The true value of communication is often not so much what you say to each other but the simple, powerful fact that you care enough to say something to each other so often.
THE BIGGEST ADVANTAGE of race radios is not what you think it is.
There's no doubt that the ability to both listen and talk to my riders as they spin along the road gives me greater strategic ability than team directors used to have. I realized this literally before anyone else: we were the first team to put radios on all of our riders—during my very first year on the job, in 1999.
When I was still racing in the early and mid-1990s, only the leaders of teams had radios. I wasn't the top rider, but I had built such a reputation as being the eyes and ears of the pack that I ended up regularly being picked to broadcast my analysis back to the director. I remember thinking at the time how much more effective it would be if everyone on the squad could communicate instantly. So when I got the job running Lance's team, I started working on that right away—and I realized why no other teams had done it. Getting all those radios to consistently and clearly work turned out to be a horrendous technical challenge.
The frequencies are used by all the other communication devices needed at races, so it was tough to find bandwidth we could rely on. And the simplest logistical problems ended up being surprisingly tough to solve. For instance, all bike jerseys have pockets on the back, which seemed the logical place for riders to carry their radios. This worked fine when only the stars used radios. But once the domestiques—the riders designated to support the rest of the team—got radios, there were complications. A domestique might be asked to come back to the team car to retrieve as many as five to seven water bottles for the rest of the team. A pocket with a radio in it was a pocket we couldn't use. We ended up having our clothing sponsors custom-build pouches onto the back of our bib shorts to hold radios, a special feature that's stock today. (Some bibs even have integrated controls in the straps now.)
That first year, the radios were a huge advantage because we could react faster. But now that all the teams have them for all their riders, the field has been evened. Everything—for everyone—happens faster. For instance, we used to have to spend two minutes or more figuring out which riders had made it into a breakaway, as chatter made its way rider by rider through the pack and back to the team cars. That gave the attacking riders a lot of time to organize and put distance between themselves and the pack. Now in twenty to thirty seconds I can marshal the whole team to the front to mount a chase if we decide that the riders who got away have to be brought back to the pack.
When it comes to tactics, the radios don't suddenly make you say brilliant things; they merely let you communicate the same things more quickly. So, in terms of strategy, the benefit is not that great. People always seem surprised to hear me say that; I think fans expect me to be whispering some kind of top-secret tactical code to the riders. But after spending seven years in Lance's ear, I can tell you that you'd be disappointed, in fact, if someone handed you a transcript of everything Lance and I had ever said to each other over the radios. The content is more mundane than sparkling.
When Lance would attack, I might tell him what was happening behind: "They're dropping off. They're sliding back. Their shoulders are bobbing now. You got it. You got it."
I might announce the gaps: "You have ten feet," I'll say. "Twenty feet." Then, as he continues to pull away, I'll switch over from distance to the currency that really matters to us: "You're up by thirty seconds."
There are some light moments. When I want to give water and energy drinks to the team, I like to say, "Boys, the bar is open."
In the 1999 Tour de France, Lance was in the yellow jersey after winning the time trial. The race hadn't yet entered the mountains, where the top climbers figured they could take away the jersey by blowing up Lance—he'd never been able to ascend like a champion. When we got to the Alps, we faced an eighty-mile stage that ended with an eighteen-mile climb up a mountain called Sestriere. Sure enough, two of the race's best climbers attacked and got a gap. Ivan Gotti and Fernando Escartín were more than half a minute up the road; it wasn't so much the time difference as the fact that the climbers wanted to crack Lance—to show that he couldn't take such hard racing.
Lance sat in a trailing group. We were playing it safe. Then, with five miles left to climb, I said softly, "It's time to go."
Lance swung out of the group and accelerated.
"You gapped them," I said. He kept accelerating, and I kept announcing distance and time. In just over half a mile he leapt across more than two-thirds of the vertical wasteland between us and the leaders, Gotti and Escartín. His legs were like pinwheels, a mesmerizing spiral of color.
"Smooth," I said, "Go. Go, go go go go, smooth, easy, sit, sit, don't stand, spin spin spin. You're coming up on them. You're coming up on them." And then he was with them, right on their wheels, sitting at the front of the Tour de France in the cruel mountains with two of this year's top climbers, two of the men who figured they'd put a cap on this brash young American's improbable comeback story. Return to the sport from cancer? Yes. Win the Tour de France against the likes of us? No way.
Lance looked loose, relaxed. I said, "Give me some more," and he accelerated. Gotti and Escartín couldn't follow. "More," I said, and then began ticking off the gap he'd created between his back wheel and their front wheels: "Two bike lengths, three, four..."
I'd known for months, of course, that Lance could ride like this. It was what we'd trained for. It was no surprise—except that there it was, really happening, on the road of the Tour de France, on the last, toughest climb of the mountains that were supposed to be his weakness.
I began speaking a stream of encouragement into Lance's ear: "Go, go, go, come on, Lance, pedal, pedal, pedal, that's it, Lance, smooth, now, now now now, yes yes yes." It was the rhythm that came to me first, not the words. The true value of communication is often not so much what you say to each other but the simple, powerful fact that you care enough to say something to each other so often. It's the connection that matters. Hearing each other. Speaking to each other.
At some point, as he neared the finish line, and what would be, so far, the greatest triumph of his cycling career, Lance's voice crackled through the radio: "Johan, do you like apples?"
I looked over at Thom Weisel, the owner of the team, who was riding in the passenger seat beside me that day. I raised my eyebrows. Had Lance cracked? Was he babbling?
"Um, yes," I answered hesitantly. "We like apples, Lance." I paused. "Why?"
"Then how," he said, "do you like them apples?"
And he crossed the finish line, hands high, head tipped to the clouds.
Everyone loves that story—including me. But when it comes to getting my voice inside Lance's head, I often think of a private moment the two of us shared, one that shows it's really not about radios or even words, but about communicating.
Proclaiming my belief that he could win the Tour de France wasn't the only radical statement I made to Lance when we decided to work together. I also told him he had to change his whole style of pedaling—that he had to, in effect, break the mold of everything he knew about propelling a bike. This wasn't going to be easy. Even on a casual ride, a cyclist makes about eighty to ninety pedal strokes a minute. To use a round number for ease, that's somewhere around five thousand revolutions every hour. Pros ride four or five hours a day, so figure twenty-five thousand pedal strokes a day. You can bet they ride two hundred days a year, easy, which puts them at around 5 million pedal strokes each year. Lance had been training and racing since he was fifteen. That meant that, by the winter of 1999, his body had learned to pedal a certain way by repeating the motion about 65 million times.
I had a few months to undo that.
I believed that, just as he had often in the past used his raw horsepower to compensate for his lack of experience, he'd relied too much on sheer power in the mountains. If he could learn to spin the pedals faster, he'd be able to take advantage of his superhuman aerobic capacity and genetic physical ability—he could ride aerobically while others suffered and gasped for breath. He'd be able to save those power surges and unleash them in full at key moments, rather than gradually expend that energy.
To accomplish this, Lance had to retrain his body to spin the pedals at 100–120 rpm while staying seated. His instinct, at this point, was to rise out of the saddle and stomp a hill into submission. All during that long winter and spring, as he rode Europe's mountains, climb after climb after climb, hour after hour, day after day, I'd follow behind and, when he rose out of the saddle, whisper through the radio that he had to sit back down and spin.
I could see him suffering. I knew that standing up to pedal must have felt good—natural, strong. "Sit," I'd say into the radio, knowing that my hated command was echoing in his ear. "Spin. High cadence, Lance. High cadence."
He'd sit, and spin his legs faster, and even though sometimes his heart rate would go up, he was sparing his muscles. His body was becoming more efficient. It was working.
"Sit," I said, over and over, almost like a chant.
It wore on both of us. We each, over the course of that training, grew weary of the routine. I wanted to stop telling him to sit. He wanted to stop hearing it. But we kept it up. We had to. We had to make seated, high-cadence pedaling feel right. One day, Lance couldn't bring himself to listen to me anymore. As he settled into yet another climb, he ripped the earpiece away from his head and rode on. I could see the cord swaying free, arcing like a pendulum with the motion of his legs.
The road steepened and Lance rose out of the saddle. Out of habit, I started to speak into the radio.
He was out of the saddle, attacking the pedals. I laid my palm against the car's horn. Brrrrrraaaaaaaa! Brrraaa! BRAAAAAAAAA!
Lance sat back down, then looked over his shoulder. He spun those pedals, around and around.
He rose again, and I blared the horn at him.
He sat. He'd heard me. More important: he'd listened.
The future seven Tour de France champion spun the pedals as fast as he could.