by David Millar
As a result, cycling, even at its highest level, is forever at the whim of a handful of individuals. There is no clear long-term system in place that allows for teams to be sure of their continuation. Therefore the same is true for the cyclists, and even the races. More and more races are disappearing off the calendar as local government backing is withdrawn due to the economic crisis or because long-term sponsors can’t increase their funding in direct correlation with the constant increase in costs. When I turned professional in 1997 it would have been possible to race a full season in Spain, as their race calendar was spread across the year and, amazingly, almost all of those races were shown live on national television. Now there are but a handful of races in Spain, and many of those are in a precarious financial state.
The paradox in all of this is that cycling is perhaps more popular than it has been in decades. The level of participation is up, and in the English-speaking world it is beginning to challenge, if not overtake, golf as the corporate sport of choice. The professional racing side of the sport has not kept up with this boom in the recreational and business side. The calendar is disjointed and confusing to say the least; it has become a global sport and yet remains far too provincial in its workings.
The most obvious and easiest way to witness this is in the way cycling coverage is produced for television. Onboard cameras have become the norm in almost all ‘wheeled’ sports for years now, yet had been banned by the UCI until Finlay and I negotiated our dispensation. Of course, this was mainly due to the technology not existing until recently as, contrary to motor sports, for cycling use everything must be very small, lightweight, extremely robust and, most importantly, rely on its own battery. Yet no research and development had taken place in anticipation of what was inevitable. Professional cycling until now has only ever been seen through the lens of a cameraman perched on the back of a motorbike or an overhead helicopter. Most races will have only two, maybe three, TV motorbikes; the biggest races will have five. There will be a fixed camera beyond the finish line to capture the final sprint, and maybe one or two more in the final 500 metres if, again, it’s a big race. In other words everything the viewer will see is from a distance; there is no real sense of what the sport actually entails. Watching a bunch sprint from an overhead helicopter image or a long-shot fixed camera is all well and good but it doesn’t really capture what’s going on: the proximity of the riders, the jostling and shouting, the panic of some and the coolness of others in among what is, at times, total chaos. A bunch sprint appears to have some sort of natural order when watched from afar, but when you’re in there it’s like being on the scariest roller coaster known to man, and there’s not just one but dozens of roller coasters, careering along next to each other, and they’re not on rails. I think it’s a shame people don’t get to experience that. I’ve seen Mark Cavendish do things in the chaos leading into a bunch sprint that defy belief.
Cav
Mark’s ability to maintain his cool when all around him lose theirs is, next to his innate natural speed, the reason he is one of the greatest sprinters in the history of the sport. It is extremely rare for him to make a mistake, which is all the more remarkable when you’ve experienced how frantic and uncontrollable it is up there at the front of the peloton in those final kilometres leading into a sprint massif.
Most sprinters spend most of their career making mistakes and rarely finding themselves in a position to actually sprint for the finish line. They will have been quacked off a wheel or have chosen the wrong tactic or simply panicked and got it wrong. That’s the difference between the good and the great sprinters: the great are consistently finding their way through the mêlée to fight it out between each other for the line. It doesn’t matter if you’re the fastest sprinter in the world, if you can’t be where you need to be when the sprint begins with 250 metres to go then you don’t stand a chance.
All we see on TV is the final sprint, not the battle that’s been going on during the preceding kilometres, where all the interesting stuff happens. Often by the time the final sprint begins most of the riders are already at or near their maximum effort. If you’re not a sprinter you simply can’t comprehend how those guys are even capable of going faster. For the majority of the peloton it would be impossible to even get out of the saddle at that point, let alone sprint out the saddle and increase the speed. It’s a particular physiological gift being able to sprint like that; you have to possess the human equivalent of a nitro button – they hit their VO2 max and then sprint.
It’s for this reason Mark is infamous for being ‘himself’ when he is interviewed immediately after a bunch sprint. The moment he crosses that finish line all the rational thinking is thrown out the window, and he becomes the irrational, emotional Mark that he was holding at bay those final kilometres in order to remain lucid and make the right decisions. The floodgates are opened the moment the line is crossed and he can flip the kill switch.
Neither of those personalities are truly representative of Mark. He exists most of the time closer to the rational side rather than the emotional side, but the racing brings out the extremes in him, as it does most of us. Fortunately most of us aren’t Mark Cavendish, or there’d be a whole peloton involved in a mixture of mass brawls and group hugs immediately after every finish line. One thing’s for sure: if we were all like Cav the journalists in the finish zone would be sporting full riot gear and trained in hostage-negotiation techniques in preparation for the spitfire interviews, each one a book in itself.
Film (2)
It was to capture all this – the jostling, the shouting, the panic; what goes on, what you can’t catch from a helicopter – that so motivated us to make a film. We considered there to be so much that people still didn’t know about cycling. The preparation had gone on between Finlay and me for years, ever since I’d seen his short film Standing Start, about the track cyclist Craig MacLean. Although barely fifteen minutes long it felt closer to the reality of cycling than anything else I’d ever seen; it felt like a first-person experience, the intensity of it all counter-balanced perfectly by the poetic narration. It made me believe Finlay could do the same for road cycling.
Finlay had already visited races and had filmed here and there, experimenting with the director of photography, Martin Radich, to get a feeling of what would and wouldn’t work. The financing phase had been accelerated with the knowledge that this was my last year racing; there was no longer any time left to talk about it, it now had to be filmed. We had an opportunity to capture footage nobody had ever seen before and with Finlay and Martin’s skill make it into something that was different from your usual fly-on-the-wall documentary, something none of us were interested in doing.
We quickly learnt the reason why so few films had been made about cycling. Corralling all the relevant parties and getting them to agree to anything was unbelievably difficult. This was mainly down to there being so many unrelated stakeholders – the teams, organisers, governing bodies, cyclists, sponsors, media – each one stands alone and we had to get permission from each group separately, and inevitably each group would be different for each race. It was a challenge to say the least, and it would have been impossible if I hadn’t been so involved and wanting the film to be made, because at times it felt like nobody in the world of cycling was interested in the slightest. Even my own team made it as difficult as humanly possible, enforcing a very strict contract limiting what could be filmed and demanding control of the final edit. They only delivered that contract a few days before we were to start filming at Tirreno, adding that little bit more stress that all of us could have done without.
Team Time Trialling
Tirreno started with a team time trial. Unfortunately my team didn’t allow us to use onboard cameras, as they thought they would compromise the aerodynamics, which was a shame because the least of our problems was lipstick-sized cameras attached to handlebars or under saddles. It wasn’t a surprise to me that we were less than average in our team time-trial per
formance. The team was no longer what it once had been.
We used to be amazing at team time trials at Garmin; there were only really two places we’d consistently finish – first or second. From 2008 to 2011 we were the gold standard to which other teams would aspire. It was thanks to Jonathan Vaughters’ recruitment policy of signing time-trial specialists that we had built such a strong group those first few years. Our greatest ever team time-trial performance was no doubt the 2009 Tour de France, Stage 4. I say ‘greatest’, but I also mean the hardest and most disappointing.
It was a thirty-nine-kilometre loop starting and finishing in Montpellier. The first twenty-one kilometres were super-technical, mostly on a country road that twisted left and right, with barely a section of flat. This was very un-Tour de France-like; in the past the majority of Tour team time trials I’d done had been point-to-point on big roads, and mostly flat. This was much different. The final eighteen kilometres were more traditional in that they banged it down a route principal straight back into Montpellier.
Leaving Montpellier was already a challenge; it was twisty, as you would expect a ride out from a small city to be – in other words, a bit shit. Already, even before breaking through the suburbs the route was taking us up and down, left and right, then only a couple of kilometres after leaving town we tackled the longest climb of the course. It wasn’t actually that long, only 1.5 kilometres or so, but long enough to basically rip our team to pieces and leave us with the bare minimum of five riders at the summit.
The only way to stand a chance of winning a team time trial at the highest level is to go very fast right from the beginning. This means that the weaker guys in the team are going to be over their limit and in the red zone almost immediately – which can be managed if the course isn’t very challenging. The problems arise when the road starts to go uphill or there are lots of corners. Corners involve deceleration followed by acceleration. In Grand Tours there are nine-man teams; that makes for quite a long line of riders, enough to make for a considerable concertina effect through tight turns. The goal is to be fast and smooth through corners; a mantra we would always be repeating to each other in training was ‘Remember – Truck and Trailer’. This would remind us to think about our trailer, to try to choose the smoothest line possible: not necessarily the racing apex you’d use in an individual time trial but a line that wouldn’t be so extreme as to force errors behind, which would lead to sudden braking and gaps being opened up.
Whoever takes the team into a corner is responsible for taking the team out, so you’ll often see the front rider in a team time trial exiting a corner looking over his shoulder making sure everybody has made it through safely and the team is in tight formation before beginning the acceleration back up to speed. The bottom line being that the further down the line you are the bigger the acceleration you’ll have to make because you’ll have lost the most speed through the corner (although the lead rider won’t have to brake much, if at all, the no. 2 rider will brake a bit more, no. 3 a bit more than no. 2, and so on). The best teams are made up of guys who have trained together on their time-trial bikes and trust each other implicitly, because ultimately that’s what it comes down: you have to believe the guy in front of you is not going to fuck it up and cause you to crash or force you to brake abruptly. The final time is taken from the fifth rider to cross the line, which means you can afford to drop no more than four of your team along the way.
Within that 2009 Tour de France team we had four pure specialists: Bradley Wiggins, Dave Zabriskie, Christian Vande Velde and myself. The four of us were at the top of our game; it meant that we absorbed the first few kilometres of corners and up and down roads without much problem, although VdV was already smashing it on certain sections, which filled me with dread as normally he always erred on the side of caution for the first half of team time trials.
It was no time until we were at the bottom of the longest climb, which would lead us into the really technical hilly section. Already at the bottom two guys peeled off, then halfway up Danny Pate pulled off (we had expected him to be one of our stronger riders). I can still remember him switching to the left side of the road and giving up and Christian shouting: ‘Don’t you fucking dare, Danny!’ To all intents and purposes it was going pear-shaped. A couple of hundred metres later we lost another rider. Whitey came on the radio through our earpieces, ‘Ryder, you’re number five now. You gotta stick with them. COME ON, RYDER! All right, boys, this is it, it’s just you four now.’
I’ll never forget that moment. We all had a split second to soak it up and accept we now had thirty kilometres to race as four riders, plus Ryder, against mostly nine-man teams. As we passed each other in the rotation we gave each other looks of ‘How the fuck are we going to do this?’ There wasn’t any talking because we couldn’t talk. I, for one, was already peaking out. I’m guessing we were all the same.
That’s the thing with team time trials: it’s horrible for all of you. People tend to think it must be easier for specialists but, in truth, it’s the other way round. The specialist has to lift the team, do longer turns on the front, bring the speed back up when it’s dropped, and not miss a turn; that’s what’s expected of them, it’s their responsibility to not flake out. Now there were four of us having to shoulder all hopes, and no way out. Ryder was our fifth man. We didn’t expect him to ride with us as he isn’t a specialist, and we couldn’t risk blowing him up and losing him. There was also the fact that the four of us were so equally matched that bringing Ryder in would have unbalanced our rotation.
Being down to effectively four men with so far to go was horrible – at least when there’s more of you it’s possible to trick yourself into thinking there’s a chance of escape. But we were now committed, the clock would only stop when all of us including Ryder crossed the line. Whatever happened we were now stuck together – crash, puncture, blackout, didn’t matter, we’d have to bring it home.
Each one of us started doing longer turns. Whitey stayed calm on the radio, controlling what each of us did: ‘Take them to the top of this one, Dave. Get it over the crest, come on, GET IT OVER! Nice work, Dave. Now you get it up to speed, Zab, you know what to do. Ryder, just stay where you are, we need you.’ Whitey is the guy you want on the radio when the shit hits the fan. He always keeps it calm and knows each of us well enough to know what needs to be said and when.
Going under the twenty-five-kilometres-to-go banner was soul-destroying. It seemed impossible to think we could keep doing what we were doing for that long. It was then that we were all thankful for the technical country road, because it allowed us to focus on something else beyond the effort – the pace was constantly changing, we were moving from one end of the block to the other on our gears, some of the corners were sketchy enough to actually spike us with a tiny bit of adrenalin, the technical and handling aspects were almost requiring as much application as the physical effort.
Then, with eighteen kilometres to go, we turned on to the big road that would take us home, and the purgatory truly began.
The road was the straightest route back to Montpellier. The only obstacles in our way were some large roundabouts, which barely slowed us down. The latest time check indicated we had the second fastest time on the road, eighteen seconds behind Lance Armstrong and Alberto Contador’s Astana team. It made no difference what the time check was; we couldn’t do anything about it, each of us was giving our maximum – it even felt more than our maximum because we would never be able to go so hard on our own. We were raising each other to a level we didn’t know was attainable.
In an individual time trial you have to constantly monitor your effort and avoid going too far in the red, otherwise you risk blowing up and losing power while your body recovers itself back to a manageable state. In theory a perfect effort is where you have been sitting on or just below your threshold the whole time, only daring to push yourself over it when you are sure there is a descent coming up which will allow you to recover, or the finish is n
ear and you can time the explosion within sight of it.
This isn’t the case in team time trials. Every time you hit the front you go into the red, because the power you have to produce is above and beyond what you would do individually. I may be putting out around 450 watts on the flat in an individual time trial, compared to 550+ watts on the flat when hitting the front in a team time trial. The only reason this is possible is because the effort lasts approximately forty-five seconds to one minute each time. Then there is recovery time while in the slipstream of your teammates; in practice you are on the cusp of exploding when you latch on to the back of the line and only recover once in position two or three. For this reason it’s better to have a complete team for as long as possible; this allows for more recovery time from the moment you latch on to the back of the line and slowly move up positions protected by the slipstream of the riders in front of you, until it’s your turn again to hit the front and begin the horrible effort once more. With only four out of five of us rotating we were never fully recovering. There was never the feeling you come to expect in team time trials of being over and under your threshold – we were either over it or on it. We were going very, very deep.
On the way back it was more a case of holding our momentum. There were no technicalities on that return stretch of road to rub our speed off, so we each knew the only thing we could do was keep our heads down and refuse to let the speed drop.
On the right day each of us individually had proved to be one of the fastest bike riders in the world. We’d all won major time trials, all been part of winning team-trial squads. I’m quite sure that’s what made us believe we could do it against all odds. I think that’s what each of us was thinking – there weren’t three other bike racers in the world I’d have rather been with for those final twenty minutes.