by Jens Voigt
One day during the 2011 Tour of Colorado, I was in a big break, like a 12-man break, when out of nowhere, an official race car pulled up alongside of us, and suddenly baseball superstar Barry Bonds stuck his head out the window and yelled, “Go, Jens!” I was like, “WTF?!” There were 11 Americans in the group, and Barry Bonds was yelling for Jensie!
I first really understood the scope of the Jensie phenomenon in the 2011 Tour de France when, on a rest day, Stuart O’Grady, Fabian Cancellara, and the Schleck brothers set up a Twitter account for me along with Leopard Trek manager Brian Nygaard. First off, all the handles that I wanted were already taken. @shutuplegs was taken. @shutuplegs1 was taken. @shutuplegs2 was taken. Finally, we came up with @thejensie, and I amassed 10,000 followers in the first hour. It just kept going and growing! After two hours, I had nearly 40,000 followers.
This popularity is a result of a combination of things, not to mention some good luck. Part of it is that my way of talking, my humor, and my way of doing things just hit at the right moment. My funny way of speaking in English, it seems, was perfect for Twitter sound bites. And people really seem to appreciate the way I talk in metaphors all the time, and I’m always making analogies to cycling from real life. I’ve only been on Twitter for four years, but it was an instant success. My little one-liners don’t translate the same way in a newspaper article, but they were perfect for Twitter. And the ability that social media has to disseminate information is just incredible. I’ve always enjoyed the fans and always treated them the same way, but suddenly, because of social media, I could say something sort of funny to one fan and thousands of people would know about it. That really changed the game. Back in 1998, if I talked to one person in France or Belgium and said, “If you only follow other people’s footprints, then you never make your own footprints in the path of life,” they might tell 10 or 15 people what I said. But with the rise of Twitter and Facebook, the whole world could hear about every little saying I came up with.
And it’s true that I do have a plateful of one-liners. A few of my favorite are “Whatever makes the race wet and sticky is good for me!”; “If I’m hurting, then the others must be hurting twice as much as I am”; and “Start out simple, because life will get complicated enough by itself.” Let’s also not forget the one I co-opted from Chris Boardman—you know, the one that goes, “If you try to win, you might lose. But if you don’t try to win, you’ll lose for sure.”
I hope that I can say I worked for this popularity. Certainly, part of my popularity was due to my success on the bike, and I worked very hard for that. I always walked the walk and stuck to my word. I’m reliable. I don’t have a diamond earring. I don’t have a fancy haircut. I don’t have a fancy tattoo. And I don’t live in Monaco—although sometimes I wish I did! No, I’m just a normal guy living in the country I grew up in. I have six children, all with the same wife. There is no patchwork. And with my mother-in-law living with us, three generations all live under the same roof here in Berlin. I even cut my own grass. So I’m just really normal and really reliable. I say what I do, and I do what I say. And I think with all the troubles in our sport, with superstars who come and go, people started to realize that Jensie was sort of the rock in the sea, the one thing you can count on in the sport. Tides come and go. Storms come and go. Waves come and go. But you know where the rock is. And you can put your foot on the rock.
And then the fact that I lasted so long probably didn’t hurt my reputation any, either. A lot of people get into cycling late. And a lot of people in my age group are out cycling, and they can all look at me and go, “Look at Jensie. He’s 41, 42, or 43, and he’s still competitive.” Heck, I still managed to win a stage in the Tour of Colorado at the age of 42. People my age know how hard it is to get into top shape as you get older, so I think a lot of people really came to respect the fact that I could still dish out some pain in the Tour de France even after I was 40.
RADIO SHACK
“I needed to squeeze everything out of my body so that I would have no regrets.”
After Andy and Frank Schleck finished second and third in the Tour de France in 2011, I was feeling pretty good about the future of my Leopard Trek team. No, we hadn’t had a big win that first year together, but we were still very successful, and I was looking forward to building on that success in 2012. I would soon learn, however, that the narrative was about to change again.
As I had been doing since 2010, I followed up the Tour with two great races in the States, the Tour of Utah and the Tour of Colorado, both of which I’d really come to enjoy, as I always came out of the Tour de France in good condition, and I could race well there. And it was there that I learned that Leopard Trek would be no more and that the team was merging with Radio Shack.
I’ll be honest—my first reaction to the news was far from positive. As you have seen in my life, I’m not a person who invites change for the sake of change. At that point, I had essentially changed teams only three times in my career. Leopard was my third team, and we had spent a lot of time and energy getting the team off the ground. So why change again? Why stop after barely six months? Give us a chance! Nobody cuts a tree down after two years. You have to give it a chance to grow. We had just planted the tree.
In addition, I didn’t feel comfortable joining up with Radio Shack, a team that was run by Lance Armstrong’s longtime director, Belgian Johan Bruyneel, who was increasingly coming under fire as the US Anti-Doping Agency investigation of Lance Armstrong evolved. This was late 2011. Armstrong’s ex-teammate Floyd Landis had already launched his lawsuit against Armstrong, and news was constantly breaking regarding doping on the old US Postal team run by Bruyneel. And as I already mentioned, I twice refused to join Johan and Lance’s teams because I was afraid that, if the rumors were true, I might be faced with pressure to dope, which I’d always avoided. I just didn’t see a need to be associated with such things.
One morning, after breakfast at the Tour of Utah, I was sitting at the table with the Schleck brothers, and Frank asked me, “So, Jens, what do you really think about the merger?”
I said, “Are you kidding? You just opened the front door and let the devil back in! We’re gonna run this whole beautiful project right into the wall! What are you thinking?” I didn’t understand the need to associate ourselves with Bruyneel, who, as I said, was at the center of one of the biggest doping scandals to ever hit the sport, and one that was unraveling before our eyes. Nobody, at that very moment, was perceived more negatively in cycling than Johan Bruyneel, including Lance Armstrong.
It was not an easy time for us, and for a couple of weeks there was real tension between me and my longtime friends, the Schlecks. I really loved that year with Leopard, and to this day, one of the things I most regret in my career is the fact that the project didn’t live longer, because we really did do a lot of things right. Heck, when I first signed with them, I was sure it was the team I would retire with.
Suddenly, late in the 2011 season, I found myself calling other teams just to see what my options were. Through my friend Bobby Julich, I made contact with Team Sky, as well as the new Australian team Orica-GreenEdge. But it was September already. Budgets were closing up quickly. I was at the end of my contract, and I was a 40-year-old cyclist. I still felt as though I had a place as a professional, and I still wasn’t ready to retire. That said, finding a new place of employment was far from easy.
But Frank and Andy were privy to more information regarding the inner workings of the team than I was. After all, Leopard Trek was based in Luxembourg. It was built around them. Flavio Becca, a Luxembourg businessman, provided the financial support in the beginning, but he wasn’t capable of underwriting the team forever. On the other side, Johan had two sponsors that he could bring to the table, Radio Shack and Nissan. And both teams were riding Trek bicycles, so from an economic and business point of view, the merger did make sense.
And on a personal level, I was offered a good contract, so soon enough, my decision to remain was pretty much
resolved. After all, how many 40-year-old cyclists are offered a new contract when two teams are merging and roughly 40 riders are vying for no more than 30 spots? No doubt about it, I was very happy to have a job. Perhaps I was being selfish, but when that contract came in the mail, I was just plain relieved!
In the long term, things turned out great. The seeds of my last team, Trek Factory Racing, were planted here. And thanks to them, I couldn’t have had a better end of my career. But in the short term, things were quite complicated.
First off, everyone clearly underestimated the challenge of bringing two teams together. Both teams had some big riders, not to mention a lot of staff. Bringing Leopard Trek together with Radio Shack–Nissan would be like merging, say, the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks with the Los Angeles Lakers. That would definitely take more than a week! A lot of egos, strategies, and approaches have to come together before things start to jell. And in our case, things never really jelled that first year. In those first few months of the new team, nobody really knew who was in charge. Nobody understood the chain of command. There was a lot of mistrust between the two teams.
So much of a team’s success comes down to operations and how people work together. Much of this goes unseen by spectators, but the daily workings of a team are quite complicated. For one, there is never one team, but rather two or three different squads racing different races at the same time. When one team is racing the Ardennes classics, like the Amstel Gold Race and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, another is at the Tour of Trentino in Italy and another may well be on their way to the Tour of Turkey. It’s a highly complicated affair, and the entire staff must be in lockstep synchronization. Such things set the tone for the team, and often enough, results reflect just how well a team clicks.
Before the season even started, we were moving our team headquarters once more, and we spent much of the early season butting heads. Johan ran his team more like a business, whereas Leopard was more of a family affair. Both ways work, but not necessarily together. Some of the mechanics, for example, saw their job as more nine to five and really wanted to go home at a certain time, while others preferred to stay until the job was done. Mechanics, though, must work as a team, and it’s not easy to work together with two very different approaches. As a result, we struggled to foster any kind of team spirit.
Perhaps on Leopard, we were a bit spoiled. If we asked for brown rice, we got brown rice. If we asked for white rice, we got white rice. If we asked for a mix of white rice and whole-grain rice, we got that, too. But suddenly, with Johan’s team, it was more like rice is rice. Win some races and we can discuss different kinds of rice. But until then, you get rice!
It really wasn’t until around June that we started to get things together and reached some kind of consensus, found some kind of balance.
And though I had my reservations about Johan, I have to say he ran a good ship. He worked well with the different staff members and was constantly looking for ways to bring the best out of the riders. Let’s not forget, our goal was still to win the Tour de France. Frank and Andy Schleck were great riders, but neither had yet won the Tour de France at that time. Johan, for example, made the two brothers race separate programs so that they would race more independently. In the end, it didn’t really work, but that’s just an example of how he was trying to change things up, to break people out of their routines, with the hope that they would perform better. Later in the season, I remember he asked me to sit down with him and discuss how the team could be better. We were at a training camp in Belgium preparing for the world championship team time trial. He understood that things had not worked out well, and he wanted my input as an experienced rider. He got out a pencil and paper and started jotting things down, things that worked, things that didn’t work. Until the day he was fired, he was still focused on making the team better. It was a good, constructive talk. But only weeks later the team announced that they were separating themselves from Johan, as his involvement in doping with the US Postal team became increasingly clearer.
Despite all the chaos on the Radio Shack–Nissan team in 2012, I had a very good year. Physically, I was still on top of my game. I won a stage in the Tour of Catalonia, and I got fifth in Paris-Nice. Then, in the Tour de France, my teammate Fabian Cancellara won the prologue in Liège, Belgium, and wore the yellow jersey for the first week. Situations like that are perfect for me because, well, they give me something to do. Whenever you have a teammate in the race lead, it’s up to your team to control the race. On any given stage, there will be an early breakaway that tries their chances. Many times, I’m in breakaways like that, but when my team has the yellow jersey, my role is very different, and I have to ride a steady tempo on the front as much as possible to make sure that the breakaways don’t gain too much time. It’s one of the things I love doing the most in the sport. I take real pride in defending a leader’s jersey, and if I say so myself, I think I do a good job at it. Heck, I probably spent at least 250 kilometers on the front that first week of the Tour, pulling the peloton through the countryside. But even after Fabian lost the yellow jersey, my job was not done. In the final week of the Tour, my team was winning the overall team standings, a very coveted prize. The team prize is awarded to the team with the five highest-placed riders in the race. And I was the fifth-best-placed rider on the team. As a result, I was constantly chasing down breaks and trying to get in breakaways myself to keep my overall place as high as possible.
I was really happy with my Tour that year and came out of it strongly, which set me up for the end of the season. Just a couple of weeks after the 2012 Tour, I went to the United States and won a stage in the Tour of Colorado. So ironically, even though there were a lot of bumps in the road, personally, I had a very good year, and well before the end of the season, I had a contract for another year, which I must say was very satisfying.
Sometimes, people wonder how I managed to keep my motivation so high year in and year out. Well, first off, there’s the small matter of having six children to provide for at home. That provides plenty of motivation. But there are other reasons, as well.
You know, even after I was a well-established professional, I never took my place in the peloton for granted. And although I’m sure many of my fellow professionals won’t like hearing this, I think that one-year contracts are a good source of motivation. With a one-year contract, your ass is constantly on the line. Most contracts are completed around the time of the Tour de France or in August at the latest. So if you haven’t had some good results by that point, you know that you’re in trouble. Later in my career, many of my contracts were one-year deals, so I constantly needed to prove myself. By that point, it is safe to say that I knew my body very well. I knew what I needed to do during the winter to set myself up for a good start to the season, and I always made sure that I did it.
I think it’s safe to say that most people think of me as a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, and on the outside, I often am. But I’m also my own worst critic. I’m very critical of myself, and I’ve even been known to hold grudges against myself. And on a very personal level, the last thing I wanted was to call myself a quitter for the rest of my life simply because I stopped racing too early. I know that may sound funny or strange coming from an over-40-year-old rider, but that’s just the way I’m wired! Over the years, I saw a lot of cyclists who, for one reason or another, retired too early. Often a rider would get caught without a team at the end of the season, but sometimes riders were simply burned out and wanted a change. Regardless of the reason, most riders who retire too early regret it for a long time afterward. And knowing myself, I don’t know that I would ever have really gotten over such frustration. It would have come back to haunt me for years to come!
I always have been a big fan of the idea that one is the master of his own destiny, that you hold your life and your faith in your hands. And when it came to my own retirement, I wanted to control the situation. I wanted it to be my decision. But to do that, I needed to squeeze everything out of
my body so that I would have no regrets when I walked away. One of the satisfactions of my career was that I ended it on my own terms. And I can tell you that I will never, ever feel the desire to make a comeback. I went as far and as long as I could. And now I simply don’t want to hurt or suffer anymore.
Perhaps the fact that I turned professional late, that I struggled to find my first professional contract, also played into this mind-set. I was always well grounded enough to realize the amazing opportunity I had simply to be a professional. I mean, in the years you spend as a professional, you’re a rock star. You’re traveling all over the world. People are helping you out with everything. Okay, I might not be Mick Jagger. But hey, it’s a great life! I would be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy it, so I wasn’t going to take it for granted.
And this may sound like vanity, but one tremendous source of satisfaction late in my career was simply knowing I was still good enough to make the cut, still good enough to make the Tour de France team, and still good enough to get a contract. Making the cut was ingrained in me from a very young age, from my days in the East German sports school. It’s second nature to me. And looking back over my career, I have to say that I’m very proud of the fact that I was good enough to compete in the Champions League of my sport for 17 years.
Another element of motivation was the Tour de France. From my first years as a professional, I fell in love with the Tour. Starting out on French teams, it was just impossible not to be bitten by the bug. Heck, many French teams more or less exist just for the Tour. But strictly from a business standpoint, the Tour is key, because that’s the race with the highest international visibility. And since it lasts for three weeks, your presence and performance, and hence your market value, are only magnified by it. That’s three weeks of visibility on prime-time television all around the world. How many races can offer that? So doing the Tour always remained a huge objective. While winning became more difficult with age, there were still a lot of roles for me in the Tour de France as a team rider, be it riding tempo for Fabian if he got the yellow jersey early in the race or pacing the Schlecks up some of the climbs. I was a pillar and a playmaker. As I have said, one of my great strengths has always been my reliability. It didn’t matter what the weather was like or what was going on in the race, my team directors always knew that I would be where I needed to be at any moment in the race. And in the Tour de France, such reliability is a real commodity.