Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  Life seemed good at that birthday party, an event notable in my memory for the sight of a lot of skinny guys with razor-sharp sock tans digging into a wide selection of French patisseries, and for a kind of sugar-fuelled hysteria that dissolved slowly into guitar playing and singing in the warm Riviera night. However, Joe’s two years with Sky did not pass as anybody might have hoped. In the tumult of moving from the States to Europe, with all the attendant disruptions and new experiences, he didn’t seem to get the right support settling in, and his neo-pro schedule, given the big jump in difficulty represented by the World Tour, was gruelling. After a fitful start to his second season, Joe didn’t race after the Tour de Suisse in June, sidelined by injury and a mysterious loss of form. Finally, an endofibrosis of the iliac artery was diagnosed – a hardening and constriction of the artery to the leg which restricts the flow of blood. It’s a problem that is increasingly common in pro cyclists, but one that’s still quite difficult to detect, and it had left him with a significant lack of power in his left pedal stroke. He was faced with an operation and a long, enforced layoff. The problem was only successfully resolved towards the end of his contract, at which time he left Team Sky.

  When Joe signed with the American World Tour team Cannondale-Garmin for the 2015/6 season it seemed almost like a new opportunity, maybe even a second bite of the apple. Later, he would tell me it ‘felt like a fresh start’. ‘Starting from zero, with a bit more perspective and more of a platform to launch from.’ I’d followed Joe’s interrupted progress from afar, and this fresh start coincided with the increasing urgency of my questions, scrawled in notebooks or pinballing around my head, that would eventually become this book. He would, I thought, be an interesting foil to my musings on mountains. One: because he was a pro. Many pros are, of course, just like us in that they love cycling purely for the simple act of cycling (they are much better at it though); but they are different in that they need to know more, to understand more about the craft of cycling well at the extremes – at extreme speeds and in extreme environments – and in their ability to negotiate the demands and pressures of competition. Two: he was pretty young (24), and still learning. One of the aims of this book is to understand and to convey – to whatever extent that is possible – what it feels like to be in the mountains in a race like the Giro or the Tour de France; and I figured someone thoughtful, and still fresh enough to be discovering and absorbing new ideas and new feelings, would help to do that. Plus, after his disappointment at Sky, this was the moment he’d really need to start showing what he was made of.

  So I got in touch, and he agreed to help.

  I don’t like interviews. They’re often a process that can be formal and uncomfortable, even oppositional, for both sides. So Joe and I just chatted. Over the course of about a year, at sea level and at altitude, on the transatlantic internet and in many different physical locations, we talked and talked and batted things back and forth. And though some of it fits neatly into different scenes and different physical places, I’m going, with his permission, to marshal his insights and arrange them so that they’re sometimes found far from where they started, in a way that helps me tell this story.

  We’re sitting in the January sun, on the terrace of a café on the seafront not far from Joe’s place in Nice, and, fittingly, we’re eating tuna Niçoise salads. Being next to the sea, talking about the upcoming Giro with somebody who really knows it – not only that, someone who is actually going to be racing it – definitely promotes a feeling of being on holiday. Even though he lives here, I think Joe sometimes feels the same, and it’s exciting that the Giro is coming to his back yard. The backcountry around Nice, which more or less culminates in the Col de la Bonette, has some of the most spectacular and deserted mountain roads around. If you’re a cyclist interested in climbing (like, for example, Joe … and Chris Froome, Peter Sagan, Geraint Thomas, Nairo Quintana, Tejay van Garderen, Richie Porte, Romain Bardet and numerous others who base themselves in the area) it’s pretty much a playground, and the only criticism that could be levelled at it, training-wise, is that there’s barely a flat road on which to do your TT efforts and motorpacing (i.e. the things lots of climbers think are the boring bits). The decision to locate here is easy to justify: ‘It’s like, why does a five-hour ride in the mountains pass so quickly, but a five-hour ride on the flat seems to drag on and on?’ Joe muses. ‘The climbs provide a bit of interest rather than the monotony of cruising along on the flat all day, and it’s the exploration of the climb itself, too. You don’t say – at least I wouldn’t say – I’m going to explore these flat roads today, but I would go look on the map and look for new climbs I’ve never done, go and ride a new climb just because it’s there.’

  It turns out that Joe is just as keen on exploring for the fun of it as any amateur cyclist, simply riding to see what happens if you turn left instead of right. That crinkle of the map as you pore over it, the alluring invitations of squiggly roads crossing contour lines. But now, with the second-largest race in the world coming to town, his detailed knowledge of the region assumes another dimension. The Bonette he hasn’t ridden all that much, but the Col de la Lombarde, the second-to-last climb, leads up to the ski resort of Isola 2000, which is where Joe and friends often go for altitude training. I’ve been up and down the road a few times, by bike and by car, so I figure that after so many visits, and long descents from altitude to cycle in the valley, Joe will know it by heart.

  There’s a definite feeling of a hometown challenge coming on. I tell him that, all things considered, he’d really better do something special on the Bonette stage – for the sake of giving my book a cracking ending, if nothing else. This is probably the first, but by no means the last, time that I make this comment. I would call it a joke but that would imply that, on some level, I’m not deadly serious.

  Joe’s was not a ‘normal’ entry into the pro ranks, if such a thing exists. He came to road cycling relatively late in life, around the age of 18, and did a couple of years at university before quitting to have a proper stab at being a pro bike racer. His official bio says he is 6' 2" and in the mid sixties, kilo-wise, though when you stand next to him in Lycra he appears taller and skinnier than that. In the seasons that have passed since that birthday party he has matured and got visibly stronger, but, with his tousled hair, cyclist’s tan, youthful face and glasses, if you passed him in the street in Nice you might be forgiven for thinking that he was an exchange student. He made it as a bike racer despite the late start because he was naturally very talented. His VO2 max (the measure of the body’s maximum oxygen consumption, which is a major determinant of potential at endurance sports, and largely genetically determined) was very high. But the top level demands a lot more, and Joe’s about to give me a taster of the psychology and the roadcraft of racing in the mountains.

  ‘Before, I could just go uphill fast. So as long as I could get to the climb without crashing, or wasting too much energy, and being reasonably close to the front, then I would probably go all right. But when you go up to the World Tour, everyone is gifted with good genetics,’ he says. ‘There’s still a difference there, but … those margins are smaller. So suddenly just learning how to ride in a bunch, how to be efficient, all the details become more and more important.’ Details, details, details. Like what? ‘Like ride as much as possible, sleep as much as possible and eat …’ he stops to think. We have finished our salads and Joe has declined dessert. We both have an espresso, his without sugar. In my head I fill the gap with my own choice of words. ‘Well,’ he finishes.

  He tells me of the people who have taught him the ropes. Not recognised climbers, actually, but seasoned old hands like Bernie Eisel and Mathew Hayman. In the early days at Sky, Joe was sometimes tasked simply with following Hayman as he performed his team duties on the narrow, twisty European roads – very different from the Stateside superhighways of Joe’s youth. Race objective: learn to move around the bunch with Matty. Understand peloton dynamics, the fluid shapes
of an ever-changing thing, a composite creature with a hundred brains. The wind and how to stay out of it, gaps that disappear before they even open up; elbows, swearing, aggression and intimidation for the sake of it, being hustled out when you’re just trying to deliver bottles. All symptoms of the pressure and the heightened competition that comes at the top level. Positioning yourself so that, when the move is being made, knowing that this is the move to make, you can leap to freedom, escape to where you’re able to act, where you’re in control.

  ‘Whenever I’ve won a bike race it’s always been alone and it’s always been on top of a mountain,’ Joe says. ‘Other than as a Junior, that’s how I’ve always won. And whenever I’ve won like that, I’ve always felt very in control, like, I have this.’ He pauses, reflects and then continues: ‘I don’t know if it’s because, when someone else is dictating the pace, a lot of times you’re not able to handle it. You just feel out of control. And really you are, because if you were in control then you would have stayed with whoever you were trying to stay with – and eventually won.’

  This may seem self-evident, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it formulated as clearly. Climbing a mountain is an uncomfortable thing. Go fast enough and the discomfort turns to pain. Race, and it is one of the most prolonged and focused ways of inflicting a certain type of pain on yourself or your rivals there is. Each revolution of the pedals is measured out in screaming muscles, and air gasped into and ripped out of lungs. In the fight against gravity normal limits cease to apply. Eventually, it becomes unbearable. And what then? Are you still in control, managing your suffering? You have a choice: ‘Ultimately, when you’re climbing, at some point you give up, don’t you? Unless you win,’ Joe says. ‘At some point you decide to give up. Anyone, even the toughest guy out there, could keep going at the point they get dropped. But at some point you decide to get dropped.’ In other words, there is rarely anything completely inevitable in that gradual inching away, the slow-motion disaster of losing a wheel. The number of people who make it literally to their last pedal stroke is minuscule, vanishingly small. The mind goes before the body. For Joe, the antidote when climbing is to try not to think about it. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? ‘You just have to dissociate with what you’re doing,’ he says. ‘You can’t really think about how uncomfortable it is, because then you just create excuses for sitting up. You think, yeah, this sucks, maybe I’m just not on that good of a day, maybe I’ll sit up now. So it’s like, goodbye! and then you just ride easy. But when you get to the finish you think, why did I do that? It’s like this endless cycle – you’re not really happy at any point in time, because when you’re on the rivet climbing you’re thinking, why am I doing this?’

  Why am I doing this? It’s one of the fundamental mind-games of the fight that goes on in the mountains: the mental fight in which you wrestle to control the physical and mental, all too aware that the impossible situation you’re in will 99.9 per cent of the time only resolve into another impossible situation. There’s only one way out. ‘The only point in time you’re happy is if you actually rode all the way to the finish as hard as you could,’ Joe continues. ‘And even then you’re just happy afterwards!’

  That said, giving it all unto the death is not always the right thing to do. If you’re a domestique, making a specific effort or doing a job for your team leader, the best thing to do is to acquit your duties and then sit up to conserve your strength for the next day. In that situation, nobody is going to applaud you for putting yourself through the wringer racing for 30th place. But if you don’t have the perseverance to keep going to the bitter end on the climb, how will you ever have the commitment to prevail on the larger, more important level of the race?

  Is this core psychological ability to commit beyond what is reasonable something you’ve just got to have, or can you learn it? You could make arguments for both sides, citing riders who had the physical talent but just never had it ‘in the head’ to be the best, and the counter-examples of riders who matured, changed team, or underwent some experience that transformed them from quitter to contender. We probably all have a favourite theory. But how you make your commitment count, rather than just wasting your energy, is definitely something that can be learnt.

  It comes back to control, and to knowing when to think, and when not to. Joe told me a few stories that might make this clearer.

  The Rettenbachferner climb is in Austria. It leads from the town of Sölden to the Rettenbach glacier, a year-round skiing area in the Ötztal Alps. If you’re looking for a climb to help people understand what it’s like to race up a mountain, then this is probably one to choose. It’s a pig. A long, steep, high pig: 12 kilometres at 11 per cent, starting around 1,400 metres and finishing somewhere close to 2,700 metres above sea level. It features fairly regularly in bike races like the Deutschland Tour and the Tour de Suisse, and, since it was built for ski-station access, it’s well surfaced, well maintained and has a regular gradient: steep and unrelenting right from the bottom. That makes it Joe’s kind of pig. The pig was included in the 2015 Tour de Suisse, a race to which Joe had been sent with the plan of riding for the general classification (GC), the overall race lead. I wondered how anyone might prepare for something so brutal, so, in one of our first conversations, I asked. He told me about scouting it using old race footage on YouTube: checking the foot of the climb for sharp turns or pinch points; the short downhill section in the middle; how exposed it got at the top. The climb was to come at the end of a hot, 200-kilometre-plus stage; given the position and the gradient, the team mechanics fitted a cassette with a 32-tooth cog to give Joe and the other riders a chance of spinning up in relative comfort rather than grinding it out slowly in too large a gear for the circumstances. ‘The team put me in a good position at the bottom, and I was pretty much right where I needed to be,’ Joe said. ‘I didn’t need to hit the bottom of the climb right at the front because, basically, there was an hour to sort yourself out – and it’s a big road, you can move around. I was actually feeling pretty good.’

  When a peloton first hits a climb, the work rate often jumps because, as sure as eggs is eggs, certain guys will accelerate. Sometimes, it’s the non-GC riders with fresh legs and limited objectives – they want to make a break, catch the break or have a crack at the stage. Sometimes, it’s purely because in the heat of the moment some guys lose their heads and rocket off unsustainably.fn1 Not this time: the bunch went gently, perhaps because of the starting altitude or the climb’s reputation. ‘Then, maybe six or seven kilometres in, the real attacks started to go, the race-winning moves: the guys who would go on to win the stage were kind of there, and that’s where I started to drift back,’ Joe explained.fn2 ‘There was no sudden implosion or anything, but I was riding at my limit, they went and I just rode to the finish as fast as I could go. It was not a bad ride but not a super ride. I’d been hoping for a bit more.’

  So a damp squib, race-wise. (In fact, a bad first couple of stages put him a handful of minutes down, and the whole Tour de Suisse wasn’t a memorable one for Joe.) One of those moments when commitment – or its lack – might not have made much difference. A sputtering out.

  But hang on, that’s not quite the story here. The real point is what happened to Thibaut Pinot on that stage. Cut back to that select front group, and to people falling off the back. Pinot, the young star riding for La Française des Jeux, was there with Joe and then, quite early on (let’s guess maybe eight minutes in) he was dropped. Joe takes up the story: ‘I’d got tailed off, and I was doing what I could, riding my own pace to the finish, and I remember seeing him come back. You don’t take in so much on your periphery because you’re so focused on what you’re doing, but I remember thinking, oh man, he came back! The nature of the climb is you can see a few switchbacks down. He was well behind, and then he came past me again.’ Joe continued: ‘For one, that’s pretty strong, mentally, to stay inside yourself, because if you go way too hard at the bottom then you blow and you’re not going to c
ome back. But also to have the mental fortitude to say – I’m assuming – I’m going to power-meter this, you know, stay within what I can do. And I’m going to sit on that all the way to the finish …’

  That takes foresight and not a little bit of control. Pinot won the stage and took the jersey that day.

  Chris Froome, apparently, is good at doing the same thing – getting dropped, riding the hill his way, coming back relentlessly – when he’s not just outright winning, of course. When it’s done well it’s about confidence in yourself but, more than that, a will to force reality to conform with your desires. I’m going to detour quickly into rowing here, and borrow shamelessly from one of the great sportswriters – Simon Barnes, of The Times – and tell you about Matthew Pinsent. Pinsent is, if you’re not familiar, a celebrated British rower, and one of our most decorated Olympians. In his book The Meaning of Sport, Barnes tells the story of Pinsent at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games: how Pinsent’s coxless four was neck and neck with Canada in the final race; how Canada edged ahead and it seemed inevitable they would win; and how Pinsent, singlehandedly, pulled the race back from an impossible position. ‘Pinsent took the crew over the line by means of a massive outpouring of the self. He refused to accept the plain and obvious fact of defeat and remade reality in front of us,’ Barnes writes.

  In cycling, mountains are where this feat of imposing one’s will onto reality tends to take place. All the greatest riders do it: Eddy Merckx attacking on the Col du Tourmalet in 1969, cresting and looking back and then, seeing nobody descending behind him, soloing 130 kilometres over the Col d’Aubisque and winning the stage – sealing his grip on all the Tour de France jerseys that year, as well as the team and combativity prizes. A young Marco Pantani on the Passo di Mortirolo, smashing the climb record (and Miguel Indurain in the process) … or in 1998, on the Col du Galibier, on a stage to Deux Alpes in cold, heavy rain. Stephen Roche on that stage to La Plagne in 1987. The most recent example that springs to mind is Cadel Evans in the 2011 Tour, proving that even minor figures – relative to Merckx and his ilk – can have superhuman moments. That day, the French expressionist Thomas Voeckler was in the yellow jersey and the Tour was in the balance when Andy Schleck, one of the real favourites, launched a surprise long-range attack on the Col d’Izoard. Nobody would help Evans, who was among Schleck’s most dangerous rivals, shut the attack down, and so he singlehandedly dragged a small bunch, including Voeckler and Alberto Contador, another of the GC favourites, 25 kilometres up the Galibier into a headwind. Such was the force of his desire that in the final couple of kilometres he dropped both Voeckler and Contador, and finished with a small time gap to Schleck that he would easily obliterate in the time trial two days later.