ANALYSIS: HOW TO BUILD A TOUR TEAM
What goes into building the perfect team for Le Tour, and how is it decided?
So said Phil Jackson, the man widely considered the greatest sports coach of all time. Jackson transformed Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls into a recordbreaking, six-times NBA title-winning basketball team during the 1990s. While basketball and cycling might not go hand in hand in terms of how the sports are played, Jackson’s words are exactly applicable to how to build a successful Tour de France team.
The Tour de France isn’t the NBA Finals. But creating a team for the Tour isn’t just about throwing the eight most in-form riders together and hoping they put out more watts than their rivals over the course of the 21 stages, either. As Jackson’s philosophy states, the strength of a team comes in the strength of its individual members, and it’s the reason why selection for the biggest race in cycling is a process that takes almost an entire season.
“It depends how you want to ride the race,” says Rod Ellingworth, general manager at Bahrain-McLaren, of where teams start. “A lot of teams perhaps try and pick who’s got the form at the minute and try and keep the door open for a bit of GC, a bit of a stage win, a bit of whatever. If you truly want to win the Tour you’ve got to put a team together that can score the goal. It’s not always the conditioning - they’ve got to be very fit and on weight and everything - they may not be naturally the best rider, but they’re very good at connecting people together and they’re very good at riding in the peloton.”
Ellingworth’s former colleague at Sky, Nicolas Portal, told Procycling in 2016 that preparations for the next Tour began 12 months in advance, when he was driving to Paris, finishing one edition of the race. Portal’s tongue was likely in cheek as he said it - he was hardly plotting tactics with one hand while being driven with a glass of champagne in the other - but the work does start early. The Tour, for instance, is one of the most active transfer markets in cycling, and during July is when discussions are held and deals made over the recruitment of riders. And while Ellingworth insists the process of selection starts properly in October, when the following year’s Tour route is announced, he continues that on some level it’s even earlier than that.
“[When the route is announced] You immediately start looking at the race and
“THE STRENGTH OF THE TEAM IS EACH INDIVIDUAL MEMBER, THE STRENGTH OF EACH INDIVIDUAL MEMBER IS THE TEAM”
the demands of the event. It depends what horses you have whether you can win or not. I start looking at that straight away,” Ellingworth says.
“What you’ve already done is start to recruit some of your riders earlier than that, without knowing what the route is. What you do know about the Tour is that it has a general rhythm to it, a general flow, so it’s quite early, the process.”
Matxin Fernández, team manager at UAE Emirates, agrees the route announcement in October is the predominant starting point, but that teams also need to look elsewhere at the other grand tours, before deciding the right rider or riders to lead at the Tour. “There are a few main factors - the profile of the race, how mountainous, how many kilometres of time trialling,” he says. “We also consider the profile of the other grand tours and how they might suit the riders compared to the Tour.”
“If you’ve got a guy who can’t time trial, yet there are 100 kilometres of time trials then you know you’re up against it. You perhaps wouldn’t put your money in that basket,” Ellingworth continues.
“Then you’re going down to the demands of the event, which is climbing, time trialling, team time trialling, cobbles, wind, bunch positioning... They’re the key elements to the race. You can do a tick box of where your riders are and you can pretty much say how they’re going to get on. That’s where you start from.”
In Ellingworth’s words, you don’t even initially think of specific riders. Rather focus on understanding stage by stage what the demands of the event are. “You start to form a picture of what the race is going to look like,” he says.
SELECTION PROCESS
The Tour rulebook stipulates that teams don’t have to finalise their rosters until hours before the first stage, handy if illness or injury rules anyone out, but it also means teams can leave it as late as possible to decide their set up.
Still, Fernández says that by the winter before the Tour, at the pre-season training camps, is where the bones of the team are formed. “Riders usually have a good idea of their race programme at the pre-season training camp in December. That’s when they are given the ‘blueprint’ of their season, or at least the most important races,” Fernández explains. “For the Tour we usually have a list of between 10 or 12 riders in mind each year. You need to have a certain amount of flexibility because
illness, crashes or a change in a rider’s form can change the line-up at short notice.”
Ellingworth keeps a selection document that tells everyone in the team the dates in the process as well as what they are looking for in riders and the key elements of the team. But he refuses to limit the options by narrowing the net to a handful of riders. “Really your long list is your full team. You don’t want to close out a big talent. When Egan Bernal first rode the Tour [in 2018], he wasn’t on the long list but he soon got included because of his performances.”
Results and performances elsewhere in racing during the first half of the season are a strong indication of who will be in line for Tour de France selection, and the advancement of data, sports science and training methods today means that every aspect of a rider’s form can be tracked and monitored. Yet on-the-bike form isn’t the only aspect teams are looking at.
“I think when you see a real successful team… in my experiences I haven’t seen many successful teams that have been put together last-minute and they work,” Ellingworth says.
“In the build towards the Tour you’re looking for the opportunity where they race together, they get the experiences together, the training camps together. The socialising time, I think, is important as well together. Sometimes it takes a bit of time to build that bond.”
Fernández agrees it’s important that the “team works as a unit and is on the same wavelength” especially in a team such as UAE which has in recent years gone to the Tour with split ambitions in the GC and targeting sprint stages. Racing together is key. Last year, Ineos, for example, sent their team leaders - Egan Bernal, Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas - to the final pre-Tour races in the Tour de Suisse and Critérium du Dauphiné, with 50 per cent of the Tour team around them.
Ultimately, the Tour route is going to be packed with challenges and opportunities. How do teams decide what’s more important? How do they choose between taking another climbing domestique or taking another rider who can work on the flat in wind, time trials or cobbles?
Ellingworth says it all comes down to the calculation of risk. “If you’ve got very specific out-of-the-box stages, versus say a team time trial, you’ve basically got to score what is the priority. If we get this wrong what does it look like, if we get this wrong what does that look like - are we going to lose more time here, we’d better invest more there...”
Planning for the worst-case scenario, then, as much as building the strongest team possible. “That’s all you can do - once you’re in, you’re in. Hence why, if you’ve got a rider like Geraint Thomas you’re quids in because you’re covering all bases.”
“Really, your long list is your full team. You don’t want to close out a big talent. When Bernal first rode the Tour he wasn’t on the long list” Rod Ellingworth, Bahrain-Mclaren