It’s been a few days since I didn’t do the Tour de France, just the Tour of Germany. Strictly speaking, it was almost twenty years ago, and it wasn’t the right Tour of Germany either, but the Tour of Germany for amateurs or, better, for leisure cyclists, which always drove one day ahead of the real Tour on slightly shortened original routes and to which you could register for a reasonable fee, for a stage or for the whole week.
I drove all week and in a real team. A bike manufacturer had the idea of organizing a press team and inviting a few journalists (back then, shame on us, we gratefully accepted such invitations). And so it happened that I was suddenly allowed to feel like a professional.
What you can learn
We got racing bikes adapted, got helmets, jerseys, trousers, rain jackets, cycling shoes, the whole program. We had a team bus, a masseuse, a mechanic and we had an impressive team captain who cycled alongside us for the seven days, that’s how many days I remember, he was Welsh and a world duathlon champion, he rode a road bike like von another star.
Every morning we had a team meeting on the bus that was less about strategy for victory and more about advice for survival. When the race started it started raining and it rained for seven days, even as we rode a terrible mountain stage in Austria which most of us finished in the broom wagon. In Karlsruhe we completed an individual time trial and found out what agony it is. It’s been a terrible week, it’s been a great week.
Since then I’ve known what a bike race is, what it feels like. I can still hear the shrill clatter when a couple of super-ambitious idiots cause a mass crash on a wet slope on a descent. I learned how important it is to get into the right group, not to be left behind in the beginning. I still thank our Welsh bike god, who pushed us up one or two poisonous ramps in the first few kilometers so that we could keep up. He saved the day, felt life.
Michael Eder, Bilbao Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 14 Michael Eder Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 10 Michael Eder Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 21
I learned where overconfidence can lead when I broke out of the group with a kilometer to go for a triumphant solo win and was run over by the full peloton 500 meters later. And what I haven’t forgotten to this day when I follow the stages of the tour is the boundless respect for what the racers achieve, most of them anyway, those who are on the road without special fuel. Chapeau!
