Getting dropped by Dani King
What does it take to ride for the world’s best women’s cycling team? Helen Pidd went to Mallorca and tried to keep up with the Olympic gold medallist and her Wiggle High5 team mate.
If you want to feel fat, old and totally out of shape, I thoroughly recommend joining the world’s number one women’s cycling team for a bike ride up a big hill.
I’d been invited to join Wiggle High5 in Mallorca as they prepared for the 2016 season with a winter training camp. My preparation for riding with the best female cyclists on the planet had largely involved eating bacon butties all winter and ending every other ride in the pub. Lean, I was not.
The riders, including Olympic gold medallist Dani King, were under strict instructions not to go full gas so that they could fool us gullible journalists into thinking we could keep up with them. But as we approached Coll de sa Batalla, a 4.8 mile climb up into the Serra de Tramuntana range, I was struggling so much that Wiggle’s race director, Egon van Kessel, ordered me to hold onto the team car with my left hand and hitch a lift. “I wouldn’t have done that in a race,” he told me later, very seriously, “unless you’d had a crash or a mechanical.” It’s harder than it looks, cheating: I hadn’t really accounted for the fact that I would have to keep pedalling, and I was in a stupidly low gear.
A few kilometres on and I’d been dropped so profoundly that Egon signalled for me to stop, got the mechanic to chuck my bike on the roof and I was bussed a few kilometres up the road through the orange groves to meet the team while they stopped for what’s sanitised in cycling as a “natural break”. I got out of the car shame-faced and Leicester’s Lucy Garner, two time junior world champion, said kindly I mustn’t worry about it, it happens to them all. I later felt worse after uploading the ride to Strava and realised my little motorised interlude had resulted in me stealing the Queen of the Mountains (QOM) top prize on a certain uphill segment after averaging an unbelievable 26mph. (Sorry, Karen Popperwell: you are the real queen).
Having to take a leak in bib shorts is a great leveller. You may have won an Olympic medal like King, or the world road championships, like her team mateGiorgia Bronzini, but you still have to suffer the indignity of getting half naked by the roadside just to have a wazz.
First the jersey has to come off, then the braces of the shorts and finally it’s bum to the breeze (no knickers: they chafe). Unless you go down the Marjin de Vriesroute, outlined in Suze Clemitson’s excellent book about women’s cycling, Ride The Revolution. De Vries, a Dutch journalist who turned professional at the age of 30 following a TV experiment called Can You Still Be A Top Athlete In Your Thirties, advocates as follows: pulling one leg of your shorts up as near to your crotch as possible using both hands inside your shorts, one at the front and one at the back, crouch and pee.
Everyone else buggered off and left me after the first two hairpins, so I soloed to the top in a rubbish 35 minutes. It took King just over 21 minutes to zip up the hill, and she later insisted she was only trying for 20 of those. She cursed herself back at the team hotel in Playa del Muro afterwards when she uploaded the ride to Strava and saw she was 11 seconds off taking the QOM title from her former British Cycling team mate, Joanna Rowsell Shand. “If I’d known how close I was I’d have smashed it,” she said.
Despite inducing feelings of immense inadequacy, there are great perks to hanging out with a bunch of pros, as I found out when I had the world’s most underwhelming and lame crash right outside the hotel on day one when I had failed to screw my pedals on properly. I was going, oh, at least ten miles per hour when the left one came off and I keeled over, the left hand side of my body scraping down the Mallorcan tarmac. The nice Wiggle PR lady was concerned about my injuries but delighted I had ruined my brand new Rapha top: it meant I would be forced to wear DHB, Wiggle’s in-house brand, in all the photos.
She sent me to see Christoph, the team “soigneur” — a jack of all trades who is part medic, part masseuse, part kit-man. I was summoned to his room, where he applied something he called “oxygen water” to my road rash. Despite its soothing name, oxygen water appears to be hydrogen peroxide and stung my wounds like billy-oh. “Sorry, but it has to be done,” said Christoph with no hint of remorse, as he scrubbed at what he thought was dirt on my bloody elbow. After a while he concluded it was actually burnt skin: lovely! Then he applied a thick layer of Arnica gel, a herbal remedy, to my badly swollen elbow, with purple bruises just peeping through.
At dinner I wore a short sleeved dress in a pathetic attempt to elicit sympathy from the riders. Annette “Nettie” Edmondson, a chatty Aussie who was 2015 world champion on the track, seemed impressed, and ordered me to ice my elbow and then wrap it in compression bandages. I was amazed she made it to Mallorca at all, having collided with a car on a training ride in Australia just the previous week. She showed me her bruises: they were somewhat more spectacular than mine. She posted a picture of what her body had done to the car when she hit it at speed: it’s amazing she got away so unscathed.
Two days of playing catch-up with the Wiggle girls and my bits were in bits. Wiggle had lent me a bike with a men’s saddle and it had not been kind to my undercarriage: it hurt to pee on the second day. Should I have worn chamois cream, I wondered out loud to über-Aussie Rochelle Gilmore, Wiggle’s team manager and former Commonwealth Games gold medallist, at the evening buffet? “I never bother myself,” she said. “Never have. I wouldn’t even know where to put it.” Dani King was the same. Most of the riders said they only occasionally used it. “I only tend to put it on when I’m doing a multi-day race and am already sore,” said Emma Johannsen, the 12-time Swedish national champion, who on our second day of riding went back down the mountain to check I hadn’t fallen off, after they were waiting so long for me at the summit.
A yoga session by the pool, led by two time Giro D’Italia winner Mara Abbott, made me feel slightly less of a useless lump. It turns out that some world class cyclists can’t touch their toes either (Lucy Garner), or reach one foot from behind when lying on their front (Amy Roberts). Afterwards, Abbott, who despite her incredible palmares has to work in the off season at a farmers’ market as well as a yoga instructor, told off Anna Christian from the Isle of Man for texting during the sun salutations.
It was refreshing to see how normal the girls are: I was delighted to see Bronzini sip a glass of red wine with her dinner later that evening. For a brief moment I thought she was just like me and ordered another glass for myself. Alcohol-induced delusion is a powerful thing.
Feature Source – http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2016/mar/31/getting-dropped-by-dani-king?CMP=share_btn_fb
Credit- Helen Pidd, Guardian.
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