OLD DOG NEW TRICKS
With a career that started in the mid-90s and has yielded 179 victories, retirement seemed a logical choice. So why has ‘AleJet’ put it all on hold to be Mark Cavendish’s lead-out?
ALESSANDRO PETACCHI
Alessandro Petacchi smiles when we ask him why on Earth, at 40, he’s still so damn keen to remain a part of the professional peloton. After all, didn’t he try to retire in the middle of last year? How did he go from that to signing a new contract with Omega Pharma-Quick Step?
It’s simple, the Italian sprint legend tells Procycling. Being a lead-out man for Mark Cavendish overrides the fact that he’s entering his third decade as a pro. Even now, he’s finding new challenges. “I have won an awful lot in my career but this particular kind of experience, working for somebody else, is something really different,” he argues.
“Well actually, I started out doing lead-outs but such a very long time ago that it now feels like new. Maybe this is the way I’m going to go out of the sport, where I began. Only this time I’ll only be doing lead-outs for top riders like Cav, or maybe Tom Boonen.”
“Maybe t h is is the way I ’ m going to go out o f the
sport, where I b egan. Only t h is t ime I ’ ll only b e doing
lead- outs for top riders l ike Cav, or maybe Tom Boonen”
As far back as October 2012, Petacchi had discussed the possibility of working with Cavendish rather than continuing with his then team, Lampre. However, with the Briton still negotiating his exit from Sky, Petacchi started the season with the Italians before announcing he was quitting the sport altogether in April and finally returning in the summer at the Eneco Tour, this time for Omega Pharma-Quick Step.
“The first race Mark and I did together was the 2013 Tour of Britain,” Petacchi point out. “Three bunch sprints and three wins for him. That’s a good average, even if the level at Britain isn’t going to be what we’ll get in the Giro or Tour. I’m sure that with me, Mark Renshaw, Gert Steegmans and Matteo Trentin, we can make a great team to support Cav.”
Petacchi certainly brings impressive on-the-job experience to his new role at OPQS. His first stint as a lead-out man was with the Fassa Bortolo team in 2000, seven years before Cavendish turned pro. At Fassa, Petacchi was the last man in the Italian squad’s launch train for the goaty-bearded fastman Fabio Baldato, who these days is a director at BMC. However, halfway through 2000, legendary Italian director Giancarlo Ferretti realised that Petacchi was actually faster than Baldato in the finishes. In a revised line-up, Petacchi started racing for himself, taking 10 victories, including two Vuelta stages, in the second half of the year. In the previous four seasons, with Scrigno, he’d taken just a single win.
Petacchi returned to his old ‘job’ of leading out when the moment seemed right – such as when he successfully led out Mario Cipollini in the 2002 Worlds in Belgium. But as the wins rolled in – 15 stages from the Giro, Vuelta and Tour in the 2003 season alone – it was a role to which he returned less and less often.
Having Cavendish rely on you for victory could be a position of almost intolerable pressure but Petacchi’s one of cycling’s more unflappable, cerebral individuals. He’s currently teaching Cavendish how to master the Rubik’s Cube rather than worrying about what
“It’s funny, I would say to Erik, ‘ Don’t you
want to win one stage? Look, I ’ ll lead you out. ’
But h e’d a lways refuse and tell me to b e the winner”
might or might not happen in the final few metres of a race.
With age comes experience and Petacchi has always worked well alongside other big names. For example, prior to Cavendish he formed a successful duo with Erik Zabel at Milram between 2006 and 2008, although it was the fading Zabel who did the lead-out work and Petacchi was the ‘star’ rider. Petacchi says he’d try to reverse the roles occasionally but Zabel would never hear of it.
“It’s funny, I would say to Erik, ‘ Don’t you want to win one stage? Look, I’ll lead you out,’” Petacchi recalls with his usual gravelly, somewhat mournful tone of voice. “But he’d always refuse and tell me to be the winner. I couldn’t work out why he wouldn’t want to win but now I do.
“It’s because there comes a point when you’ve won a heck of a lot” – in Petacchi’s case, a staggering 179 races – “and that’s enough. That’s why I’ve said to Omega Pharma-Quick Step I only want to win one race. That’s all. Just one. Why? Because I’ve won races with all my teams and I don’t want this to be an exception.”
At the time of writing this, Cavendish has already had one superb win this season – on stage 6 of Tirreno-Adriatico – and another less wellpublicised success in the final stage of the Tour of the Algarve; Petacchi was instrumental in both. It would unfair to say that Petacchi failed at Milano-Sanremo, given he was far from being the only sprinter to quit in the rain-soaked, freezing 2014 edition. The big tests for how Petacchi, Cavendish and Mark Renshaw combine as a winning sprint team – and whether Petacchi or Renshaw will gel best as the final lead-out man – have yet to arrive.
This internal tussle between Petacchi and Renshaw will probably start to grab the media’s attention at the Giro, should Cavendish take part. But there is no doubt that it will reach maximum intensity in the first week of the Tour de France,
with that home soil first stage to Harrogate coinciding with Cavendish’s best-ever chance of a yellow jersey.
As Petacchi says with typically laconic understatement, “That’s the big one.” When we spoke to him, he was adamant that all things being equal he, rather than Renshaw should lead out Cav at the Tour. “I’ve done more sprints than he has and
“As a former winner, you know where you would want to go
in a bunch sprint. Obviously you have to b e up there in f ront
whatever, but it’s where you place yourself that matters, too”
I’ve got more experience but it depends on the conditions in the race and what kind of condition both of us are in.
“It’s important to have different options. In Milram, at first Marco Velo was my lead-out man but if Zabel was there, then he would be. It made sense as he was taller and he was faster. And I think it’s normal that if I’m in good shape, I should be the last man. Renshaw is also fast but he’s not won so much. He’s younger than me, true, but when I’m in good shape, I think I can do well.
“As a former winner, you know where you would want to go in a bunch sprint. Obviously you have to be up there in front whatever but it’s where you place yourself that matters, too.” Petacchi says there is no single tactic for leading out, though, “because each sprint is a different one, so you have to change tactics. It’s not a question of me doing ‘my’ sprint and stopping at 200 or 250 metres to go. Instead, you have to take it steadily and build up your speed gradually poco a
poco so that there’s no sudden acceleration – that’s for Mark to do.” It’s true that some of the great lead-out men – Giovanni Lombardi and Zabel spring to mind – were once top sprinters in their own right. However, Cavendish has said that what’s most important to him is his willingness to trust in the judgement of his lead-out men, be that on going through gaps, tackling corners or whatever. Cavendish forged that bond of trust with George Hincapie in his early days at Highroad and again with Renshaw. The most memorable pay-off for the latter pair came at the 2009 Tour de France, when Cavendish blindly trusted the Australian’s judgement coming onto the Champs-Élysées and Renshaw guided him through the final corner so successfully that the pair took the top two spots.
“Of course trust matters,” Petacchi agrees. “Mark’s always nervous before a sprint and that’s normal. Your teammates have worked really hard throughout the whole stage and you have 200 metres to prove yourself. I know what that’s like.”
“I was n ever actually born to be a sprinter
and for the f irst four years o f my career at
Scrigno- Blue Storm and Navigare, I hardly d id any”
“Mark was really nervous in the Tour of Britain but I would tell him, ‘ Follow me, stay cool’. He did, and it worked.”
It will take time, as it did with Cavendish and Renshaw, for Petacchi to build the same level of trust but there is no doubting Cavendish’s feelings of reverence and respect for his former rival whose racecraft is already solidly in place.
Petacchi is also one of the very few sprinters in the world, as Cavendish pointed out to Procycling a few months ago, who has managed to beat him in bunch sprints, “by going away and actually studying what I did and working out how best to come back at me.”
That particular facet of the Italian’s skill set should now come in handy for figuring out how he and Cavendish can best combine to keep their mutual rivals at a distance. As Petacchi explains, thinking hard about bunch sprints is something he was doing for almost a whole decade before Cavendish appeared on the scene.
“I was never actually born to be a sprinter and for the first four years of my career at Scrigno-Blue Storm and Navigare, I hardly did any of it. So when I actually began sprinting, I would always do very long sprints, trying to keep a high speed” – rather than kicking in a brutal change in pace a la Cavendish – “because I knew that if I started accelerating from behind Mark, it would be very hard for me to get past. I had to adapt and make my move first. Sometimes it worked but it wasn’t easy.” The unadulterated joy with which Cavendish and Petacchi hugged each other as they celebrated the Briton’s stage 6 win at Tirreno-Adriatico would suggest that the two are already building up a solid relationship on the bike as well as off it. There was also, notably, not even a hint of dissatisfaction with Petacchi on Cavendish’s part when he analysed what had, and had not, gone right in his build-up to fifth place behind Alexander Kristoff (Katusha) at Sanremo. “There was nothing I could have done differently,” Cavendish said after the event.
On, then, to the grand tours – Cavendish’s big targets of the season and where Petacchi will also be aiming to be an integral part of the Briton’s victory strategy, right up to 250 or 200 metres before the finish line. Should Petacchi fail, with a contract only for one year with Omega Pharma-Quick Step, retirement would seem more than likely. But for now, one particular old cycling dog is very happy with his new set of tricks.