THE SOLDIER BUTTON

“There’s been a big cultural change now. When I was racing you were just trying to kill the guy next to you and that was it” Jonathan Vaughters

He’s been called many things, but Lance Armstrong was certainly an interesting case study in the psychology of racing, particularly his ability to ire up a group of team-mates and then psych out the opposition. “He would absolutely dehumanise all the competition. He’d come on the radio and be like, ‘We’re gonna kill these motherf**ers, these f***ing pieces of trash are gonna die.’ It got you into this mindset that the competition was not worth the air they were breathing. And your only job was to make sure that they were behind you,” remembers his ex-US Postal team-mate Jonathan Vaughters. “Extremely e fective in competition; extremely unhealthy in everyday life,” he adds. Not everyone uses Armstrong’s strongarm tactics, but his psychological methods bring into focus the di ference between healthy behaviours in cycling and in normal life. The most e fective cyclists are able to switch o f the part of their brain that makes them a conscientious and compassionate human being and press what QuickStep DS Brian Holm once called the ‘soldier button.’ A prime example is Dan Martin, who Holm describes as a gentleman o f the bike, yet who rode much of the ‘17 Tour with a broken back. Many riders have struggled with playing the roles – either lacking the cut-throat instinct in cycling situations or struggling with switching o f from being a bad human. But that said, Vaughters notices how there has been a psychological shift in the peloton in the passing of the EPO generation. “We were much meaner bunch of hardened criminals compared to today’s riders, who have a much healthier outlook on life,” he says. “There’s been a big cultural change now. When I was racing you were just trying to kill the guy next to you and that was it.”