Surviving & Leaving Paris-Nice
March 16, 2008:

Paris-Nice has proven to be the polar opposite to our Tour of California experiences. We have been cursed with bad weather and countless crashes, and some of us have been hit with differing degrees of sickness. It’s quite amazing how quickly fortunes change in sport.

We had Tyler on his was to an incredible ride in the wet prologue only to have the road disappear from under him, then smash him up hard. We had Trent put time into all the climbers in the prologue giving him an amazing opportunity to seize yellow on the first mountain day. He made it through the horrific weather and crosswinds of the first day. He bettered many of the more experienced GC riders, Cadel included, only to have a piece of road furniture appear from nowhere (actually Cadel was the rider whose wheel he was on when it appeared!) at the foot of the final climb on stage 3. Had he not hit this and smashed his bike up and lost minutes, Trent would have most definitely been wearing the yellow jersey of race leader. The wee guy took it like an experienced champion though, and that was something wonderful to see and made me very proud to be his teammate.

I had two crashes. One was 4 km from the finish on the first day, and I managed to get back from it okay. The second was one of the most spectacular crashes of my career happening at high speed on a straight road on stage 2. Though I survived both of these, I knew there something wasn’t right. I was feeling tired and rundown and not the cyclist I had been in the weeks before. The first mountain day proved what I feared. I rode a perfect stage and as usual had been looked after fantastically by the team. But when it came to the definitive moment on the last climb when Gesink went I had absolutely nothing.

That evening I checked my Powertap file and could see that it had all been within me. I was at a loss to explain my poor performance. The next morning I woke up with legs like I’d been weight training and an itchy throat. It was the Mont Ventoux stage and I hoped that maybe I could just take it easy (my two recons of the climb the week previously at least meant I would know it well from the grupetto!) and recover enough to play a part in the stages to come. But by the end of the day I was a broken man. It was clear that I had come down sick. I had a mild fever and my throat had swollen up and coughing had begun.

One of the hardest decisions to make as a pro cyclist is to quit a race. It feels like you’re letting your teammates and the people that support you down, not to mention the sponsors and the people who have put so much belief into you. It sounds really melodramatic and a lot heavier that you’d imagine it to be, but when you’ve spent so much energy and time and emotions with your team, when you leave them, you feel like you’re being selfish and letting them down.

I suppose that is a sign of how close we’ve become as a team as well. I had to give it a lot of thought to come to a decision that was best for me, and therefore, best for the team. Still, leaving the boys feels like I’ve let them down, and leaving my roommate Christian to battle on alone when he has been suffering with blocked sinuses all along didn’t seem fair.

Christian has been the road captain we had always talked about. He is leading by example and showing how his role doesn’t change. The expectations he has of his teammates remains the same even when everything around seems to be conspiring against them. Knowing Christian was there made it easier for me to make the right decision and come home and rest up and be ready for the next races.

Keep supporting the boys. They’re doing everything they can. It’s just sometimes we’re going to take a kicking for reasons outside of our control. But then that is what sport is all about. How we carry ourselves in times of defeat is equally if not more important than how we carry ourselves in victory.