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Follow Michael Barry of Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team as he chronicles the 2005 racing season.
Tour de Langkawi
Date: February 11, 2005
The Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team began racing immediately after our training camp with one roster of riders racing in Qatar and the second in Malaysia at the Tour de Langkawi.
The schedule was a bit tight, with only a day or two for staff and riders to return home and re-pack before traveling to the first competition.
Each of the races is entirely different from any other race we will compete in during the season. Generally we race in Europe or the U.S., in moderately warm climates similar to the environments in which we were raised.
In Qatar, the riders are challenged by the desert winds that splinter the peloton each day and in Malaysia, they fight to stay cool in the humid, hot weather.
I was part of the roster scheduled to race at the Tour de Langkawi, a 10-day race that begins on the island of Langkawi off the northwestern side of the Malaysian peninsula that is just south of Thailand (and is capped by Singapore at its southern tip).
The Malaysian government hopes to attract more tourists to Langkawi in the coming months and years, so the race is named after this island, despite the fact that the majority of the event takes place on the peninsula.
The team for the race consisted of Antonio Cruz, Mike Creed, Pat McCarty, Tom Danielson, Hayden Roulston and Fumy Beppu. Hayden didn’t get much chance to race, however, as he came down with heat exhaustion after the first stage and was soon on a return flight to Belgium.
The heat was the toughest element we had to deal with during the race and it was certainly a limiting factor as we never really had a good chance to acclimate to the 100 degree temperatures and tropical humidity.
Each day the racing courses took us through miles of dense jungle. Along the northern border of Thailand, the jungle is lush and full, monkeys are at the roadside and signs along the way cautioned us that elephants could be crossing the road.
Each team racing in Malaysia is assigned two drivers to chauffeur the luggage between hotels and drive us to where we'll either be racing or overnighting.
Our Italian soigneur, Elvio Barcella, is not scared behind the wheel of a car as he grew up negotiating the Milan traffic. Elvio warned me that our Malaysian drivers would approach each destination as if it were a finish line.
As it turned out, our drivers were both army veterans and police officers. Both were kind and extremely helpful, but neither man hesitated to pass on the left or right, on the shoulder or even straight into oncoming traffic.
One of the drivers, Motka, had worked for the U.S. military on contract work during the Vietnam War, teaching soldiers how to fight in the jungle. He told many stories that were equally shocking and intriguing. Each day of our competition, members of Motka's family would be there to greet us at the start or finish. He has eleven children.
The Malaysians are some of the kindest people I have met during my travels throughout the world. Often we would race through small towns where people had little more than the shoes on their feet.
They stood and watched us get ready for the races or clean up afterward. Normally at the races in Europe, the swarms of spectators ask for autographs, bottles, hats, cards or any handout they can get for free. The Malaysians never asked for a thing, and then when we offered a bottle, they accepted it reluctantly but we could also see a sparkle in their eye.
One month prior to the Tour de Langkawi, the Indian Ocean and most of the land masses that its shores touch was rocked by a tsunami that killed more than 160,000 people and left millions homeless.
Some of the first images I saw in the New York Times of the Tsunami destruction had come from the island of Langkawi. When we arrived in Malaysia I was expecting to see damaged coastal towns and debris strewn along the shores. Upon arriving I asked the hotel bellman which areas of the island had been hardest hit.
He pointed them out on a map and they happened to be on the training route we had planned on taking that morning to loosen up our legs from the trans-Pacific flight. When we arrived near the sites on our bikes, the damage was barely noticeable and it seemed as though life was carrying on as usual in the towns. Malaysia weathered the Tsunami as well as could be expected, as their western coastline is protected by Indonesia, the nation hardest hit in the catastrophe.
The 10-day Tour de Langkawi was essentially a sprinter’s race, with eight of the stages coming down to field sprints, the majority won by Aussie sprinting ace, Graeme Brown.
The two stages that decided the overall classification for the race were the 20 km individual time trial and the 100 km mountain road race up to Genting Highlands, a 30 km climb that is perhaps one of the hardest mountains we will climb all season. These two stages were the major tests for our team as we did not have a pure sprinter that could contest Graeme.
In the time trial the team did well, placing five riders in the first 20. This left us in a good position going into the climb up to Genting Highlands.
Tom Danielson and I were equal leaders going into the mountain stage as we were the top two riders on the team in the time trial stage. He is a pure climber; I am not. And he was in his element, whereas I was not as comfortable on the climb and suffered in the heat.
At the end of the day he had moved up the classification and all but secured himself a position in the first five overall. I moved down slightly in the classification and was just within the first 15 overall. In all, it was a good day for the team and I think our fitness is where we want it to be at this time of the year.
Antonio Cruz, the best sprinter within the team in Malaysia, was able to place himself in the top 10 on a few stages and improved through the race. The fact that the team improved as the race progressed was a good sign as this was the major goal in going to Malaysia. We are building the foundation of our fitness for the coming months of racing.
The 10-day event finished in Kuala Lumpur, the largest and most affluent city in Malaysia. The contrast between the northern communities and Kuala Lumpur is dramatic. Kuala Lumpur is a prospering metropolis with incredible modern architecture and Mercedes rounding every bend.
The evening of the final stage we once again boarded a plane, but this time for Europe where our season will continue. In the next few months the team has some major targets in both the early season Classics in northern Europe and the UCI Pro Tour stage races such as Paris-Nice.
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