Secret behind Bevin’s success
Patrick Bevin became obsessed with perfecting his positioning on the bike, after he improved a staggering 12 places between races simply by raising his handlebars 4cm.
Unhappy with his 14th placing in the time trial at Tirreno-Adriatico last year, Bevin spent the following weekend meticulously analysing his performance with his girlfriend. He was putting out the same power as his rivals, but finished 23 seconds off the pace.
He decided he needed to make some wholesale changes. Clearly his methods were not working.
Bevin set a camera up next to his wind trainer, and he ‘‘went to work,’’ making various adjustments to his bike and comparing the data.
‘‘You’ve got to think outside the box a little bit,’’ he said.
The 27-year-old eventually reached a breakthrough when he adjusted the height of his handlebars. After the disappointment of finishing 14th, Bevin went on to finish second in his next race, at Itzulia Basque Country. He was only nine seconds away from winning.
He could not believe such a minor adjustment would result in significant gains.
‘‘Basically all the improvements I’ve seen are from that. The power across distances is basically the same or even less, because you lose a bit as you refine the position, so I’m still building up to the point when I’m at my best on the time trial bike.
‘‘There was an old school thought that the lower you got your hands and the lower you got your body the better off you are, but it’s a complete fallacy and that was my first learning curve. When you come through with these sports science guys who are telling you to go low it’s very hard to say ‘I’ve raised by bar 7cm’.
‘‘You’re meant to believe in these guys but it moves so quickly and so fast and there’s so many different variables for each rider that you’ve really got to focus on you as an individual and just put away everything you’ve heard. Anything that can be applied to more than one person is a waste of time. You’ve got to do it individually and that’s a hard process to do because there’s a lot of moving parts to get that done on a track or in a wind tunnel.’’
The new star of New Zealand cycling experienced a breakthrough year with BMC Racing last year. He finished in eighth place in the individual time trial at the UCI road world championships, led the team to victory in the team time trial at the Tour de France and challenged for the overall honours at the Tour of Britain, before eventually finishing fourth.
But Bevin has gone up another gear with the rebranded CCC Team in 2019. He kicked off his fifth season as a professional cyclist by winning the New Zealand time trial title before notching his first stage victory, on stage two of the Tour Down Under.
It was the first stage win by a Kiwi on the World Tour since 2011 and highlighted his versatility, as Bevin was able to edge a bunch sprint that included former world champion Peter Sagan.
While the nature of his victory came as a surprise, Bevin, who played rugby as a child and only took up cycling seriously in his final year of secondary school, has been knocking on the door for the past nine months.
And he credits his development to his attention to detail. Since that eureka moment after TirrenoAdriatico, Bevin has become a lab rat. He has spent countless hours testing on the track and in the wind tunnel and he picks engineers’ brains at every opportunity.
‘‘I’m never going to be happy with my position until I’m winning. If you’ve got that desire to win then you’re never going to be happy until the power and the results line up. As bikes change and helmets change, you’re always going to have to be refining that. If you want to be a really, really good time trial rider then you have to be at the front end making those changes and working with the brands and the equipment guys to make it as fast as possible,’’ he said.
‘‘What was amazing to me was, one; how big a difference it can make, two; that teams weren’t doing it, and three; how different it is for every single rider. You could look at 10 guys and you can’t eyeball the difference but you could be looking at, percentage wise, huge difference in the coefficient of drag. It’s real science focused and teams are only now really starting to focus on it for all their riders because you look at the average speed for time trial riders and they’re just getting better and better.
‘‘In the past some of the guys who were specialists were simply good at it because they had the power, now you can’t get away with that. You need the power and the position because the position is too important. The power to overcome the drag is so high when you’re averaging 50kmh for an hour. It becomes impossible to undo the difference between a good position and a bad position, and that’s been a real turn in the last maybe three of four seasons as I’ve come in.’’
Despite a promising start to the new season, it is in the coming months where Bevin, fresh off a summer break in New Zealand, will be hoping to reach peak form. The Taupo¯ product has set big targets for 2019, hoping to win the individual time trial at both the Tour de France and road world championships.
Although they are incredibly ambitious goals in a truly global sport, Bevin has every reason to believe he can achieve them, especially now that CCC have given him the freedom to focus on his specialist discipline, with his busy schedule covering as many time trials as possible in the lead-up to the two pinnacle events.
‘‘Last season I was spread pretty thin, bouncing around doing different jobs, different roles on different terrains. I think having the focus on the time trial has made me a better rider and you think ‘man you’re only a per cent off a worlds medal or a per cent or two off an individual Tour de France stage win. You’re really starting to knock on the door’.
‘‘As a sportsperson this is what you do this for and what drives me is trying to win these races. I’ve grown particularly fond of the time trial because it is so black and white. You’ve got a distance, you’ve got a course and there’s no tactics involving other riders, it’s all about riding as good as you can be and I’ve grown and enjoyed that process.
‘‘I had these ideas for a couple of seasons but getting into a team where it all aligns is hard. You spend an awful lot of the season riding for other riders, you’ve got big stars in your team and it’s all a bit of a balancing act to manage it.
‘‘It doesn’t just happen. I didn’t come through as a time triallist, I wasn’t a time triallist as a junior or even at under-23 level and the process does take a long time but I feel like I am breaking through now and I can legitimately stake a claim to go to races where I believe I can win.’’