by Jens Voigt
So now, we have six little and not-so-little Voigts running around. All six are real Voigts. And as I sometimes say jokingly, they all come from the same production line. In all six, you can see a bit of Stephanie and a bit of me. They all have blue eyes like Stephanie. And like me, they were all very blond when they were young. The boys tend to have my chin and nose, but fortunately the girls don’t, because my chin is pretty, how shall we say, manly. And my nose is, well, pretty much like an orange squeezer.
Marc, the oldest, is like Stephanie. He’s very clean, neat, and organized, and he doesn’t like endurance sports. He prefers team sports because he’s very social, and he’s always been a big lacrosse enthusiast.
Julian is more like me. He can’t stand team sports. The idea of chasing a soccer ball around with 20 kids would drive him up a wall. He is tall and lanky, like me, and likes endurance sports, especially mountain biking. And like his dad, he thinks that tidiness and orderliness are only for small-minded people. The geniuses of the world control the chaos. For years, everything in his room was on the ground. He just said, “Hey, if it’s on the ground, I can see where it is!”
Adriana is a bit of a mix. She can be strong-minded like her father, and she has a bit of my temper, too. I know the public doesn’t see it much, but in many ways, cycling saved the world from a real monster. All those years, I was able to channel my hostility. All those years, I was getting paid to hurt other people. I was getting paid to erase my demons. Where do I go with my demons now? I mean, how long can I keep them in a cage? So Adriana is a bit like me. She’s struggling with her demons. They’re out on the streets all the time as she becomes a teenager.
Kimmy is the perfect mix of Stephanie and me. Her face is the perfect mix, too. She is really athletic. She rode her first bike without training wheels before her third birthday. She walked at a really young age and as a young kid, just wasn’t afraid of anything. She picks up every sport very easily. But on the flip side, she doesn’t have the patience for any of them. She has tried a lot of sports, even horseback riding and hip-hop dancing. She picks everything up very quickly but then loses interest. For the moment, she is most motivated by school. She does well in school and is really driven to succeed.
Maya is only just starting school, so it’s too early to tell where life will take her. Heck, it was only a year ago that she got a clean bill of health. She has a ton of energy and likes sports.
And finally, there’s little Helen! Oh my, she’s so cute. And my, oh my, she has so much energy. She’s so wild, and she has a strong head. She must be a bit like me, because she doesn’t like to share food. She’ll get really aggressive when people try her food, but she’s always trying to get other people’s food. And you know, after all those years on the road, eating at the team table, I can tell you that I don’t like to share my food, either! And like her dad, she’s always hungry. If you give her a choice between eating chocolate or steak, she’ll always choose the steak!
Although it’s still too early to tell where my children’s lives will lead them, I think it’s safe to say that none of them are future “Jensies” destined for the professional peloton. Each one of my kids is unique in his or her own way, but I don’t see any Tour de France participants in the lot.
BAD FOOD, BAD HOTELS
“It was always the same thing:
haricots verts (green beans), overcooked pasta, and a chewy piece of meat!”
From the outside, being a pro cyclist looks exciting, I’m sure. And sometimes, yes, it is. But often, from the inside, the life can be much less glamorous than expected. Actually, one of the best-kept secrets in the peloton is that the key to a long, successful career isn’t hard training, but an athlete’s ability to endure an endless line of bad hotels and bad food when on the road.
Finding a hotel big enough for all the riders and staff, with a parking lot for all the team buses and trucks, isn’t always easy when you’re out racing. But sometimes, we get some real dives! And I’m not just talking about my early years as a young pro. Heck, I got one of the worst rooms ever in my very last year as a professional in 2014. We were in Spain at the Ruta del Sol (Ciclista a Andalucia), and I woke with this strange feeling. I thought, “Oh man, why is my head itching so much? Why is my body itching?” My roommate, Bob Jungels, must have heard me moving around and said, “What’s going on?” We turned on the light and found that our room had been attacked by ants! It was the middle of the night, and we were in the middle of the race. We couldn’t believe it. There were ants everywhere. I had at least 10 in my hair, 20 on my body, and another 20 all over my bed!
There were no more rooms available in the hotel that night, so we just did the best we could. We tried to move our beds out of the way of what seemed to be the ants’ little own auto route, but it was anything but a good night’s sleep. To make matters worse, the team was booked in the same hotel the following night. We complained, and they assured us they would fix the problem, but we were in the same room the next night. The ants were gone, so I imagine that they must have fumigated very heavily. And I just had to ignore whatever kind of chemical residue we were breathing in as we slept that night.
You would have thought that in my nearly 20 years as a professional, hotels would have improved. And in some ways, they did. But as you can see, not always! Putting up with the bad hotels was easier in the early years, because we basically didn’t know any better. Back in the day, bike racing was still pretty much confined to four or five countries, primarily France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Spain. And after growing up in East Germany, I was used to Spartan accommodations. So I wasn’t shocked. It wasn’t until we started doing races like the Tour of California that we saw something different. Suddenly, we were like, “Wow! They have hotels like that?! They have beds like that?!” UNBELIEVABLE!
I guess of all the countries we raced in regularly, Spain probably had the worst reputation when it came to hotels, and, in particular, on the island of Majorca. Now Majorca is a beautiful island in the Mediterranean, and as a result, there is a huge tourist turnover on a weekly basis. And for some reason, Majorca is just known for fleas. We spent a lot of time in Majorca over the years, as a lot of teams do training camps there and there are good early-season races. There are a lot of good reasons to go to Majorca as a cyclist, but not for the fleas!
Racing in Spain did have one distinct advantage—the late race starts. Everything in that country is shifted back a couple of hours, so races generally start later, which is a real treat! I really liked being able to sleep in. Ever since I’ve been a father, sleeping in at home has not really been an option. So I look forward to racing in Spain, because it offers me one of those rare occasions to sleep in.
Each country had its individual characteristics. In Belgium, you know that you’re going to be stuck racing in the wind and rain a lot. But you also know that, every once in a while, you can treat yourself to one of those amazing beers, of which they have hundreds. And then, of course, there are the fans, who are some of the best in the world! On any given day of the week, the fans come out in big numbers for the bike race. And they’re all knowledgeable. They’re all experts! At the end of my career, I would have fans in Belgium come up to me with the most amazing scrapbooks. They would have these books with every one of my team postcards signed by me. There were all kinds of articles about me that they had cut out over the years. They really put their hearts into it. Holland was even worse when it came to the wind, probably because we often raced on these bike paths that were about 50 centimeters wide! The racing there is always so nervous, so sketchy and dangerous. But the Dutch probably had the best hotels in Europe, not to mention a lot of great American TV shows. So I would go to Holland to work on my English!
In Italy, you knew the hotel rooms would be small. But you also knew that the food would be good and that the coffee would be even better. I don’t know how they do it, but in Italy, even the gas stations have awesome coffee.
France was just the opposite.
They had the worst pasta. And the coffee was pretty bad, too. I swear, in France, if your team dinner was scheduled for eight o’clock, they would put the pasta in to boil at noon! I’m not kidding here. I would swear to this and agree to have lightning hit me if I’m exaggerating in the slightest. The French just seem to have this amazing disregard for pasta! And as a bike racer, you get pretty sensitive about your pasta! You know, it’s almost funny. The French are so famous for their cooking. But in the hotels we stayed in, it was always the same thing: haricots verts (green beans), overcooked pasta, and a chewy piece of meat!
How could this be, you ask? Well, like most things in life, it comes down to money. It’s up to the race organizers to pay for the hotels and the food, so such things are dependent on the race organizer’s budget. If a race organizer says to a hotel owner, I can only pay you four euros per rider per dinner, then the hotel has to come up with a menu that fits the budget. The hotel wants to make some money, too. So if, say, the organizer pays four euros for dinner, the hotel may well take one euro profit, which in reality leaves only three euros for a meal. As a result, you’re going to get the cheapest meat, the cheapest haricots verts, and a lot of overcooked pasta!
In most hotels, we wouldn’t eat in the main restaurant but rather in a conference room of some kind. A lot of fans probably thought that this was to maintain privacy, but in the eyes of the riders, there was another reason altogether. Neither the race organizer nor the hotel wanted the riders to see what was really being served!
This, of course, was all before the teams got their own cooking trucks with private chefs and everything. Inevitably, the teams or the riders themselves would break down and buy regular food from the restaurant because, well, a bike racer cannot live on haricots verts and overcooked pasta alone!
On more than one occasion—and I’m not just talking about France here—I’ve seen someone from the team, sometimes even myself, go up to the restaurant owner and say, “Look at this! Would you really feed this to your own children?” Of course, the owner would say no, which only begged the questions, “Why do you think you can give this food to us, then? Are we just animals to you?”
France did have its upsides, too, especially when we were able to get some cheese. It may be a bit of a cliché, but the baguettes and cheeses in France are just amazing. Still, to this day, I love to dip a crispy baguette into a cup of coffee in the morning. Modern sports science really frowns on eating white bread, but that baguette and coffee combo is just one of those things I’ve come to love from my life on the road. And a baguette, cheese, and fresh grapes are a pretty good way to end just about any meal.
The other thing you have to get used to on the road is spending countless hours in your hotel room. It would be really scary to count up all the hours we cyclists spend sitting in our hotel rooms. But in all fairness, I guess you could say that it’s something we spend our whole lives preparing for. It comes with the job, and you grow into it.
As an amateur, as a kid, you drive home from races every night. And then as you move up in the ranks, you start having shorter stage races where you might have two or three nights in a hotel. And then, when you go to training camps, you get in the habit of just hanging out. So you slowly get into it.
One thing I noticed that changed over the years was that riders really started staying in their rooms. Before, when I was starting out, whole teams—especially the Italian and Spanish teams—would hang out in the hotel lobby or by the pool or simply the parking lot after dinner or whenever there was some downtime. But cycling is like society, and now it seems that everybody spends the whole time roaming the Internet on their smartphones or tablets.
And now with social media, news travels so much faster. As a result, it seems that everybody knows where our hotel is. So today, a lot more journalists and fans hang around the hotel, and as soon as you look like you’ve got nothing to do, it’s as though you’re extending an open invitation for an interview or autographs or whatever. Often, it seems your room is the only place where you can really just chill and be left alone.
That said, I never minded hanging out in my room. Obviously, I always have a lot of action at home with all the kids, so I welcomed the chance to simply relax. Also, I’m really good at falling asleep in the afternoon. I’m actually world-class when it comes to taking naps. Plus, I always liked to read a lot or play a computer game or something. Or, back in the day, I would watch Bobby Julich do his stretching or core-muscle training on the fit ball. And, of course, I would make fun of him. I just couldn’t get my head around it. Stretching made sense, but I guess I just put it in the “too hard” basket or category. Bobby and I also had a lot of deep conversations about how we saw life, family, and other matters. And if I wanted a little excitement, I could always go over to one of the Australians’ rooms. Those guys always had a full stereo-entertainment system hooked up and going. So, for me, the hotel has always offered a rare opportunity for some downtime.
Now your ability to relax also depends on the hotel you’re booked in. And that can be pretty hit or miss. Never is this more true than in the Tour de France. The Tour, you see, has its own points system for the hotels, and they try to work it out so each team in the race has the same hotel points by the end of the race. A really nice hotel is three points, while the not-so-nice hotels are one point. So you really have to make the most of the good hotels, because if you’re in a beautiful château on a lake one night, you know that you’ll likely be in some dive on a highway for the next two nights.
Travel, too, is a huge part of our existence as cyclists. That’s one aspect of cycling that has definitely improved over the years, mostly due to the introduction of team buses. Back when I was starting out, we could spend hours cramped up in a team car after a stage—not the best way to recover from a hard race. But with the team buses, we can relax, spread out, and exchange war stories from the day’s race. It’s actually quite enjoyable!
Undoubtedly, the best day on the team bus is the last day of the Tour de France. The last stage of the Tour is always short, but the day is really long. We ride slowly for much of the race, and then there’s all the postrace ceremony and the promenade down the Champs-Élysées. I’ll never forget the first time I finished the Tour. I almost bonked on the final stage because it just took so long. But now we’re prepared for that, and we always have a big pizza party waiting for us in the bus when we get back from the finish. What better way to end the Tour de France than with pizza and beer on the Place de la Concorde?
Who would have ever guessed that little old Jensie would someday have his own clothing brand! (James Startt)
THE CULT OF JENS
“Jens for President!”
Jens as seen by Bobby Julich (longtime roommate and friend on Crédit Agricole and CSC; currently works for Team BMC):
You know, a lot of guys have the ability to turn on the charm when somebody important is around. But Jens has so much energy to talk to everyone, to share details of his life and genuinely ask about theirs. I don’t know how he does it.
I’ll never forget after the Tour of Georgia in 2004, Jens came to my house up in the mountains outside Reno for an altitude training camp to get ready for the Tour de France. Near the end, he asked to take my car into town to get some gifts for his kids.
But when he came back, he was just wasted. Now, normally, Jens is “Mr. Energy,” but on this day, he just looked gone. He had this dark cloud around him.
I was like, “What happened? Did you wreck the car?”
“No,” he said. “But I got nothing done!”
“What do you mean?” I said.
And he responded, “I got nothing done because everywhere I went people said, ‘Hello! How are you?’”
And I said, “Yeah, and?”
To which he responded, “Yeah, so I had to talk to everybody in every store I went into for 15 or 20 minutes.”
I had to laugh. “Jens,” I said, “When an American says, ‘Hi, how are you?’ when you walk i
nto a store, it’s just a formality. It’s like they’re waving to you. They’re not looking for your life story!”
But he was so distraught. “But I can’t just do that. I can’t just say ‘fine.’ I have to ask how they are doing, too, and then one thing leads to another, and we’re having a conversation!”
But that’s Jens. He genuinely likes people. He is a genuinely nice guy. Going out with him and trying to actually get something done is never easy, because he’ll always end up talking to somebody. It doesn’t matter if it’s the CEO of a big company, a sponsor, or just somebody walking down the street. He gives everyone time. He always finds time to say hello. And it’s not just a wave. He’ll tell you a story or something, get you laughing, and then move on. But he makes people feel good. And he always leaves a mark.
In the last couple of years of my career, I was definitely losing strength. It was getting harder to win, and it was even getting hard to make the breakaways. But one thing that was undeniable was that my popularity just kept rising.
I was already pretty popular in France after racing on so many Tours de France and racing on a French team early in my career. I remember one headline in France called me “Father Courage,” a word play on the Bertolt Brecht play Mother Courage and Her Children, for all my attacking. And, in Spain, they sometimes called me the “Boeing 747” for my ability to launch a breakaway.
Fans in the United States started picking up on me a bit later, but I remember in the 2009 Tour of California, while in the middle of a time trial, I looked up and saw someone wearing a “Jens for President” T-shirt. Bjarne was driving support behind me that day, and he pulled up and motioned to me in a way that said, “Did you see that guy’s T-shirt?” Hilarious, just hilarious!