On the face of it, the life of a sports director is a pretty cushty one.
It’s stressful and long hours, of course, but it’s also an all expenses paid-for trip around Europe and sometimes further away, driving cars up and down mountains and through tiny villages, managing a team as you try to win bike races and develop new talents.
There is another side to it, though, a side that involves very few nights in your own home, and sometimes even having to forgo your bed in a hotel during a race, as happened to DSM’s Matt Winston at the Tour de France.
“One night we had a rider who was a little bit ill so we split him up, away from the rest of the group,” says Winston, who has been a DS with the Dutch team since 2019.
“We had no more rooms and the hotel was fully booked so I said that the rider could go in my room. We had three coaches at the Tour – myself, Phil West and Pim Ligthart – and we were rotating who was sharing rooms. Because I gave up my room, I slept on the mattress in the floor in the same room as the other two coaches.
“It was literally like a sleepover, one night in the middle of the Tour, three of us having a laugh, all having a beer in bed, talking away until 1am, talking s**t. I think we were the only WorldTour team to do that! But we had a really good laugh and it’s stuff like that you remember, the fun parts and trying to have a bit of fun. It’s serious most of the day but when we get those moments it’s nice to enjoy it.”
Winston is currently directing at the Vuelta a España, his fourth consecutive Grand Tour, and has spent four weeks at home in the last four months, offering him very little time to enjoy watching his beloved Lancashire Cricket Club. In between January and the Giro, however, he was at home for even less time – just two weeks.
All that time on the road means that it’s little wonder that from time to time Winston needs to unwind, like he does at the end of every Grand Tour. “On the last stage of the Giro we had a cool box full of Italian beer and I tweeted about it,” he says. “I have a friend who runs a beer company and he said I needed to fix it and have better beer. His beers cost about £6 a can so I said I’d keep him to it.
“[Because of Brexit red-tape] three of them came out to the Champs-Élysées so they could come with the legal customs allowance. I think they flew with 60 beers, maybe even more, and we had a nice evening on the Champs-Élysées. Romain [Bardet, who finished sixth overall] drank two 8% IPAs so that was…