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Follow Michael Barry of Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team as he chronicles the 2005 racing season.
Rolling Toward the Cobblestones
Date: February 24, 2005
The racing season is now well underway, we are settled in our European homes, and are ready to tackle the next month of intense racing in the Classics in Belgium and France.
In the past month, nearly the entire team has pinned on a set of numbers and raced somewhere in the world. In the second week of February teams were racing both in Algarve, in the south of Portugal, and in Andalusia in the south of Spain.
My wife DeDe and I left Girona, Spain, our overseas home, last October, so when we arrived back here at the beginning of February we had a little organizing to do. The first days back here were busy ones, as we had to get our lives on track in Europe while also dealing with jetlag. For the first week, we were up at five in the morning and raring to go. If it had been light outdoors I probably would have got out on my bike.
The Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team has already started showing the jersey at the front of the peloton and in the results. The Classics team, led by George Hincapie, was racing last week in the Vuelta Andalusia and they were well represented in the breakaways, over the climbs and in the field sprints.
Max Van Heeswijk came a very close second to Italian Alessandro Petacchi. - The finish was so close, in fact, that they had to enlarge the photo-finish image to life-size -- and still it was hard to tell who had won the race. In the end they gave to Petacchi as he had a millimeter on Max.
In Portugal at the Tour of Algarve, the team also performed well, as Chechu Rubiera -- one of the team’s ace climbers who will be at Lance’s side during the Tour de France -- was second on a stage and third in the overall classification. The other riders on the team were consistently in the top 10 on the stages.
This weekend the Classics team will face the first big objectives of the year in Het Volk and Kurne-Brussels-Kurne. Both races are held in Belgium over cobbled roads and each event draws massive crowds.
Belgium is cycling’s capital in the early months of the year and cyclists are icons in their culture. The climbs we will race over hold the history of the sport; on these climbs riders were defeated while others became heroes.
Not only are the courses tough due to the cobbles, they are also sinuous and undulating. When 200 riders are thundering over a cobbled road 10 feet wide, each jockeying toward the front, it provides for some exciting, and dangerous, racing.
The courses are not the only challenge, either. Weather is another element we will have to deal with in the north. The last couple of weeks, we have been battling the wind and training in the cold in Girona, which will hopefully acclimate us a little to the Belgian weather.
I have been training with George and I can say there is excitement and motivation in our training sessions due to the imminence of the coming Classics. In the center of Girona there is a cobbled climb, much like the climbs we’ll be racing up in Belgium in the coming weeks, and we have been finishing all of our training sessions up the hill to get ready. We sprint up the hill, around the cathedral, through the crowds of tourists walking around the old town, and punch the pedals one last time as we near the summit before dropping back down into town to our apartments.
The team is ready. Bring on the rain, the cold, the mud, and the cobbles. It all adds fuel to the fire.
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