Tour de France Stage 21: Carlos Sastre Wins Yellow, Others Get To Keep Their Jobs

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The final podium for the 2008 Tour de France (l-r):
Cadel Evans in second, Carlos Sastre in first,
and Bernhard Kohl in third.
Photo: Graham Watson

Amateur racers and cycling enthusiasts should find it very encouraging to watch Bernhard Kohl standing on the final podium of the Tour de France as King of the Mountains and third place finisher overall. He came to the Tour de France as somewhat of an unknown rider. He had tasted success as a racer, but was not on anyone’s list as a potential podium finisher or a contender for the King of the Mountains competition. His performance at the 2008 Tour de France proves that your previous performances aren’t what define you as a racer, and should never place limitations on what you consider to be possible. And on top of the rewards he’s already received for his Tour de France performance this year, he’ll also see an increase in his market value as a professional athlete.

Besides being the most grueling race in professional cycling, the Tour de France is also a rolling job fair. It’s one of the rarely seen or talked about sides of the Tour, but it’s during these three weeks that a lot of teams make the deals that move riders from one squad to another for next year. This sometimes has an impact on the race itself, because one impressive performance can be enough to get you a better job, on a better team, at a higher salary.

Winning a stage of the Tour de France guarantees that you’ll have a job next year, and having a Tour stage win on your resume can also have the long-term effect of keeping you on a team even if you have a bad season in the future. As the Tour de France progressed, a handful of riders were fighting for the various jersey competitions, and a larger group of riders were fighting for their jobs.

Some of the negotiations actually happen inside the race caravan. The discussions are short, but happen as riders move through the cars and pause to talk to the team directors. Talks continue before the stages in the Tour de France village where the riders gather before starting each day of racing, and afterwards in the hotels. And since teams have limited budgets to pay riders’ salaries, it’s important for riders who don’t already have a secure contract for 2009 to make a deal before the race ends. If you wait too long, the team you’re talking to may not have the money to pay you a higher salary.

You don’t have to win a stage to get a job, either. There are many roles to play on a pro cycling team, and a strong performance in a supporting role is often enough to peak a team’s interest in you. Take John Lee-Augustyn. His team’s main sponsor, Barloworld, announced during the Tour de France that they are withdrawing from the sport as the result of a positive doping test from one of the team’s riders. Lee-Augustyn suddenly found himself without a stable future and did the best thing he possibly could to secure a contract. He upped his game in the Alps, worked hard to ride in the front group on the very hard Stage 16, and attacked the lead group to reach the high-altitude summit of the Col de la Bonnette-Restefond first. Team directors want to see what a rider can do at the hardest moments of the biggest races, and John Lee-Augustyn’s effort on the Bonnette may well have earned him a contract with a new team for 2009 (as long as they overlook the fact he crashed off the side of the mountain a few kilometers later on the descent…). And throughout the rest of the peloton, team directors are always looking at the riders who are doing their jobs well, whether it’s riding tempo on the front of the field, chasing down breakaways, or getting bottles. At some level, every moment of the race is a performance evaluation.

And it’s not just riders who negotiate deals during the Tour de France. Race results here also have a big impact on team sponsorships. Barloworld is out, and so is Saunier Duval. Scott Bicycles announced they’d take over as primary sponsor of the former Saunier Duval – Scott team, and then American Beef stepped in and decided they’d come on as a primary sponsor of that team as well. The teams’ infrastructures typically exist independently of the sponsor. For instance, the Garmin-Chipotle team is run by Slipstream Sports, and Team Columbia is run by Highroad Sports. But without the financial backing of a big-time sponsor, the companies that run the teams don’t have the money to pay the riders’ salaries, support them with a full staff, and get them to the races. If you’re looking for sponsors, the team’s performance in the biggest showcase in the sport is a huge factor in convincing someone to write a very big check to sponsor the team. It’s a lot harder to find a sponsor when a team is struggling, because media exposure – positive media exposure, that is - is the primary reason for a company to sponsor a cycling team.

This was part of the reason that some teams – like the Quickstep team - at the Tour de France were getting desperate in the final week of the event. While Quickstep is not threatening to pull its sponsorship, the team had not won a single stage or factored into any of the jersey competitions going into the final three days of racing. Quickstep put all their men on the front partway through Stage 18 to pull back an early breakaway and get their man Carlos Barredo off the front in a late-stage break. He, unfortunately, was accompanied by a much stronger sprinter, Marcus Burghardt from Team Columbia, and finished second on the stage. With Sylvain Chavanel winning Stage 19 and the time trial on Stage 20, that left only today for Quickstep to redeem themselves and walk away from the 2008 Tour de France with some success. They again put their men on the front of the peloton, this time with just two kilometers remaining, and Gert Steegemans finally delivered the stage win the team has been searching for since the race began three weeks ago.  

What’s next for the 145 men who just crossed the final finish line at the Tour de France? Well, unlike the Superbowl or the World Series, the biggest event in cycling does not mark the end of the season. Many of the riders will go on to compete in the Olympics just two weeks from now, and some will compete again as soon as next week. In fact, the professional cycling season doesn’t end until October, and there’s even one more three-week Grand Tour, the Tour of Spain in September. For the pros, the Tour de France is a very special race, but at some level it is also just another event to mark off the calendar.

And in addition to of course congratulating Carlos Sastre for winning the 2008 Tour de France and Garmin-Chipotle’s Christian Vande Velde for exceeding expectations and finishing fifth overall, I want to make special mention of his teammates Will Frischkorn and Danny Pate. These two Colorado residents had never ridden a three-week Grand Tour before starting the Tour de France three weeks ago. Frischkorn was in the day-long breakaway on Stage 3 and finished second. Pate rode in the long winning breakaway on the way to Hautacam and finished third atop one of the hardest climbs in the race. They did much more than just survive to finish, and hopefully this was just the first of several Tour de France participations for both men.

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