Cycling: A Team Sport

For the uninitiated, it’s often hard to comprehend how bike racing is a team – rather than individual – sport.   More than once I’ve found myself unable to do it quickly enough to avoid the glazed look in a friend’s eye.  So from now on, I’ll just be forwarding this passage from David Millar’s Tour de France diary.  All you need to know in advance is that when you’re racing, it’s essential to be immediately behind another cyclist.  If you’re not, the wind hits you full on and you end up having to work much harder than the rest of the riders in the peloton.  So, we join David Millar near the end of yesterday’s stage, who has somehow fallen off the back of the peloton, and is on his own:

dangling 50m off the back nuking from the effort and those 50m may as well have been 10km. I felt like an astronaut whose tether has been cut.

Then I saw [teammates] Martijn and Maggy at the back of the group and I shouted on the radio (what Maggy would later describe as screaming). I could only just get out, ‘Maggy, Martijn, LOOK BEHIND!’. The first time they didn’t turn, the second time I screamed Martijn looked behind. Without hesitating, he dropped out of the safety of the group and came back to me. At this moment, I was literally blowing up. I couldn’t even hold his wheel as he tried to accelerate me back into the group. After trying three times, he turned around and reached out his hand. It was a ballsy move as we were going very fast and it would transfer all his energy to me leaving him stranded and on his own. He did it though. I took it and he slung me as hard as he could. By this time, Maggy had dropped out of the group and was awaiting me a little further up the road. The momentum Martijn had given me allowed me to get onto the accelerating sanctuary of Maggy’s wheel and he towed me back on. The relief to find myself back in the front group was almost as strong as the few minutes of fear and pain I’d just put myself through.

Teamwork.