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Michael Barry's Diary: A team effort

By Michael Barry, Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team
Published: Aug. 26, 2006

For the last three days we have been waiting in a hotel in Málaga, anticipating the start of the Vuelta a España. Over the last weeks we finished our final training sessions in preparation for the event, and during the final run in to the race all that was left to do was test our time-trial equipment and keep our legs loose by riding a little every day. Those final three days are long ones, as we need to rest, so we aren’t walking around town and visiting the city. We're sitting in our beds, reading with our legs up and minds focused on the coming weeks of racing.

Why do we have to be here three days before the race? For the UCI blood controls, where they test everything imaginable. The tests occur in the morning, two days before the start of the race. It makes a three-week race nearly a month long – and that is an awfully long time to be away from home and our families. By the time I finish here I am sure my son Liam will be babbling new sounds and words, climbing onto higher furniture and discovering a whole new part of the world he didn’t know existed. As this year’s Vuelta opened with a bang — a 7km team time trial — we needed to practice a little as a team in the days leading up to the event. The team time trial is an event I love. There are few sensations in cycling that are similar to the feeling of flying in formation as a team. And we do fly. With disc wheels, aero bikes and a fluid team riding, 55 km/h seems effortless. Cycling is a team sport, yet in virtually every race we ride there is only one victor. This is what makes the team trial unique and special — everyone on the team can climb on the podium and receive accolades for their efforts. In a road race only one rider wins, no matter how hard, or for how long, his teammates pulled on the front, chased down breakaways and controlled the field. A 7km TTT is unbelievably short for a team event. Usually, individual prologues are under 10km and TTT’s are anywhere from 20 to 80km. So we needed to figure out how we would ride the course — who would pull in which sections, how long we would pull, and what kind of a formation we would ride in: double or single paceline. In team time trials it is also important what order the team rides in; generally, the team rides in ascending order of height with the tallest guys on the back. In riding a team time trial, the effort and speed are the most important. A hard acceleration can destroy the team as the rider on the back feels the whiplash, suffers more and can open a gap. Basically, the strong guys take longer pulls and progressively pick up the speed whereas the weaker guys simply try to keep the speed, pull through and immediately pull off. We each wear radios and Johan, our director, tell us how we are riding — whether we need to increase the speed, take shorter pulls, how to approach the corners, etc., guiding the team from start to finish. This year, the team is here with one clear leader, Tom Danielson, and we will race in complete support of his overall ambitions in the race. He looks fit — skinnier than I have ever seen him — and has been riding in the Pyrenees for the last month, preparing for the race. Last year he came into the race a young, naïve kid; this year, he is a team leader with confidence in his abilities and clear goals.

At the end of the race we went fast, but not fast enough. Somehow, we never got on top of our pedals and really flew; we never found the rhythm we needed to win. We made a few small mistakes and paid the price — there is no time to make up for them in a seven-minute race — and we lost to CSC by nine long seconds.

Sunday will surely be a day for the sprinters as there are two climbs early on in the day and then it is flat for about 100km, all the way to the finish. For us, it will be a day to follow the attacks, cover breakaways, and get familiar with the peloton we will spend the next three weeks cruising around with.