance of joining the trio of riders who have achieved this remarkable feat. But the question is, should we really be all that surprised?

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There has been much made of the supposed 'Curse of the Rainbow Jersey' over the years. The story goes that the rider who becomes World Champion often has a bit of a stinker throughout his year in the Rainbow Jersey.

But what of the White Jersey as the best young rider in the Tour de France? Unlike the World Champion, the winner of this prize doesn't carry the jersey with him for the following 12 months, but he does carry with him a weight of expectation; that his performance in the Tour is the start of something good.

But quite often, for the best young rider in the Tour de France, this has not turned out to be the case.

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This year's Tour has thrown up a whole feast of stats and facts. Some records were broken and others were equalled in what was an amazing three weeks of racing.

I've spent the last few days putting up a large amount of these stats on twitter. But if you're not on the twitter or you missed a few I've compiled all the facts that have entered my head in the last week or so, right here. There's also a few here that I haven't mentioned at all yet.

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Stephen Roche wrote in an article yesterday that he thought it would be an interesting exercise to calculate who would be leading the green jersey competition if the intermediate sprints were ignored and the points were assigned on the stage finishes alone.

Well, Roche's wish is my command.

Currently the green jersey standings are as follows:

If we discount all the points scored in the intermediate sprints and use last year's points system instead of this year's, let's see how that table changes. The big difference between the two systems, in terms of the points at the end of the stage, is that the points this year are more heavily weighted toward the winner. Whereas last year's system distributed the points more evenly.

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In the early years of the Tour de France at the beginning of the 20th century, riders were forbidden from receiving help of any kind. The most famous and extreme example of this came in 1913 when Eugène Christophe was penalised three minutes for allowing a boy to work the bellows as he attempted to fix his own broken forks at a local forge.

On a more day to day basis, receiving no help meant that taking advantage of another rider’s slipstream was also forbidden. This rule was an attempt by the Tour organisers to ensure that truly the strongest rider ended up winning the Tour and not the rider who had received the most help.

Nowadays of course, things are completely different and no rider could possibly consider winning the Tour without the help of his team-mates. The faithful domestiques selflessly shepherd their leader around France with little or no potential for personal glory. Although they are rewarded financially if their leader succeeds, as any winnings tend to be divided amongst all team members.

As hard as it is to judge who is ‘the best cyclist in the world‘, it is surely a far trickier task to determine who is the best domestique. Although there are some who have been more successful than others at the Tour de France, and by that I mean riding for a team leader who ultimately won the Tour.

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A fact I’ve become rather obsessed and impressed with over the last while is that Liquigas are on a run of seven straight Grand Tours in which all of their riders have finished the race. And currently they are one of only eight teams in the Tour de France who still have a full complement of riders.

The other teams still fully intact in the Tour are Saxo Bank, Leopard-Trek, BMC, Cofidis, Lampre, HTC-HighRoad and Saur-Sojasun. Importantly, Contador, the Schlecks, Evans and Basso all have full-strength squads to call on as the Tour finally reaches the mountains tomorrow.

It is crucial during the rigorous mountain stages to have as much team support as possible in order to make life easier for team leaders. Historically, the winner of the Tour has always had most of their team-mates left in the race as the Tour reaches Paris, as shown in the graph below.

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The lads at Cycle Sport magazine have been churning out a heap of articles every day during this Tour de France, all available to read online. One of them in particular caught the eye yesterday. It alluded to the teams that have been winning stages in this year’s Tour.

Apart from Philippe Gilbert’s opening stage win, the rest of the victories have been divided amongst Garmin-Cervelo, HTC-High Road, BMC Racing and Team Sky. All relatively new teams, none of which hail from cycling's traditional nations of mainland Europe.

While these teams have been clocking up podium time, the older generation of teams have been clocking up time in the soporific breakaways every day, teams like FDJ, Euskaltel-Euskadi and Europcar.

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Alberto Contador is aiming to win his fourth Tour de France. Should he be successful he will leave the company of Philippe Thys, Louison Bobet and Greg LeMond and be in a category of his own just behind Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain,  who all have five. It would also be Contador's seventh Grand Tour victory which would see him move up to fourth on the list of all time winners, level with Indurain, Fausto Coppi and Lance Armstrong.

However, even if Contador makes it to seven Grand Tour wins, the CAS hearing in August could see him stripped of two Tours de France and a Giro d'Italia landing him right back down at four wins.

Despite having won three of the last four Tours, Contador is not the active rider with the most days spent in the Yellow Jersey.

That honour goes to Fabian Cancellara with 21 days in the race lead thanks to his dominance in the opening time trials. Contador has racked up 17 days in the Maillot Jaune to date, so needs five more days in the race lead to overtake Cancellara.

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Philip Lavery is a 20-year old Irish cyclist currently riding for the An Post-Sean Kelly team. For a number of years now he has been talked about as a future star of Irish cycling. Having seen success in domestic races such as the Tour of the North and the Tour of Ulster, he was given the opportunity to ride as a stagiaire for the An Post-Sean Kelly team towards the end of last season. He impressed sufficiently to be offered a contract for this year.

Lavery has been riding plenty of the Belgian semi-classics this year but could not take part in the An Post Rás due to illness. He has refocused and is now gearing up for the Irish national championships road race which take place next Sunday. I had a chance to talk to him earlier this week:

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Due to its position on the cycling calendar, the Critérium du Dauphiné is perennially used as a preparation race for the Tour de France. This has been the case going all the way back to the seventies when Eddy Merckx, Luis Ocana, Bernard Thevenet and Bernard Hinault all won the week-long race before going on to take victory in the Tour de France a month later.

Last year, the Dauphiné Libéré newspaper ceded organisation of the race to ASO, the company who also take care of the Tour de France. This change has seen the race embrace its moniker as a Tour preparation race even further by including a carbon copy of the final time trial of this year's Tour de France.

As we all know by now, Bradley Wiggins won the race overall thanks to a great time trial followed by defensive riding in the mountains. His performance was by no means the wonderful, fantastical, incredible ride that Carlton Kirby of Eurosport would have us believe.But Wiggins played to his strengths and won the race in the same manner that Indurain went about winning five Tours de France. It's hard to fault. Wiggins can only ride the route that's in front of him and he did so effectively and efficeintly, albeit without panache.

Naturally, the British press are salivating at Wiggins's prospects for the Tour. Perhaps rightly so. But historically, does success in the Dauphiné translate well to success in the Tour de France a few weeks later?

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John Gadret and Nicolas Roche don't get on. There have been diplomatic comments coming from both of them in the past few days. Gadret has said he would be willing to work for Roche at the Tour and Roche has congratulated Gadret on his stage win in the Giro. But it still seems to me like they don't get on.

Gadret performed beyond all expectations in the Giro to finish fourth. This is the best performance by a Frenchman in the Giro since Laurent Jalabert also managed fourth in the 1999 edition. It has been decided for some time, after last year's results in both the Tour and the Vuelta, that Roche would be the leader once again for the Tour de France. But Gadret's recent fourth place seems to have thrown a spanner in the works.

It is easy to dismiss Gadret's chances for this year's Tour having completed such a murderous Giro route, one of the most brutal in recent memory. I've already been guilty of this, pointing one finger toward last year's Tour failures Ivan Basso, Cadel Evans and Bradley Wiggins - all of whom rode the Giro. While also pointing another finger at the top 10 in last year's Tour - none of whom rode the Giro.

On the face of it, it seems that it is almost impossible to perform well in the Tour having completed three weeks of outrageously difficult racing around Italy. But if we dig a little deeper, things start to look a lot less comfortable for Nicolas Roche.

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Vincenzo Nibali could have been forgiven for conceding defeat in the Giro d'Italia with a week left to race.

It was quite clear after the first real mountain stage up Mount Etna that Contador was in a league of his own. So instead of trying to match him, blowing up, losing massive amounts of time and sacrificing any chance of a podium place, why not ride for second place knowing that you may actually be riding for first?

This is the farcical scenario we were left with as Contador continues to race pending the result of an appeal by both the UCI and WADA to the Court of Arbitration for Sport regarding his exoneration by the Spanish cycling federation after his positive test in the 2010 Tour de France. Now the appeal process has been delayed even further which means Contador now seems likely to be at this year's Tour. Which means if Contador is subsequently found guilty we could potentially see him stripped of a Giro and two Tour de France titles, all because of one positive...lunacy!

If I was Contador I would be trying to keep somewhat of a low profile. Although winning the Giro doesn't exactly make you inconspicuous, the way in which he shot out of the group at the end of Stage 19 to catch Paolo Tiralongo only to let him win the stage anyway was just taking the piss.

Regardless, here are some trivial oddities which no doubt will require plenty of revisionism in the future...

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No doubt over the coming weeks and months, as the federal investigation into Lance Armstrong comes to a climax, there will be plenty of riders, past and present who will be asked to comment. Now more than ever it is important to scrutinise carefully what each of them say and not allow what they say to easily pass into the realm of what is true.

Armstrong himself has been a master of proof by repeating over the years. A major case in point is his tired old line 'the most tested sportsperson in the world'. This line has been repeated so often by Armstrong and his entourage that it seems to be taken as fact by millions. This, despite the fact that Armstrong himself has no way of knowing whether this is true or not.

There is also his mantra that he has 'never tested positive' which is also quoted as fact in an alarming amount of journalistic pieces. This is simply not true, he tested positive for a corticosteroid in 1999. But Armstrong's constant repitition that he has never failed a test has millions believeing it.

These thoughts came to mind having read a recent comment by Armstrong's former teammate Viatcheslav Ekimov. Speaking to the Associated Press, Ekimov labelled Tyler Hamilton a liar. He also said the following:

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The Tour de France is still waiting for a French winner. Since Bernard Hinault last delivered a home victory in 1985, the Tour has been a free for all.  It has been won by five Spaniards, two Amercians, an Italian, a German, a Dane and an Irishman. So while the biggest Grand Tour of them all has been a largely international affair, the same is not quite true of the Tour's younger cousins.

Of the past ten years in the Vuelta, the race has been won six times by five different Spaniards. The Giro fares even better with eight victories by five different Italians. Unlike the Tour, both the Giro and Vuelta have managed to maintain a steady stream of home victories.

It's a generalisation but the Italians tend to ride the Giro and the Spaniards tend to ride the Vuelta, and then some might also ride the Tour which may dilute the presence of the French in their own race. A dilution which neither the Giro or Vuelta experience to the same extent. The price you pay for hosting the biggest race on the planet. But when the Spaniards and Italians do stray further afield, how have the indiginous riders of the two lesser Grand Tours fared in each others races?

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To the first Grand Tour of the year and the race of the cycling connoisseur: the Giro d’Italia and some rather lovely nuggets of cycling trivia…

It is the fourth year out of five in which the reigning Giro d’Italia champion is not present to defend his crown. This year the missing man is Ivan Basso who has foregone the honour of wearing the number ‘one’ on his back in order to focus solely on the Tour de France. Last year, the 2009 winner Denis Menchov was absent for the same reason. As was Alberto Contador the year before that.

The only Giro champion to have defended his Pink Jersey in the past five years was Danilo Di Luca in 2008 when he finished an underwhelming eighth.

Basso, the 2006 winner, was again missing in 2007 as he had been rumbled in Operation Puerto and was suspended. Basso’s absence this time around means that Franco Balmamion will remain the last Italian rider to have won back to back Giri d’Italia, a whopping 48 years ago.

In fact there has been no back to back winner at all since Miguel Indurain won consecutively in 1992 and 1993. There has been no ‘era of domination’ in the Giro in recent times such as those of Indurain and Lance Armstrong at the Tour de France. As such, the variety of Giro champions means there is always a clutch of former winners present at each edition of the race. This is in contrast to the Tour where it is not unusual for there to be no former winners present; 2006 and 2008 are examples and depending on the outcome of Alberto Contador’s hearing, 2011 may be another (although in that case, Andy Schleck would most likely be considered a former winner).

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Lance Armstrong gets a hard time. He is regularly accused of something he didn’t do. He is renowned for doing it, he is blamed for others having subsequently copied him doing it but he didn’t do it at all. Everyone who says he did do it is wrong.

He never focused solely on the Tour de France.

It is common practice in this modern age of cycling to slowly build race-winning form over a number of preparation races. Although every race that a team leader participates in is either a goal, or is preparation for a goal, the attitudes exuded by cyclists in each of these races can be quite different. In 2010, the two most polarised examples are Alberto Contador and Bradley Wiggins.

In preparation for the Tour de France, Contador won the Volta ao Algarve, Paris-Nice and the Vuelta Castilla y Leon and he also finished runner up at the Dauphiné. In contrast Wiggins didn’t try to win any of the races he entered, preferring to save all his effort for the Tour. With hindsight, Wiggins has regretted this decision and has changed his attitude this year having already taken an excellent podium finish in Paris-Nice.

Lance Armstrong is often accused of focusing solely on the Tour de France. Although his main goal for the year was obviously the Tour itself, he would earmark certain pre-July races in which he planned on riding aggressively and attempting to win, not merely to just bank race miles. Armstrong would always perform well in either the Tour de Suisse or the Dauphiné, winning both over the years. He also won a clutch of smaller stage races like the Midi-Libre or the Tour de Georgia. Amstel Gold was also a major goal of his throughout his Tour winning years.

Admittedly, claiming that Armstrong didn’t focus solely on the Tour de France is a tad disingenuous. Every race he entered was preparation for the Tour, but he did try to win other races throughout the year.

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Cycling is a peculiar sport. It's difficult to explain to the non-enthusiast. Do you start with the difference between stage races and one-day races? Do you explain why, despite winning the most stages in each of the last three Tours de France, Mark Cavendish will never win the Tour? Or do you explain that even though one rider gets to celebrate winning at the finish line, cycling is in fact a team sport?

The team vs. individual element of cycling is perhaps the oddest, but it is the most important to explain to newcomers to the sport. The best avenue of enlightenment is to sit the person down and make them watch a race. Once the concept of drafting and energy conservation is explained, I find the rest falls into place rather easily. In fact, people get intrigued quite quickly and amazed at the fact that riders are literally sacrificing their bodies for a designated team leader.

But once the fact that cycling is a team sport is established, the next hurdle is explaining that fans don't tend to support any particular team. There are fans that would choose not to support a particular team, mostly for doping-related reasons. For instance, there are those that don't like RadioShack because of the Armstrong/Bruyneel factor. By the same token, there are those who dislike Leopard-Trek, Geox-TMC and Saxo Bank because of Kim Andersen, Mauro Gianetti and Bjarne Riis respectively.

There can also be a certain sense of schadenfreude amongst some fans when the PR-heavy self-trumpeting teams like Garmin-Cervelo or Team Sky perform particularly poorly. But for the most part, fans have a certain clutch of riders from various teams who they like to see succeed, with whom they may or may not share a nationality. Indeed for most cycling fans, the identity of the winner plays second fiddle to the desire that it is simply a good exciting race.

I came across a case in point recently when listening to the Flammecast podcast. John and Derek were chatting to Daniel Benson, the editor of Cycling News, about the recent Tour of Flanders. They had talked enthusiastically about one of the most exciting races in recent years for about ten minutes before one of them eventually realised that they had yet to mention who won the race.

But it is this aspect of cycling, the fact that there are no real team affiliations amongst fans, that makes cycling so different, as a fan, to football, the one other sport that excites me as much. In football, the result is everything, the three points at the end of the day are paramount, to the team and to the fans. Whereas with cycling, the result is important to the teams of course, but for the fans, how the race was won is much more important.

For instance, ask yourself can you remember who won the stage of the 1988 Giro d'Italia in the snowstorm when Andy Hampsten took over the Maglia Rosa and went on to win the race? Or who won the Tour stage when the famous battle between Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor was taking place on the Puy de Dome? Can you remember who won the Mont Ventoux stage in 2009 when Andy Schleck tried to drag his brother on to the Tour podium while Contador strolled to overall victory? Or who won the stage in last year's Tour when the chaingate incident happened?

Granted, the identity of a stage winner in a Grand Tour is far less important than the identity of the eventual winner of a monument classic like the Tour of Flanders, but the sentiment remains the same. It's the journey to the finish line which fascinates the fans, not simply the identity of the guy who crosses it first.

Try imagining a Man United or a Chelsea fan sitting down to watch the Champion's League Quarter Final Second Leg next Tuesday and saying 'I just really hope it's a good game'. Nonsense. Fans of both teams would be happy to sit through the most dour, dreary, dismal display if it meant their team qualified at the end of the tie.

The fact that cycling fans tend not to have any particular affiliation with a team makes the pre-race, in-race and post-race chat with cycling enthusiasts so interesting and engaging.

If I think that Cadel Evans has a good chance of winning of a race, people are willing to listen to my reasons for this. Somebody then might come back to me and say that "I think Robert Gesink has a better chance, and here's why". In my experience, the conversation is based on reason and is always civil and (almost) always intelligent. Arguments are presented based on previous results, current form and possible goals and ultimately people may agree to disagree, but most are willing to have their opinions challenged and perhaps changed based on a decent argument.

Compare this with football fans (now, I say 'football fans' as if they are a completely separate breed quite apart from cycling fans; I am both, as I'm sure many are), the difference is startling. When Fernando Torres played for Liverpool, fans of Chelsea (amongst others) mocked him for looking feminine and wished him nothing but misfortune. But literally overnight, £50 million later, he became Chelsea's saviour, a new demi-God to be worshipped at the alter of Stamford Bridge. The fact that he is 'half a girl and half a boy' soon disappeared from the arsenal of chants on match days.

The only thing in cycling that compares with the blinkered tribalism exuded by football fans is the Armstrong/Livestrong brigade which staunchly defend every word and action by the seven times Tour-winner. But they are a minority and are avoidable.

But trawl for a moment amongst the plethora of online football forums and the vitriol and hate that certain fans have for other teams, simply because they are not their own, is pitiful. The forum comments are littered with f-words, c-words and even n-words. If somebody tries to make a reasonable point, he may be shouted down with cries of 'scouse bastard', 'cockney wanker' or 'Leeds scum' by people who don't even read what he has to say. Fans are blinded by their unwavering, thick-and-thin support of their own team and are not willing to listen to polite and rational arguments which may paint their precious football club as anything but the upstanding pillar of society with which they hold it in their own minds.

How refreshing it is to be a cycling fan.

I think Alessandro Ballan will win Paris-Roubaix. I think Vino will win Liége-Bastogne-Liége again and I think, if Contador is banned, that Robert Gesink will win the Tour de France.

Do your worst!