The fact that cycling is a team sport isn’t all that obvious to the casual observer. Of course, only one person can cross the finish line first at the end of a race, but the work that his team mates have carried out throughout the race is crucial in affording their team leader the opportunity of victory. A domestique is expected to drop back to the team car and fetch water bottles, to keep tempo at the front of a group, to chase down breakaways and perhaps most importantly of all, to shelter the team leader from the wind.

A rider can save a substantial amount of their energy by drafting behind a team mate instead of riding at the front of the race. This is a fact I’ve only come to fully comprehend recently having ridden in a group for the first time this October with the Orwell Wheelers. The respite you get by being towed along by a group of riders really needs to be experienced to be appreciated.

But what’s in it for the domestique? A friend of mine asked me at the end of the final stage of this year’s Tour de France “sure Cavendish had won five stages already, why didn’t he let yer man win the last one?”. ‘Yer man’ in question was Mark Renshaw, quite possibly the best lead out man on the planet. I thought about a way of explaining it in terms of football. In football, every team has a designated penalty taker. In Ireland’s case, Robbie Keane takes the penalties. Damien Duff’s job on the other hand is merely to set up goalscoring opportunities for Keane to put away. Mark Cavendish letting Mark Renshaw win the final stage of the Tour on the Champs Elysees would be similar to Keane allowing Duff to take a penalty in the World Cup Final. It would just never happen.

However, my friend then went on to argue that if Ireland were already up 5-0, then Keane might let Duff take a penalty. This is where the comparison between cycling and football must end. For a sprinter like Cavendish, apart from a World Championship Road Race with a flat parcourse, winning on the Champs Elysees is the ultimate victory. Cavendish is his team’s designated sprinter and therefore he rightly took the victory on the day. Mark Renshaw knew the role he had to play, and he played it perfectly.

This might seem harsh on the domestiques of cycling, but they are all aware of what is expected of them when they sign for a professional cycling team. I’ve just finished reading Jean-Paul Vespini’s book ‘The Tour is won on the Alpe‘. In it, Armstrong’s directeur sportif Johan Bruyneel had this to say about his domestiques:

“This team only exists for the Tour. Everything we do all season long is in preparation for that event. We know how to build a true Tour team. We don’t just randomly pluck nine racers in June to race three weeks in July. No, we start thinking about the Tour in December. And we pick only racers who fit in. I don’t care how good they are, if I’m not 100% sure that they will sacrifice themselves for the team’s goal, I’m not interested. They have to suppress any personal ambition. If they can’t, we’re not the team for them.“

In my eyes, this attitude really isn’t all that different to that of a football team. Everybody on the team is there to do a job to ensure a victory for the team. Of course individuals will be remembered for individual feats. Most people can recall Olé Gunnar Solskjaer scoring the winning goal for Man United in the 1999 Champion’s League Final or that Italy beat France on penalties in the last World Cup Final in 2006. But can those same people remember who was United’s sub goalie during that treble winning season, or who played right-back for Italy that day? All the players in a squad of footballers have a role to play in the overall success of the team, and yet success is only achieved by individuals scoring goals.

In general the domestiques within a cycling team are expected to do everything they can to ensure victory for their leader, there are occasions where this expectancy can be manipulated and used to surprise an opponent. In other words, a team leader can be employed as a decoy while one of his lesser marked team mates can break up the road and seek a victory for himself. Recent examples of this tactic have been the last two editions of the Tour of Flanders. Tom Boonen, a previous double winner of the race was racing for Quick Step. In both 2009 and 2008 all of Boonen’s main rivals were watching Boonen and making sure to follow any attack he might make, meanwhile his Quick Step team mate Stijn Devolder escaped unmarked and soloed home for the victory.

Something similar also happened in the World Championships Road Race in 2008. The favourites were all marking the Italians Damiano Cunego and Paolo Bettini and their team mate Alessandro Ballan escaped up the road for the biggest victory of his career. In an interview with Stephen Farrand in the December 2008 issue of Cycle Sport, Ballan had this to say about the tactics of Paolo Bettini in that race:

“It was his last ever race but he gave up his chance of victory so we could win and Valverde, Boonen and Freire all fell for it.”

This tactic was also employed by the Spanish team in the Olympic games road race in Beijing. Samuel Sanchez was allowed to breakaway and win gold while his more fancied team mates Carlos Sastre, Alberto Contador, Oscar Freire and Alejandro Valverde all acted as decoys. In another Cycle Sport issue in October 2008, Alasdair Fotheringham suggests that this tactic originated at the Worlds Road Race in 1995. Everybody was marking the formidable Miguel Indurain which allowed his team mate Abraham Olano to break away and land the rainbow jersey. Famously, Olano rode the last two kilometres with a puncture. Fotheringham had this to say about the innovative play by the Spaniards:

“Ever since 1995 when Indurain let Olano go up the road to win in the World Championships, something changed.”

So while there is obviously an emphasis on personal glory in cycling, we must always remember that solo success is rarely possible without the domestiques who are willing to sacrifice themselves to selflessly ensure the victory for another rider.

Next year Kim Kirchen will ride for the Russian Katusha squad having made the move from the Columbia-HTC team of Mark Cavendish. Kirchen’s best year in terms of results was undoubtedly 2008. He finally won the Fléche Wallonne classic having previously come 2nd in 2005, he also took stage wins at the Vuelta al País Vasco and the Tour de Suisse as well as wearing both the green and yellow jerseys at the Tour de France where he also finished in 7th place in the G.C. In an interview with Daily Peloton at the beginning of this year he outlined his goals for the season.

“This year I am going to try to win another classic, then focus on the Tour de France to get the yellow jersey. I also will concentrate on the General Classification because while I am not that close to first spot, I am not that far away based on 2008.”

In 2009, he came up short on all three of those goals in what was an extremely disappointing season for the Luxembourger, not helped by a broken collarbone sustained at the Tour of California. He didn’t finish either of his preferred Ardennes classics, Fléche Wallonne and Liége-Bastogne-Liége. He never came close to the yellow jersey at the Tour, losing almost 2 minutes on the stage 1 time trial in Monaco. He lost a further 4′30 on the first mountain stage to Arcalis, over half an hour on stage 17 to Le Grand-Bornand and a further half an hour on the penultimate stage up Mont Ventoux. He finished the Tour in 57th place almost an hour and a half behind Contador. Compare this with his 6′55 defecit to Carlos Sastre in 2008 and it’s safe to say that Kim Kirchen took a giant step backwards last year.

At 31 years of age, Kirchen is no spring chicken and he took the decision this year to leave the might of Columbia-HTC and move to the relatively new Katusha team. This, I feel, is an excellent move by Kirchen. At Columbia-HTC this year, Kirchen found himself doing plenty of work to set up stage wins for Mark Cavendish. He chased down breakaways and even formed the early part of the Columbia lead out train. Columbia, in my opinion, have evolved from a team that could challenge on all fronts to a team now functioning for the sole purpose of sprint wins for Cavendish and Greipel. There was Hincapie and Burghardt for the cobbles, Kirchen and Lovkvist for the Ardennes classics, Rogers, Martin and Kirchen to challenge for G.C., a vast amount of time trial specialists and then obviously the sprinting talents of Cavendish and Greipel (and let’s not forget Boassan Hagen who’s immense at everything).

But this year, there has been an exodus of established talent. Lovkvist, Boassan Hagen, Hincapie,  Burghardt and Michael Barry have all joined new teams in search of success. No doubt a contributing factor to these riders leaving is the responsibility of having to constantly work as part of a sprint train. Indeed, that’s why Bradley Wiggins left Team Columbia for Garmin at the start of this year. At Columbia-HTC, Kirchen and Lovkvist were the only realistic challengers for the Ardennes classics, although Lovkvist’s only real showing was his 6th place at Fléche Wallonne this year. At Katusha, Kirchen will now find himself surrounded by a team which could do extremely well in April of next year.

At Katusha are Sergei Ivanov, winner of this year’s Amstel Gold, he also finished 5th in Liége and 13th in Fléche Wallonne. Also there is Christian Pfannberger who finished in the top 10 of all three Ardennes races in 2008, although he currently finds himself in the middle of a legal battle regarding doping. Classics speciaist Filippo Pozzato could also prove to be an invaluable team mate for Kirchen should he decide to expand his racing horizons to the Ardennes. Finally, also joining Katyusha next season will be Joaquim Rodriquez who unusually finished 8th in all three Ardennes classics in 2008 and took 2nd at Liége-Bastogne-Liége this year.

Katusha’s other hopes for next year will be sprint victories for Robbie McEwen and Danilo Napolitano. The good news for Kirchen though is that neither are the kind of sprinter that require a long lead out train. Nor, unlike Cavendish, are either of them of sufficient ability to warrant a whole team built around them. Along with Kirchen, the other G.C. hopes within the team will be Joaquim Rodriguez who finished 7th at the Vuelta this year, and Vladimir Karpets, a previous winner of the Tour de Suisse and the young rider’s classification at the Tour de France.

At Katusha, Kim Kirchen should now consider himself to be an out and out leader where he can finally free himself of the shackles of having Cavendish as a team mate. In a feature about Kirchen in the July 2008 issue of Pro Cycling magazine, the journalist from Luxembourg Marcel Gilles said that he’s always likened Kirchen to Moreno Argentin. By the time Argentin was Kirchen’s age he had already won four editions of Liége-Bastogne-Liége, two Fléche Wallonnes, a Tour of Lombardy, a Tour of Flanders and the World Championships. Kirchen has a lot of work to do, but I think he’s finally at a team now where he can start thinking about catching up.

Tom Boonen is a cross between a sprinter and a strong cobbled classics rider. He’s a multiple winner of both major cobbled classics, Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders. He’s also won six stages of the Tour de France along with the green points jersey in the Tour and the rainbow jersey of World Champion. Add to that most of the other cobbled races, Gent-Wevelgem, Grote Scheldeprijs, Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, E3 Prijs Vlaanderen and Dwars door Vlaanderen and he’s won most of the races that a rider with his abilities would be capable of winning.

Notable races that he could win but hasn’t are Milan San Remo, Het Volk and Paris-Tours, although he has finished on the podium in all three. He has now come out and said that he would consider targeting the World Time Trial Championships in Australia next year. Can Boonen really adapt to becoming a time trial specialist in one season and challenge Fabian Cancellara for the World Time Trial crown?

The fact is that Tom Boonen has only ever won one time trial in his professional career. That was a 5km prologue in the 2.3 category Ster Elektrotoer in 2004. He has racked up a few good placings in prologue time trials down through the years, but so have a lot of sprinters. The power output required for a very short prologue tends to suit the abilities of powerful sprinters. Boonen’s main sprint rivals Mark Cavendish, Thor Hushovd and Tyler Farrar have all won prologue time trials. It is a massive leap to go from being a sprinter who can churn out a good prologue to a full-blown time trial specialist who can challenge over distances of 40km or more.

Although it must be said that when there is a long time trial during a stage race, sprinters tend to treat these stages as a rest day. They will just go through the motions, not over exerting themselves, conserving energy for when the next bunch sprint comes along. Perhaps Tom Boonen has never really given 100% in a long time trial before. His best ever result in a full length time trial came this year in the Vuelta a Espana, where he finished 11th in a 30km test against the clock. Not exactly sensational, but certainly an improvement on his previous efforts.

Perhaps Tom Boonen has taken a look at his sprinting rivals, most of all the two young phenoms Cavendish and Farrar, and thought to himself that he might never win another Tour de France stage or green jersey ever again. He might feel that he needs to shift his focus from sprinting to time trialling in order to keep his focus throughout the racing season. The cobbled classics are all done and dusted by April, the only races Boonen is likely to win after this are stages in minor stage races, that may not be enough to feed the ego of Belgium’s greatest sports star.

Bradley Wiggins proved this year that changing one’s physique and specialty is entirely possible with training, diet and preparation. But is it possible for Tom Boonen to become a time trial specialist whilst maintaining his dominance on the cobbles? Fabian Cancellara is the living answer to that question. Cancellara is amongst the perennial challengers on the cobbles and has also dominated the World Time Trial Championships in recent years. He even won both the World Time Trial and Paris-Roubaix in the same year back in 2006, showing that specialising in both disciplines is quite feasible. The two riders are also quite similar physically, there’s only six months difference between them in terms of age, according to their official websites they both weigh 80kg however Boonen is slightly taller at 6′ 4″ compared to Cancellara at 6′ 1″.

The general consensus is that next year’s World Road Race Championship in Geelong is going to be one for the sprinters. I can’t help but wonder why Boonen isn’t channeling his efforts towards this rather than the time trial. How can he think he’ll be capable of beating Cancellara when the rest of the world’s time trial specialists, who’ve been focusing on time trials their entire careers, can’t even get close to him? I don’t think any amount of time in the wind tunnel over the winter is going to help Boonen reach this most lofty of goals, he should stick to what he knows, cobbles and sprints.