Every year I wonder the same thing about the Tour de France: why is this race not a thousand times more popular in the United States? Here we love the speed of NASCAR, the athleticism of the NBA, the tradition and history of Major League Baseball, the physical strength and endurance of the NFL—and yet the Tour offers all of this and more over a three-week period. While our most popular sports espouse a win-at-all-costs mindset, cycling fans appreciate the unpredictability of the race: the breakaway that takes off, splits apart and then gets caught, the domestique that sets the pace, buries himself for a time and then fades away, the lead-out guys that sacrifice themselves so another man can win. Of course we want our favorite riders to do well (most often shown as an expression of national pride—the British for Wiggins, the Italians for Nibali, the Aussies for Evans), but doing well in the Tour—or any team cycling event—means having the ability to adapt to the particular, and sometimes strange, world that is pro cycling.
Here in the U.S. we are simply not familiar with sports that have to navigate a team and individual focus simultaneously. The Tour seems to fall somewhere in between being a total team sport, where players share the common goal of winning, each contributing to that end, and an individual sport like tennis, which is contested on a one-on-one basis of skill, endurance and effort. And so, while most days may be all about the team dynamic and working together to position top riders near the lead, it’s the solo grind of the time trials—representing just 101.4 kilometers of the total 3,497 kilometers of this year’s Tour—that often makes the difference between winning and losing.
But off the bike, underneath the team/solo components of the race, there is yet another structural aspect to the race that riders have to contend with: how to manage the built-in chain of command—or hierarchy—that dictates and “organizes” every team.
By definition, a hierarchy within a cycling team would seem to be as stable as any other—whether it be within a religious, social, economic or professional group—which is to say that it is very often not stable at all. Any organized structure that is established on a framework of “top-down delegation of power and determination of functions” will ultimately be challenged as leaders are overpowered, people in the organization come and go, and as the dynamics of the system shift—all of it motivated by the need to control, maintain power and out-earn the competition. Knowing one’s role and how to function correctly in relationship to others on the team can seem, at times, relatively automatic—especially on the “flat” stages: work to keep the team leader out of the wind, away from danger and well positioned in the peloton. Those are the days in which it seems fairly simple to execute whatever plan is laid out before the stage—in terms of riders’ rank and role—but even those plans can be pretty complicated, given the stress of a sprint stage.
During stage 5 of the 2010 Tour de France, Robbie Hunter leans his head into the driver’s side door of the Garmin-Transitions team car, and this is the message that team director Matt White lays out for him:
“What they’ve done is barricaded the upcoming roundabouts, definitely faster on the right-hand side, both roundabouts, one at 6 and one at 2, definitely faster on the right-hand side. From 2k the profile is wrong. It’s downhill from 2 to 1k to go—3 or 4 percent. So it’s gonna be warp speed. Then the last quarter is at least 90 degrees, maybe even sharper. The first three or four guys will get through there without braking, but you know what’s gonna happen—it’s gonna bottleneck, and if one team goes in front with numbers, it’s good, man. So, 2 to 1 is downhill, then 1 to 700—in the corners it’s closer to 700 than 6. The book says 6 but I think it’s closer to 7. All right, Martijn’s gonna move you guys in the downhill, and Dave’s gonna go well through the corner, well, well through the corner—take us into the corner and out of the corner, otherwise you’re gonna be on the front way too early. The last 200 is a little slight uphill, not much, like one percent, and there’s no wind, no wind. But you’re gonna be going at warp speed.”
Hunter remembered every world of it, and so did the other guys on the team, knowing their respective, ordered duties in the final. Millar did go well through the corner while Hunter took over in front of Dean and Farrar. It looked beautiful and all hung together for a time, but in the end Cavendish won the sprint for his first of five stage wins that year for HTC-Columbia.
At other times, maintaining the intended balance of power within the team can seem downright difficult—even somewhat embarrassing—especially when the mountains come into play.
This year’s Tour was pretty much like those of the past—the mountains proved to be the most revealing stages in the race. Here we see how the race takes shape and who will truly contend for the podium. We also see how well team structures are able to withstand the pressure, especially those in the Tour that are built on human relationships and physical effort, awareness and discipline—being able to sacrifice for another over and over, at any time and in any conditions. This is fragile territory, indeed.
Leadership
Leaders lead (it’s sometimes as simple as that) especially in the Tour. But on other levels—mainly involving ability, character, motivation and enthusiasm—the concept of leader involves much more. Here we are used to identifying the leader/captain of a sports team by a kind of default process that associates leadership with physical ability only, and so athletes like Kobe Bryant, Aaron Rogers and Albert Pujols—guys that are recognized as the most physically talented players on their respective teams—are naturally placed in the leadership role. But are they the true leaders?
Consider this description of a leader by writer David Foster Wallace: “Somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with ‘inspire’ being used here in a serious and noncliché way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own. It’s a mysterious quality, hard to define, but we always know it when we see it, even as kids.”
While the context of Wallace’s description may not have been made with a specific sports/cycling team leader in mind, the overall idea is there: leaders inspire others. We get so used to thinking of a team leader in cycling as someone others work for and protect (the subservient aspect, which is true), but what about the other side of that? How often do we see a leader truly inspire the lower ranking guys to find something new within and achieve beyond their previous capabilities—to find a higher level and glimpse becoming one of the best in future years? I think we saw that very thing this year at the Tour—and not once, but twice.
Evans and van Garderen
The relationship between BMC’s Tejay van Garderen and Cadel Evans looked perfect on the surface—in broadcast interviews and in the press—in the days leading up to and including this year’s Tour. Why would it be otherwise? BMC had made it’s intensions clear to make Evans, the defending Tour de France champion, it’s leader, and no one could blame them for that. Early on in the race, the strategy was clear, as van Garderen said: “I’m here for Cadel. The white jersey is kind of a bonus, but if I have to lose it in order to help Cadel, then that’s gonna be the call I’ll make—to help Cadel.” But on the road, as the race moved toward Paris through the mountain regions of La Toussuire (stage 11) and the Peyresourde (stage 16), we began to witness the very concepts of “team leader” and “hierarchy” being revised right before our very eyes.
“After beating his boss in the first two time trials, van Garderen also appeared to be clearly stronger in the mountains, having to tap the brakes every so often to avoid pulling away from the 35-year-old Aussie,” wrote Austin Murphy. “With Evans losing ground to the leaders on the Alp called La Toussuire in Stage 11, van Garderen stayed beside his captain, helping to stanch the bleeding.” It looked bad for Evans, even a bit embarrassing, but the fact of the matter is that the established team structure of BMC purposely put van Garderen in the midst of the most critical moments of the Tour, and expected him to become, in effect, the leader for a time: to pace Evans into contention and set up his attack on the leaders. That was his job. But when Evans clearly couldn’t keep pace with his younger teammate again during stage 16 ("I had a few stomach issues before the race and when you have it two hours before the race, there's not a lot you can do,” said Evans), cycling fans everywhere were wondering the same thing about BMC: who’s the real leader now?
Within the team, Evans was the leader; on the road, van Garderen was in charge. Was it a split in the ranks, a public humiliation for Evans and BMC? Was it an example of how old structures are naturally replaced by new ones? Or was it a kind of subtle example of leadership/inspiration on Evans’s part, a way of bringing van Garderen into the heart of the race and giving him the opportunity to go beyond his previous limits. Recall the words quoted earlier: “A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own.” It may actually have been Evans who motivated van Garderen to ride the way he did in the mountains. And how fitting it was to watch TVG power past Evans in the final TT en route to an impressive fifth-place finish overall—a vivid example of a definite shift in the balance of power for BMC.
Wiggins and Froome
Although many in the press were apt to go with the standard default media story about Brad Wiggins and Chris Froome being adversaries or rivals following the events of stage 17 as Froome sacrificed (perhaps) a stage win for himself in order to pace a clearly slower Wiggins to the finish, it didn’t seem all that simple. It was Jonathon Vaughters who had tweeted afterwards, “Whoa. Yikes. Either work for Wiggins or attack him. Two feet in or two feet out.” And it was Vaughters again, saying, “Would have been better for Froome to just drop Wiggins by 20 seconds or whatever and settle it in the time trial. That was just humiliation.” What this assumes is that the relationship between Wiggins and Froome within the Sky hierarchy was unsettled—even as late in the race as stage 17—and that both guys were acting as free agents, essentially given the green light to ride their own race at any time.
“We can’t play the roulette, we need to be conservative and keep our cards in the right places,” Sky director Sean Yates said. “If Froome went up the road, Bradley got dropped and slipped down to fourth, and then Froome fell off, then we’re stuffed. We’ve got to be calculating.”
Even other teams recognized the fact that Sky did not have any real issues to deal with, and that Wiggins was their clear leader. “From the start you have to have one goal and stick with it until it fails,” said BMC’s general manager, Jim Ochowicz. “Wiggins hasn’t failed, so why change the strategy?” Roberto Amadio, general manager of Liquigas-Cannondale, was also clear in his perspective of the Wiggins/Froome affair: “I don’t think there are problems in Sky. A team at this level knows how to manage its affairs.”
What was clear in watching this year’s Tour was that Wiggins was always the leader of Sky, no matter how the media spun it or how brilliant Froome was in the mountains. Sky’s strategy was about balance and consistency for the most part, combined with massive individual efforts in the time trials. “The nature of the Tour is that people fall by the wayside as the race goes on,” Wiggins said. “That's the affect of the length of the race and how hard it is; it's the nature of the Tour de France. I said at the start in Liège that it's about being good for 21 days and never really having any super days or any bad days.“
It was also clear this year that Bradley Wiggins was a different kind of leader, both as a presence within his team and as a representative for the entire Tour. He seemed to wear the maillot jaune very differently than recent previous winners. In 2011, Evans was reluctant in yellow; in 2010, Schleck was uncertain in yellow; in 2009, Contador was quietly deceptive in yellow. Wiggins, by contract, was forthright, giving and inspirational in yellow this year. In short, he was true to himself within the team, a grateful recipient of the protection and help he received from the other Sky riders, but also doing his best to return the favor whenever possible (Remember Wiggins’s lead-out efforts for Boasson Hagen in stage 13, and for Cavendish in Paris.) This shift in Wiggins had started years earlier at Garmin, with a team environment that provided one key component: freedom.
"For once I was with a team that I felt you had freedom to explore not only your physical capabilities but it was the first team I was on where you could just be yourself," Wiggins said. "There was no sort of stereotypes or little cliques. "Every team I was on up to that point was very kind of like, there's little groups and you had to mold yourself like everybody else. Otherwise you didn't fit in. Garmin was the first team where you had the freedom just to be yourself. That's when I started performing well physically."
And so, even within the most rigid team structure, having that space of individual freedom may have made the critical difference for Wiggins and the rest of Sky. Everyone on the team—from Wiggins to Boasson Hagen to Cavendish to Rogers to Porte—rode a beautifully coordinated race—well planned and well executed—while at the same time appearing very loose, content and free, never losing sense of their own individual character/style in the saddle. Maybe it was that same sense of freedom within the team that allowed Froome to fully announce himself to the cycling world, raise his own level and show such an incredible physical effort. Could Froome have won the Tour this year? Perhaps, but given the hierarchy within Sky, he’ll have to wait.
Nevertheless, what remains in the history books is the story of Brad Wiggins, Britain’s first Tour winner—a guy who wore the yellow jersey with class and ease, and who will surely someday pay back to another the good fortune that was bestowed upon him. Speaking of Froome after the race, Wiggins said, “He's been a fantastic teammate during this Tour de France. For sure, one day, he'll win the Tour and I'll be there beside him to do it.”
Giving back and inspiring others—that’s what real leaders do.
peloton, Issue 15