THE POLITICS OF SPORT
A new cycling superstar can thank a peloton of Cape Town doctors and coaches for his sensational victory in the ultimate bike race. The South Africans spent 18 months whipping the champion’s once-lowly UAE Team Emirates into shape.
CSA and Sascoc on a collision course
When Slovenian Tadej Pogacar pulled off one of the most astonishing time trial performances in Tour de France history last Saturday to win Le Grand Boucle, a contingent of South African doctors and coaches celebrated along with the 21-year-old.
The UAE Team Emirates phenomenon became the second youngest winner in the history of the great race. Henri Cornet won in 1904 at the age of 19, but the baby-faced Pogacar, who turned 22 the day after the Tour ended, was also the first to win three of the four category jerseys: The overall general classification yellow jersey, the white jersey as the best young rider and the coveted polka dot King of the Mountains jersey as the most competitive climber.
It was a remarkable performance from a young rider competing in his first Tour de France. Having already been a podium finisher in another Grand Tour at the 2019 Vuelta a Espana (Tour of Spain), his potential was unquestioned.
Pogacar’s performance on the penultimate individual stage up the famed 5.8km climb of Les Planche des Belle Filles brought back memories of Greg LeMond’s legendary final day time trial victory over Laurent Fignon on the Champs Elysees in 1989.
LeMond grabbed the yellow jersey by just eight seconds in a dramatic showdown as he became the first rider to employ time trial bar extensions.
Three decades later Pogacar trailed fellow Slovenian Primoz Roglic by 57 seconds before a time trial that started with an undulating 30km “warm-up” before the brutal final climb to the finish.
The bookies were already inscribing Roglic’s name on the winner’s trophy and picking him to take the stage. But, in a dominant display, Pogacar not only made up the deficit but ended up taking almost another minute out of his countryman to win his second stage and take the yellow jersey by just 59 seconds after a journey of 3,482km.
It was a performance that stunned the cycling world. Some critics accused Pogacar of being “suspiciously” strong while others lauded him as a future great.
Back in Cape Town, Dr Jeroen Swart was at home in quarantine having returned from his stint with UAE Team Emirates during the Tour.
He watched the finale on TV. “I screamed so loud that I think they must have heard me three houses down,” Swart told DM168. “It was a truly special moment. I was sitting with my wife and two kids and just thinking, ‘Wow, we’ve won the Tour de France’.”
Since the beginning of 2019 Swart and a team of South African physicians and coaches has been closely involved in helping get the UAE team back to the top echelons of World Tour cycling.
Swart was initially approached by the team’s performance director, US-based Inigo San Millan, who was looking to overhaul the struggling outfit.
“I had some interaction with Inigo on social media and we began chatting since he was looking for someone to take over as medical director and we shared a lot of similar philosophies and ideas,” said Swart, who is Head of Sport and Exercise Medicine at the University of Cape Town’s Sport Science Institute (SSISA).
“Eventually he asked me to put a team together at the end of 2018 and by 2019 we were on board.” The brief was simple: Create a more structured, evidence-based cutting-edge outfit.
In all, six South Africans are part of the medical and coaching staff: Swart, 45, is head of the medical team, which includes doctors
Raaghib Fredericks, Adrian
Rotunno, Jason Suter (who is also the Stormers rugby team doctor) and Jarrad van Zuydam. All are part of the Cape Sports
Medicine Group based at
SSISA.
Coach John
Wakefield, part of Swart’s
Science2Sport coaching business, was brought in to help
San Millan with the performance aspect of the team. In an interview with Bicycling magazine in 2019, Wakefield spoke of his first few months working with the team under the guidance of
San Millan.
“There are riders in that team with years of experience, who have top 10s in Grand Tours; and then this South African comes along and says they’ve been doing it all wrong.
But it didn’t take long for them to come around, when they could see it was working,”
Wakefield said.
It worked so well that Wakefield n o w lives at the team’s European base in Girona, Italy, where a performance lab is due to open late in 2020.
“Yeah, I think initially it was tough to get all the riders on board with what we were trying to do,” he said.
“I would send them emails and ask them to do a maximal fatigue test and I would get no response.
“I would have to phone them and tell them that it was important and they need to do it. It was a very Italian culture in the team and it’s known that the more Anglo-Saxon teams tend to be more structured and scientific while Italians tend to be more passionate and fly by the seat of their pants. So, asking
riders who had been training a certain way for 10 years to change was tough.”
Despite the early cultural challenges, Swart and his South African team recently extended their contract with UAE Team Emirates and are looking forward to more success.
In 2018, they were ranked a lowly 17th in the world. By the end of 2019 they had moved up to fourth and they now rank second after their Tour de France exploits.
Swart, himself a semi-pro mountain biker who represented South Africa, has spent more than two decades working with some of South Africa’s and the world’s best riders.
In 2006, he and fellow South African sports scientist Professor Ross Tucker were due to join German star cyclist Jan Ullrich’s team as advisors. But, when Operation Puerto uncovered a range of doping allegations against Ullrich’s T-Mobile team, the opportunity fell through.
Swart has been involved in testing with four-time Tour de France champion Chris Froome, along with most of South Africa’s top cycling stars including the late Burry Stander. Most recently, he and Wakefield have worked with former under-24 world mountain biking champion Alan Hatherly.
Within the UAE Team Emirates structure, Swart and his team are responsible for ensuring everything from Covid-19related health protocols to injury prevention and nutrition are looked after.
“We monitor the load we place on athletes in the most scientific way possible and work out how to relate to recovery and body weight,” Swart said.
Besides the team that were part of the Tour de France entourage, biokineticist Warwick Cross, so from SSISA, works alongside Rotunno in helping develop the team’s strength and conditioning programmes.
Being part of a team that won the world’s most famous cycle is arguably the pinnacle for anyone involved in the sport, but for Swart the real joy was making it happen.
“I genuinely enjoyed the process of how we got the team to where it was able to win. To get everyone to gel and work towards a common goal. It’s amazing.” DM168