Tejay van Garderen’s past experiences as a team leader will have taught him plenty about the nuances of his current role as a directeur sportif. The evidence has been in the American’s work this week for EF Education-EasyPost at the Tour Colombia, where Richard Carapaz claimed victory atop the Alto del Vino on stage 5.
The bread and butter of Van Garderen’s new trade is tactical instruction. When Carapaz looked to be offering yellow jersey Rodrigo Contreras (Nu Colombia) a free ride to the top of the Alto del Vino on Saturday, Van Garderen immediately reached for his radio.
“We didn’t have a lot of information and the TV was going in and out,” Van Garderen explained as a line of race traffic snaked slowly past the EF team van beyond the finish. “But at one point, I saw Richard was pulling with the yellow jersey on his wheel and I had to yell at him and say, ‘No, no, no, no.’”
The more subtle part of the game is psychological. Carapaz’s performances on the opening days here in Colombia suggested that he was the favourite for the key stage to the Alto del Vino, but the Olympic champion wasn’t entirely keen to claim the mantle of outright leadership for himself beforehand.
That was partially due to the presence of men like Rigoberto Urán and Esteban Chaves in the EF line-up, but Carapaz must also have been influenced by how his debut season with EF had been so blighted by ill fortune. There was the tacit sense that he didn’t want to lead until he had earned the right to do so. Van Garderen understood where the Ecuadorian was coming from.
“He missed some training with some illness coming into this race, so we started with the idea he would help the team, but then we saw him on stage 2, and we said, ok, he’s very strong,” Van Garderen explained.
“But we also had the sense that he was happy not taking the pressure, so we kind of said, ok, let’s shift the focus onto the other guys. Internally we knew how strong he was, but we didn’t want to say that to anybody, because we wanted to keep him happy, keep him low stress, low pressure.”
“He’s a pretty tranquillo guy, I don’t think he feels external pressure. But I think the fact that we were putting the attention on other guys was making him happy, and in meetings, he started saying, ‘I could do this, I can work for you, I can try this.’ So I think having that mentality helped to loosen him up and really perform today.”
So it proved. EF Education-EasyPost had Carapaz,…
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