![]() The pre-race favorites were very strong against the clock Remco Evenepoel is the reigning world time trial champion, Primož Roglič the reigning Olympic champion. When Kuss took the red jersey on stage eight at this year’s Vuelta, no one expected him to hang on to it for very long, with the race’s sole individual time trial coming up on stage 10. Sepp Kuss celebrates on the podium after his victory was confirmed in Madrid. Kuss is the opposite, a pure climber, listed at 5ft 11in and 134 lbs, surely at least 70 lbs of which is lungs. Elite climbers, yes, but also able to put huge time into their rivals against the clock. In the past, successful American GC riders have usually been dynamite time trialists. Kuss is now undoubtedly the most decorated active American male cyclist, which is notable, because he could not represent a sterner rebuke of the US stereotype. This group has won age-group world championships, World Tour classics, and grand tour stages, but winning the general classification at a grand tour is at least one step beyond what anyone from the current generation had accomplished. (Kuss, born in September 1994, is technically a millennial, but he’s close enough to Gen Z to keep the thread going.) Kuss is the oldest of a new generation of young American men who have the potential to bring the US back to the front of the peloton: Neilson Powless, Matteo Jorgenson, Brandon McNulty, Quinn Simmons, and Magnus Sheffield. That year, Andrew Talansky scored a breakout win at the Critérium du Dauphiné – probably the biggest win by an American man between Horner’s Vuelta win and Kuss’s – and then left cycling for triathlon three years later. Taylor Phinney seemed bound for a decorated career as a time trialist and classics rider before suffering a horrendous leg injury at age 23. Tejay van Garderen could hang with Chris Froome or Nairo Quintana for a week or two, but never put it together over a full grand tour. The process of rebuilding the sport took so long because the millennials who followed couldn’t build on early promise. Gen-X enhanced US cycling’s reputation further, before destroying it entirely. Boomers – Greg LeMond, Andy Hampsten, and the 7-Eleven team of the 1980s – put the US on the map. The history of American pro cycling is very easy to understand through a generational framework. He was born in 1971, the same year as Armstrong and grand tour podium finishers Hamilton and Bobby Julich he was a reminder of times gone by, not the vanguard of a new generation. And Horner was too old to build on his career-defining success. When Horner won the Vuelta, the wounds caused by Armstrong’s perfidy were still too raw – American fans weren’t ready to trust another shocking comeback story yet, even though the legitimacy of Horner’s win was never called into question. In his world, there was one race, and one cyclist, that mattered. Since his first Tour de France win in 1999, Armstrong had built up a cult of personality around himself, and devoted his career solely to winning the Tour. Nine months earlier, Lance Armstrong had finally admitted that he was guilty of the doping allegations he’d denied and mocked his whole career.
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