by David Millar
What was weird was how similar we all looked on the bike. Each of us had worked hard to develop our aerodynamic speed, none of us were big fans of wind tunnels, we just had the feel for it. We’d learnt to hide from the wind, tucking our heads down, rolling our shoulders in, and tucking our arms and hands as narrow as we could, all in order to shrink our frontal area. Beyond the actual positions each of us had we also pedalled with the classic old-school time-trial specialist’s smooth style, always keeping our cadences high even when entering a state of total fubar. Poor Ryder, on the other hand, was in a world of hurt at the back, the fifth man hanging on for dear life.
In an individual time trial we have an empty road in front of us, and we only have to apply ourselves on corners, where the entry/apex/exit are all-important; the rest of the time we can pick and choose our own line on the road without any undue concern. But in any team time trial a racer’s visual point of reference continually changes; in the final phase of a team time trial it becomes completely narrowed to the smallest of areas. Once our turn is done, and we begin the horrible process of dropping down the line readying ourselves for the explosion of effort to latch back on to the rear, we count the riders who pass us (so far we have only had to count three for the majority of the race, so that bit is relatively easy). As the second rider passes we prepare ourselves to accelerate so we can make it back into the lineout without missing the third rider’s slipstream, which means beginning that move as soon as the second rider comes by. This is when you hope beyond hope that the rider who has taken the front isn’t accelerating at the same time, otherwise it will be even more difficult to slot back in as you’re already at your maximal effort. We all know this, and so, if we accelerate, we only do so when we know everybody is in formation.
Once you latch back in you are so blown to pieces that the only thing you care about and focus on is that precious wheel of the rider in front of you. The first minute is excruciating, as you’re still putting out near threshold power, so it takes your body that much longer to recuperate. During that time you just stare down at the gap between your front wheel and the back wheel you cannot – will not – lose. There’s probably only an inch or so separating the two wheels, and we don’t have the option of braking as we’re in our aero tucks, where there are only gear shifters rather than brake levers. We’re near delirious from the effort, while teetering on the edge of a crash, so that first minute all you think about is that tiny gap, and trying to keep it as small as possible to reap maximum benefit from the slipstream. By the time the next rider drops back and makes your rear wheel their focus you already begin to feel like you’re not going to die. You begin to lift your head a little in order to catch in your peripheral vision the rider two positions in front. Readying yourself for the cycle to begin all over again.
But in 2009, on those final five kilometres, Zab and I were beyond fucked. We didn’t miss turns, but they became shorter; Christian was as strong as he had been from the beginning, while Brad had been doing longer and longer turns, lifting the load Zab and I could no longer carry.
With two kilometres to go we went up a very little hill. We were still on the main road we’d been on for the previous sixteen kilometres – normally the slope would have been a bump rather than the wall it resembled as we approached. As I peeled off from my turn at the bottom and Christian came by me I managed, in total desperation, to order him, ‘Don’t stand up, Christian.’ I knew he had the power and wherewithal to stand up out the saddle and smash on the pedals in one final take-it-home effort. I knew that would send Zab and me out the back. We were completely broken by this point.
I can’t remember those last two kilometres. We crossed the line and I didn’t even stop. I was too dazed and didn’t have the strength to unclip, let alone get off my bike, so kept rolling through all the people and past all the teams and out into the non-Tour de France part of the world. I think I was gone ten minutes. Again, I can’t remember much about that. Finally, I got back to the team, where all the guys were sitting there at the side of the road by the team cars with wet towels on their heads, as it was so hot and we were so overheated. They all looked like me: none of us could quite register what we’d just done. I wasn’t able to eat anything for seven hours, my body was in such shock. I think it was the deepest I ever went in a race.
Astana ended up winning by eighteen seconds, putting us in second place. With a full team they hadn’t taken back one second from us in those final eighteen kilometres. Few things I’ve done as a professional cyclist have left me feeling so proud. And we didn’t even win.
That Was Then …
That team is gone now, and we have a different team, one that is better at other things. Unfortunately the team management hasn’t quite accepted that team time trialling is no longer ‘our thing’. So they expect the results of old yet don’t have the specialist riders required. What’s most ridiculous about it is that almost no training is done to make the team better. It’s almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy; as the team has slowly declined in team time trials, less effort has been put into recruitment or specific work in training, and the only thing that we have left from our golden years of team time trialling is the expectation. So for some reason beyond my comprehension, Garmin’s Charly Wegelius and Jonathan Vaughters still think we’re going to do well, and are shocked when we don’t.
We definitely sucked at Tirreno this year – eighteenth out of twenty-two teams. We could have crashed and done better than that back in the day, not that we ever used to crash in team time trials – that’s something the team does quite often of late – so, in a way, eighteenth without crashing is a bit of a bonus (it’s clear our standards have fallen). It’s for this reason I was a little angry about not being able to have cameras on the bikes for the team time trial, because at least then we’d have felt like we got something from the day’s racing.
The bright side of a poor performance in a first-stage team time trial is that there’s really not much to do the following days. There are enough teams ahead of us with bigger responsibilities and the right to assume position at the front of the peloton that we’re left to scuttle around keeping out of trouble and awaiting the next general classification shake up. This suits most of us as we’re only at Tirreno to get ready for the remaining, and most important, Flanders Classics, so we don’t have the pressure of protecting a general classification rider or controlling the race.
And, anyhow, my biggest motivation was making sure I got some decent material for the film, which first of all meant getting used to having my very own camera-equipped motorbike following me around every day; on top of that I permanently wore a microphone, while my bike was carrying onboard cameras. I wasn’t exactly keeping a low profile.
The motorbike itself was impressively set up, cameras fixed to the front and sides and a fully stabilised cinema-quality camera on the back on a rig so that Martin could position himself facing backwards in order to control it. The motorbike pilot – ‘pilot’ because that’s what he resembled: ‘rider’ simply doesn’t do him justice – is a Frenchman called Patrice. He has more than twenty Tours under his belt and is sporting the sort of moustache last seen in the RAF during the Second World War. He sings (in French) through the helmet intercom, only breaking it up when catching sight of something at the side of the road that reminds him of an adventure that Martin absolutely must be told about. His English is perfect, made all the more so by his fantastical French accent. He is from another time, an absolutely brilliant pilote de moto and, most importantly, has no fucks to give.
Martin on the other hand is a very quiet man; he would have happily sat on the back of that motorbike in complete silence for the duration of even the longest day (Stage 4 – 244 kilometres); he’s a studious listener. Cinematography is his primary love, but his passions encompass books, film, music and art. Somehow he gets bike racing very quickly. Having had no previous knowledge, he is seeing it all with fresh eyes and no preconceptions. He is seeing it and fil
ming it in a way that none of us has ever witnessed before.
It takes me a couple of days to get used to Patrice and Martin hanging around all the time. The first day was a bit embarrassing, as the motorbike was carrying so much electronics that it created a blocking signal around it, meaning that everyone in the vicinity stopped receiving data on whatever device they were relying upon. I was sitting not too far from the front, hovering around, making it easy for Martin to get me in shot. Cav had his team riding up there, as he had the leader’s jersey and wanted to win the stage. After a while I could see discussions beginning up and down the line of his team. Cav being Cav, he figured it out pretty quickly. He went and ‘had a word’ with Martin. The next day they disconnected some of the radios on the motorbike. Nobody likes being told off by Mark Cavendish – the only saving grace is he’ll always come back later and apologise profusely, so Martin and Cav were friends for life by Stage 3.
Fortunately, I’m big enough and old enough not to worry too much about what people think. The younger me would have been far too concerned about having the piss taken out of him, or, worse, bullied out of it, to have thought it was a good idea. In truth there was nobody left to take the piss or bully me. They’d all retired. I was at the top of the food chain.
Fortunately for me, although not so much for Martin and Finlay, the race as a whole was fantastically uneventful. I switched my head into using the race as a training exercise and made sure I did just the right amount of work to have me coming out of it feeling good for the following month. I definitely wanted to avoid doing so much that I’d weaken myself sufficiently to succumb to illness as in previous editions. All of which was frustrating for Finlay, as he wanted to get images of me off the front of the race, but I couldn’t do it. I knew my primary job was to think ahead – no matter how much time, effort and money had been put into the film, I still had to do what was professional.
To complete the race feeling healthy and in form was a major success. I’d almost go as far to claim it to be the greatest Tirreno–Adriatico of my career. I finished eighty-third. Success comes in all shapes and colours.
La Classicissima di Primavera
Milan–San Remo is the first of the five one-day races held throughout the season and referred to as the ‘Monuments’ of cycling. They’ve all been around for more than a century, and if you can win one of these in your career then you will be considered a great of the sport. As successful as British Cycling is we have only won four Monuments in those 100-plus years; three of those were won by Tommy Simpson in the sixties, the other by Mark Cavendish – and those two are also the only British riders to have won the World Championships Road Race, arguably the sixth Monument. (The other Monuments are the Tour of Flanders, then Paris–Roubaix followed by Liège–Bastogne–Liège to close the start of the season. The final Monument of the year, and considered by many to be the final race of the year, is the Tour of Lombardy in October.)
Apart from their longevity, the Monuments all have one thing in common: they all have distances of over 250 kilometres, which is a remnant of ye olde bike racing when the distances were massive – for example, the first Tour de France in 1903 was just under 2,500 kilometres and consisted of a scant six stages: that makes for an average of just over 400 kilometres per stage. That’s what cycling was originally: expeditionary in its nature.
Milan–San Remo takes the biscuit for the modern era, with its 294 kilometres, a long way to drive a car let alone race a bike. And yet it’s considered the easiest of the Monuments to finish. This is because the majority of the race is on big, flat, straight roads, and, because of the length, everybody is scared to make any effort until it’s absolutely necessary, as the race is almost always decided in the final thirty kilometres, and more often than that in the last ten.
Milan–San Remo has always been one of my favourite races to watch – it seems so perfect in the way it has such a clearly defined finale. Yes, the race is 294 kilometres long, but ultimately there are only four kilometres that matter, and they begin after 284 kilometres, at the foot of the final climb, the Poggio. As a teenager beginning to follow pro cycling from Hong Kong (on a video, months after the actual race, of course), I remember Maurizio Fondriest winning, and that was it: he was my hero and stylistic role model. I spent that first year on a road bike trying to mimic his position and form on the bike.
That all said, the first 130 kilometres of flatlands, heading south from Milan to the foot of the Turchino, are mind-numbing to the point of inducing sleep. The first stress point of the race comes at the Passo del Turchino. It’s not a particularly hard climb, but it is made difficult by the battle for position in order to pass the summit at the front of the peloton and so begin the long, fast and technical descent in a relatively safe position. Milan–San Remos have been lost on the descent of the Turchino due to splits in the peloton that were never regrouped.
Once off the Turchino Pass the mood changes as much as the landscape. We arrive into the Mediterranean azure and on to the corniche road that will take us the final 150 kilometres to San Remo. The cold, grey flatlands are now a thing of the past, the leaders start peeling off clothes item by item, and domestiques are seen laden with gear descending through the peloton to hand it all off to the following car. The final calls of nature are made and the peloton begins to feel more alive as tensions rise.
Now the wearing down begins. We fly up and down hills, strung out through coastal towns, all similar to each other, the speed gradually increasing as more teams ride on the front, positioning their leaders. Around here the day-long breakaway will begin to haemorrhage time, their 200-plus-kilometre escapade beginning to take its toll. While they are slowing down the bunch is speeding up, and all of sudden minutes are chopped off their gap. Then we hit the first true obstacle of the race, the Cipressa climb, right off the coastal road and up the side of one of the many hills that rise up off the seafront. The positioning into this is frantic, and it’s very easy to waste too much energy in the battle leading up to it, as many riders do. Not much happens at the front of the peloton up the Cipressa; almost all the action is at the back, as riders are spat out one by one. The summit is at 272 kilometres – for the many riders taking part in Milan–San Remo for the first time this will be the furthest they have ever raced. Much like the Turchino, the motivation for being at the front over the top of the Cipressa lies in being positioned well for the descent. With almost 280 kilometres in your legs as you rejoin the coastal road it’s nearly impossible to close the gap. This is probably the spot where the most racers watch their chances of success evaporate.
The final and deciding climb is the legendary Poggio, with its summit at 288 kilometres, yet only six kilometres from the finish. And so the whole day comes down to this point. There will be teams who are there to try to control the race by keeping it together and making sure their sprinter makes it over at the front and in a position to sprint for victory. There are other teams whose job has been to disrupt the race, making it harder for the sprinters’ teams to control and thus allow their leader to attack and solo to victory. Ultimately each team’s tactic is dependent on their leader’s abilities. A climber will attack on the Cipressa, a puncheur will attack on the Poggio and a sprinter will try to survive the Cipressa and Poggio and win the sprint finish in San Remo.
My final Milan–San Remo is something of a damp squib. I don’t even make it to the Cipressa. The weather has been bad – not as bad as the winter wonderland we had experienced in the 2013 edition, but still unpleasant. In my usual role as road captain it has been upon me to cover the first part of the race then make sure our leaders are looked after. We have two in Sebastian Langeveld and Tom-Jelte Slagter. It has rained for much of the race, from Milan to the Turchino, then, descending down to the Mediterranean, it seems to clear up, and so, following tradition, everybody starts to remove the extra clothes, convinced that the worst is behind us. Unfortunately, it isn’t.
A mere handful of kilometres later it begins chuck
ing it down again. With nearly 140 kilometres still to go this means we can’t risk getting cold, so back to the team cars we go to get the clothes we’ve only just removed. I spend nearly an hour in the convoy trying to organise who needs what and then ferrying Sebastian or Tom back and forth. At one point Tom finds himself totally out the back of the convoy – I actually thought he’d stopped the race – so there I am out the back looking over my shoulder and asking other team cars if they’ve seen him. It would be funny if it wasn’t so unfunny. (It turned out his hands were so cold he couldn’t actually get his gloves on, so had slowed to a stop in order to get them on. Even then it took him an age to get them on, then he couldn’t get his jacket fastened, which he probably should have done before putting the gloves on – but when you’re that cold rational thinking isn’t readily available.) It’s a black comedy of errors.
And so my lasting memory of my final Milan–San Remo will be of racing rain-blind with numbed, useless hands, dodging cars, off the back looking for Tom-Jelte Slagter. Just before the Cipressa, I’m a broken man. I make a last delivery of bars and gels to Tom and Sebastian and then let the race go and climb into the next team car I see, frozen and tired to the bone. I wasn’t alone. Nathan Haas was already in there having been in the break all day before being dropped due to near hypothermia. He’d been in the car long enough to return to life and know exactly what I was going through. Without asking, he began to help me out of my clothes, knowing my hands were useless to me. La Classicissima di Primavera, my arse – wet and cold misery-fest is more like it.
Flanders
The Europa Hotel in Ghent is our home for three weeks. This is the Tour of Duty for the Classics team, staff and riders alike. Most teams will fix themselves a hotel as a base camp for the Flanders campaign; those riders who don’t live in Belgium or Holland will stay there for the duration. There’s no going home between races. When we aren’t racing we’re either resting or doing reconnaissance. The recon ride is done by all the teams: it allows for the experienced riders to refresh their knowledge and learn of changes to the route since the previous edition. For the inexperienced riders it will more than likely confuse and scare rather than educate. Everybody gets something from it, though.