Downhill fast
In the modern Tour de France where a cigarette paper separates the best climbers, there’s more focus than ever on descending skills. In this extract from his book Full Gas How to Win a Bike Race – Tactics from Inside the Peloton, Peter Cossins looks at the ingredients that go into good descending
More than anything it comes down to being confident, believes Tiffany Cromwell (CanyonSRAM): “It’s about enjoying speed and having no fear. Secondly, it’s about getting the line right, recognising where the apex is on a corner and going through it correctly, braking before you get to the apex rather than on the corner itself, and shifting your weight at the right moment from one side to the other. This is most easily achieved when you’re at the front and don’t have to think about having people around you, as being in the middle of the peloton when you’re going down a descent throws up some particular problems. There are a few more unknown elements when you’re in that position, principally the fact that you can’t control the people around you.
“Having a good bike set-up has a lot to do with it too,” Cromwell continues, “trusting your tyres, trusting your equipment, because the moment you think there’s an issue there – ‘Are they going to slip out from underneath me?’ ‘Is my centre of gravity right?’ – it will start to play on your mind and erode your confidence. You start to think, ‘maybe I should hold back a little bit.’
“It’s such a mental thing. I went through a period when I crashed a few times on descents and it knocked my confidence completely. But I have got it back. Perhaps that comes from growing up in the hills back in Australia and training with the guys who are based around Monaco. I just love the speed. There’s no better feeling than when you get a descent right and go flying down.”
The Australian admits that the only time she does hold back is when it’s raining, but she adds that it’s easy to overdo this, and that the most confident descenders will consequently pick up even more time in the rain.
“For me, descending is a real area of confidence. I know that I’m better than most of the peloton and I can use descents as a place to attack, especially if it’s a technical descent, where you can perhaps gain more time on people than you can on a climb,” she explains.
In saying this, Cromwell lands squarely on the reason why descents have taken on growing importance in recent seasons. According to Slipstream team boss Jonathan Vaughters, “The fitness and competitive level of all the top riders is a lot closer now than it’s ever been, so it’s difficult to drop anyone on the climbs. Now if you’re Romain Bardet and you can’t make the difference on the climb you say, ‘OK, well now I’m going to test their technical skills and see if they can hang with me around the corners.’”
Tejay van Garderen sums it up more succinctly. “The reason people are attacking on descents now is because they’re thinking, ‘How do you beat Sky?’ and one way is to attack on a descent. It’s something that would have been totally frowned upon a few years ago, but it’s another aspect to the new look of cycling. When people can see there’s a potential gain, even if it’s just a small advantage, they’ll go after it.”
There are no hard and fast rules to what makes a good descender. According to Mikaël Cherel, the French rider who instigated the attack on the Côte de Domancy that led to his AG2R leader Romain Bardet’s stage victory at Saint Gervais in the 2016 Tour de France, “You need vision, anticipation, to be agile because you need to be able to lean into corners, but not too much. More than anything, you need to go with the bike and not be too stiff.
“It’s innate,” he adds. “I’ve been able to do it since I was a kid. I take real pleasure from it. I’m never afraid on a descent. On rainy days, I don’t like to ride, but I’m still happy to go down a pass. I’ve had real some pile-ups as well, but that’s never removed my desire for risk-taking, for speed.”
Former sprinter Thor Hushovd offers much the same assessment, suggesting that sprinters tend to be good at going downhill fast because “they have better bike control and are not so afraid of crashing”. Racers who have come from mountain biking also have a reputation for being solid performers, among them 2011 Tour winner Cadel Evans, threetime world champion Peter Sagan and Sky DS Portal, who had an off-road background before switching to the road.
While riders can work on their descending skillset when training, they can only take that so far on roads that aren’t closed as they would be in a race. As Jonathan Vaughters points out, “If you cut the apex like you should do, there could be a car coming the other way and that’s a situation you certainly don’t want to find yourself in. So improving is mostly a question of going as fast as you can in a closed road situation, getting used to the speed and having other riders around you.”
As descending has taken on greater significance in deciding the outcome of races, some teams have turned to experts from outside road racing to assist their riders.
“We always do some descending training in the winter, working on getting through corners as fast as possible. We work with Oscar Saiz, a former mountain bike downhiller, who comes in and teaches the guys,” says LottoNL-Jumbo team manager Richard Plugge. “Working with him helps them pick up new things, but also reminds them of the fundamentals
AS A CONSEQUENCE OF A CRASH AS A 15-YEAR-OLD THAT LEFT HIM WITH BOTH OF HIS WRISTS BROKEN, THIBAUT PUNUT HAS NEVER BEEN THE MOST CONFIDENT OF RIDERS ON DESCENTS
that are important to remember on descents.”
Saiz, who has worked with several big teams, has said of his speciality, “It seems to me, as an outsider, that it’s crazy that so much time and money is being invested in making riders better in time trials, shaving off just a few seconds, yet when riders talk about climbs they neglect 50 per cent of the mountain... They’re going down these mountains on super-light bikes, on super-thin tyres, with no protective gear, and when they’re already tired. You need to be prepared for that yet they do no work on it... The first thing I talk about is how to make it safe: the consequences of a crash are too great. Then I look at how you can save energy by carrying your speed. Only lastly do I look at how to make someone faster.”
Other riders have opted for very different solutions, particularly if their confidence has been eroded. As a consequence of a crash as a 15-year-old that left him with both of his wrists broken, Thibaut Pinot has never been the most confident of riders on descents, often attacking just before reaching the summit of a pass simply to be able to tackle the descent at the front and on his own, as he did in the 2017 edition of the Giro di Lombardia. At the 2013 Tour, as pressure built on him as the home country’s new favourite for the yellow jersey, the Frenchman was hit by what could perhaps be described as the cycling equivalent of the yips that can affect golfers when putting. On the first major mountain stage, which took the race over the Col de Pailhères in the Pyrenees, Pinot’s confidence evaporated.
According to his brother and coach Julien, “Thibaut’s head was going in one direction and his bike in another.” Meanwhile, Bardet, his rival as France’s big new hope, explained that, “As soon as I can get past Pinot on a descent I do it. He’s scared and when two or three riders are flashing past him on either side, it exacerbates his problem.”
Pinot’s FDJ team sent him to a motor racing school to help him regain his feel for speed, which has been rekindled, although the Frenchman is never likely to achieve [Vincenzo] Nibali’s class.
Occasionally, overconfidence can prove an issue on descents. Italian team manager Gianni Savio, who has often mined talent in South America, recalls Venezuelan rider Leonardo Sierra winning a stage of the 1990 Giro for his team despite crashing twice on the same descent of the often scarily steep Mortirolo pass. “When the Giro finished, we organised an emergency training binge in the mountains solely to work on his downhilling and realised what the problem was: it wasn’t that Leonardo was a bad descender, he just didn’t understand gravity. He didn’t understand there was a speed limit beyond which it was pretty dangerous to ride on a mountain road. He was actually quite nifty on a bike, but he took too many risks.”
Riders use more conventional tactics too to get an edge. For reasons Cromwell has already indicated, most pros prefer to be at the front rather than following, partly because there is usually a motorbike just ahead of them. It shouldn’t be close enough for them to get any shelter from it, but watching the way the driver brakes and moves on the bike gives the rider closest behind it useful clues about when and how sharply to brake, about which way to shift their weight and turn. Rotating on the front and thereby sharing the pacemaking can also help those in a group, especially when trying to open or close a gap. Putting on a jacket approaching the summit of a climb rather than beyond the crest can also save valuable seconds.
"YOU NEDD VISION, ANTICIPATION, TO BE AGILE BECAUSE YOU NEDD TO BE ABLE TO LEAN INTO CORNERS, BUT NOT TOO MUCH, MORE THAN ANY THING, YOU NEED TO GO WITH THE BIKE AND NOT BE TOO STIFF"