Stage 5

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Stage 5

Key Stage

July 10 Epernay - Chateau-Thierry TTT 67.5 km

Right off the bat, there are several things I have to point out about the team time trial. You can almost always tell the rookie teams in the team time trial. This year Alessio dropped a rider before the first time check and Frigo dropped his team (Tacconi) with a surge. These are signs that those teams don't do their fundamentals work as a team. 7-Eleven had similar problems in their first Tour and spent three months before the next tour doing fundamentals work in Southern California just before their second Tour to keep that from happening again. It worked.

I know that the fundamentals work is boring and you think you can ride a paceline, but it is necessary to prevent looking like a bunch of rookies in the races. I am amazed at how we humans like to not do our home work until we have made fools out of ourselves in front of the world and then we do our home work so we wont look like fools again. Do your home work before you show up for the test and you wont look like the fool.

You can do more to improve your performance and your team's performance by working on fundamentals (bike or riding discipline) as a team in the same time than by working on anything else. By just working on fundamentals, I can improve the performance of the average pro by at least one to two percent in just one to two months, the average amateur racer by at least three to five percent, and the average tourist by 10 to 20 percent. That is a HUGE increase in performance but we humans like to think we don't need to do those boring fundamentals. If these pro teams need to do their fundamentals, so do you. Get real and get with it. Do the fundamentals.

I NEVER had even one of my amateur teams drop a rider early in a TTT or a rider drop the team in a TTT because I made them work on fundamentals regularly and they knew how to ride paceline with their team. Any time a team paceline begins to blow itself apart, it is because the team has not been doing its fundamentals work.

A fun way for you to improve your time trialing and especially team time trialing is to have your club run a 10 mile or 15 km time trial once a month during the off season. I like doing them at the beginning of the month and do four of them in November, December, January, and February. Do the first two as individual time trials. Then have the coach pair the riders on your team based on times so that the riders are as closely matched as possible. Stage the second time trial as a two man TTT. Then match the two man teams together based on their times to form four rider teams and stage the fourth time trial as a four rider TTT. This provides training for time trialing and also provides experience in both two man and four man TTT's. It is good for you and fun too.

I always worked to make my team Winter training programs fun and functional. I will be teaching those kinds of things at my training camps. BTW, I added a few more camps. One for Winter and one for early Spring. See my pages under coachcarl.com racing academy. A good idea would be for your clubs or teams to send one or more riders or coaches to the camps.

I would like to state that, if I were coaching a team for the Tour, one thing I would work on a lot is team time trialing. You will see how bad some teams will fare on GC following the TTT. This has become one of the most important stages in the race as far as not losing time. Teams that don't work on this are forcing themselves out of the race for any timed title and limiting themselves to only about half the titles and winning stages. Why limit yourself?

The team time trial stage has just finished and I can finish this write up. It is interesting in relation to what I wrote above while the stage was still in progress that the CSC team had the fastest time until they lost a rider to a flat. They finished third with Jalabert losing his shot at wearing the Yellow Jersey tomorrow. It should be common sense that another pair of legs means the paceline will go one pair of legs faster. Note that the teams who blew themselves apart finished further down in the standings. Do your home work.

Let's take a look at the timed titles. Now comes the real lessons. After you put together your title pages showing the current standings, do two things. First, see where your top five picks are on GC and how much time they lost in the TTT. For example Armstrong is still only 7" down from the current GC leader, Hamilton dropped to 53" down (not too bad), and Beloki is still only 4" down, but Botero dropped to 2'14" which is a nice hole to dig yourself out of.

Now look up the other team leaders or other riders you want to know about or follow. For example, in the White Jersey classification, Nozal jumped into first place while Cooke dropped from third to eighth losing about three minutes, Casar dropped from fifth to 10th losing about the same time, and Zubeldia dropped from sixth to 14th losing almost four minutes. This is the same problem Zubeldia had last year when his team did so poorly in the TTT costing him at least four minutes.

Then we grab a couple of other riders to see what happened because of poor team riding in the TTT. Leipheimer was considered to be some one who could challenge Armstrong but his team dropped him to 41st on GC at 2'23". There is no way he is going to come back 2'23" and give Armstrong any kind of challenge unless every one ignores him for a long break and permits him to gain some really big time. He will be lucky if he can dig out of that hole and make top five.

If you are a good GC rider and are preparing for a stage race with a TTT and your team wont get their act together to train for the TTT, then find a team who will. The team time trial shows more than anything else the significance of team racing in road racing. Properly developed bicycle road racing is a team sport. Don't forget that.

Tomorrow

The Soissons/Rouen stage is 195 km but may be the flattest stage in the Tour this year. There will be sprints at 74, 117, and 150.5 km but there wont be any KOM primes. Expect the subtitle battles to dominate. Look for another long break from riders like Agnoluto and Verbrugghe. Other than defending the Yellow Jersey (ONCE may opt not to) the only races for tomorrow will be for the Points Title, the Combativity Title, and the stage win. This is a long stage so expect a very long break which could surprise every one and stay off to the finish.

If they get too lax, they could wait too long to start the chase especially if ONCE decides not to defend the Yellow Jersey now. They would be crazy to with them having two powerful GC riders in the top of the standings.

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