Stage 7: Power analysis of a domestique

Featured athletes: Danny Pate

Provided courtesy of Saris Cycling Group

For Stage 7, we’ll take a close look at Danny Pate’s power data. Danny Pate’s role on Team Garmin for the 2008 Tour is to be a domestique. He is charged with setting pace at the front when necessary, grabbing bottles from the team car, trying to get in a break when appropriate, and generally protecting Team Garmin’s GC riders: Vande Velde and Millar.

David Millar said that the first 40K of the stage was “savage.” He reported that the whole team put themselves on the line and ripped themselves to pieces in the first 40K of the race to help set up David for a mid-race break away attempt.

Taking a look at the first uphill 33K of the race, it is clear that Danny Pate was indeed working hard for the team. He averaged 5.15 watts per kg, the highest average watts-per-kg he held over any portion of the stage. He was afforded a small amount of recovery for the next 13 kilometer descent, but the pressure was on again when David Millar burst free of the peloton with a smaller group of race favorites. Since some of the key players missed the move, the chase was on. With the climb from Saint-Flour to Ussel lasting almost another hour and requiring a 4.62 watts-per-kg power output, it is easy to see how this stage was coined the hardest stage in the Tour so far. As the rest of the race continued between low-powered descents and high-powered climbs, Danny Pate never achieved his original 5.15 watt per-kg-average, showing through the numbers, that indeed, the domestiques in argyle were working hard for their team leaders in the first kilometers of the race.

In the below image, the profile of Stage 7 is devided into sections. We then took Danny Pate’s power file and matched the graph to the profiles sections. The final table gives ride data for each of the sections.

Stage 7 Profile by Section:

Stage 7 PowerAgent Graph for Danny Pate:

Stage 7 Ride Data for Danny Pate: