Ten days in the Caribbean. What sounds like a relaxing summer holiday to many people is actually pushing six Germans from a Frankfurt club to their limits. They are not there to relax, but to race. Cycling races, to be precise. More than 100 kilometers a day, many of them steeply uphill. At 32 degrees and tropically high humidity on the French overseas department of Martinique, an island in the Lesser Antilles.
The heat was what caused his team the most problems at the beginning, says Niklas Reinhardt, the sports director of Hessen Frankfurt Opelit, because the drivers were not used to it. “But everyone from Europe had the same problem.” The field of participants is predominantly French, with a Swiss and a British team also taking part. The German drivers needed a day to get used to the climatic conditions, while the local teams had the advantage.
Mountain specialists are particularly challenged
The locals are the riders from the island where the “Tour Cycliste International de Martinique” takes place every summer. A road bike race over eight stages and a total of 982 kilometers. The tour started last Sunday and will continue until this Sunday.
Frankfurt Opelit, the only German team, has arrived with ambitions. They want to place in the top ten. The team’s climbers, especially Matthias Herrmann, a 1.68 meter tall and 55 kilogram mountain specialist, are particularly challenged and are expected to make the tour a successful experience. But it didn’t look like that at the beginning.
Ruptured wheel after the flight
The journey had been strenuous. The flight – the team had travelled to Paris on Thursday of last week and from there to the small Caribbean island on Friday – had not left driver Robert Müller’s bike unscathed: the chain stays had broken. A replacement bike was needed the evening before the first stage. “We quickly got one from eBay,” says Reinhardt. Opelit is not a professional team that carries a replacement bike for everyone.
Reinhardt and his two colleagues, one of whom is the co-sports director and the other a physiotherapist and mechanic rolled into one, manage everything around the riders so that they can concentrate fully on the race. Because the tour is tough. The stages are “relatively short,” says Reinhardt, just over 100 kilometers a day, but “tough from the start.”
Many sections begin with steep climbs with gradients of up to 14 percent. In general, there is a lot of “up and down” on the volcanic island, with hardly any long flat sections. “The elevation profile of the tour looks like a sawblade.” It is hardly possible to catch your breath after a tough climb. This makes the stages “very selective.” Added to this is the island’s climate: the rainy season lasts from June to October. The weather often changes suddenly, from oppressive humidity to heavy, continuous rain.
“It was brutally hard for me in the morning”
This was also the case during the first few days of the tour. On Sunday, during the first stage, the German riders were not yet used to the climate. “It was brutally difficult for me in the morning,” says Matthias Herrmann, the German’s hopeful for the classification. The 24-year-old, who is studying in the United States and is a guest rider for Opelit, actually feels in good shape. But despite intensive training, his body was hardly prepared for the high temperatures.
Matthias Herrmann from Frankfurt, the Germans’ hope for a place in the rankings on Martinique.martiniquela1ere/Facebook
“My pulse was high right away, I really struggled on the first day,” he says. It consisted of two half stages, with a three-hour break in between. He felt “really bad” before the second half stage in particular. Herrmann was particularly concerned about the end of the stage: one last mountain, 200 meters of altitude. But the weather at that point on the route played into his hands: “It started to rain in the mountains. That was a real blessing. My legs opened up again,” he says.
The top ten within reach
After finishing 66th after the first half stage on Sunday, he reached the finish line in 23rd place at the end of the day. On Monday, things went much better for him and the others in the team. For the first time, he finished in the top ten after a mountain stage: he finished ninth, his team mate Tobias Kreuzer eighth. On Tuesday, Kreuzer followed up with ninth place and Herrmann with tenth place. On Wednesday, Herrmann finished 21st after a technical defect that briefly set him back, and is now in twelfth place in the rankings. This makes him optimistic for the next stages this weekend. “The goal is the top ten,” he says.
He had been preparing for the heat for a while. “I have a training colleague from Lotto Dstny who does heat training,” says Herrmann. He copied this: when the temperature is high, he rides on the roller in the room, closing the window and door so that the room can heat up. After 40 minutes, the room is so hot that it is almost unbearable. “After a training session like that, you can easily have a fever of 1.5 degrees,” says Herrmann. He prepared for the heat in this way twice a week.
“Eat what fits”
But that’s not the only thing that’s causing problems for the drivers, who are none of them professionals at Opelit, but very ambitious amateurs, and thus lead a “middle-class life” in parallel: cycling has to be organized between work or studies and private life. The daily routine on the tour is therefore particularly challenging, the days are long: getting up at 6.40 a.m., getting dressed, having breakfast, packing a bag, getting on the bus to the start, warming up, getting through the stage, leaving the station, getting on the bus to the hotel, showering, dinner, sleeping, then starting all over again.
Herrmann says that taking care of his body with this daily routine is not always easy, especially when it comes to eating. He burns 2,500 calories a day just on the bike. His body currently needs 4,500 to 5,000 calories to stay fit and maintain his weight. But unlike the pros in the current Tour de France, he doesn’t pay attention to every gram. “I don’t pay too much attention to my weight and just eat what I can. If I’m a kilo heavier, that’s better than one kilo lighter because I’m fitter,” says Herrmann.
The German team can only take part in the tour in the Caribbean because the organizer, the “Comité Régional Cycliste de Martinique”, noticed them at the Tour de Guyane in French Guiana last year and invited them. Overall, cycling is very popular in the Caribbean region, with several tours taking place in the summer and autumn each year, including the Tour de Guadeloupe on the neighboring island of the same name north of Martinique. The current tour will be broadcast live on the island’s regional television station, says Reinhardt, with many residents lining the route cheering the riders on.
Herrmann hopes to continue to “get through well” on the last days of the tour. The team is working well, and the agreements are clear about who will drop back for whom to get supplies. “We are much better than we thought at the beginning,” adds Reinhardt. This was also evident on the last stage: Kreuzer finished ninth after a sprint, while his teammate Hermann crossed the finish line 55 seconds later in tenth place.