We Might As Well Win: On the Road to Success with the Mastermind Behind a Record-Setting Eight Tour de France Victories - Hardcover

Bruyneel, Johan; Strickland, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0618879374 ISBN 13: 9780618879373

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008

Synopsis

On the tour and inside the mind of Johan Bruyneel, the winningest team leader in cycling history and the mastermind behind the success of the world’s most celebrated champion, Lance Armstrong

Johan Bruyneel knows what it takes to win. In 1998, this calculating Belgian and former professional cyclist looked a struggling rider and cancer survivor in the eye and said, “Look, if we’re going to ride the Tour, we might as well win.” In that powerful phrase a dynasty was born. With Bruyneel as his team director, Lance Armstrong seized a record seven straight Tour de France victories. In the meantime, Bruyneel innovated the sport of cycling and went on to prove he could win without his superstar -- in 2007 he took the Tour de France title with a young new team and a lot of nerve, sealing his place in sports history forever.
We Might as Well Win takes readers behind the scenes of this amazing nine-year journey through the Alps and the Pyrenees, revealing a radical recipe for winning that readers can adapt from the bike to the boardroom to life. We witness Bruyneel’s near-death crash and comeback as a rider. We are privy to the many ways he and Armstrong outsmarted their opponents. We listen in on the team’s race radios to hear the secret strategies that inspire greatness from a disparate team. We learn how to make sure "not winning" isn’t the same as "losing" as Bruyneel struggles to prove himself -- post-Armstrong -- with new riders, new strategies, and skeptics around every corner.
Whether mounting a difficult climb, or managing a team of thirty riders and forty support staff from a miniature car hurtling along narrow European roads, or looking a future legend in the eye and willing him to believe, Bruyneel is, and has always been, the consummate winner. Readers will relish this inside tour.

About this title

About the Author:

JOHAN BRUYNEEL is a former professional cyclist and was the team director, from 1999 to 2007, of the U.S. Postal Service Pro Cycling Team, which later became the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team. In that role, he won a record eight Tour de France victories. Bruyneel maintains a website at www.johanbruyneel.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Follow Your Heart But Bring Along Your Head

I had, for the first time, hooked my heart and my head together and, in the alchemy of that combination, created something more powerful than the parts.

In 1993 I performed a miracle. Or maybe I was granted a miracle. To this day, I’m not sure which. I know this: it was the first time I rode with each element it takes to win a bike race my body’s physical ability, my mind’s acuity, and the passion of my heart fully integrated and working together seamlessly. I rode for one magic, tragic day with everything I was. After years of proving my mettle first with amateur teams in Belgium, then with smaller pro teams, I was in my second season with the Spanish team ONCE, a top-notch squad that regularly fielded Tour de France contenders and featured champions such as Laurent Jalabert and Alex Zülle (who at the end of the decade would battle Lance for the Tour de France crown). On such an exalted team, my spot in the hierarchy was clear: I was not a champion. I was not a superdomestique, either one of those riders whose career exists only as a sacrifice to the team’s leader. I was something in between. I was a threat to win stages of the Grand Tours (the three major European stage races, including the Tour de France and the tours of Spain and Italy), and some one-day races, but my true value seemed to be as a kind of rolling strategist. I had a knack for reading races and racers, and intuiting what the winning moves would be. On the road, I was like a radar antenna, casting my attention across the entire field until I picked up some useful impression: someone’s pedaling style looked a little ragged that day, or something seemed slightly off in another team’s dynamics maybe two of their riders had gotten into a fight the night before and weren’t going to cooperate. I think my brain spun faster than my legs sometimes. My combination of skills made me a good rider to have in the Grand Tours, where a team survived on savvy as much as on conditioning. When I finished ninth in the Tour of Spain that spring (the race now takes place in the fall), ONCE’s team director guaranteed me a spot on the Tour de France roster. I couldn’t wait to tell my father. As corny as it sounds, he’d always been my biggest fan and not because he didn’t have competition. In Belgium, when a kid starts to win races, he gets adopted by locals, who form a kind of fan club. Mostly it’s an excuse for the neighborhood guys to get together and drink beer at the pub before clambering onto a bus to stand beside the racecourse and scream your name. It’s not so much that you’re a star, but that the guys need an excuse to socialize. Still, mix beer and bike racing and a bunch of guys in Belgium and the loyalties can get pretty intense. Even so, my father had always been, easily, my most ardent supporter. He didn’t care when, at eight or nine, I turned out to be horrible at soccer, which was roughly akin to not being able to hit a ball out of the infield in America. My dad simply kept introducing me to different sports. I was terrible at every sport with a ball except Ping-Pong, which didn’t exactly herald the life I dreamed of. I’d always ridden my bike, of course almost every kid in Europe does, early and often. And it’s not just for sport. We ride to school, to the market, into town on weekends, across town with our friends. Informal races develop from street to street, then to the top of the biggest hill. Eventually, you’re out one day and you see a big, tight group of cyclists fly by the air from the moving pack pulling at your hair. The sound is like a locomotive. Men are shouting at each other and laughing. They’re wearing bright clothes and spinning their legs impossibly fast. It seems more than anything else like a grand adventure, a bunch of grownups playing out beyond the boundaries of the schoolyards and practice fields that games are supposed to be limited to. You’ve just been passed by a local club, out for one of their regular training rides, or maybe one of the informal races they organize among themselves maybe even their club championship. My father belonged to one of those clubs; the talent and fitness levels he and his friends were able to maintain in between their obligations to their careers and families were, naturally, far below the pro ranks. But they were also much more skilled and much faster than the average riders. They raced, hard and often, and at speeds that would frighten a typical weekend warrior; they were as serious about the sport as one could get while still holding down a full-time job. I began tagging along with my dad, and the first emotion I can remember from those timees is a feeling of being at ease. I just felt as if I belonged in that pack. By the time I was thirteen, I was regularly beating the adulllllts when we’d have sprints to the finish of our training rides, or up the hills around our house. I was a natural: my heart rate stayed lower than others’ as we streamed along in a tight, fast pack, and when we rose out of our saddles to sprint, it seemed as if I could spin my legs faster, or push one gear harder, or pedal with my heart jackhammering near its maximum for twice as long as the others. I also had a fluidity on the bike, not only in the motions of my legs and the way I sat, but in how I was able to navigate my handlebar through the bunch, or how I leaned into corners, or swooped around ruts, how I found holes to shoot my front wheel through when it seemed other riders were blocked. That I had some kind of gift for cycling was apparent. What none of us knew was how much of a gift. Was I going to be better than average or was I going to be pro level? And if I was pro level, was I going to be an average pro or something else? All we knew was that suddenly I was riding faster and farther and harder than my father’s friends, and he loved that. He laughed as I attacked out of the groups, and he patted me on the back at the finish of tough rides. I could hear him shouting encouragement from behind as I hammered away at the front of a group, splitting it apart. My father also knew how to encourage me in just the right way when I didn’t do well. In the first real race I competed in the first one with an official number and an entry fee I crashed badly; my father said, simply, Nerves,” making my failure seem not like some insurmountable disaster but a mistake an error I’d be able to easily overcome. Belgium is known, most famously, for its gritty, hard road races in damp, chilly conditions on cobbled streets, and for long, muddy courses that are as much tests of the soul as the body; those are the races that make national heroes out of my countrymen. Cyclists from other countries believe that we Belgians are born to the rain and mud, that it is our birthright to excel when a race is at its worst. A Belgian who wins a mucky race in his home country is held up as a symbol of the nation’s character. So it was sort of funny that, as my father exposed me to different kinds of racing, I turned out to be best suited to track racing. This is a very specialized type of racing that happens on a velodrome, an oval course, usually 333 meters around, that’s made of smooth concrete or wooden planks. The turns are steeply banked picture an elongated toilet bowl so you can pedal to the top of the track then dive down into the turns to hit speeds of 45 mph or more. The bikes have one speed, can’t coast if the rear wheel is turning, the pedals are, too and have no brakes. The frames are very short lengthwise, and the angles between the tubes and the handlebar and seat are steep, so the bike steers incredibly fast, can be whipped here and there at what feels like the speed of thought. Because of the velodrome’s smooth surface, the frames can also be made extremely stiff (a regular bike generally sacrifices some stiffness for the sake of absorbing bumps and vibration from the road), which means that less of your leg power is lost through flex; when you sprint on a track bike, it’s like setting off a cannon. It wasn’t so much the chance to deliver power to the pedals that made me a good track racer exposed to greater competition, I was discovering that, as it turned out, I was not going to be one of the elite of the elite in terms of physical ability but the nature of the racing itself. Because the bikes respond so quickly to input, and because there are no brakes to get in the way of the pack’s movement, track racing rewards snap decisions. I had a knack for divining which of my opponents was going to make a jump from the back of a pack, then finding my way to the outside of the pack so I could latch onto his wheel as he passed and sit behind him safe in the draft until the finish line drew near. I found that I could, better than most of my opponents, keep track of complicated events such as points races, in which points are awarded to riders throughout the race on designated laps; I always somehow knew which riders had scored each lap, and what their totals were, and how many places ahead of them I had to be on the next points lap to end up in the lead. I was not a champion of the mud, but I was a champion. From the time I was thirteen until it was time for me to enter the advanced education program that, in Belgium, is somewhere between a junior college and a four-year university in the U.S., I’d put together a respectable amateur career: some national championships in track events, a few race wins that anyone in Belgium would have known by name, and even, now and then, some attention from European teams looking to recruit. But my father helped keep my feet on the ground, helped me understand that beating someone my age in our home country was a lot different than, say, riding side by side with the Tour de France legends we watched together on TV. A lot of good amateur racers put together the kind of win list I had then settled down and became businessmen, used the connections they’d made with sponsors to get jobs in accounting firms, in marketing, running divisions of industries. The plan my father and I mapped out was that I would keep track racing while I studied for an advanced marketing degree. I thought I was probably good enough to turn pro, but I could also tell that I would never be a top pro. At every big race I participated in, there were usually two or three people faster than me. Multiply those two or three by all the races taking place in Europe in one weekend, and that put me pretty far down the talent list. And, anyway, I was almost as interested in the study of marketing. I liked being able to use my brain to do more than keep track of points. That plan worked pretty well until my last year. Unfortunately, one of the professors at school, for some reason, resented my success outside the classroom. He found out that I’d once snuck out of a seminar two hours early so I could prepare for a race, and he used that incident to call me before a board that was in charge of academics and discipline. I still don’t understand why, but the board ruled that, based on that one infraction, I wasn’t going to be allowed to take my final exams. I would have to spend the summer retaking the semester’s classes and then do the exams in September. There went my summer of racing. It looked like the decision I’d long put off bike racing or marketing had been made for me. I went to my dad and told him what had happened. My father was a successful jewelry businessman and watchmaker, a guy who didn’t take many risks. What do you want to do, Johan?” he asked. I swallowed. I wanted to do everything. I wanted to do it all. I wanted to race bikes, and I wanted the kind of solid career and family my father had built for our family. After a long pause, he said, Johan. What is in your heart?” I don’t want to redo my schooling,” I said. I want to try to be a bike racer now.” Okay,” said my father, the non-risk-taker. Follow your heart. Pedal.” That season I finished second in the Tour of Belgium, which always received a lot of publicity and media coverage in our country, and I won the national time-trial championship. I would get to wear my country’s colors every time I did a time trial through the whole next season. I was, in a tiny way national compared to worldwide a bit of a star. My potential for attracting media coverage the next season got the attention of the director of a new, small road-racing team sponsored by a bank in Licge. He offered me a contract for about seven hundred dollars a month, and I took it. We mostly did local races, and rarely went outside of Belgium. They were not glamorous, nor all that fun for spectators. Even so, my father attended as many as he could, and at the end of each one he’d seen, the watchmaker would carefully help me pull apart the tiny pieces of the race and examine them. My career ticked along from then on as predictably as one of my father’s repairs. In my second year I won a stage at a race called the Tour de l’Avenir, which doesn’t mean much to Americans raised on a steady diet of the Tour de France, but which is well known in Europe. The next year I won two stages in the Tour of Switzerland and got an offer to join Lotto, one of the biggest teams in the world, and then a few seasons later moved to ONCE. My father was giddy, like a kid, not exactly happier than I’d ever seen him, but happy in a way I’d never seen in him. He’d always loved to hang out with me and the teams I’d been on. Though he didn’t always speak the dominant languages the coaches and directors used, he somehow always formed a bond with my team directors, who seemed both amused by and extremely fond of my one-man fan club. Now, at age fifty-three, when he found out I would be riding with ONCE in the Tour de France, I saw that same kind of elation in his face. I had a month and a half to prepare for the Tour, and I planned to spend some of it joining my father on his club rides. One evening, just five weeks before the Tour, my father closed up his shop and slipped out for a late ride with his club. They weren’t racers, but they were one of the strongest recreational clubs in the region, and my father was one of the strongest riders in the club and the most well liked. My father was a major figure in town. Everyone loved him. No matter what my successes, in town I had always been my father’s son. Now, proudly, he’d become the father of Johan Bruyneel. On that ride, less than half a mile from home, he had a heart attack and died. My world stopped. It’s hard to describe, but from the moment my younger sister, Daisy, called and said, Dad had an accident he’s dead,” my world simply stopped moving. I did the things you have to do I drove home and comforted my mother and acted strong while coming apart inside. But the hardest, most confusing and terrifying feeling was that time seemed to no longer be really passing, as if the world were no longer really spinning, as if I had to wade through the thickness of time itself, marshaling an exhausting output of energy just to carry out the tiniest, easiest motions. Ride? I could barely manage to move. But two days after the funeral, I got back on my bike. I knew I had to. The Tour was coming. And I owed my biggest fan a ride.

But I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t move my bike. I’d always trained alone when I needed to train hardest, because I could suffer more on my own. But now, I couldn’t pedal hard enough or fast enough to hurt. When I would go out to ride, I couldn’t will myself to really train. It was as if I were pedaling into some invisible, fluid but somehow immobile, force. I spent more time sitting in my apartment than sitting on my bike. I would look at my legs and wonder what was happening. My chest felt empty yet heavy. Finally, one day, I set my bike deliberately against the wall of my apartment. I knew what I was doing. I was putting ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0618879374
• ISBN 13: 9780618879373
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240