Feature: Development alumni continue to impress
Slipstream Sports is proud of its commitment to developing the next generation of riders, through the Chipotle-First Solar Continental team and the Slipstream-Craddock junior development team. The fruits of this effort are increasingly visible on the Garmin-Barracuda team, most recently at the Amstel Gold Race where development team alumni Alex Howes and Raymond Kreder rode [...]
Feature: Reconnoitering Flanders
Allan Peiper and Geert Van Bondt took the Classics crew out in Flanders to recon the race changes for this year and sent this report. Today was our second attempt to get an early glimpse of the Tour of Flanders course. We had a recon planned for late December but the weather was too bad [...]
Feature: Danny Summerhill — An Apprentice’s Tour of Colorado
During stage two of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge Danny Summerhill couldn’t believe it when he went over the top of 12,095-foot high Independence pass ahead of Andy Schleck. “I was pleased that I made it with the big guys,” Summerhill recalls. Though 22-year old Summerhill grew up in and lives in Denver and has [...]
Feature: Home team ready for the USA Pro Cycling Challenge
Racing the USA Pro Cycling Challenge in Colorado has special significance for Team Garmin-Cervélo. Boulder, Colorado is where sporting director and president Jonathan Vaughters founded the team in 2003 and where its U.S. headquarters remain today. Back in 2003, Vaughters started out with a dream, a chunk of his personal savings and a humble objective: [...]
Feature: In the team car at Clasica San Sebastian
Moments before the start of the the Basque one-day Clásica San Sebastián, I slip into the team car and ask Garmin-Cervélo director sportif Bingen Fernandez how many times he has done this race. He shakes his head and smiles. “Phewwww…too many!” Fernandez knows this 234-kilometer course from the Atlantic beaches of San Sebastián, over five [...]
Feature: Sean and Olga Fowler – Keeping the Tour boys fed and happy
When American chef Sean Fowler opened his restaurant, El Racó d’Urús, in the Catalan Pyrenees, just southeast of Andorra, he had no idea it would lead to a life on the road with the Garmin-Cervélo pro cycling team. But then in one day in the spring of 2008, Fowler was out riding his bike when [...]
Feature: A Provencal Rest Day With Chipotle
For the Garmin-Cervélo team, the second rest day of the Tour de France starts off with a ride through the Rhône Valley. “Nothing special, just spinning the legs out” Tyler Farrar says of their two-hour ride through vineyards that spread like green blankets around the flanks of the Mount Ventoux, also known as the Giant [...]
Feature: Rest Day #2 with the chiro
Team chiropractor Matt Rabin checks in with us again after the second rest day, with another week of racing to reflect upon. The second rest day certainly comes with a touch more optimism. We are further south, the sun is shining, and Paris seems close, but yet so far. There is far more of a [...]
Feature: A day as a soigneur
While the mechanics keep the Garmin-Cervélo bikes performing, a special group of people keep the riders performing, the soigneurs. This is their story. Two groups of people keep the Garmin-Cervélo riders going at the Tour de France: the mechanics who keep the bikes singing and the soigneurs who keep their bodies fueled and supple. Soigneurs [...]
Feature: Resetting on the rest day
Our chiropractor Matt Rabin took a few minutes out of his busy rest day of realigning various body parts to send us this first week recap and an insight into the happenings of the first Tour rest day. The first rest day could not have come soon enough for what seems like most of the [...]
Gallery: Seven days in yellow
Thor Hushovd rode beyond himself this past week and spent a glorious SEVEN days in yellow. Here is a compilation of those podiums! Stage 8: Aigurande – Super-Besse Sancy Stage 7: Le Mans – Châteauroux Stage 5: Carhaix – Cap Fréhel Stage 3: Olonne-sur-Mer – Redon Stage 6: Dinan – Lisieux Stage 4: Lorient – [...]
Feature: Meet Ramunas the Revelation
A little over two weeks ago Ramunas Navardauskas did not know he would race the Tour de France. After the team won the stage two team time trial, the 23-year old Lithuanian national road champion can now count himself as a stage winner of that very race. Since then, with Thor Hushovd in the yellow [...]
Feature: Cervélo S5 launches a force at Tour de France
On the Wednesday before the Tour de France starts on the Atlantic Coast at France’s Passage du Gois, Dave Zabriskie sauntered out of the Garmin-Cervélo team hotel with Yoda. “I’m taking Yoda out,” he said. DZ had just returned from a ride with his teammates on a brand new Cervélo frame, the S5. The bike, [...]
Race preview: Recon for the Giro Donne
Sharon Laws is part of our team for the Giro Donne, the Grand Tour for women’s racing. She sent this diary of the team’s scouting of the race. The Giro Donne is the most prestigious women’s stage race of the year and runs from the first to the tenth of July taking in many of [...]
Feature: An Irishman in the Golden State, Dan Martin talks Tour of California
Before May 2011 Garmin-Cervélo rider Dan Martin had never been to California. His introduction to the state at this year’s Amgen Tour of California gave him a vivid view of the Golden State’s varied terrain and weather. From a 30-degree Tahoe blizzard to raking Central Valley winds to 75-degree Southern California sunshine, the 24-year old [...]
Feature: Garmin-Cervélo Fans at the Tour of California
Nevada City is a gloriously picturesque Sierra Nevada foothills mining town. And it is here, outside the Garmin-Cervélo bus where the riders are inside having a pre-race meeting ahead of the day’s Tour of California stage, that we take time to chat with a trio of argyle fans. Chris Blancett and Regina Molina are from [...]
Feature: Tour of California Cuisine from the Clif Bar Food Mobile
Walk into a team hotel at the Tour of California at dinnertime and the Garmin-Cervélo table is empty. While the other teams load their plates from buffet tables then gravitate to their assigned seats, to find the Garmin-Cervélo boys you have to go to the parking lot. This year the team brought along the Clif [...]
Feature: A day with new team director Eric Van Lancker
On April 22 we joined Garmin-Cervélo director sportif Eric Van Lancker as he took some of the Garmin-Cervélo team out to pre ride the last 100 kilometers of the 2011 Liège-Bastogne-Liège course through the Belgian Ardennes. Along the way, we talked about his work with the team, and his other job as a Belgian cycling [...]
Castelli’s new road race SpeedSuit showcased in Roubaix victory
A new, revolutionary road racing SpeedSuit in development by Castelli is being showcased by our riders this Classics season. The combination of an aero jersey and time trial skin suit is the result of Castelli’s innovative approach to product development, one that may have aided Johan’s 19 second margin of victory in Paris-Roubaix. Our riders [...]
Feature: The teamwork in clean clothes
The Garmin-Cervélo teamwork that fans saw at Paris-Roubaix was impressive. From Johan Van Summeren taking the directors’ advice to throttle it at the Carrefour de l’Arbe, to Thor Hushovd frustrating Cancellera’s efforts to bridge, the team rode as an orchestrated whole. But that teamwork starts long before the tubulars hit the road, and it involves [...]
Feature: Wrenching the spring Classics
Of all the races Garmin-Cervélo mechanics support during pro cycling’s 10-month racing season, Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders are the most intense. We hung around the team trucks this week to see just what goes into wrenching for the Classics. According to Garmin-Cervélo head mechanic Geoff Brown, Roubaix is the most challenging because the [...]
Feature: Tour of Flanders – A day in the ‘mobile’ wheel pits
To get a look at how Garmin-Cervélo’s riders are supported with water and wheels at the most-challenging event in one-day racing, on April 3 we joined one of five Garmin-Cervélo vehicles supporting the 95th running of the Tour of Flanders. Due to the ragged nature of the Flanders course and the fact that the peloton [...]
Catching up with Emma Pooley
When Jonathan Vaughters introduced 28-year old Garmin-Cervélo rider Emma Pooley at a team presentation earlier this year, he remarked that in 2010 the 28-year won the world time trial championship as well as the British road and TT championships, all while working on her Ph.D. Handed the microphone, Pooley admitted that pro cycling has become [...]
Garmin-Cervélo Girona Training Camp—An Inside View
What happens at a pro team training camp? To find out, we spent seven days with the Garmin-Cervélo team at the camp that ended on February third in Girona, Spain, the town that is also the team’s European headquarters. Long days in the saddle are the backbone of the camp. Yet for riders, the experience [...]
