We've been fortunate to see the Tour up close a few years ago. I thought this article by a retired "rider" who drives one of the support vehicles would be of interest:
Gruissan, France
In his two decades as a professional bike racer, Matthew Hayman always figured that it took a special kind of lunatic to do his job. Get on the bike, pedal to the brink of total exhaustion, maybe win once in a blue moon.
Only after he retired and became a coach did Hayman understand that riding a bicycle wasn’t the craziest thing he could do at the Tour de France.
For a real test of endurance, reflexes, focus and sanity, he could put his foot to the floor and drive a team car. These are the Tour’s dugouts on wheels. They sit in a high-speed convoy behind the peloton, supplying riders with food, water, tactics, spare wheels and foul-mouthed encouragement—all while doing their best not to drive into each other.
“I raced in the peloton for 20 years and still had no idea what was going on behind the bunch,” Hayman says. “It’s organized chaos.”
One part of the chaos stems from each of the 20 teams having its own pair of cars to follow its riders along practically every inch of the 2,174-mile course. Another comes down to the fact that all of them are driven by ex-bike racers, a population without a normal human relationship to speed or fear. They motor around in close quarters as bikes weave between them, and treat the rules of the road as mere suggestions. They honk liberally.
(At the Tour de France, every driver becomes a little bit French.)
“Inside that bubble, there are no traffic rules,” says Stig Kristiansen, whose Norwegian Uno-X team nearly saw its two vehicles crash into each other on Tuesday when one overshot the exit of a roundabout. “There are no speed limits…And every now and then, you [lose a] wing mirror or get a few kisses between the cars.”
But inside that hectic convoy, team cars play an essential role. Pro cycling is a sport of imperfect information, the rare contest where the people making in-race decisions can’t see everything at all times.
Instead, the car-bound sports directors spend every stage relying on a collection of phones and tablets that show the television broadcast, a mapping system, social media, and live-tracking on a website called ProCyclingStats, plus the Tour’s official radio frequency and two-way radio to the riders. It’s the equivalent of an NFL offensive coordinator being locked inside a laundry room with an iPad and the RedZone channel. Only here, the stadium happens to be the alpine passes and narrow roads of rural France.
“Trying to get internet service is a big one,” Hayman says.
At any given time, Hayman might have one hand on the wheel, the other on the radio receiver, and a couple of water bottles for riders balanced between his knees. He hardly ever sees riders in the flesh unless they drop back to the car to collect bottles out of the driver-side window or need a tow back to the peloton after a crash.
That level of multitasking has always been a part of a sports director’s job, but many fans failed to appreciate how wild it was until teams began sharing footage from inside the cars. Suddenly, people who’d never been to a bike race could peer into these mobile bubbles that came with all the crying, screaming and passenger-seat driving of a packed station wagon on a family vacation.
It’s no surprise that teams have done their best to outsource many of those information-gathering responsibilities to people who aren’t cooped up inside the cars. The American EF Education-Easypost team, for instance, has staffers waking up at the crack of dawn back in the U.S. to scour race coverage for any vital nuggets that might help the directors on the ground.
Dutch outfit Visma-Lease a Bike, the Tour’s two-time defending champion, went even further—or at least it tried to. Trumpeting the power of “limitless thinking” ahead of this year’s race, the team introduced a mobile Command Center that would act as its very own Apollo Mission Control during stages of the Tour.
The idea was to allow the Visma brain trust to monitor data, weather, and live race pictures away from the chaos of the car, allowing cooler heads to make the big strategic calls. What the Command Center actually was, however, was a black-and-yellow van parked by the side of the road with a part-time podcaster inside. It didn’t take long for Tour organizers to deem this an illegal advantage and ban it.
The race would much prefer to keep its tactical competition pure, on the asphalt, in the hands of directors who are sweating the same roads as the peloton.
When Hayman made the switch in 2019, he was so nervous about it that he signed up for a defensive driving course. But with experience comes confidence and, eventually, a form of addiction. Team Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale’s Vincent Lavenu is one of the few team managers to drive his own car in the race. After more than 30 Tours de France, the 68-year-old still refuses to let go of the steering wheel.
“I’m the last specimen,” he says. “I just love to feel the race, feel the competition.”
Lavenu, remembers a time before tablets, before live pictures, and even before team radios, back when the only way to get a message to the riders was to drive up alongside them and roll down the window. Though he has more information at his disposal now, he still relies on his feel and instinct to guide attacks or, as he put it, “choosing the right moment to loose the horses.”
And when Lavenu finally crosses the line, after nearly four weeks and 21 stages in the team car, he inevitably finds that some of those racing habits have followed him back to civilian driving.
“My wife always tells me, ‘Calm down,’” he says. “‘You’re not at the Tour anymore.’”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com
Gruissan, France
In his two decades as a professional bike racer, Matthew Hayman always figured that it took a special kind of lunatic to do his job. Get on the bike, pedal to the brink of total exhaustion, maybe win once in a blue moon.
Only after he retired and became a coach did Hayman understand that riding a bicycle wasn’t the craziest thing he could do at the Tour de France.
For a real test of endurance, reflexes, focus and sanity, he could put his foot to the floor and drive a team car. These are the Tour’s dugouts on wheels. They sit in a high-speed convoy behind the peloton, supplying riders with food, water, tactics, spare wheels and foul-mouthed encouragement—all while doing their best not to drive into each other.
“I raced in the peloton for 20 years and still had no idea what was going on behind the bunch,” Hayman says. “It’s organized chaos.”
One part of the chaos stems from each of the 20 teams having its own pair of cars to follow its riders along practically every inch of the 2,174-mile course. Another comes down to the fact that all of them are driven by ex-bike racers, a population without a normal human relationship to speed or fear. They motor around in close quarters as bikes weave between them, and treat the rules of the road as mere suggestions. They honk liberally.
(At the Tour de France, every driver becomes a little bit French.)
“Inside that bubble, there are no traffic rules,” says Stig Kristiansen, whose Norwegian Uno-X team nearly saw its two vehicles crash into each other on Tuesday when one overshot the exit of a roundabout. “There are no speed limits…And every now and then, you [lose a] wing mirror or get a few kisses between the cars.”
But inside that hectic convoy, team cars play an essential role. Pro cycling is a sport of imperfect information, the rare contest where the people making in-race decisions can’t see everything at all times.
Instead, the car-bound sports directors spend every stage relying on a collection of phones and tablets that show the television broadcast, a mapping system, social media, and live-tracking on a website called ProCyclingStats, plus the Tour’s official radio frequency and two-way radio to the riders. It’s the equivalent of an NFL offensive coordinator being locked inside a laundry room with an iPad and the RedZone channel. Only here, the stadium happens to be the alpine passes and narrow roads of rural France.
“Trying to get internet service is a big one,” Hayman says.
At any given time, Hayman might have one hand on the wheel, the other on the radio receiver, and a couple of water bottles for riders balanced between his knees. He hardly ever sees riders in the flesh unless they drop back to the car to collect bottles out of the driver-side window or need a tow back to the peloton after a crash.
That level of multitasking has always been a part of a sports director’s job, but many fans failed to appreciate how wild it was until teams began sharing footage from inside the cars. Suddenly, people who’d never been to a bike race could peer into these mobile bubbles that came with all the crying, screaming and passenger-seat driving of a packed station wagon on a family vacation.
It’s no surprise that teams have done their best to outsource many of those information-gathering responsibilities to people who aren’t cooped up inside the cars. The American EF Education-Easypost team, for instance, has staffers waking up at the crack of dawn back in the U.S. to scour race coverage for any vital nuggets that might help the directors on the ground.
Dutch outfit Visma-Lease a Bike, the Tour’s two-time defending champion, went even further—or at least it tried to. Trumpeting the power of “limitless thinking” ahead of this year’s race, the team introduced a mobile Command Center that would act as its very own Apollo Mission Control during stages of the Tour.
The idea was to allow the Visma brain trust to monitor data, weather, and live race pictures away from the chaos of the car, allowing cooler heads to make the big strategic calls. What the Command Center actually was, however, was a black-and-yellow van parked by the side of the road with a part-time podcaster inside. It didn’t take long for Tour organizers to deem this an illegal advantage and ban it.
The race would much prefer to keep its tactical competition pure, on the asphalt, in the hands of directors who are sweating the same roads as the peloton.
When Hayman made the switch in 2019, he was so nervous about it that he signed up for a defensive driving course. But with experience comes confidence and, eventually, a form of addiction. Team Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale’s Vincent Lavenu is one of the few team managers to drive his own car in the race. After more than 30 Tours de France, the 68-year-old still refuses to let go of the steering wheel.
“I’m the last specimen,” he says. “I just love to feel the race, feel the competition.”
Lavenu, remembers a time before tablets, before live pictures, and even before team radios, back when the only way to get a message to the riders was to drive up alongside them and roll down the window. Though he has more information at his disposal now, he still relies on his feel and instinct to guide attacks or, as he put it, “choosing the right moment to loose the horses.”
And when Lavenu finally crosses the line, after nearly four weeks and 21 stages in the team car, he inevitably finds that some of those racing habits have followed him back to civilian driving.
“My wife always tells me, ‘Calm down,’” he says. “‘You’re not at the Tour anymore.’”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com
Um, ok. What I find most crazy about this article is that the Matthew Hayman in question wasn't merely a "professional bike racer of two decades". Matthew Hayman, an Australian, in his last year as a pro won the mother of all Monuments, Paris-Roubaix. And he did it by beating Tom Boonen at the line, who was considered to be one of the best Classics racers of the modern era. Just a little context! 😱
Yes. I've often wondered how they managed to get through a Tour or Vuelta without running over part of the back of the peloton.