Behind the scenes at Tour de France

The Tour de France is almost done for another year and there’s been a lot of sporting prowess laid out there on the tarmac over the last 3000-odd kilometres.

The incessant work to keep such a tangle of logistics in check and ticking over is something the avid Tour de France sofa surfer undoubtedly knows little about.

A team guest travelling within our circus for a couple of days mentioned to me that the Tour de France has to be one of the most complex sporting operations.

Until now I had never really thought too much about it.

Aside from my primary role doing avant course, my other daily tasks make up just one cog of many that keep the operational wheel turning. It is a very complex and arduous working environment. We are under constant pressure to make things run seamlessly and efficiently.

I quickly realised after

retiring from being a rider, that staff work tirelessly to avoid exposing the riders to their frenetic logistical Rubik’s Cube.

We normally have eight riders on board whilst our staff numbers vary between 26 to 32, depending on whether it’s a time trial stage or a mountain stage and where we are placed in the race.

This number is aside from the stream of VIP guests/sponsors who come and go nearly on a daily basis.

Each day staff are assigned daily tasks and their primary focus is to service the riders in the best possible way. This includes planning meal times, departure times, who goes in which vehicle, who drives which vehicle, rider service and bottle points on the route and the nutritional requirements at these points, media requirements and windows, studying weather conditions, navigating efficiently to the start then continuing to the course during the stage through the specified access point for teams. There is also the evacuation from the finish to get to the next hotel as quickly as possible.

Something so seemingly simple as getting staff from the hotel in the morning to the race to fulfil their daily role and then back to the new hotel – some several hundred kms from the last – for the next day is problematic. Especially because we have a truck, a bus, four cars, a cargo van, a refrigerator van and two people movers. There is a lot to go wrong and it inevitably does from time to time.

Stage 17, which saw our fourth stage win at this year’s Tour by our Italian European Champion, Matteo Trentin is a great example.

Most days we will have four to six service points out on the road where we have our staff members with bottles and wheels for the riders. Some staff will drive to their designated point in a team car which they keep for the day while others will be dropped off and hopefully picked up later once the race passes. ‘Hopefully’ being the key word here. As I am avant course, often I am the one dropping people off to be picked up later by another staff member.

This particular day I dropped off one of our mechanics to give bottles at the bottom of the last climb and it was planned he’d be picked up by one of the two director’s cars following the race.

After our joyous victory celebrations at the finish line, we were about to leave when a photo popped up on the team’s WhatsApp group of Xavi, our Mitchelton Scott mechanic, in the Team SunWeb car – one of our competitor teams – giving the thumbs up to our win.

In all the excitement of Trentin riding the final 15kms solo to his stellar victory, both directors had driven right past poor Xavi, leaving him standing on the roadside.

Fortunately, the good nature of our sport with its challenging logistical elements, means that teams help each other out in these circumstances.

It happens in turn and turnabout amongst teams. Only 10 days earlier when I was one of the last team vehicles to leave the finish, I spotted someone in my rear vision mirror chasing me frantically down the road with a team Cofidis bike.

I caught a glimpse of the Tour de France accreditation flapping around his chest with each stride and the intent with which this character was chasing after me made it clear he needed help.

It turned out he was the Cofidis doctor who had been assigned the task of taking the team bike to the scanning machine for control and had been forgotten by the rest of the team, who had returned to the hotel.

Lucky for him I stopped and the cherry on his cake was that both our teams were staying at the same hotel in the Champagne region. Needless to say we were able to share a laugh over a drink that evening.

* Julian Dean rode the Tour de France seven times and this year is working for Mitchelton Scott.