Along the road to Le Tour

Yesterday was the last day of the training camp in the Pyrénées. And this was the final training camp before the Tour the France. David Millar, Christian Vande Velde, Ryder Hesjedal and Danny Pate have done an immense amount of work over the past couple of months.

It all started in April with the pre-Giro team time trial training camp. Then, all four of these guys finished the brutally hard Giro d’Italia in good health and more or less tired. After the Giro, they went up to St. Moritz for an altitude camp and recuperation from the Giro. Last week, the guys trained in La Molina in the beautiful Pyrénées. Yesterday, they rode their bikes back to Girona.

Are they ready for the the Tour the France?

I don’t know what they could have done better. Nobody is injured, all the training was completed and no one is sick. The last ten days will be spent on fine tuning their condition based on their specific characteristics – time trialing, sprinting, endurance work and recuperation too. The riders and coaches know each other well enough to understand what is best for every one.

This week, we will also check all the new equipment, like the Garmins which are adapted to work in combination with the PowerTap. Felt has built lighter bikes for us and Shimano delivered lighter cranks. The boys even lost weight and the power per kg bodyweight is higher than ever for some of them.

But all the other Tour teams will be doing the same sort of intense preparations to be competitive in the most competitive stage race in the world, “Le Tour de France”

Will we be successful?

We’ll know when we arrive in Paris. Another three weeks on the road for the team. Three weeks of the hardest competition. Three weeks full of emotion, missed opportunities, disappointments and, once a while, success. And that makes winning in cycling at this level so beautiful. It’s great to be a part of this team.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 7:58 am and is filed under Features, Garmin Web Site, Home Page and tagged with Adrie van Diemen, Christian Vande Velde, Danny Pate, David Millar, Ryder Hesjedal, Tour de France. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.