And so the Q & A continues.
Q: Question for Christian: What have you done mentally and psychologically to prepare to transition to the roll of team leader?
CVV: It hasn’t been easy at all. I’ve been kind of in the process with CSC a little bit but a lot of times I just have to take a step back and remember what it was like to be on the other side of the fence. Sometimes I can get really ahead of myself and get excited and a little bit hot headed, but for the most part it’s been great and I’ve worked with a sports psychologist this year and that’s been a big change in my perception of myself and how I view myself going into a race starting with Tour of California on. That’s been the biggest change for me personally. As far as me being the team leader, it’s just been a steady progression throughout the year. I think it all really started to come together in Missouri where I felt completely comfortable in it. Other times I was never really comfortable being the leader of the team and I was always a little bit insecure and scared for all the guys to put their effort into me where I’ve always been the one to put the effort into other leaders. In Missouri was the first time I was one hundred percent committed and comfortable with my roll.
Q: In relation to Armstrong, How old is too old?
JV: Straight science, there is no reason Lance couldn’t be close to as good as he was at 38 as he was at 30. There are things that deteriorate of course, but at the same time for an aerobic athlete your mitochondrial density, which is the primary source of your oxygen delivery that does go down as you get older. Muscle strength can a little bit and obviously certain hormone levels back off a little bit as you get older. The foundation of an aerobic athlete is your ability to deliver oxygen. That’s pretty much the same your whole life to a degree as long as you stay injury free and so on and so forth. The key for an older athlete really is just to be really careful with injuries because they won’t heal up as fast. You can’t over train yourself because if you over train and get tendonitis, it’s going to be two weeks off the bike as opposed to two day off the bike. The second key is that as Christian was talking about as he’s gotten older, although we won’t call him grandpa just yet, consistently year round, not taking a month off. At the same time it’s not hammering yourself year round either. It’s some hard training and some quality rest and just being very consistent about that on a year round basis. I think those are the keys to older athletes. We grew up in a generation where there was this guy, Kent Bostic, does anyone here remember Kent Bostic? Kent Bostic was killing us. That guy was winning Elite National Time Trial championships at 45 years old, so….
Q: [To Jonathan] What inspired you to get back into the sport?
JV: Doug. I was happily living a life away from cycling (laughter). There were a lot of things and the opportunities kept presenting themselves and I felt like if I couldn’t follow up on it, there wasn’t anyone else that was going to. I started out this Junior team and then there were a couple of people that wanted to sponsor the junior team and so I said ok, I’ll do that, and we grew it a little bit more and there were a few more people that said ‘Wow, I really like what you’re doing’ and so it grew a little bit more. Basically it just came down to starting the team a small Junior team to where it is now, I always did it the best that I possibly could and really tried to organize it the best I knew how to and promote it the best I knew how to and because of that it seemed to keep drawing in more and more people. One of the big limiting factors in cycling is that sponsorships are difficult to find, finances are difficult to find and those finances and sponsorships kept coming my way and I felt like if I drop the rope and say ‘I’m just too busy for this and I just need to get back to my normal job’ and not do this team and dropped the rope and let those finances go by the wayside that there wasn’t anyone else that was going to convince these sponsors and these people to get involved in the sport so I just kept doing it. Doug, who is the primary owner of Slipstream Sports now, when he came along, he really had a dream of making a Tour de France team and he asked me to be his partner in realizing that and here we are.
Q: What happened on Stage 16 [in the Tour de France]?
JV: I’ll let Christian answer this one. I have my theory, he has his.
CVV: Well, it was the day after a rest day and I felt horrible all day long and it was in the higher mountains. I never felt good in the high mountains. The higher mountains aren’t as high as here like the Rocky Mountains, but it’s still 6 or 7 thousand feet, but I just didn’t feel so good that day and I felt blocked. Andy Schleck put me on the ropes and they saw that I was getting dropped and I was a big time threat and at that point in time they dropped me on the hill. I limited my losses and I did a decent climb and then on the way down I just took a little bit too much risk through one of the switchbacks and slid out. It wasn’t a horrible crash by any means because switchbacks you’re only going like 12-15 miles and hour so I just slid out and jumped back on my bike. At that point I lost all of my momentum and had a lot of fear going into the rest of the corners on a technical decent and lost a ton of time. It was a horrible day because you never want to lose time on a downhill of all things. It was really frustrating, but the next day was Alpe d’Huez and I was so pissed and I couldn’t wait to show everyone that that wasn’t me and I wasn’t just a fluke and I was going to ride well in the Alpe d’Huez.
JV: Christian had been just a tiny tiny bit on the edge of catching a cold or something two or three days before the rest day, so when we got to the rest day we saw that as an opportunity to really rest so that he wasn’t going to get sick in the race and so we only rode like an hour and half that day. You never really know how it will turn out because hindsight is 20/20, but when your body is turning over at such a high rate doing 5 hours every single day you ride one and a half hours one day, and this is hard to describe because until you get to a certain level of training you don’t feel this, but you literally fill up with fluid and whatever because your metabolic rate is so quick you slow it down to doing only an hour and a half one day and you puff up like a balloon. I think that day with Christian, we should have ridden 3 or 3 ½ hour but at the same time you never know, his cold might have gotten worse the next day, it wouldn’t have given his immune system time to heal and he might have ended up 18th overall instead of 5th. Going into next year it’s clear that if we’ve got a hard stage the next day that when we go into the rest day and we’re going for the race win, we’ve got to ride quite a bit on the rest day
NDN LUV
