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UjENA FIT Club 100 Interesting Running Articles

Best Road Races and the UjENA FIT Club is publishing 100 articles about races, training, diet, shoes and coaching.   If you would like to contribute to this feature, send an email to Bob Anderson at bob@ujena.com .  We are looking for cutting edge material.

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Pleasanton: The Masters of Double Racing
Posted Wednesday, February 11th, 2015
By David Prokop Pleasanton, Calif., may be a quiet, relaxed community across the bay from San Francisco, but where Double... Read Article
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Champions of the Double
Posted Monday, September 15th, 2014
Peter Mullin has taken Double Racing® by storm. He broke the 60-64 age group world record in the first Double... Read Article
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Double Racing Has Truly Arrived!
Posted Monday, September 22nd, 2014
by David Prokop (Editor Best Road Races) Photo: Double 15k top three Double Racing® is a new sport for... Read Article
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Pritz's Honor
Posted Sunday, May 11th, 2014
By David Prokop, editor Best Road Races The world’s most unusual race met the world’s most beautiful place, in the... Read Article

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Something Borrowed, Something New
Tuesday, December 4th, 2012
Long a tradition in cycling’s Tour de France, the yellow jersey makes the transition to running Dec. 23 at the Pleasanton Double Road Race™.
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by Dave Prokop

It’s been described as one of the most famous pieces of sports clothing in the world.

The yellow jersey finally makes the leap from cycling to running Dec. 23 at the Pleasanton Double Road Race™ when the men’s and women’s winners of the opening 10K leg will wear a yellow jersey in the concluding 5K leg.

Everyone knows that the overall race leader after each stage of the Tour de France wears a yellow jersey going into the next day’s stage. The organizers of the Double, which consists of two legs after all, decided that would not only be an excellent but also a very practical idea for their competition, too.

This is not simply some gimmick or blatant attempt to borrow something so honored and associated with the Tour de France and introduce it as a glamorous new feature in a running competition. Rather, the yellow jersey  serves a very practical function and was, in fact, deemed necessary, even imperative, in the effective staging of the Double.

Understand that in the Tour de France, the yellow jersey is not only an honor for the cyclist wearing it, it identifies for the competitors, the media and the spectators alike who is in the lead based on cumulative time. It is a focal point of what the competition is about – who’s the leader on elapsed time?  If there were no yellow jersey, there’d be no visual way to readily know who was the overall race leader. Each day the crowd would just see a bunch of cyclists riding by, with someone leading the pack, or peleton in French, but that rider would not necessarily be the overall leader, because the leader of the Tour de France on any given day is the rider with the lowest aggregate or cumulative time up to that point. Who that person is would be a complete mystery to spectators visually without some ready means to identify him. Thanks to the yellow jersey, he isn’t.

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Likewise, the leaders on aggregate time as the concluding 5K leg of the Double is run in Pleasanton Dec. 23 won’t be a mystery either, because the yellow jersey concept has been borrowed from cycling and introduced to running as something new, yet practical, for just that reason.

None other than marathon great Bill Rodgers, who will compete in the Pleasanton Double, is enthusiastically supportive of the yellow jersey idea.  “It’s a little Tour de France-ish,” he says, “but I think it’s a great idea. I think it brings some focus on the leader. Spectators will want to see whether the leaders from the 10K will be able to maintain their lead or not. It’s a cool idea.”

Again, in any stage race like the Tour de France, or a race consisting of two legs, as in the case of the Double, it is imperative to have some easy visual means of identifying who leads the race on cumulative time. Because of its long history in the Tour de France, the yellow jersey fulfills that function very effectively and dramatically. In other words, everyone knows what the yellow jersey signifies.

The now-famous yellow jersey was introduced into the Tour de France in 1919 after journalists – believe it or not! – had asked Tour Director Henri Desgrange to make it easier for them to pick out the overall leader in the peleton. So it was that on the morning of July 19, 1919, before the stage between Grenoble, France and Geneva, Switzerland, Frenchman Eugene Christophe was the first rider to receive a yellow jersey in the history of the Tour de France.

Christophe, incidentally, was none too happy about wearing the jersey. He claimed that its distinctive color made it easier for the rest of the field to pick out where he was on the road, so it was easier for them to mark him.

But why yellow? For example, the overall leader in another famous cycling stage race, the Giro d’Italia, wears pink.

In his book about the Tour de France, A Race for Madmen, Chris Sidwells writes: “The official race history (of the Tour de France) holds that yellow was chosen because L’Auto (the newspaper sponsoring the Tour) was printed on yellow paper, but the real reason is far more mundane. Desgrange needed 15 jerseys in different sizes and they had to be the same color, but the supplier only had that quantity in yellow, because yellow was the least popular color. And so the yellow jersey was born.”

The most yellow jerseys any rider has been awarded in the Tour de France is 96, which is the number five-time Tour winner Eddy Merckx of Belgium was given between 1969-1975. Lance Armstrong had been awarded 83, but his recent troubles with the U.S. and international cycling bodies, stripping him of all his Tour victories and associated honors, drop his yellow jersey total precipitously all the way down to … zero! The other cyclists in the top five all-time yellow jersey list are Bernard Hinault, France (1957-1964), who had 79, Miguel Indurain, Spain (1991-1995), 60, and Jacques Anquetil, France (1957-1964), 51.

The great American cyclist Greg LeMond, who won the Tour de France three times (’86, ’89 and ‘90), was awarded XX yellow jerseys during a brilliant career that could have been even brighter and probably longer if not for a devastating shotgun accident he suffered while hunting. 

Someday, hopefully, we’ll be able to report that the most yellow jerseys awarded any runner in the Double is (blank), which is the number (blank) was given between the years (blank) and (blank).

Who knows, could you be that blankity blank person?

 

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Double Road Race