TRIXI WORRACK
Trek- Segafredo’s German road captain on crashing and the power of teamwork
I was in Australia in January. We did the Tour Down Under and we won it, which was pretty good.
We had a good start to the year, which was good, because last year was a bad one with a lot of crashes, so I was really motivated after having a good winter. I did another three races in Belgium, and then racing stopped.
My crashes were just bad luck, really.
The first was at my first race in Spain, and the second was at the Tour of Thüringen in May, and straight after that my third crash was at the Women’s Tour. The first crash gave me a broken collarbone, then I came back, crashed, and it happened again. At the Women’s Tour I had a wheel between my mouth and my nose, so I broke some teeth and my nose, which wasn’t good. Then I eventually came back for the Giro.
Trek is a really nice team, and after what I experienced with my crashes, they always gave me time to come back with no pressure.
They trusted me to come back after the races I missed. It has been a really good experience, and so I was really motivated for this year.
I’m older now, and I have a lot of experience.
I still want to win races, but for me it’s more important to win races with the team. That is good for all of us. I’ve won a lot of races for myself in over 20 years as a pro cyclist, so now it’s more important to win as a team. Sometimes I’m much better when I have to work for someone else. I don’t know why, but my data shows that I’m much stronger in that case.
I’m not so hungry for myself any more.
Obviously I can still motivate myself, but over the years I’ve won races just through teamwork. You don’t have to have the best individual in the team, but you can win as a team much more.
Some of my favourite results are the TTT world titles that I’ve won.
Again, it shows the importance of the team. You can have the best individual time triallist in there, but you need to race as a team, also in road races. For people just watching from the outside, they think it’s an individual sport, but it really is not.
I was really close to dying after my crash at Trofeo Alfredo Binda where I lost my kidney in 2016.
I had a couple of weeks to think about whether to come back or not, but it was pretty quick to get back. I wanted to go to the Rio Olympics - that was my motivation. The first week, I was still in hospital and not thinking about it, then I went home and had to be helped onto my home trainer, but then I saw improvement really quickly, which was good for the head.
The last five to six years, professional cycling has changed a lot.
Teams have become a lot more advanced, and riders have become more professional. I would say 15 years ago, about 50 per cent of the peloton still had to work to cycle, but now it’s more of a job. Girls can focus more on cycling.
The TV coverage has to change.
This is the most important thing, because you can see every men’s race, not just the Tour or the Giro. You can see a lot of races on TV, and I think that is the big difference. For us now, I think the WorldTour races have coverage, but a lot aren’t filmed at all. A lot of people find the women’s World Championships race much more interesting than the men’s races. A lot of the time, women’s racing is so interesting, but you just can’t see it.
I was thinking a lot over the last couple of weeks about my retirement, because I don’t know whether our season will start again.
I haven’t decided now. For women, it has always been a big goal to go to the Olympics. You get a lot of attention. It was a big goal to go to Tokyo. If I decide to go on for another year, that would be the big goal again.
I’m doing a lot of stuff that I don’t normally have time for at the moment.
Stuff in the house - I wanted to rebuild the cellar for my bikes, but normally when you train, you’re tired and you push it back. The only other thing is training... but without races it’s not as important. Training is the same, but you have more time to do other stuff.