Even before the 2010 season ended BMC’s planning for the 2011 Tour de France was already well underway. One of the team’s first moves was to improve the riders’ bikes.
With a bike manufacturer as a sponsor, the BMC team has access to all the latest in bike technology. BMC makes sure its riders are always riding the very best bikes. In 2010 BMC’s engineers and designers were busy working on a new time trial bike.
The bike engineers faced a big challenge when perfecting a time trial bike for Cadel. All cyclists use a streamlined riding position in time trials. Cadel’s is even lower than normal, so BMC’s new time trial bike had to be easy to adjust. In the end, the new model adjusted to more than forty positions. The ‘Timemachine TT01’ also had flat tubes to make it more aerodynamic. A host of onboard gadgets measured speed and power output. The new bike also looked cool: mean and black with red trims and white BMC decals on the frame.
With the bike engineering underway, the team got to work recruiting new riders. The course for the upcoming Tour was rumoured to include a team time trial, so BMC wanted to be ready. Also, the team knew it was still weak in the mountains and the Tour competition would be fierce. The Schleck brothers were riding for a new team called Leopard Trek. The brothers would be unbeatable unless BMC could add more climbing talent to its line-up.
Finding new riders was a long and difficult process. New riders had to have exceptional physical abilities. But it was also important that each recruit fitted the ambitious, motivated mood of the BMC team. In the end there were eight new team members, including Amaël Moinard, Taylor Phinney, Manuel Quinziato and Ivan Santaromita.
As positive as all his team’s work was, Cadel found it hard to get excited. He was dealing with very sad news. In December, Aldo Sassi died of a brain tumour. As one of his earliest coaches, Sassi was a hugely important person in Cadel’s professional life. He believed in Cadel, always encouraging him to continue battling when it would have been easier to quit. Sassi was a mentor and a trusted friend. His death devastated Cadel.
Before Sassi died, he and Cadel spent lots of time developing a new training program. Cadel’s old routine was to go home to Australia over Christmas where he’d train on Victoria’s famous Great Ocean Road. This time he and Sassi decided Cadel should stay in Europe. After Sassi died, Cadel had the support of Andrea Morelli, who took over from Sassi as Cadel’s main coach.
Cadel found training in Europe very different to training in Australia. He wasn’t used to the extreme cold. In Europe, the winter days are very short. Cadel found it was getting dark by three or four in the afternoon, which meant he didn’t have enough time for long training rides. Often he had to continue training inside on rollers.
While the winter was difficult, there were benefits too. It was very quiet, which meant Cadel could really focus on what he was doing. There were no long, exhausting international flights. And finally, staying home meant he and Chiara got some time alone together.
Not going to Australia for the summer meant Cadel would miss the first event on the ProTour calendar, the Tour Down Under. As an Australian, Cadel was under a lot of pressure to take part. In 2011, he had to refuse. Saying no was difficult because Cadel is always keen to support Australian cycling.
A big part of Cadel’s new strategy was to race less overall. In the past he always had between 40 and 45 days of racing before the Tour started. His new goal was to race only 30 days. Cadel would turn 34 in February. As an older rider, he thought he’d perform better with more time to recover between races.
Cadel’s racing season didn’t kick off until the start of March. That gave him two months more than usual to find form. When he did start racing, it was low-key events like the Giro del Friuli, an Italian one-day road race. Cadel followed that with the Montepaschi Strade Bianche.
The Montepaschi Strade Bianche was held on the same white dirt roads that featured in the previous year’s Tour. Cadel had won that stage, using his background in mountain biking to his advantage. He didn’t repeat his win though, finding the one-day race more intense than the Tour stage had been. His form was improving, but he was still a long way off a win.
Next on Cadel’s calendar was the Tirreno–Adriatico, a seven-day stage race in Italy. Lots of star riders competed, including Ivan Basso and Andy Schleck. Cadel wasn’t rated a favourite before the race. The Tirreno–Adriatico was in March and most people thought that would be too early for Cadel’s form to peak.
The race started out with flat stages. In the middle days, the peloton hit the mountains. Cadel quickly moved up the ranks then. By Stage 4, he was second in the GC behind Rabobank’s Robert Gesink.
Although Cadel still hadn’t reached peak form, he really enjoyed the race. He was working well with his BMC teammates and the Tirreno–Adriatico course suited him. The climbs were short but steep. He hoped they would help him perfect a punchy attacking style he could later use in the Tour de France.
In Stage 5, Gesink lost time and Cadel jumped ahead to take the race leader’s blue jersey. Next was Stage 6, which Cadel wasn’t really aiming to win, but on the last climb of the day he saw an opportunity. The two leading riders hesitated for a moment so Cadel swooped, powering past them. He held on to first position to the end. Cadel won the stage, keeping the blue jersey.
By Stage 7, Cadel had an unbeatable lead. All he needed was a solid performance in the time trial. He achieved that and won the race. It was his first win in a stage race since the 2008 Coppi e Bartali.
To win was an awesome feeling. It was a huge boost ahead of the tough training Cadel would soon face. Straight after the Tirreno–Adriatico, he started preparing for the Spring Classics, including the Flèche Wallonne and the Amstel Gold.
Then, at the end of March, Cadel crashed during a training session near his home in Switzerland. His doctors first thought Cadel had only suffered bruising to his knee. When the injury didn’t heal as fast as he expected, Cadel had more tests. The bruising turned out to be worse than anyone imagined.
From there, Cadel made a tough decision. He withdrew from the Amstel Gold and the Flèche Wallonne. As the previous year’s winner of the Flèche Wallonne, Cadel was keen to defend his title. In the Amstel Gold, his role would have been to support his teammates. He was sorry to miss both those chances. But team doctors decided the best way for Cadel to prepare for the Tour was to rest and recover properly. Cadel agreed, not wanting a relatively small injury to turn into a major problem later in the season.
Following his race withdrawals, there were lots of physiotherapy visits, tests and ice packs for Cadel. The recovery program was tedious but successful. By the end of April Cadel was able to start the Tour de Romandie.
The Tour de Romandie is a personal favourite of Cadel’s. He won the event back in 2006. Cadel also likes the race because it’s in Switzerland, his European home away from home. Cadel performed very well in the 2011 event. Although he didn’t win a stage, he topped the GC rankings. It was his second major stage race win for the season. A victory in his second home was special enough. It felt even better after an injury.
After Romandie, Cadel and his BMC teammates held a series of high-altitude training camps to prepare for the Tour. It is always difficult to get all the riders together in one place since each has a different schedule. Training camps are one of the few chances teammates get to work closely with each other before a major race. That year Cadel and his team were able to practise several of the climbs that would feature in the upcoming Tour.
High-altitude training
The way a rider’s body performs can be affected by high altitude. High-altitude locations are places high above sea level, like the tops of mountains. At high altitude, the air has less oxygen. With less oxygen to take in, riders have less power. Training at high altitudes ahead of a mountainous race helps the body adapt to the conditions, which can improve race performance.
Cadel’s final race before the Tour was the Critérium du Dauphiné. As with the Tour, he was all too familiar with second place in the Dauphiné. Cadel had come second three times in a row.
The Dauphiné started with an individual time trial. BMC used the stage to launch its new cutting-edge time trial bike. Cadel was happy with his seventh place in the time trial and even happier with the BMC Timemachine bikes. He praised BMC’s engineers for their work, adding that he was glad BMC had the bikes and not their rivals.
Cadel was most interested in Stage 3 of the Dauphiné, another individual time trial. Held in Grenoble, this was the same course as Stage 20 in the upcoming Tour de France. Winning or losing the Tour could very well hinge on Cadel’s result in the Grenoble time trial. Riding the course in the Dauphiné would help him get to know the course at race speeds and on closed roads. Any experience gained now could give Cadel an edge during the Tour.
Cadel came sixth in the Dauphiné’s Grenoble time trial. This put him in second place in the GC, behind Team Sky’s Bradley Wiggins. And that’s how the GC stayed until the end of the race. Cadel could have put on a display of power and tried to beat Wiggins. But he chose not to. Cadel knew he’d have to dig deep to beat Wiggins. He didn’t want to risk using up any precious energy so close to the Tour. For the fourth time, Cadel had to be happy with second place in the Dauphiné.
The Dauphiné ended on 12 June. The Tour was set to start on 2 July. Although Cadel had no more races scheduled, he kept up his training in the weeks between the Dauphiné and the Tour.
The days leading up to the Tour were a haze of press conferences and team meetings for Cadel. Amid the general Tour hype he had so many things to do. By now, Cadel was used to being busy in July. But he never adjusted to the way people talked about him.
As much as the media praised him, they served out harsh criticism too. Everyone had an opinion about Cadel’s abilities, his personality and even his private life. After all his years as a pro, it still made him feel uncomfortable. All the attention made him feel more like an object than a human being with real feelings.
It was vital for Cadel to escape the pressure and find some time alone before the Tour. For the first time he wasn’t sharing a room with another rider. That meant he could rest and enjoy the quiet, which he’d always loved and needed.
Another bonus was that most attention ahead of the Tour seemed to be on the Schleck brothers, Philippe Gilbert, Bradley Wiggins and defending champion Alberto Contador.
Many people still had Cadel pegged as the Nearly Man, a strong rider who didn’t quite have what it took to win the Tour. It suited Cadel to be out of the spotlight.