Work All Day for 20 Minutes of Tension—Inside the Tour de France Team Time Trial

The first thing you need to know about a Tour de France team time trial is that it is an all-day event. Team time trial day consumes the morning, afternoon, and evening of the Tour de France. The second thing that you need to know about a Tour de France team time trial is that it is decided by seconds. It is a compact race that is seldom longer than 30 minutes, where the margins are tiny, and the speeds are fast.

The fact that it is always decided by seconds is why the team time trial takes all day—ratcheting up the tension as each step of the process gets checked off.

Normally, most of these steps happen behind closed doors, but at the opening team time trial, we got brought behind the scenes courtesy of XDS-Astana for the pre-race recon. From the team car, we could understand the shape of the day—from the setup, to the recon, warm-up, and race—and, ultimately, how it can all come crashing down in an instant.

The long wind-up before the warm-up

“It’s a long day, but I do like it,” Pete Kennaugh said before the team of eight riders and four cars headed out on the course for a recon. Kennaugh is a team director at XDS-Astana, but really, you could attribute that quote to many people we met throughout the day. It is the pervasive attitude among many of the team staff bouncing around the Barcelona seaside parking lot where the buses gathered.

Alex Dowsett was the man of the day for XDS-Astana. The former British pro was known in his days racing as a time trial meastro, eeking out performance gains from his time trial position and equipment choices. That dedication has neatly translated into a role at XDS-Astana as the team has massively overhauled its performance structure.

“Technically, I am the performance engineer,” Dowsett said,” Although I’m hardly an engineer in any real sense.”

Dowsett handles equipment for the team. From the X-Lab frames from XDS, to the tires, chainrings, etc. Yet on time trial days, his job expands. For the team time trial, he does everything from pacing strategy to calling the shots into the radio from behind the team, in addition to all of the equipment duties.

Once the recon got underway, in front of a few thousand spectators already lining the course hours before the race began, Dowsett’s expertise really began to shine through, even through a radio that was on the fritz. From the car behind the riders, what is clear is the defined dichotomy of responsibility between the staff and the riders. Especially in a team time trial, the jobs of everyone involved are extremely narrow.

For the mechanics, it is to get the four bikes ready for each rider: the time trial, the time trial bike on the trainer, the time trial bike on the car, and the road bike for the ride to the start line. The sougiers likewise are charged with keeping the riders hydrated, fed, and cooled. The directors plan, communicate, and manage what the riders do. The director in the car doesn’t talk much, but it carries a lot of weight. The riders, of course, pedal as hard as they can and do as little as they can outside of it.

Out on course during the recon, the riders finally got to start their job in earnest. Throughout the first ten kilometers, the pace kept creeping up—50kph, 55kph, 60kph. “Keeping a lid on the effort, boys,” Dowsett said, crackling over the radio in a deeply calm British accent, “Keeping a lid on the effort, please.”

Dutifully, the pace dropped to a 50kph crawl. The riders ride, the directors think, everyone does their roles, as they have all day.

On many levels, Barcelona was the perfect setting for a team time trial, and it could only be fully appreciated from inside the barriers. From the recon, the energy overflowed, even hours before.

The new format has also boosted the craft of team time trialing. Instead of keeping the team together, the goal is to get the most out of each rider. That means that some will sit on the back for the first three quarters and then explode up the final ramp to the finish. This change, according to the team, has meant every ride on the team can have a distinct role that caters to their strength, boosting the collective power of the team.

Even though there was only one rider arriving at the finish together, the new method is truly the biggest team effort in the sport.

While the effort was far from full gas, once the team hit the final slopes around Montjuic, the big riders pulled up, grinding their massive 64t chainrings up the final kilometer kick to the finish. All around the race, the barriers were already packed on the climb, with flags, signs, and horns blasting away hours before the main show. Add to that the background of one of the world’s great cities, and the tapestry was unbelievable. The Tour had fully arrived, even before it properly started.

We made it to the finish, and the mechanics in the back seat jumped out, rushing around to corral the bikes and get them on the roof of the car. Soigneurs were also in the mix, spreading bottles, towels, and other recovery tools. The directors had a quick huddle—the radios needed changing—and a few of the elder riders added some notes about the ride. Chaos swirled around as many of the teams were bottlenecked together, but it didn’t matter.

Everyone was doing their job, as they had been all day.

Disaster in the end

When the time trial came around, XDS-Astana started the race meeting their marks. They were never going to win; the top five teams were always a cut above the rest, but they were firmly on a path to a top ten at the end. The top ten might not seem like much, but crucially, it keeps their Colombian climbers, Sergio Higuita and Harold Tejada.

Unfortunately, that didn’t last. About halfway through the race, the team was cruising down one of the long straightaways of the course, touching 35 miles per hour, and disaster struck. Midway through the line of riders, a sunken manhole dropped the front wheel of one of the riders, and the rest of the team crashed behind him.

“We just hit a manhole, and that was it,” Dowsett said, “It is just the way it goes. We should have avoided it; it was painted pink, 21 teams missed it, but we didn’t. It is what it is.”

A day of work is gone in a second. Yet, that is the beauty and brutality of it. It requires everyone doing their job, all day, at the highest possible level, for 20 minutes of high-tension execution.