Freezing in a wigwam in a Swedish forest, Laurent Jalabert, Carlos Sastre and the rest of the team listened intently to former soldier BS Christiansen, who was busy explaining how important it was to work together as a team. “A bike race is a bit like being in a war – you have to be able to trust each other,” BS told them.
For the past three days, BS had had the riders and the other employees on the team taking part in various tasks and exercises designed to put them in situations where they would have to be honest with each other, work together and communicate with each other.
The trip, and BS’s presence, was all part of my plan to turn my team into one of the best in the world, and the most modern in terms of teamwork. I’d put the plan together through a combination of my vision for it and the sum of my experiences as a pro rider, which, looking back, were characterised by far too many unnecessary lows, too many things just happening by chance and too many instances when, internally in the teams, people were working against each other. They were all things I wanted to change. My team would be different. I wanted us to be innovative, cooperative and driven – just like any company in the business world. I had a number of thoughts, ideas and philosophies, but I wasn’t so good at formulating them so that other people on the team could understand where I was coming from. It was for that reason that I’d brought in BS. He understood my philosophy and ideas, and could help make them a reality. He knew how to convey those ideas to make the team function that bit better. And it was the reason he was on our team training and survival camp in Sweden in December 2001. He was to help work out a set of values that would be fundamental to the team, and which we would follow when running the company.
With his personality and his methods, BS was able to inspire the riders, the team employees and me to think differently and to see everyday problems from a different angle. Making the training camp a survival camp gave the riders a different kind of experience to what they were used to, and forced them to think outside the box. “We’re now going to divide you into smaller groups, and ask you to come up with a set of values that you think are important for you and the team,” BS told the group.
Armed with paper and pens, the different groups, made up of a mix of riders and staff, set to work. It was a completely different way of working, for the riders in particular. They had all come from traditional cycling teams, where things had been done in exactly the same way since the 1970s. The teams, with a boss more akin to a dictator, had always been run in the same way, and things were done the way they were for that reason alone: because that was how it had always been done.
While other teams simply concentrated on trying to make their riders faster, we were busy trying to teach them about themselves. And most of the riders were ready to try out this new method of having a more social and technical element to the team.
Laurent Jalabert was one of them. “I find it strange that, as one of the team leaders, I always get to go to massage after training and racing before everyone else. It’s wrong,” he said. “Massage should be given first to whoever needs it most.” As one of the more cultured members of the team, Jalabert helped to influence the mood and the attitude towards the new way of doing things that I was trying to introduce.
“They’re beginning to see each other not just as riders or members of staff any more, but as human beings,” said BS.
It was my goal to create a climate where people trusted one another, and where individuals were encouraged to contribute with their own ideas. We needed to work out how to make individuals’ performances become collaborative performances.
BS was able to draw on a lot of experience from the military. “Bike riders, like soldiers, are individuals,” he pointed out after his first meeting with the team. He thought that there existed a kind of “something for something” attitude – that is, that riders would say, “If I help you, then you also need to help me.” Their goal was personal success, whereas our goal was to create team successes.
BS had become a much-needed breath of fresh air in the team, and I began to use him more and more as my mentor. He was disciplined, loyal and honest, and he brought real organisation to everything he did. He was also able to spot where there were problems in the company – people bad-mouthing or working against each other, and was able to reduce the friction by getting people to talk openly: “What’s the problem here? And what can we do to resolve it?” It was always constructive and forward-looking.
My dream was to build the organisation up so that it functioned like a professional business, which – in theory, at least – could produce anything. It should be a business that didn’t rely solely on sporting performances, and where the employees were left in no doubt as to what was expected of them and by which values they should work.
Concepts such as leadership, teamwork, manpower, personal development and coaching should be integrated into the team. The concept of structured coaching, in particular, had never really played a big role in bike racing. The antiquated opinion was that a directeur sportif was someone who sat behind the steering wheel and gave out orders. We wanted to move away from directeurs sportifs simply functioning as glorified tour guides. Their decision-making powers should instead be used through daily contact with the riders and they should have the ability to influence them and motivate them to train properly. In short, the directeur sportif’s role should be to get the best out of the riders.
The new way of doing things would take a while to take real effect, though, I had to admit in the spring of 2002. The team’s results had been disappointing, especially in the Classics, and only Jalabert lived up to our expectations with a stage win at Paris-Nice. I asked BS to dig a little deeper, and he went with the team to races in Spain and Belgium to observe how the team was progressing. “The expectations have been too high,” he told me. “There has been too much fire-fighting and too much hole-plugging to have been able to reach such high expectations.
“But like in military operations, it’s important to adapt your strategy in accordance with the situation,” he continued. “We need to develop a new plan with new goals.”
He encouraged me to restructure things both at the management and rider levels. I also wanted to step back from the sporting side of things a little and work more within the company, which meant the directeurs sportifs taking on more responsibility. To that end, we decided to send them on a coaching course in Ålborg, where they would learn to become better leaders. The riders needed to be coached more than they had been so far, and we needed to engage with them more as people if we wanted them to improve, and if they were to really take the team’s values to heart.
For example, Tyler Hamilton was our team leader for the 2002 season, and he was a rider who wanted to be coached and to develop and improve himself. He had been a talented ski racer until he broke his back in a crash, which put an end to that career. He used cycling as rehabilitation, and then became a professional cyclist almost by accident.
As part of his preparations for the season, I’d asked him to pull his ski boots on again to train on the pistes at home in the US. “Have you drunk too much wine, Bjarne?” he asked me when I suggested it.
“It’ll give you power in your legs,” I told him. “When I was a pro, I would have loved to have trained like that, but it wasn’t really deemed acceptable back then.”
So for the first time in five years, Tyler got back on his skis as part of his winter training. One week skiing, two weeks cycling, then one week skiing again, and so on through the winter at his home in New England.
The training paid dividends at the Giro, where Tyler finished the race in Milan second overall, despite a crash earlier in the race. When he had some X-rays done the day after the finish, it was found that Tyler had ridden for 16 days with a fractured shoulder.
Before we left for the 2002 Tour de France, BS and I discussed how the implementation of our team values was going. It felt like a never-ending battle with and against the riders to get them to take my ideas about how they should do things on board. Clearly it wasn’t that easy for some of them to think the same way I did. I wasn’t really sure how much pressure I should put on them as their boss. Different people needed to be treated in different ways. Some preferred the direct approach, while others needed to be treated with kid gloves.
Ekstra Bladet had written that I was “too hard” as a boss, and one person in particular said that I made tough demands on how the riders lived their lives, and that riders with a sweet tooth needed to be careful. Brian Holm, my former team-mate at Telekom, also told the paper: “Bjarne has a reputation as a very hard sports director who doesn’t allow riders to eat sweets or drink cola. He has his principles, especially when it comes to training, and the young Danish riders find the extreme discipline especially hard.” Brian had no doubt heard about my “forceps” technique, which was my own little way of measuring whether a rider was approaching form and keeping his weight down. My forceps were actually just my thumb and forefinger, which I’d use to measure the riders’ fat on their stomach or tricep by giving them a little pinch. It was part of the job that you turned up to a race with good form and at the right weight.
The team’s morale was also on the agenda before the start of the Tour, and in that respect BS had found a problem. “The riders are saying that they haven’t really had a leader for much of the spring,” he said. Laurent Jalabert was the squad’s natural leader and normally took the initiative, but an injury had kept him out for most of the spring. It had also taken time for Laurent to feel comfortable in a leadership role. He’d come to us from ONCE, where the manager, Manolo Saiz, dictated how things worked, so Laurent and I had talked a lot about him taking on more responsibility. “We need you to do it,” I’d told him. “Every time you say something, everyone listens to you with real respect.”
“But it’s still not really me,” he’d said.
“But we really need you to do it on this team,” I insisted. “It’s your role.”
And eventually he did take on that role and was able to learn to take important decisions on behalf of the team. As one of our three leaders for the Tour, he was about to put those leadership qualities to the test. During a race, you sometimes needed to make decisions in a hundredth of a second, and in those stressful circumstances, your qualities could be pushed to the limit.
That’s exactly what happened during the Tour’s team time trial. Jalabert was in a position to try to take the yellow jersey after the 67.5km stage, and time-trial specialist Michael Sandstød was the main man to help drive the team home in a good position. The team was like a well-oiled machine, cutting through the air like a hot knife through butter. We led through the intermediate checkpoints at 21.5km and 40.5km, and things were looking good for Laurent and yellow – until disaster struck. Sandstød punctured and had to stop to change his wheel. Should the team wait for him, as he was one of our strongest riders, or should they go on without him?
“Wait for him!” I shouted into the radio from the car.
Jalabert decided that the team should carry on. “Keep going! Keep going!” he shouted to the others, and on they went while the mechanics changed Sandstød’s wheel as quickly as possible. Jalabert had shown decisiveness and had taken responsibility for the situation, and that was good. But it was the wrong decision.
“Damn!” I shouted angrily in the car. The rhythm had been lost, and the riders tried unsuccessfully to find it again. Behind them, Sandstød gave it everything, battling to get back up to the others. At one point, he almost made contact again, but as just one man against a speeding locomotive it was an impossible task. With a couple of other riders also dropping off the pace towards the end, the team could only manage fourth place on the line. It wasn’t enough to get Jalabert the yellow jersey.
Jalabert stormed off to the bus, with me following close behind. I was just as angry. “What happened?” I asked him inside.
“We did the only thing we could do in the situation,” he replied.
We argued back and forth about what the best thing to have done would have been, without agreeing with each other.
“You said before the stage that we should only wait if Carlos or Tyler punctured, so we didn’t wait,” snapped Laurent. “It’s not good that it worked out like this, especially when half the team wanted to wait and half the team wanted to ride.”
It seemed that there had also been trouble with the radio system, and it was unclear whether my command had even been heard properly by the riders. Because I’d encouraged someone to take on a leadership role, I also had to take responsibility for when things didn’t go right. Later that evening we all talked through what had happened, and then moved on.
On the rest day, Laurent informed me that he had decided to retire at the end of the season. I’d hoped that he might ride one more season, but I also had a lot of respect for the fact that he wanted to stop while he was still at the top. Jalabert ended up winning the polka-dot climbers’ jersey for the second year in a row. Carlos finished 10th overall in Paris, while Tyler was 15th, 28 minutes down on his former team leader, Lance Armstrong, who won his fourth Tour in a row.
At the start of September, Anne Dorthe gave birth to our first child together in Vejle hospital. The birth lasted seven hours, but I was there every step of the way. With little Cristian, I now had three beautiful boys.
For the 2003 season, everything was geared towards us having a good Tour de France. Tyler Hamilton had worked hard to be ready and was prepared to give it everything he had. But as early as the first week of the race our new team spirit was put to the test. On one of the early stages there was a huge crash, which took down a number of our riders. “What’s happened?” I yelled into the radio. It seemed that everyone had got up okay, but as the peloton came into the finish we could see that Tyler was hurt.
I began to worry as we drove him to hospital for X-rays, and it gave me time to think about what it might mean if he had to drop out of the Tour. The squad had been built up of riders capable of supporting Tyler’s goal of making the Tour podium, and our race tactics were all geared towards him as a result.
The X-rays showed that Tyler’s collarbone was fractured in two places, in a “V” formation. Back at the hotel, we stared at the X-ray pictures, considering our next move, while Tyler stared into space.
“Are you in pain?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered, unhappily. We all knew that it was unlikely that he’d be able to continue in the race.
“Do you think you can carry on?” I asked, hopefully.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I think that’s going to be determined by the pain.”
“It’s your decision,” I said. “No one’s going to force you into anything. You’re the only one who can feel how much it hurts.”
We had trained for this kind of situation at our pre-season camps when our resolve would be tested and we would see how we’d react in a crisis. I called a team meeting and explained everything to the other riders and team staff, telling them that we had to make the best of the situation. With all the energy I could conjure up, I tried to get them pumped up again. “We can’t do anything about what’s happened,” I told them, “but we can still fight on with everything we have.”
Tyler fought on through the next few stages in immense pain, his collarbone strapped up, his body dosed up on painkillers and his team-mates supporting him every step of the way. Within the peloton, they created almost a protective ring around him to ensure that no one could bump into him and make his injury any worse, while at the end of the stage BS would act as his bodyguard and escort him safely back to the bus.
Stage after stage, though, he battled his way through, gritting his teeth in an effort to overcome the pain. He was able to stay with the bunch on the flat, but when the road headed upwards, he really struggled. When the pace went up, he had to stay seated, as he wasn’t able to get out of the saddle and pull on the handlebars. It had been clear a long time ago that a podium place was out of the question. But his daily battle to stay in the Tour and to try to ignore the pain was fascinating in its own way, and deserved huge respect. Here was a man with extreme willpower and dedication who was capable of hiding his disappointment to carry on regardless. There weren’t many other riders who would have been able to bring forth that fighting spirit having come to the race as one of the favourites and then seen their role become reduced to that of a rider just trying to get through each day. People were extremely sympathetic, and we were able to show them that we were a team that stood together, supporting our injured star and never giving up.
While Tyler fought his own battle, one of our Danish riders, Jakob Piil, won the 10th stage, giving the team a real boost. By stage 13 we were into the mountains, and on the road to Plateau de Bonascre Tyler was suffering, while Carlos, on the other hand, was riding brilliantly. In the team car, I was trying to keep an eye on both of them, but then Carlos attacked and got a gap, which, if he could hold on to it, could result in a stage victory. I needed to follow Carlos, even though, further down the climb, Tyler probably needed me more than the Spaniard. For a moment, I paused, but then made the decision to go with Carlos, in case he needed us. No one could follow him, and he rode to the finish alone. In the last few metres before crossing the line he took out his newborn daughter’s dummy from his pocket and put it in his mouth as a celebration.
Back at the hotel, everyone was thrilled – apart from Tyler. He got out of the team bus and walked straight past me and up to his room without saying anything. He was clearly disappointed about what he thought my priorities were and felt abandoned. Later, we got the chance to talk, but he felt like I was just making excuses. “We have to fix this, Bjarne,” he told me.
A camera crew from DR followed our discussion, so neither of us wanted to make a scene, but he felt that I really hadn’t followed the team’s values through my decision in the team car. Maybe I owed him an apology as I had deserted him when he needed me most. Later that evening, as I thought it all through, I came to the conclusion that it was a dilemma that had no real right or wrong solution. It was impossible to please everyone.
On stage 16 between Pau and Bayonne, Tyler really showed just how much willpower and character he had. With 90km of the stage still to go, he broke away on his own. He gritted his teeth and fought his way through the stage, holding the chasing group at bay. It was the sort of achievement that would go down in history, and the press, the team and the people watching at home went crazy when he crossed the line as the day’s winner. The whole way I’d sat in the team car shouting encouragement at him. “Come on, Tyler! You can do it!” It was my chance to redeem myself in his eyes. He could tell that I supported him and had such respect for his fighting spirit. After the stage, I gave him a big hug. “I’m so proud of you,” I told him, and he thanked me.
Tyler finished the Tour with a fantastic fourth place overall in Paris, Carlos was ninth and we won the team prize. But sadly Tyler then informed me that he was leaving the team and had signed a contract with the Phonak squad for the following year. BS had already had his suspicions, and so it didn’t come as a huge surprise to me. “But is there no chance of me giving you a better offer to keep you here?” I asked Tyler.
“I’ve already signed, I’m afraid,” he told me.
“It’s disappointing not to even have had the chance to talk about it,” I said.