Words by Our Man in the Bunch

Illustration by Simon Scarsbrook

This article originally appeared in Cycle Sport November 2012

Cycling team managers are the face of the whole outfit. They are the people chiefly responsible for its success or failure, the happiness of its riders and staff and the value of a squad to its sponsors.

Think of the ones that spring to mind: Bjarne Riis, David Brailsford, Patrick Lefévère, Johan Bruyneel, Jonathan Vaughters. Each has achieved a lot with their respective teams, yet it’s hard to think of a more eclectic mix of personalities, backgrounds and management styles.

I’ve been racing for over 16 years now, through the amateur and professional ranks, and I’ve certainly experienced my fair share of different characters on that journey. Some have been warm and friendly, others have ruled with an iron fist; some were hands-on, others aloof.

One of my first managers was a Belgian. It was a small team, so his role was wide-ranging: general manager, directeur sportif, training advisor — I think he even saw himself as team psychologist, regularly pointing out flaws that we didn’t even know we had (suggested solutions were less forthcoming).

Both he and his family were steeped in cycling tradition, the sport was all he knew and all he wanted to know. He was very much of the ‘what worked for us, will work for you’ way of thinking, shunning anything even slightly innovative. Heart-rate monitors were banned in his team; in his opinion, kilometres and hours were all we needed. He once spent almost an hour trying to convince me that toe-clips and straps were still superior to clip-in pedals, and that sooner or later they’d make a sweeping return to the peloton.
As a young rider keen on researching and experimenting with new training methods and equipment, we clashed constantly during my time on the team.

In my experience, the managers of smaller teams have always appeared to be the most passionate. They don’t have the staff available in order to delegate tasks, so their role incorporates everything: sponsor liaison, general manager, directeur sportif on the road, running the team’s service course, logistics and travel arrangements — the list goes on. They are there for the love of the sport, surviving financially on a year-to-year basis and watching their best riders move on to bigger teams with little or no reward. It’s hard to argue with their opinions or intentions because, more often than not, they are doing their best to give young riders the experience and racing they need as a stepping stone to the next level.

It’s for this simple reason that creating a team, rather than a group of individual riders, is particularly hard at this level. You could spend a whole season working for the best rider in a small team who is poached by a top team in the winter, with no recognition or promotion for those around him.

Sky style
A few years later, albeit on a much bigger and newly formed team, I experienced the polar opposite. This time, the manager had no background in cycling, coming instead from many years of experience in other sports. In some ways, his approach was similar to that of Team Sky principal David Brailsford, constantly questioning principles and traditions which the rest of the team adhered to out of habit. It seemed like hard work, especially for the staff, mechanics, soigneurs and directeurs, who felt that they couldn’t complete even the simplest task without being asked if there was a better way of doing it.

I remember one stage race where, despite trying every tactic in the book, we were unable to dethrone the race leader despite having two guys very close on the general classification. The manager came in to see my room-mate, something of the team tactician, and me, saying that we needed to think outside the box, do something that nobody would be expecting.

Opening his laptop, he brought up YouTube and showed us a clip of the French Open match where Michael Chang served underarm, catching his opponent so much by surprise that he won the point and went on to take the match. Shutting his computer, he looked at us expectantly, waiting for one of us to immediately come up with cycling’s equivalent of an underarm serve. We were both so stunned that all three of us sat awkwardly in silence for what felt like an eternity. Alas, we failed, both in finding a similarly radical tactic and in winning the race: sometimes in cycling a rider is simply too strong and there is nothing you can do to beat them, however clever you try to be.

Another of my early managers was particularly old-school, ruling the riders by fear. Step out of line in any way and you would often publicly receive a stern dressing-down. Interestingly, this tactic really seemed to work for a couple of the more wayward riders on the team, who had relied simply on raw talent in their early years and not reached their full potential. Gone were the days where they could slip out of a training camp or race and have a couple of drinks on the town without reprimand. They were kept in line throughout the season, the results spoke for themselves and they stepped up a level, to where they should have been all along.

On the other hand, there was one rider on the team who didn’t respond at all well. Naturally quiet and self-critical, he took everything to heart and was often visibly depressed at races. I felt sorry for him: he was a hard worker and always gave his all for the team. To be fair to the manager, he did give credit and encouragement when it was due, but out of 10 comments, this particular rider would focus on the one criticism rather than the nine compliments.

Leading from the front
One advantage of having such a hands-on manager was that you knew where you stood, good or bad. He’d let his thoughts be known and you could respond accordingly. I found him much easier to deal with than with another manager I had who we barely saw all season. He seemed to view his role as central coordinator, rallying the troops from head office and virtually using the directeurs as messengers. The problem for many of us was that we often found out his thoughts in the media before we’d heard them ourselves. I think he was just afraid, in some ways, of making enemies with anyone in the team and criticising people face to face.

Having experienced such a wide range of characters in teams I’ve ridden for, it would be easy for me to sit here and say that I think I could do a better job. Would you ever see me running a team? I would love to, but it would depend on whether I find a sponsor to come into cycling and give me that chance. I don’t think there can be much that’s more satisfying than building up a new team, completely from scratch.

Happy riders equals results
Ultimately, the most important elements of being a good team manager are having good people skills and realising that each rider is different. Some need constant attention, cajoling and encouragement, some respond well to the occasional kick up the backside and others are at their best when left to their own devices, placing enough pressure on themselves without need for outside motivation. Cycling is a team sport, and if you’re able to create a squad full of happy riders, then you’re unlikely to go wrong when it comes to results.

Our man in the bunch: More article in the series >>

Words by Edward Pickering

Friday May 3, 2012. This article was first published in Cycle Sport August 2012

The 2012 Giro was won on the Col du Tourmalet.

Wind back two years, to the final mountain stage of the 2010 Tour de France. In the thick mist at the summit of the Col du Tourmalet, Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador, the two strongest climbers in the race, are fighting out the stage.

Behind them, just over a minute down the mountain, the best of the rest, a fragmenting group of six riders, are wringing the last drops of energy from their bodies on one of the hardest climbs in cycling, with almost three weeks’ racing in their legs. There are no tactics left: the riders will come in today in order of how strong they are.

And look at the rider in fourth place on the line: Ryder Hesjedal, the revelation of the 2010 Tour. In this final contest of brute endurance, the Canadian has been distanced only by Contador (who will later go on to be disqualified for a positive doping test) and Schleck, by a minute. Just one more rider lies a handful of seconds ahead of him. Significantly, for the 2012 Giro, that other rider was Joaquim Rodriguez.

Anybody who was paying attention would realise that Hesjedal is a rider who finishes Grand Tours strongly.

Hesjedal’s Garmin team manager Jonathan Vaughters was paying attention, and last year, he had an idea. At Garmin’s pre-season get-together at the team’s base in Boulder in November, Hesjedal was summoned to a meeting with Vaughters, and managers Allan Peiper and Charly Wegelius. Hesjedal, Vaughters suggested, should lead the team at the Giro. It would involve a complete restructuring of goals and training.

“He wasn’t very keen on it at first,” Vaughters tells Cycle Sport.

“He felt it wasn’t so good for getting ready for the Tour and he didn’t know if he liked the idea. He felt that the Giro was hard, and didn’t believe he could do well there,” he continues.

“I understood his concerns, but I kept on pushing, saying, ‘Ryder, the Giro is suited to you’. We showed him the route and the profiles and he saw that the route was very back-loaded. He knows his body well enough to know what I know – that he’s good at the tail end of a long stage race. It took us about half an hour to convince him.”

Wegelius helped with the persuasion.

“Ryder has been doing the same kind of program for years and years, and when you do something like that successfully it’s not easy to make the mental switch to doing it in any other way. For North American riders, there’s also a natural tendency to focus on the Tour,” Wegelius says. “It took a bit of lobbying to get him on board.”

Vaughters adds, “The good thing about Ryder is that he’s stubborn and he’s a pain in the ass. When you give him advice, he fights it. But once he buys in, he’s not paying lip service, he goes at it 100 per cent.”

Hesjedal bought in. He’d lead the team at the Giro.

Meticulous
The stage one time trial of the 2012 Giro in Herning, Denmark, was one for the purists. Taylor Phinney and Geraint Thomas dominated it, with Garmin’s Rasmussen in third. The top 10 was a rogue’s gallery of meatheads and flat-track bullies.

But was it here that Hesjedal struck his most important blow? He was the best of all the GC contenders, finishing 17th, 29 seconds behind Phinney, but 14 seconds clear of 44th-placed Joaquim Rodriguez. It was a curious event in terms of the final result: of the final top 10, only Hesjedal finished within 30 seconds of Phinney, but it was their times in relation to each other which were important.

“I took a huge boost in morale from that stage,” Hesjedal tells Cycle Sport.

“It was short, but it showed where I was with my legs. I put time into all the other contenders, even if they weren’t looking at me as a contender.”

Garmin also had their secret weapon in Herning: Robby Ketchell, the team’s biomechanist, physiologist, aerodynamicist and nutritionist.

“There was a lot of focus on this prologue,” says Ketchell.

“I’ve never seen Ryder start a time trial like he did this one. Down the ramp, he started fast and was cornering very well. This was the first race he did on the [Cervélo] T5, and he was doing corners in the aero bars that he wouldn’t have done before. He was at one with his bike.

“Before the race we did a lot of TT preparation in Denmark, and he was riding on the TT bike, next to the car and he told me he felt amazing. I knew he’d do a good prologue.”

The other notable thing about the Herning time trial was the performance of Garmin as a whole. Rasmussen was third. Five Garmin riders were in the top 17, and all but one finished in the top 50 — Peter Stetina was 52nd.

The 2012 Garmin Giro squad wasn’t the A-team and, at first sight, it looked light on climbers. But every rider was there for a reason. Hesjedal was there for the general classification, with Christian Vande Velde as his main climbing support.

Vande Velde’s part in the plan was significant — historically he has benefitted from riding two Grand Tours in a season — so he’d support Hesjedal as well as build towards the Tour de France. The other climbing domestique was Peter Stetina, who’d quietly come 21st in his Giro debut the year before.

Tyler Farrar was there for the sprints, although he’d crash out of the race early, while the road captain was Robert Hunter, a master of the dark arts of understanding the dynamics of the peloton.

“He knows the races inside out, and he organises everyone on the road. He’s the link between the riders and the team car,” Wegelius says of Hunter.

“There are things riders like him can feel in the group that you can’t see from the car; he’ll see a team starting to chase, or he’ll have talked to somebody who knows something. He doesn’t mince his words and he’s very clear, which is what you need in a race,” he says.

The rest of the team were what Allan Peiper describes as “musclemen” – Sebastien Rosseler, Ramunas Navardauskas, Jack Bauer and Alex Rasmussen.

“Part of the equation was going with Tyler for stage wins, and strong guys for the TTT,” says Peiper.

“We knew that if we won the TTT we’d be in a good position GC-wise. But the climbers were Vande Velde and Stetina and the rest are musclemen who don’t climb so well. We’d have to ride conservatively and use our resources really wisely.”

Garmin looked like a strong team for the TTT, but surely not a Grand Tour-winning team?

Vaughters disagrees. “We chose a well balanced team. Lots of big strong guys keeping Ryder out of trouble on the flat, with enough climbing talent to support him in the mountains,” he says.

“Getting that balance right is tricky. Everyone looks at Christian and Peter and says that they did the work, but they don’t see the first three hours of the race when Rosseler and the rest are doing their thing.”

There was also one more team member whose selection Vaughters felt was absolutely crucial. “One of our biggest advantages was that we have Charly Wegelius, who is the best neo director I’ve ever seen. He was an everyman rider, and he’s an authoritative leader and strong personality. He has a calm and intelligent way of telling the riders what to do, and they listen intently to him.”

Obsession
While the peloton contested the two road stages in Denmark, Ketchell flew ahead to Verona to make final preparations for the team time trial.

“I was able to drive the course, look at it and nail the final details. I had videos, profiles, terrain and weather reports, and I took it back to show the riders at the meeting. On the rest day we were able to recon it with the entire team, doing rotations, seeing the start and the finish. We could see that the middle was very important, with some big hills,” he says.

Garmin’s attention to detail in team time trials borders on obsession. Every detail is planned and the order of rotation is tweaked, worked on, and perfected. The team practiced standing starts until they could achieve top speed, with everybody in the right place in the line, as quickly as possible. This approach had resulted in a win at the Tour de France last year, and they did the same at the Giro.

But it didn’t all go to plan. Alex Rasmussen, their best rider overall, got tailed off in the tough middle section in the Verona test, and the team had to quickly adjust.

“With TTTs, a lot of people say you can dial in all the details,” says Ketchell. “But it’s also the event with the most variables. When things go wrong, you have to be flexible. Alex still did a great ride and performed for the team, but the hilly section was tough and he had no choice but to sacrifice himself, which was a noble effort,” he continues.

“We had so much strength,” says Hesjedal. “Everyone gave everything, and everybody rode honestly. It’s unfortunate that Alex came off, but we were still fine. We put Ramunas into the pink jersey, and he’s a selfless worker and talented guy. It was a good Giro already.”

Control
Momentum is everything in a Grand Tour. It’s hard-won and easily lost, and it had been uppermost in Wegelius’s mind since that November meeting.

“The biggest concern I had was Denmark,” he says.

“We saw with the start in Holland a couple of years ago what can happen: crosswinds, crashes. When I saw Ryder’s stage one result and how well he came out of Denmark, I knew top five was possible. Some people said his win was because of the team time trial, but what we really did in Denmark and Verona was set a positive tone.

“By getting out of Denmark unscathed and getting the victory in the TTT it set a positive momentum behind the team that continued all the way through the race.”

Garmin showed how confident they had become when Hesjedal took the pink jersey a few days later on stage seven. He’d already missed out on taking the lead when the early break stayed away on stage six, and Adriano Malori stole in front of him, to Hesjedal’s frustration. Stage seven was the first hard uphill finish of the Giro, and Garmin showed how much thought Vaughters and the team managers had put into selecting the team, and how to play to their strengths, in spite of their perceived weakness. Garmin didn’t have a full team of climbing domestiques, so they exploited their strength on the flat instead.

“We had a team that was able to go at 55 kilometres per hour to the base of the climbs, and that put us one step ahead of the other leaders. They were stuck 50 riders back and having to close gaps on the climbs,” Vaughters explains.

It wasn’t just a case of being able to hammer to the climbs, either. The pacing has to be more finely-judged than, say, a sprint lead-out, and one rider in particular was very good at it.

“Alex Rasmussen is a brilliant time triallist. But he rides on the track, too. He can ride in the wind all day, but he has that smoothness of acceleration from the track, so he can ride on the front without putting a climber into difficulty,” explains Wegelius.

“When you work with riders used to leading out sprints and ask them to place a climber in a good position, it’s not the same thing. You don’t deliver the guy to the bottom at full sprint, for him to do 15 seconds all out — he’s got to keep going for an hour.

“The acceleration has to be smooth and soft. Smooth and soft. Imagine you are passing a crystal vase to the next rider. Alex is good for that.”

Garmin went to the front of stage seven with 40 kilometres to go, and led the bunch to the base of the climb to the finish at Rocca di Cambio.

“We had it lined out, slightly downhill, dust coming off the road at 65 kilometres per hour, and our guys were drilling it,” says Peiper.

“We’d done some recon of the final, and Vande Velde knew to lead into the downhill before the kick-up with 1,300 metres to go. Ryder turned into the corner first and got a gap. He got caught, but got his breath to hang on and stay with them to the line and take the jersey. We talk about him winning the Giro by 16 seconds but we could have lost 16 seconds on that single day, just by not having the team do what we did, or not doing the recon.

“Christian said that evening that it might have been Garmin’s finest ever day. We controlled it, set Ryder up and he took the jersey.”

Winning mentality
Hesjedal and Rodriguez spent the next week and a half swapping the pink jersey back and forth, never separated by more than a handful of seconds.

The parcours favoured one, then the other. Stage 10, with a violently steep uphill finish in Assisi, was perfectly suited to Rodriguez, and the Spaniard took the pink jersey, in spite of another well-executed lead into the climb by Garmin, which kept Hesjedal close behind. Four stages later, Hesjedal took the lead back with an aggressive, well-timed, clever and strong move on the climb to Cervinia.

Before this stage, Hesjedal had looked like a good rider who’d taken advantage of favourable terrain to keep his place in the top three. After this stage, he looked like a potential winner, and his rivals should have known it.

“It was hugely important. If I hadn’t gained those 26 seconds, who knows what would have happened?” Hesjedal asks.

“I did it based on feeling. I was looking around, waiting for the attacks, and they weren’t happening. My legs were good, so I tried.”

At the time, it looked like his rivals might not have been too worried about him going away from them.

“If anybody had more to give on that climb and they didn’t chase, they made a big mistake,” Hesjedal says bluntly. “I did my race, I took my chances, and I won. That’s why you have a race. People might have been thinking they would drop me in a few days, and if they did, that’s fine. But if they did, then they miscalculated.”

Hesjedal was growing in confidence and stature as he pulled on the pink jersey that evening, and Wegelius was starting to think that aiming for the top five was setting their sights a little low, but that they still had to be careful.

“I got to the team bus and had to ride a bike up the final kilometre to take Ryder’s recuperation drink to him. I remember riding up thinking, ‘this is brilliant, but now we have to calm him down and make sure we think rationally, and cold-blooded,’” says Wegelius.

“I was working out in my head how to keep him calm without putting a downer on the whole thing, how to tell him that it wasn’t necessary to defend the jersey, but in a way that wouldn’t demoralise him.

“I got to him, and he said, ‘we don’t need to do anything. It’s the other guys’ race to lose.’ He had the coolest head of all of us!”

And then Rodriguez took the jersey back the very next day on the steep final climb to Lecco.

“That was my bad day,” reveals Hesjedal. “There was bad weather, I was defending the jersey, having to take responsibility on a hard day. I had a couple of bike changes and rode my spare bike for the first time. These little things add up.”

Hesjedal finished the day 30 seconds down overall. With three very hard mountain stages to come, Rodriguez was the favourite again.

Robust
It was actually Ivan Basso who was riding the most like a favourite, well into the final week of the Giro. Day after day, he set his Liquigas climbing domestiques, probably the best in the race, to work. They burned off everybody except Basso and his strongest rivals, but the 2010 winner was unable to take advantage of their work.

In fact, through the race, Garmin had been careful to conserve their resources.

“The team never panicked or used too much energy,” says Vaughters. “We put ourselves in the position to use energy if necessary, but the riders were metering it out just enough, and never overcooking it.”

The Liquigas mountain tactics suited Hesjedal perfectly, and took the pressure off Garmin having to dictate the pace in the mountains when they were short-staffed.

“Basso continued his strategy of making the race hard. I think he wanted to keep himself in the picture,” reflects Hesjedal. “Liquigas did all the damage on the climbs, but every time Basso accelerated, I was able to respond.”

On the surface, the tactics looked nonsensical, especially seen in the harsh light of hindsight. But in Vaughters’ opinion, they had no choice.

“The only way for Basso to win is to keep a high sustained pace for long periods of time, and then he can grind everyone’s legs off, like he did in 2010,” he says.

“Liquigas had to do that, it’s the only tactic they have, and their team was built for it. We didn’t play off them, but we knew what they were doing.”

On the stage to Cortina d’Ampezzo, Liquigas had stifled the race, while Hesjedal and Rodriguez matched each other on the climb. It looked like stalemate, but with the fearsome climbs of Alpe di Pampeago and the Stelvio to come, it was hard to see Hesjedal matching Rodriguez. Except for one thing: Garmin’s final trump card.

“I’ve got more info than you guys on Ryder’s physiology,” Jonathan Vaughters tells Cycle Sport.

“And the thing that’s interesting about him is that as he gets fatigued, his power levels don’t drop off. So if you can find a race that’s going to be decided in the third week, he’ll be good at it.

“When we saw the Giro, we said, ‘wow, the Stelvio with two days to go, and a time trial… it’s loaded in the back end’. In a weeklong race, Ryder can get top 10, but he’s not great at those because he’s a diesel. Basically, he won the Giro because he out-dieseled everybody. He wasn’t spectacular anywhere, but he never faltered, while everybody else was getting fatigued.

“He also has an incredible capacity to absorb hard work. Some riders have a high VO2 Max, me for example. But I never had the ability to absorb work – I always got sick or injured. Some riders can be under-23 world champ, and have real talent given a certain training load. But when they go from 22,000 kilometres a year as an under-23, to 32,000 kilometres a year as a pro, they break down.

“Ryder’s talent isn’t his lab value, but from an immunological and hormonal perspective, his body is robust. He has to train more to get there, but he’s one of the few riders who, the harder he trains, the faster he goes.”

Pampeago plan
Alpe di Pampeago, the finish of stage 19, left Allan Peiper with two striking memories of Hesjedal’s Giro, one before the stage, one towards the end.

“The night before Pampeago, in the team hotel, I was watching Ryder. The staff were eating on one table, the riders on another, and he was turned 90 degrees from me.

“He knew I was looking, and he turned his head towards me, and he gave me this little smile and nodded his head ever so slightly, like, ‘It’s going to be OK,’

“The confidence was dripping off him. He knew he was good, and he knew what he could do.”

Hesjedal turned the race on its head on Alpe di Pampeago. Pundits speculated about how much time he would cede to Rodriguez on its steep slopes, which on the surface, suited the Spaniard more than the Canadian. Rodriguez himself probably anticipated this being a climb on which he could win the Giro. But none of them took into account the fact that the race was almost three weeks old. Any advantage Rodriguez had would be negated by Hesjedal’s extraordinary stamina.

“I knew they had to do something to me on the climb, and all I had to do was watch out for the attacks and respond,” says Hesjedal.

“Scarponi did many attacks and I was able to respond. I knew I had the strength in my legs — that’s the time to give it some, and see what’s happening. So I did. I really gave it some — at that point there’s not a whole lot to it.”

Hesjedal’s attack on Alpe di Pampeago put him 13 seconds closer to Rodriguez, just 17 seconds behind the Spaniard overall.

It was at the moment of Hesjedal’s attack that Peiper became convinced he would win the Giro.

“There was a tunnel with 500 metres to go, and I saw the picture of him coming out of the tunnel, like a classic ride from the old days. I could see his silhouette, and the light around him. I could see his style. He really put his stamp on the race then.”

Twisted tactics
Stage 20 of the 2012 Giro, to the summit of the Stelvio, was one of the finest day’s racing in the last decade, a reprise of Cadel Evans and Andy Schleck’s duel on the Col du Galibier in last year’s Tour, but with more tactical finesse. It was a stage in which only the strongest riders could hope to survive yet it was raced in a very tactical way.

The stage crossed some early climbs, then the very steep Mortirolo, before a long valley drag up to the base of the Stelvio. There were several tactics being employed, some of which looked well-planned, others of which looked hastily improvised.

“I know what it feels like as a rider to sit on the bus on the morning of stage 20,” says Wegelius. “I told the guys all they needed to do was be a little more special for a few hours. I knew his rivals would throw everything at us. I could see the reactions to Hesjedal’s ride on Pampeago.

“In Italy, a lot of the race is played out through the press. People make statements, knowing everyone will read it, and it’s a dance. I got worried when I read people saying they were riding for second, and that Hesjedal was the strongest. It was very flattering, but it meant they wanted us to ride, to defend. And our team wasn’t balanced for a hard stage like that.”

Christian Vande Velde joined the early attack, yet Peiper and Wegelius made Garmin ride on the front of the bunch. They didn’t want Vande Velde too far ahead, so that they could call him back if they needed him. Thomas De Gendt of Vacansoleil attacked over the Mortirolo and joined up with his team-mate Marco Carrara who’d also escaped earlier in the day. As the Belgian stretched away, Hesjedal suddenly looked isolated; with Vande Velde ahead, and Stetina getting dropped on the Mortirolo, his rivals hung him out to dry. Rodriguez didn’t chase, nor did Scarponi, who at least had the excuse of his team-mate Cunego also being in the escape. De Gendt’s lead stretched to over five minutes at one point; he was threatening to win overall, and still Rodriguez and Katusha wouldn’t chase.

“After the Mortirolo, we had to regroup,” says Peiper. “De Gendt attacked, Peter Stetina was off the back, and everybody looked at Ryder, while they rode at 15 kilometres per hour. We pulled back Christian and we waited for Peter to catch back, which gave De Gendt minutes. But we needed both guys – with any less, we wouldn’t have won the Giro. Katusha were prepared to lose rather than ride, and they were prepared to lose, rather than let Ryder win.”

Once Vande Velde and Stetina were both with Hesjedal, which took longer than hoped when the younger rider punctured and had to chase on for the second time, Garmin went to work. Stetina got them into the Stelvio climb, then Vande Velde took over.

Vande Velde, in Wegelius’s opinion, was key to Hesjedal’s win, both for the work he did on the road, but also the work he did before and after the stages.

“Christian was a rock,” says Wegelius. “He’s really helpful – he’s the nagging voice in Ryder’s ear, keeping him awake. In those races, you can’t sit at the back of the group for five minutes, so Christian kept nudging him. Hearing it from him gives it extra value because he’s so experienced.”

As Garmin set about rescuing the race on the Stelvio, the riders knew that the next 45 minutes would decide the destiny of the pink jersey.

“It was now our race to lose,” said Hesjedal. “Christian was crucial. Every pedal stroke that he and Peter did that day was part of my win.”

Peiper was anxiously watching from the team car.

“Christian got us to halfway,” he says. “At that point, it could unfold in a lot of ways, but we remembered Evans riding with courage on the Galibier. We talked about that in the car when Ryder was left on his own.’”

Wegelius wanted Hesjedal to leave it as late as possible before committing himself fully.

“We waited as long as we dared, and said, you’ve got to ride now. Ride in the gutter to make them suffer in the wind, and ride a time trial to the finish. Don’t turn around. Rodriguez isn’t attacking you now, because he can’t,” says Wegelius.

The closer Hesjedal got to the finish without Rodriguez attacking, the better it was. With 800 metres to go, the Katusha rider went for it. “Rodriguez, to his credit, threw everything he had at Ryder at the end,” says Peiper.

The brave Spaniard gained 14 seconds, but he must have known it wouldn’t be enough.

Narrow margin
If Hesjedal had been the epitome of cool throughout the Giro, he finally woke up nervous on the morning of the final stage. “He was more nervous than I’d ever seen,” says Peiper. “That’s a good thing. He was on his game.”

Robby Ketchell had gone to the USA after the team time trial, to work with Garmin at the Tour of California. But he had one last job to do in Italy, and he flew to Milan to help Hesjedal’s final effort of the race: the stage 21 time trial.

“I got to Milan and started reconning the time trial course,” says Ketchell.

“It was like a giant prologue – unlike most time trials, it was in a city, so there were a lot of corners. People were saying Ryder could gain three minutes, but I could see that wouldn’t happen. In a straight out-and-back course it would be just him against his competitors, but there were more variables here.

“It wasn’t a time trial we were able to ride in advance — there are lots of one-way streets, and lots of cars. But I walked around a lot of it, marking down the critical points, which corners he could go full speed through, where to be careful, and where the wind was going to blow from. We were able to communicate that to him through the race and that was critical.”

The team used the splits from the riders who set off early in the day to guide them for Hesjedal’s effort. The most technical section was at the start, and that’s where the time was being gained.

“Ryder took 28 seconds out of Rodriguez in the first 10k,” says Peiper.

That left him only three more needed to win, and while Rodriguez fought hard, Hesjedal did enough to win the Giro by 16 seconds.

With margins that tight, it’s impossible to say where the Giro was won and lost. The lead swung back and forth so much that it looked almost like an equal fight. But Hesjedal dominated the final three mountain stages and the time trial. If his rivals wanted to beat him, they had to put him out of the race before his ascendancy in the final week. Hesjedal underlines his consistency over three weeks when he points out an unusual symmetry in his win: “It’s a complete three-week race, and I took the pink jersey on stage seven, stage 14 and stage 21.”

THE GENERAL CLASSIFICATION
How the GC evolved over three weeks

THE CLOSEST GRAND TOURS IN HISTORY

THE GIRO 2012 SWINGOMETER

Words by Our Man in the Bunch

Illustration by Simon Scarsbrook

This article originally appeared in Cycle Sport October 2012

As I begin to write this month’s column, I’m starting to wonder if Cycle Sport has any intention of publishing it, or if it’s just a devious ploy by the editor and staff to find out what I/we think of them. It’s time to talk about the relationship between cyclists and the press: sometimes rosy, sometimes tense, and occasionally confrontational.

My first memory of anything media-related in my cycling career came when I was 15. I’d finally managed to crack the top three in my age category at the local race, and the following Thursday my name appeared in the local paper. It might have been printed in a tiny font size and camouflaged among a multitude of other local sporting results, but I was pleased as punch and immensely proud. It was a publicly available recognition of an achievement that I’d worked hard for over the previous two years.

I’m pretty sure that most cyclists, and sportspeople in general, experience similar feelings after their first brush with the media. We love winning, and the resulting attention from the crowd (if there is one) and press are pleasant by-products. They’re good for the ego.

The logical conclusion of this comes when an athlete transcends their sport, becoming so successful that they’re recognised not just by fans but by Joe Public, and becomes a focus for journalists who may have no knowledge whatsoever about their particular discipline. What is happening in their personal lives makes as many headlines as their results, and more is written about them in magazines and online than they’re able to keep tabs on. In cycling, that’s Lance Armstrong, although Mark Cavendish appears to be well on his way.

Also Bradley Wiggins. He’s been on the receiving end of some unwanted side-effects of his recently found fame, being pictured post-Olympics in the tabloids having a sneaky (or so he thought) cigarette. Receiving that amount of attention is difficult for riders, who are used to an uninhibited private life, and relative anonymity outside of races.

Anti-social media
I’ve never come near to reaching those lofty heights, but I have had a lot of experience with the press. I’ve seen firsthand just how many demands the champions of our sport have on them, and how they are misquoted and misinterpreted. I’ve seen how negative comments can affect a rider’s mentality, both positively and negatively.

There comes a point in most sporting careers when, having had nothing but positive reports in the media, you receive your first public criticism. I have to admit it’s not easy to read. Nobody likes to be criticised, and especially not to have it in black and white for everyone to read. It can be for any number of perceived faults: from not being visible enough in a race, carrying too much weight, performing under par, or just because a journalist thinks they’ve discovered some tension within a team.

Modern social media, and in particular Twitter, has opened us up to criticism from seemingly everyone. It can be a great tool to get your own side of a story across. But on the flip-side, it’s hard to read the comments, sometimes harsh or even abusive, and not take them to heart, even though you have no idea who is writing them. It’s an even more direct form of criticism than internet forums, and significantly harder to hide from. Last year, Greg Henderson posted a tweet indicating that he was leaving Team Sky. Judging by the fact that it was quickly deleted, we can presume it was meant to be a private message, but by that point it was too late.

Teams have started to set rules for riders using these media in an attempt to curb controversy and prevent negative publicity. Omega Pharma have implemented a rule preventing riders from tweeting within an hour of crossing the finish line, when tempers can be frayed and adrenalin is at its highest. Once it’s out there, there’s no going back. You will also rarely see riders blaming equipment failure on a bad performance. It happens, but teams understandably don’t take kindly to riders publicly criticising precious sponsors.

As the sport has become bigger, teams are spending more time teaching riders about media relations: what not to say, how to handle awkward or provocative questions, how to portray the team in a good light, etc. I heard about one team doing a role-play interview in which a rider was asked deliberately challenging questions. He was doing well until a few minutes in when he was asked if he knew where to source performance-enhancing drugs. Judging by the media advisor’s face, his reply, “Well, I guess you can find anything if you do enough research on Google,” wasn’t the answer they were looking for. That’s not the kind of quote you want in a headline with your name in it.

Some riders are far more comfortable in the limelight than others. Edvald Boasson Hagen, for example, would obviously much rather just race his bike and not have to deal with the press. On the other hand, some riders bask in the limelight and milk every minute of it, giving long elaborate answers to whoever will listen to them.

Groundhog day
One thing the public should take into consideration when assessing a personality through a post-race interview is the frequency and volume of the questions. A stage-winner or jersey-wearer may have to answer very similar questions from five or more journalists in a short space of time. If you happen to read or view the last of those, it’s not a surprise that the answers have become shorter
and more abrupt, as the rider is probably bored of saying the same thing; he wants nothing more than to go back to his hotel. To put things into perspective, the yellow jersey at the Tour is interviewed by two or three of the head journalists from television, sometimes in different languages, then faces a few short interviews for other television and radio, then heads to a press conference with the written and online press, before finally being set free. Bearing this burden of interviews is the rider’s obligation; dare to skip one and he will be reprimanded by ASO.

Generally, things go pretty smoothly. Many in the press are familiar faces covering races all season long. This can pose a problem in itself — at what point does a friendly chat become a full-blown interview? For the most part, journalists want to keep a good relationship with the riders, and won’t print anything that is obviously meant to be private. Even so, as a rider I’ve learned to be careful to define what’s on-the-record and what’s off; otherwise, the juicy gossip shared over a beer all too easily turns into the next big story.

At higher-profile races, and in particular in the Tour, a new problem crops up. Journalists who don’t specialise in cycling arrive on the scene with a basic but far from in-depth knowledge of the sport. Some of their questions are either irrelevant or completely patronising, so it can be hard to remain buoyant and enthusiastic.

I was training in Italy this year during the first week of the Giro d’Italia, and so I caught the local coverage in the late afternoons. After watching Mark Cavendish take a hard-fought sprint ahead of Matt Goss, the Radiotelevisione Italiana interviewer asked him how it felt to win in front of his girlfriend and son, who were visiting the race. The instant reply was “It’s not my f***ing son, it’s my daughter. Do you wanna start again?” The only trouble for the journalist was that he couldn’t — it was live.

Words by Edward Pickering

Sunday April 21, 2013

Dan Martin won Liège-Bastogne-Liège, but the more complete story is that the Garmin team won it.

The American team engineered the Irishman’s victory by dominating the front of the race in the final 25 kilometres, with Ryder Hesjedal going for a long solo attack over the top of the Côte de Colonster, then putting the final drops of energy in his body into working on the front of a small group, including Martin, who bridged up to him over the final climb of the Côte de St Nicolas.

Hesjedal’s tactic was risky. The others in the group, Alejandro Valverde (Movistar), Joaquim Rodriguez (Katusha), Carlos Betancur (Ag2r) and Michele Scarponi (Lampre), were getting a free ride to the finish. Valverde, Rodriguez and Betancur are all proven uphill sprinters. All have finished on the podium of an Ardennes Classic, while Martin’s best was fourth in last week’s Flèche Wallonne.

But the Irishman has been building up to a win like this for a couple of seasons. He was already confident of his form – the evidence for that was in his late burst up the Mur de Huy, where he covered the final 100 metres extremely fast. All he had to do was get the timing right, and his good form would do the rest.

The finishing climb of Ans is not as tough as Amstel Gold’s Cauberg, nor Flèche Wallonne’s Mur de Huy – the damage is done with the harder climbs earlier in the race – but it’s not a straightforward sprint. With a 90-degree left-hand turn 100 metres before the line, there are two races – first into the corner, then first over the line. Win the first race, and the chances are the second will happen automatically.

With a dozen-strong group, led by Astana, slowly pressing from behind, Rodriguez was the first to panic. He launched a very hard attack from the back with 1,200 metres to go, and destroyed the coherence of the group. Hesjedal was immediately finished. Scarponi tried to follow, but was clearly not moving as fast as the Spaniard.

However, Martin hadn’t given up yet. He distanced the others, then started clawing his way up to Rodriguez’s back wheel. It took 300 metres or so, but the momentum was clearly with him. The trouble was that it was too early to launch the sprint, too dangerous to come through and lead, and by sitting in, he’d risk the others coming up from behind. His uncle, Stephen Roche, suffered that fate in the 1987 race.

The crucial thing was that while Rodriguez had launched an all-out attack, Martin’s pursuit had been a steady acceleration and grind, rather than a sprint. It was hard work – Valverde and Betancur had been unable to follow – but Martin’s move had been less physically expensive than Rodriguez’s

Martin slowed and rode next to Rodriguez. Maybe something in the Spaniard’s breathing or riding style told him that victory was one, last, attack away. With just 100 metres to the final bend, Martin jumped. Rodriguez tried to match him, but his effort was a pale imitation of the force with which he’d ripped himself clear originally. He’d made his play to win La Doyenne and it had failed. Now it was Martin’s turn.

***

It was an unusual edition of Liège-Bastogne-Liège. With the tough Côte de la Roche aux Faucons under roadworks, the organisers had to find a different way to Ans. Their solution was the new climb of the Côte de Colonster, a wide, draggy rise very different in character from the narrow, steep ascents typical of the race.

The peloton was still 60-strong when they tackled the climb. The early break had been and gone, and a series of attacks over the Redoute climb, had been contained, not without effort, by the BMC team. Once the breaks, which had never gained more than a few hundred metres’ lead, had been caught, BMC carried their effort through to the Colonster climb. Their tactics were an echo of those which they’d used to smother Flèche Wallonne just four days previously.

On the Côte de Colonster, Rui Costa (Movistar) and Sergio Henao attacked, but on such a shallow gradient, the effect was to stretch, rather than break the peloton, and they couldn’t quite build enough of a lead to make a significant break.

Alberto Contador (Saxo Bank) went. This time, the damage was starting to show behind him. But it still wasn’t quite enough to force a proper break.

The peloton was one attack away from letting go. And it came from Ryder Hesjedal. The Canadian dragged Contador, Henao, Igor Anton (Euskaltel), Rodriguez and Costa with him, and suddenly there was a gap, with 17 kilometres to go.

Hesjedal looked the most committed. He cajoled and nagged his fellow escapees to work together, and when they didn’t, he just took off on his own over the drag down the other side of the climb. Behind, Astana massed at the front of what was left of the peloton – of the 35 survivors, five were from the Kazakh team. Last year, they’d chased down Nibali in the final kilometres and won the race. This year, they were working for him.

Ahead, Hesjedal spent the first few kilometres of his lone attack looking over his shoulder, but with the remnants of the group going back to the peloton, it was clear it was him against everyone. He looked like he was working a little too hard, but he was moving extremely fast – he built a 20-second lead over the next seven kilometres.

However, it was an unequal battle. Hesjedal had committed himself, but his main rivals were still fighting the war by proxy, hiding behind their domestiques. A line of Astana riders kept the pressure up behind, and slowly started squeezing his lead.

The peloton definitively broke on the final significant climb, the Côte de St Nicolas. Hesjedal gamely defended his lead, and the first signs that Garmin weren’t just on a suicide mission started to show – Dan Martin started riding alongside whoever was at the front of the fast-eroding bunch up the climb. It was a clear message that anybody who went after Hesjedal would be pulling him along, too.

Betancur attacked. He was followed by Scarponi and Rodriguez, with Martin in close attendance. They were joined by Valverde, and they bridged to Hesjedal. Incredibly, at this point, they were barely 20 metres clear of Philppe Gilbert, but over the top Martin pressed forward, and the gap went out.

Martin led down the descent, then Hesjedal took over again. The race was down to six men, five if you discounted Hesjedal, who had made the transition to domestique and was haring through the streets of Ans on the front of the group, holding the chase, still led by Astana, at bay.

It was a gamble. Valverde and Rodriguez couldn’t have asked for a more convenient tactic. But Garmin had worked their own tactics to perfection and Martin had ridden the last six kilometres, over the St Nicolas, down through Ans, and up the finishing climb, like the winner-elect.

Garmin didn’t have the theoretical strength in depth of the other teams. Sky led up La Redoute with four riders in a line. BMC had five riders on the front of the bunch between La Redoute and the Côte de Colonster. Then Astana put five at the front between the Côte de Colonster and Côte de St Nicolas.

Garmin only had two riders involved in the final part of the race. But unlike the other teams, whose strength led them into the trap of riding defensively, they still had the confidence to put them off the front. In the final 16 kilometres, apart from Rodriguez’s attack, Garmin had led for every single metre of the race.

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Words by Edward Pickering

Wednesday April 17, 2013

One of the biggest myths peddled by all kinds of interests in the world of professional cycling is that bike racing is always exciting. Elements of the media, race organisers, sponsors, teams and fans often take this as a given.

But it’s not true.

Just as there are turgid nil-nil draws in football, or dull, penalty-dominated rugby matches, some bike races are a bit of a yawn. As with everything, there is a spectrum, with fascinating, absorbing, exciting races like this year’s Paris-Roubaix, for example, at one end. Milan San Remo was there or thereabouts this year, too, as was Sunday’s Amstel Gold Race.

Flèche Wallonne was towards the other end. The race evolved along such predictable lines that the only doubt was which uphill sprinter would burst from the front of the race to cross the line first. The method was the same as most recent Flèche Wallonnes – start the climb in a big group, and the rider with the best combination of strength and timing wins.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t enjoyable to watch. There was pleasant green scenery: the rolling, forested hills of the Ardennes looked beautiful in the spring sunshine. Watching the peloton shifting in shape and size as occasional attacks went, or as they climbed, was an interesting study of racing dynamics. But the real action was compressed into a 20-metre stretch of road (coincidentally the same spot as last year) when Katusha’s Daniel Moreno launched his finishing sprint, and put clear air between himself and the labouring Philippe Gilbert.

The sprint on the Mur de Huy is all about timing and positioning. Riders who go too early, as Ag2r’s Carlos Betancur discovered, find themselves pedalling as if through treacle. Riders who go too late, or start their effort from too far down, as fourth-placed Dan Martin of Garmin discovered, find themselves overtaking riders all the way up the finishing straight, but too late for the win.

Moreno did both things right – by tracking race favourite Gilbert’s wheel up through the climb’s famous steep S-bend, and out onto the long straight road towards the final 250 metres, he’d put himself in the right position. And he left his attack late enough that he could hold his speed to the line. Sergio Henao chased in for second, but never looked like threatening Moreno, while Betancur just held off Martin for third. Colombian cycling fans will be cheering having two of their countrymen on the podium of a semi-Classic.

This year was the 10th anniversary of the last time the race happened in any other way than a straight uphill sprint between the favourites. Cycling races need to think carefully before tinkering with formulas and formats that work, but Flèche Wallonne is fast becoming one of the most predictable events on the calendar. Is it time for a rethink on the route?

***

The fastest rider on the Cauberg climb in Amstel Gold last week was Philippe Gilbert, and while this only got him fourth place then, he was obviously feeling confident for Flèche. His BMC team took responsibility for controlling the race, and the smothering pace they set was in large part responsible for the inability of attacks to stick in the final 50 kilometres.

Gilbert is still waiting for his first win as World Champion, and after his display on the Cauberg, and the fact that Flèche Wallonne’s defending champion Joaquim Rodriguez injured himself in a crash in the Dutch race, he obviously fancied his chances of being the fastest up the Mur. He’d been peerless on the same climb in 2011 – he lacks the lightning acceleration of that year, but he and his team still rode most of the race like he was the winner-elect.

BMC shut down the early break with 40 kilometres to go, before the penultimate ascent of the Mur, then kept the bunch stretched out in single file as riders tried and failed to escape. Laurens Ten Dam of Blanco and Simon Geschke of Argos managed to emerge over the Mur with a lead that barely scratched 30 seconds, but they’d only succeeded in providing BMC with a carrot to chase, and they had no hope of victory. The Swiss team kept the bunch at a fast, uncomfortable pace all the way to Huy. As the kilometres ticked downwards, a line of red riders, interrupted by Gilbert’s white world champion’s strip, hared towards the finishing climb.

Astana gave BMC a breather as the race crossed the Meuse river into the town, and up the draggy main street that leads to the bottom of the Mur, before a Blanco rider led into the climb. Betancur attacked, too early, sealing his fate. Gilbert went to the front early – at the speeds they ride up the Mur, wind resistance is less of an issue – followed by Sagan, Moreno and Henao.

As Sagan faltered, Gilbert looked like he might be able to ride away, but he suddenly looked uncomfortable, and Moreno chose that moment to go for it. Uran followed, but his timing and positioning were inferior to Moreno’s and he couldn’t make an impression on the Spaniard’s lead. As for Gilbert, he started zig-zagging, head down, and sat down. After Moreno, 13 more riders passed him in the final 100 metres. Gilbert’s team had ridden as if he were going to win the race. Unfortunately for them and him, he hadn’t.

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Words by Our Man in the Bunch

Illustration by Simon Scarsbrook

This article originally appeared in Cycle Sport August 2012

It’s no secret that cyclists don’t command the same salaries as Formula 1 drivers, golfers, basketball or football players, but how big are the differences? How about the discrepancy between the stars of the sport and the ‘also-rans’?

Cycling is one of the harder professional sports. The amount of hours’ training, the number of days of competition and the risks of crashing are all high. But despite that, and the fact we’re not as highly paid as football players, I don’t think we have much to complain about with our salaries these days.

You won’t find many pros who started cycling motivated by money. Equally, you won’t find many pros who can retire with the luxury of not having to think about working again. In fact, the majority of us will need to find a job pretty sharpish once our sporting careers are over.

In terms of exact figures, apart from my own salary and those of a few others, my knowledge is little better than that of the general public. It’s not something openly talked about in the bunch, which can make it hard for those of us without an agent when it comes to negotiating. However, based
on the figures that I do know, I can make some reasonable assessments of what various levels
of riders can expect to earn.

The base level is the minimum wage. For ProConti teams, that amount is €27,500, or €23,000 for first-year pros. At WorldTour level, it increases to €35,000 and €24,000 respectively. Most riders enter their pro careers at this minimum level, happy to have got their foot on the first rung of the ladder. However, show something truly exceptional in the under-23 category and you may be lucky enough to have more than one team after your signature, immediately bumping your price up.

In the WorldTour, there won’t be too many experienced riders toiling away for the minimum wage. If you’ve proven yourself enough to warrant being given a contract extension, the team is probably going to pay that bit extra for a rider that they’ve got to know and helped to develop.

The minimum wage has been a welcome development, but I have heard in the past of certain ProContinental teams finding loopholes to get around it. Some riders find sponsors, whose donations to the team are enough to cover their wages, effectively paying their way on to the team.

I have also heard of riders having two contracts: one official UCI contract, and another stating an amount that the rider must pay back to the team each month. That way, the team is able to prove that the correct amounts are being transferred to the rider each month, so no questions are asked and everything appears above board.

The top end of the salary scale is made up of riders who have won the biggest races, like Alberto Contador, Philippe Gilbert and Mark Cavendish. These riders are able to command basic salaries (before bonuses or endorsements) of more than $2.5m, leading to the skewed €264,000 “average wage of a pro cyclist” recently quoted in a UCI report [edit: in February 2012]. On top, they may well have negotiated large bonuses within their contract, and will have a number of endorsements ranging from shoes and shades to watches and cars. While this is a far cry from the neo-pros I just talked about, these champions are generally very generous when it comes to giving gifts and bonuses to team-mates.

The hordes of us who fill the void between these extremes are offered contracts based on
a number of factors. Ability carries the biggest influence, but beyond that, age, nationality, future potential, leadership qualities and publicity generation are all taken into account.

‘Potential’ is a big one. Finish on the podium of one of the Monuments, World Championships
or Grand Tours, and, if you’re not too old, you’ve effectively shown you have the potential to win
one in the future. Make the podium of the Tour of Flanders, for example, and even if you do little else for the rest of the season, you can expect to earn upwards of €250,000 for the following few years. Do it at the Giro or Vuelta and you can double or even triple that figure.

Nationality has played a role in a couple of high-profile cases recently. Matt Goss had a tremendous season in 2011, coinciding perfectly with the creation of the first ever Australian WorldTour team, inflating his price further. Similarly, Bradley Wiggins showed his potential for future Tour de France glory with fourth place in 2009, just as Sky had invested millions of pounds in a cycling team whose aim was to have a British winner of the event within five years.

Moving billboards
Publicity generation is an interesting one. We are, after all, moving billboards paid to get exposure for the team sponsors. Most riders assume that just means achieving personal results or helping the team leaders to do so, but some of the more savvy riders spend time generating extra publicity through social media, or devote extra time outside the racing and training schedule helping sponsors with product testing or launches and appearances at trade shows. This can add a certain value to a rider above and beyond simply performing at races.

In a slightly extreme case, Francesco Planckaert did a couple of professional seasons with MrBookmaker.com and Chocolade Jacques a while ago. He didn’t set the world on fire on the bike, but at the time there was a very popular television documentary following his family, so he was a very well-known figure who received a lot of airtime and publicity, justifying his wage despite the lack of results. In a similar vein, ageing champions who are beyond their best will often continue to earn big salaries due to the fact that they are still a ‘big name’ and garner a lot of attention from the public and press.

So how much are we able to earn outside our basic salaries? Well, you can write for a magazine, but they pay like sh*t (You’re fired! — Ed). Diaries or blogs for websites, after-dinner speaking and guest appearances at events or training camps can all bring a little extra money in, the fee obviously depending on how big a rider’s profile is.

I have done talks ranging from free (my local club), to €400 for a two-hour Q&A on my training methods, right up to €1,200 for a 40-minute talk to non-cyclists on motivation and my career. The bigger your profile, the more of these events you’ll be offered and the more you’ll be paid for them.

Endorsements are another option, although these days there are fewer opportunities. When a team is sponsored for everything bike-related, there is little or no room to get a personal sponsorship deal. A few years ago, riders could often choose their shades and shoes, but these days a lot of the teams have sponsorship deals in place for that. Many of us are still able to select our own shoes, but unless you’re a hitter, it’s going to be hard to persuade Sidi to pay you significantly, with bonuses for podium places the common deal.

Prize money is the most lucrative extra income a rider can hope for. Work your backside off for a leader who wins a Grand Tour or World Champs and you will be in for a share of a large sum, and possibly a hefty bonus from the rider and/or team.

Almost all teams split prize money among the riders, but I’ve experienced this in two forms. In some of my teams, the prize money from a race was split equally between the riders who rode that particular race. On another, the prize money was pooled for the entire year and split between the riders based on the number of days they’d competed that season — I’d never been so happy to see my team-mates win on the TV as that year.

The problem with prize money, however, is twofold. Firstly, there is a huge drop-off from winning a race to even being third. Coming between 10th and 20th, the amount is virtually an insult when you consider how hard it is to achieve such a result in a big race. Secondly, the prize money is taxed at source (up to 50 per cent), and some is taken away to pay for anti-doping controls. The amount that lands in your account is often far from what you expected after a top team performance.

Welcome extras
The days of being able to do a post-Tour criterium in France virtually every day for the following month are long gone. Not only have those events dwindled over the years, but we are often still required to race through August. That said, Philippe Gilbert did manage to compete in one every evening between finishing the Tour and winning San Sebastian a week later, in 2011. I don’t know how much he earned per evening, but it was probably in excess of €20,000. For my part, even when I was a little-known young pro, I would get €600 for a standard post-Tour crit in France (often in cash), a very welcome extra at the time. My appearances at these events are fewer these days, but on average I would expect €1,500-2,000 per event, with all expenses paid.

The final source of potential extra income is contractual bonuses provided by the team. These also vary between one team and the next. I’ve been on teams where there are no bonuses whatsoever, and another where I’d not only get a bonus for a personal podium place, but also if a team-mate made the podium. The amount varied from a few hundred euros for winning a stage of a smaller race, to €5,000 each if one of us won a ‘Monument’ (which, unfortunately, didn’t happen that year).

Our lives are reasonably comfortable these days, even if few of us are driving around in Ferraris or Lamborghinis. Until TV rights begin (if ever) to filter through to the teams, that won’t change, but it won’t stop us giving every ounce of energy to a sport that is about passion, not money. We’re happiest training, resting, racing and fully concentrating on the sport. So while the extra income can often be enticing, it should never affect our real job, which is to ride a bike as fast as possible.

Words by Edward Pickering

Monday April 15, 2013

KREUZIGER: QUESTIONS TO ANSWER
Roman Kreuziger rode a clever and aggressive race to win the Amstel Gold Race. He chose the perfect moment to bridge from the peloton to the break, over the Cauberg, just as the peloton was being considerably weakened by the climb. Then he chose the perfect moment to attack the break, towards the top of the Bemelerberg climb. The timing was perfect, and he had the strength to take his lead all the way to the finish line.

Although this is the Czech rider’s first major one-day win, he’s had primarily good results in stage races until now. He’s won the Tour of Romandy and Tour of Switzerland, and achieved two top 10 results at the Tour de France, and fifth in the Giro d’Italia.

In fact, he was a real prodigy. I remember adding a sidebar to an interview Cycle Sport did with him in early 2010 which compared his results at the same age as other young achievers in the Tour de France since 1990.

When he was 22, he came 13th in the Tour (bumped up to 12th by a subsequent disqualification). Only Jan Ullrich, who was second in 1996 at the same age, had been better at the same age.

When he was 23, he came ninth in the Tour. That’s better than Andy Schleck (12th) and Vincenzo NIbali (20th) were at 23. Only Ullrich (1st in 1997, and Peter Luttenberger (fifth in 1996) were better.

However, he only improved to eighth at 24, in 2010, his last year with Liquigas. Fifth in the Giro in 2011, with Astana, was his last strong result in a Grand Tour. Since then, he’s been mediocre.

However, stunning results – and they were stunning, all the way back to his Tour of Switzerland win at 22 in 2008 – aren’t the only feature of Kreuziger’s early years as a professional. His name also popped up in the Lance Armstrong case brought by the United States Anti-Doping Agency at the end of last year.

In his witness statement, former rider Leonardo Bertagnolli alleged that Kreuziger was one of several Liquigas riders who was being trained by disgraced sports scientist Michele Ferrari. Bertagnolli admitted that Ferrari had administered EPO to him.

Now Kreuziger is a Classics winner, with the added novelty of having achieved it in an attacking, classy way. But given cycling’s past, he now owes it to the fans to clear up the matter of his relationship with Doctor Ferrari.

NEW COURSE, OLD TACTICS

Philippe Gilbert, Simon Gerrans and Alejandro Valverde are riders of similar strengths. Their speciality is uphill sprinting, which means the Ardennes Classics and Amstel Gold have been fertile territory for good results for them.

But yesterday, they got caught out by the route change. With the finish line 1,500 metres further down the road from the top of the Cauberg, uphill sprinting was no longer enough.

The trio were still the strongest riders on the Cauberg. Gilbert’s attack on the final climb was incredible, and it took Valverde and Gerrans a long time to claw their way up to his back wheel. Everybody else had been easily dropped.

But it counted for nothing when they couldn’t find enough common cause to close down Kreuziger, who was just over 10 seconds ahead at the top.

Their mistake was a double one. First, they assumed that any break could be closed down enough for them to decide the race on the Cauberg – but the course whittled down the peloton so much that only BMC had the numbers to mount a chase, and given Kreuziger’s strength, this wasn’t enough. Second, they stopped co-operating, to such an extent that they were caught by the next group.

It’s early to say whether the new course favours exciting racing, but one out of one is not a bad record.

ORICA’S TACTICS: HIT OR MISS
Orica really got stuck into Amstel Gold. Their Dutchman, Pieter Weening, went for a mid-range attack with about 40 kilometres to go, and was a persistent force in the escape group which decided the race. Then Simon Gerrans sprinted in and took third place. Weening held on for eighth.

Weening’s presence in the break took the pressure off the team, who could focus on protecting Simon Gerrans without the responsibility of chasing.

Could they have done better? If Orica had kept Weening back to assist in BMC’s chase, Kreuziger might have been closed down, putting Gerrans in a position to sprint for first, rather than second. But it was a day when conservative tactics were overshadowed by attacking enterprise. The result was Orica’s first podium in a major one-day race this year. Well worth the effort they put in.

MISSING IN ACTION (i): SAGAN
Something was wrong with Peter Sagan in Amstel Gold. Just four days previously, he’d won Brabantse Pijl with a performance of Merckx-like dominance, single-handedly chasing down strong breaks in the finale, leading out Gilbert in the sprint, then still managing to come back round the world champion.

The Slovak, who’s not come lower than second in a major one-day race this year, blamed his performance on the warm weather, but it was hardly summer weather in the Netherlands. And generally, riders don’t lose form as quickly as he seemed to between Brabantse Pijl and Amstel.

It’s possible that his poor performance yesterday, along with that of his team, caught out the other favourites. For most pundits, the question before the race was not whether he’d win, but by how far. The same might have gone of his rivals, who’d have based their races to a certain extent on the assumption that he was going to be a factor.

By the time they realised he wasn’t, and that Cannondale weren’t going to be any help in the final run-in to Valkenburg, Kreuziger was 30 seconds up the road.

MISSING IN ACTION (ii): SKY

How long before Sky’s Classics campaign edges over into the territory of a disaster?

While their stage racers continue to sweep all before them, the team’s vaunted Classics project has fallen flat on its face. Sergio Henao rode well to finish sixth in Amstel Gold, but he’d been unable to match Gilbert, Gerrans and Valverde on the Cauberg, and the rest of the team were non-existent as a tactical force and invisible at the front.

Their mediocre performance here wasn’t even down to the controversial training regime in Tenerife, which the flat Classics team used to replace racing in Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico. After the race, their DS Nicolas Portal blamed crashes.

Sky remain without a podium in the WorldTour one-day races. They’re not the only team in that situation, but they are certainly the biggest one. Now they’ve got two races to rescue their spring campaign.

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Words by Edward Pickering

Sunday April 14, 2013

There’s a rule in cycling that is so true, I defy you to find me an exception.

It’s this: a single, committed rider off the front will beat a group of pursuers if they start foxing. It reverses the first golden rule of road cycling, that a cohesive group of riders will move faster than an individual, so long as they are co-operating. As a mathematical expression it would look something like this: Cohesive group of riders > committed lone rider > uncohesive group of riders.

Saxo Bank’s Roman Kreuziger was the lone victor of the Amstel Gold Race, and he can thank the reluctance of two separate groups of pursuers to work together for his win. He moved smoothly clear of a bickering group of fellow escapees on the draggy, exposed plateau at the top of the Bemelerberg climb with seven kilometres to go. As he pedalled on, leaning into the crosswind but maintaining a steady effort, the tell-tale signs were clear in the quartet behind him: freewheeling riders, little attacks and counter-attacks, followed by more freewheeling, and plenty of looking around at each other. The four riders, Lars-Petter Nordhaug (Blanco), Pieter Weening (Orica), Giampaolo Caruso (Katusha) and Andriy Grivko (Astana), seemed more concerned with each other than the sight of Kreuziger disappearing over the horizon.

Again, on the final climb of the Cauberg, Philippe Gilbert of BMC found himself clear with Weening’s team-mate Simon Gerrans and Alejandro Valverde of Movistar. Perhaps, with one, last, co-operative effort, the three could have got closer to Kreuziger along the heartbreakingly long and straight final kilometre from the top.

Instead, they started foxing. Game over.

There was one more reason for Kreuziger’s win: the new finish. The organisers can breathe a sigh of relief that the first race on the new course, with the finish line 1,500 metres after the summit of the Cauberg, provided an exciting race with the novelty of a breakway winner. The race had grown formulaic over the last few years, with repeated straightforward uphill sprints.

The new course allowed Kreuziger to take advantage of an indecisive and small peloton by attacking on the second-last climb of the Cauberg with 20 kilometres to go, joining up with the survivors of previous breaks, and using them as a springboard for his solo attack.

Kreuziger used the final sequence of hills to break his fellow escapees, and by the time he hit the final climb, it was obvious that the peloton had misjudged the gap he’d been allowed. With only BMC able and willing to commit to the final chase, the balance of power swung to Kreuziger some time before the final Cauberg climb.

A mark of how efficiently Kreuziger rode his final seven-kilometre lone break was that he’d hit the bottom of the Cauberg 30 seconds clear of Gilbert, who’d torn himself clear of the peloton through the climb’s steep S-bend, followed at a short distance by Gerrans and Valverde. At the top of the climb, the gap was hovering just above 10 seconds, the Czech’s lead evaporating in the bright sunshine.

But Gilbert, Valverde and Gerrans realised that they were too equally-matched in a straight sprint, and each withdrew their co-operation. At the finish line, Kreuziger’s lead had gone back out to 22 seconds.

Valverde pipped Gerrans for second, with a fast-closing group nipping at their heels, and Gilbert was just overtaken for fourth by Michal Kwiatkowski of Omega Pharma. In previous years, Valverde, Gerrans and Gilbert might have expected to fill the podium, but thanks to a clever bit of route design, a clever tactical ride by Kreuziger, and a not-so-clever bit of riding behind him, they were just scrapping to be first loser.

***

Maybe it was the spring sunshine, which made its first appearance in northern Europe. Attacking spirits were liberated in this Amstel Gold.

An optimistic group of seven formed the early break. The riders in it had a variety of agendas, but found enough common ground to build a lead of 11 minutes, a contrast to the tight rein kept on escapees in the cobbled Classics this year. Klaas Sys of Crelan, Nicolas Vogondy and Tim de Troyer of Accent Jobs and Arthur Van Overberghe of Topsport Vlaanderen were there as advertising fodder. With no chance of holding on into the finale, they formed a moving billboard of Belgian businesses, obediently relaying their companions in return for extra television time. Alexandre Pliuschin (IAM) and Mikel Astarloza (Euskaltel) both ride for teams which need both exposure and results, while Johan Vansummeren’s Garmin team could rely on him to help out late in the race.

With 100 kilometres to go, the lead was exactly 10 minutes. Chapatte’s Law of cycling (named after a French television commentator), which dictates that a committed peloton can expect to take a minute out of a group’s lead for every 10 kilometres, would predict that the race was well-balanced between the attackers and pursuers. But Chapatte’s Law is a bit out of date these days, and a series of crashes, combined with frantic chases (as well as some crafty hard riding at the front of the bunch by teams who hadn’t been involved in the crashes), brought the lead down to three minutes with 50 kilometres left.

By this point, Vansummeren, Pliuschin and Astarloza had dropped the other four riders, and in turn, Astarloza went for it alone on the Gulperberg climb with 46 kilometres to go.

It looked like the race would boil down to its usual formula: a shrinking bunch pulling back the leader until the final sprint up the Cauberg.

But instead, riders started chipping off the front of the bunch. Weening attacked on the descent of Ejserbosweg, pulling Grivko, and two Blanco riders, Nordhaug and David Tanner with him. They picked up Pliuschin on the Keutenberg climb. This left Astarloza alone at the front, these five riders a minute behind, and the peloton another minute in arrears.

The television coverage of Amstel Gold included several sequences of super slo-mo footage. What these didn’t show was the slow-motion chaos that was beginning to affect the peloton. Up the Cauberg for the second time, three more riders attacked: Kreuziger, Caruso and Marco Marcato of Vacansoleil. Simultaneously, the fast pace set by BMC up the climb had put a lot of riders off the back. Through the finish line, Astarloza still led, with the middle two groups of five and three forming an octet 30 seconds behind the Basque rider, and 25 seconds ahead of the bunch, which was down to about 35 riders.

The maths became more interesting at this point. There were eight teams represented off the front, and suddenly, the peloton’s job had become less straightforward, especially given its size. Cannondale and BMC took charge, but the relentless sequence of hills on the final finishing lap hit them hard. Cannondale had started the race with the clear favourite, Peter Sagan, but with two climbs left, they were chasing with their final domestique, and Sagan was beginning to be noticeable by his absence in the first 20 riders. The race was slipping away from him.

On the penultimate climb, the Bemelerberg, with Tanner and Pliuschin already gone and Astarloza caught, a series of attacks divided the front group into possible winners, and definitive losers. First Grivko, then Nordhaug and finally Kreuziger upped the pace, and by the time the dust had settled, there were only these three, plus Weening and Caruso left.

Of the five survivors, Kreuziger rode the most intelligently and positively as he attacked over the top. The other four will be kicking themselves for not taking the chance he offered of a ride to the finish, while behind, Gilbert, Valverde and Gerrans will be kicking themselves for allowing him such a lead. But it hadn’t been a gift – Kreuziger made two separate attacks, first from the peloton, then from the group.

The Czech was the only rider to take the challenges of the new route into account. His rivals seemed to be reading from last year’s tactical rulebook.

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Words by Our Man in the Bunch

Illustration by Simon Scarsbrook

This article originally appeared in Cycle Sport Summer 2012

A lot has changed in cycling over the last decade or two. But there’s one thing that’s constant: the Tour de France.

It towers over everything else in the calendar, for fans and riders. It’s a pressure-cooker for the staff, management, sponsors, press and everybody else involved, including us riders.

The magnitude of the event is evident as soon as we arrive, normally the Tuesday or Wednesday before the start. Press conferences seem three times the size, and sponsors and VIPs make a sudden appearance from the woodwork. All of a sudden, it’s the general public who want to take pictures and have a chat with us, not just the slightly over-enthusiastic autograph-collectors who are the only spectators we see at the lesser European races.

That final lead-up to the first stage seems to last an eternity. As if I need anything more to heighten the nerves, three days consisting of team meetings, course recces, TTT practice, interviews with journalists, team presentation, etc, is enough to throw me over the edge. Finally arriving at the start ramp or kilometre-zero of the first stage gives me a sense of relief as much as anything else.

My first Tour started with a prologue, and I will always remember the five-second countdown before launching myself down the ramp. I’d finally started the race of my dreams, and as I settled into the aero bars, I looked down to see huge goose-bumps covering my forearms. It was a magical feeling. I didn’t set the world on fire that day, but I didn’t care, I was a part of the big circus and I had a job to do for our team captains over the next 20 stages.

Some home truths dawned on me the following day during the first road stage. Looking around the peloton, I was amazed to see how lean some of the riders were looking. I’d raced with most of them over the previous months, and the extra ‘sharpness’ — the hollow cheeks and wafer-thin skin — still came as a surprise.

It made me self-conscious. I’d lost a kilo-and-a-half over the previous month, but that wasn’t enough to change my appearance. I was also aware that almost everybody around me was a known ‘name’; I couldn’t find anybody I’d have described as making up the numbers. Some of the domestiques are of high enough quality to be bona fide champions at the Classics.

Crème de la crème
The Tour de France bunch is the cream of the crop, and the cream of the crop at the peak of their form and motivation. I soon found out the effect that had on the speed and nervousness of the race. The first week was like nothing I’d ever experienced, the sheer strength in depth giving an extra couple of clicks to the speed. Coming towards the finishes and crunch points, the gaps between the riders were tiny. Nobody gives an inch in other races. In the Tour, nobody gives a millimetre. Physical contact with elbows and spokes touching rear mechs was far more common than at other races. It’s no wonder there are so many crashes in the first week of the Tour — there’s a lot at stake and many different agendas.

The last week of my first Tour was one of the most mentally and physically challenging times of my career. By that point, a lot of teams have got nothing out of the race: no stage wins, no time in yellow, green or polka dot. The managers and sponsors start to panic, and the fight to get into breakaways (which, by this point, stand a much greater chance of staying away) becomes manic.

Twice in the last week, it took more than 100 kilometres for the breakaway to forge clear. That isn’t 100 kilometres of stop-start racing, that’s 100 kilometres of constant attacks, chasing of attacks by teams who’ve missed it, counter-attacks and general carnage.

Another good example of this was stage 16 of the 2011 Tour, Hushovd’s second stage win, in Gap. The live television coverage started at 65 kilometres to go (out of 163), and the break still hadn’t gone. Average speed that day: 46kph.

In the end, I got through the last week, although I did spend a lot of time in the gruppetto. The nuances within the gruppetto are numerous; some riders like to set the pace at the front, some are happy to sit at the back. There are always people on good or bad days, and we generally help each other through.

It’s always interesting when someone is there who shouldn’t be, a GC rider who has got ill, for example. They don’t know the drill. Despite being off-colour, they still end up riding at a pace slightly too hard for the ‘regulars’, cue lots of abuse up the mountains. Then they get a big surprise on the descents.

The gruppetto descents are something rarely seen on television, but I’m almost certain they are the fastest of the entire day. The gruppetto is made up largely of heavier riders, sprinters with supreme bike-handling skills, and the descents are an opportunity to make up time on the front riders, aiding the chances of finishing within the time cut. On one mountainous stage of my first Tour, a GC rider (previously top 10 at the Tour) found himself at the back with the rest of us. The gruppetto formed on the penultimate mountain and said rider rode 1kph faster than was comfortable for the rest of us the whole way up, and then drifted back through the group at the top as he put his gilet on. I didn’t see him again until three kilometres to go to the summit finish — he’d been frantically trying to get back on, having been dropped by two minutes on the descent. He knew better than to push the pace in that last stretch.

An intimate arrangement
Rooming arrangements at the Tour are like most other races — we get a room-mate, and stick with them throughout the three weeks. At the Tour, the teams are nine riders, so there is always one person, at least at the start of the race, on their own. It’s often the team leader, or if they don’t like being alone, it’s the person who snores the most or has the strangest sleep pattern (night owls or early risers). I’ve always got on really well with my room-mates from the Grand Tours. We share everything, the highs and the lows; we get each other through and keep the morale high when it’s ebbing. Of course, as with any relationship, when we’re living on top of each other to that degree, there are things that start to piss us off, but there are rarely arguments. It’s a strange experience if a room-mate is forced to abandon the race. That night, they are still there, depressed and inconsolable, the following day they are gone, and it feels like I’ve lost a part of myself.

Finishing that first Tour on the Champs is one of my fondest memories. Every Grand Tour should finish in the same place every year, in my opinion – it gives the race a sense of identity, an iconic ending, and something for the riders and fans to look forward to year on year.

I’d only ever watched the Paris stage on TV, and it felt quite surreal as we entered the circuit. The leader’s team is always allowed to enter the circuit leading the race as a unit, but with a sprinter on my team, it was only a couple of laps before a break had formed and I found myself setting a tempo at the front of the bunch. The crowd was so loud it was incredible, drowning out every little noise that you normally hear within the peloton, I book-ended that race with goose-bumps.

The after-party, or stage 22 as it’s sometimes known, varies enormously in duration, excessiveness and cheeriness. If we’ve had a bad Tour, there isn’t much to celebrate apart from completing the course, but if a rider has won a jersey or the team has won the team competition, there is no excuse not to party.

Most riders will find any excuse to have a drink by that point. We are tired and exhausted, but the majority of us make one last push on stage 22, which is often the biggest endurance test of the race. We might head early to bed most nights, but when we party, I’d say we do a pretty good job. Some riders/staff will head back to the hotel sooner rather than later, but there are always a hard core who remain committed until dawn.

The comedown after the Tour is another thing it’s hard to deal with. I imagine it must be akin to a band having played to their biggest ever audience, a sense of, what next? One day I’m racing the Tour in front of thousands of fans, hounded by autograph-hunters, journalists, and among a group of 30 riders and staff, and the next I’m back home in my quiet town. After that first Tour, I felt lost, and the cumulative fatigue of three weeks finally kicked in with a vengeance, my mind finally relaxing and my body following suit. I hadn’t thought about what was next, and hadn’t made any more goals for the season. I didn’t touch my bike for a week, and I didn’t get back to top form, mentally and physically, until the start of the following season.

Words by Cycle Sport staff

Friday April 11 2013

Happy birthday to us! Cycle Sport’s first edition came out 20 years ago this month! Within the pages of this month’s bumper 164-page issue…

Moving Targets, by Richard Moore
”Mark Cavendish is due to call at 4.45pm. At 4.46, Cavendish calls. He is apologetic. ‘I would’ve been on time,’ he says. ‘I was on another call.’”

Nothing’s changed much with Mark Cavendish, then. The fastest sprinter in the world may be riding with a new team, Omega Pharma-Quick Step, in 2013, but he still applies the same attention to detail to everything, whether it be sprinting or telephoning cycling journalists. He’s still got the same fighting spirit and outspoken honesty as he always did, the only real difference is that the win total keeps on ticking upwards (he’s currently four away from 100).

Cavendish’s intensity is legendary, and it’s showing little sign of dying down. He says the move to Omega Pharma has rejuvenated his ambition, after a good, but not perfect year at Team Sky. Another Cavendish personality trait is that he’s extremely demanding, and when Sky couldn’t accommodate his demands, with their focus on winning the Tour de France with Bradley Wiggins, it was best that he left.

It’s probably going to be a good year for Cavendish, and that means winning Giro and Tour de France stages. He couldn’t quite repeat his 2009 victory in Milan-San Remo, sprinting in a handful of seconds behind the leading group, and Ghent-Wevelgem will have to wait another year, but he’s got a strong team that will focus almost exclusively on his goal of bagging stages in Grand Tours. “It’s three years since Quick Step have won a Tour stage,” Cavendish says. You get the impression it won’t be long before they break that run.

ALSO IN THE MAGAZINE…

The Clown Prince, by Richard Moore
”Taylor the Clown or Phinney the Cannibal. Sometimes the two incarnations can be apparent in the same race. At the Tour of Qatar, he rolled up with his BMC team-mates to the start line for the team time trial. It was the kind of stage a rider of his build and his abilities should relish, but his chirpy mood went beyond simple optimism. As he approached the line, Phinney whistled a jaunty tune. Then, as the eight riders were held up and the electronic clock counted down, he burst into song. Beside him, his team-mates’ faces were uniformly fixed in grim concentration. Phinney ceased singing, then piped up: “Is everybody in the right gear?” The mischievous question was met with a stony silence. But when they were pushed off, Phinney was transformed from joker into a machine.”

Taylor Phinney is fast developing into one of the best Classics riders and time triallists in the world. He was seventh in Milan-San Remo, after being the only rider brave and strong enough to bridge from the peloton to the lead group through the streets of San Remo, and he rode well in Paris-Roubaix, although he still lacks the experience to make the front group. Richard Moore tries to find out if Phinney is the serious professional or the clown, and discovers that the answer is more complicated than you might think.

On the Evelyn of Greatness, by Andy McGrath
Evelyn Stevens’ story is one of the most fascinating in world cycling. She famously went from a high-powered job in New York, to the professional peloton, after discovering late that she had the aptitude and ability to be a competitive cyclist. Just a few years after taking up cycling, she’s enjoying life as one of the best female cyclists in the world – how many others have outsprinted Marianne Vos on the Mur de Huy in Flèche Wallonne?

Andy McGrath interviewed Stevens, and spoke to her first cycling coach, about her extraordinary rise. It was clear Stevens was good – when her coach Neal Henderson saw her physiological test results in 2009, he assumed she was a world-class female athlete. In fact, she had only been riding a few months. Stevens’ weakness – her relative lack of experience compared to some of her rivals – is also a strength. The life experience and perspective that she gained from her years on Wall Street have given her balance, and she’s learned from her rapid rise that she won’t be shackled by limits.

SPECIAL FEATURE: GIRO D’ITALIA PREVIEW
The countdown to the first Grand Tour of 2013 continues. The Giro d’Italia is the connoisseur’s Grand Tour, a unique race, and one that is attracting more and more major race contenders, as opposed to its parochial history.

We’ve broken down the route and identified the key stages, looked at the local culture, and found local experts to guide us round the three-week race. Will Bradley Wiggins win his first pink jersey? Will Ryder Hesjedal defend his title successfully? Will Vincenzo Nibali confirm his early promise and finally win his home Tour? All these questions will be answered soon.

Route master, by Gregor Brown
Michele Acquarone is the new race director of the Tour of Italy, and 2013 will be his second race in charge. Acquarone is a proud Italian whose cycling roots are deep – he grew up in San Remo – and he has designed a race this year that showcases Italian culture and geography. But he’s also staunchly outward-looking. He tells Gregor Brown, “If I had to describe this year’s race in one word, I’d say ‘modern’…I’m happy with the mountain stages, but also the stages that sell Italy. That’s something that’s important to me, to have Naples, Florence, Matera, Vajont, Ischia. We are selling bella Italia.”

Images of the Giro d’Italia
No words. Just some of the most beautiful pictures from the Giro’s long and illustrious history.

Swede Success, by Andy McGrath
Where did it all go wrong for Thomas Löfkvist? He was once one of the most talked-about prodigies in cycling, developing with the FDJ team, wearing the white jersey with Columbia, and being signed by Sky, originally as their team leader. But three difficult years with Sky have led to Löfkvist becoming one of cycling’s forgotten men, the race wins drying up and the ambition shrinking as the hard realities of life sink in.

But the Swede is enjoying a new lease of life with a new team, IAM. He’s come to terms with the fact that he won’t win a Grand Tour, but he now sets his sights on the week-long stage races that suit his talents down to the ground. And he’s already bouncing back – he won the Tour of the Mediterranean this year with a display of strength, resilience and tenacity. In this revealing interview, Andy McGrath finds out what makes the Swede tick, and why he still feels, having just turned 29, that his best is yet to come.

Tainted Town, by Owen Slot
Lance Armstrong is a walking cliché in Austin. The skeleton in the closet, the elephant in the room. But how has his rapid demise affected his adopted hometown? Owen Slot went right to the heart of the story when Armstrong did his famous confessional television interview with Oprah Winfrey, to explore the town and examine its reaction to their most famous son’s disgrace. He spoke to the locals, tested the atmosphere, and wrote us this eyewitness piece which finds that the city is doing just fine, but has a curious reluctance in some quarters to discuss Armstrong.

By Presidential Decree, by Klaus Bellon

Colombian cycling’s heyday was famously in the 1980s, with a cohort of talented and fragile climbers landing in the 1984 Tour de France, immediately winning races, and establishing themselves as genuine Grand Tour contenders. Lucho Herrera won the King of the Mountains competition in France, and won the Vuelta. Fabio Parra was third in the Tour in 1988. But there is a renaissance happening right now, spearheaded by the Colombia team, which has secured a wild card entry to the Giro d’Italia, and has the ambition to repeat and even surpass the exploits of their forebears. Klaus Bellon, an expert on the Colombian cycling scene, describes how the ambition of the country’s cyclists is reflected by the country’s aims to rebuild its own confidence.

I love 1993, by Edward Pickering
In the latest of our retro series looking at seasons past, we go back 20 years to the year of Cycle Sport’s birth, 1993. It was a year in which the news wasn’t universally good –some results and performances demonstrated that EPO was inexorably taking hold in the peloton. It was a year in which Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle pipped the strongest rider in the race, Franco Ballerini, to win one of the most entertaining Paris-Roubaix in history, and the year Miguel Indurain achieved an unprecedented second consecutive Giro-Tour double.

Plus…All our regular features – Graham Watson shares his best pictures from the Classics; Shop Window features the latest cycling bling it’s the LAST EVER BROOMWAGON, and possibly the funniest in history; Q&A with Peter Stetina (“Yorkshire pudding and what? Bitter?); Flanders route frustrations, Ghent-Wevelgem’s food and booze map; Tour-ometer; Team of the Month; Geraint; great writing, brilliant photography and more.

Cycle Sport June, featuring the very best writing and photography of professional cycling, is available now in the UK, and will be on sale in the USA shortly. It is also available electronically through Zinio.