Lost in translation.

It’s just the little differences you know? The first time I saw the team kit for “Baby-Dump”, I couldn’t help but laugh. I’m pretty sure an Aussie team called Baby-Dump would struggle to get any respect in the peloton, especially in team colours that seem awkwardly appropriate to the team name.

One of the major races on our calendar was the Olympia’s Tour in the Netherlands. This is one of the races where we can accumulate points for our UCI ranking that will determine how many riders can start at the World Champs in Copenhagen later in the year. The beauty of racing in Holland and a lot of the northern European countries, is that more often than not everything is very well organised.

The best point to illustrate this is the feed zones. In Italy they may have designated feed zones, although this may well just be a random point on the race map. On the course, the feed zone may not actually be marked as such, or it may be in a different spot to the race map, in a terrible spot to feed or not exist at all. In the northern European countries, the feed zone will be marked on the race map and signposted on the course. Further, if you get caught feeding outside of this zone, you are likely to get fined by the race commissaires.

Feeding from the race cars is usually allowed from 50km from the race start to 20km from the race finish. In Italy, this is also where you are allowed to feed from the side of the road, so pick your spot, or spots.

We had a few hotels transfers during this tour. Transferring hotels may sound easy, but there is still quite a lot of work to make it happen smoothly. It starts with packing the vehicles at the start of the day to make sure luggage, bikes, race kits, eskies all end up where they need to go.

Somedays, the soignie would head straight to the hotel, sometimes to the start, the feed and then on to the hotel, sometimes to the hotel and then the finish. If you can imagine all the logical permutations of hotel-start-feed-finish-hotel, there are a few different ways to go about things.

Once you get to the hotel you need to check in and get all the room keys. This might take some convincing, especially when you tell the concierge that you don’t have a credit card for him and the boss will be along later to provide one. Once you have the keys, it’s time to check that the rooms are twins and not doubles, guaranteed to lead to sulky riders if you get that one wrong. Then you get to move the luggage up to the rooms (for around 10 people plus massage table, breakfast box and a whole bunch of random team stuff). Order is important, so you have to put some consideration into room combinations as well. The advantage of this, is that I get to choose the least worst option, or a single if there is one spare, after all I need the space for my massage table.

Once the luggage is upstairs, the room lists get written up, one goes downstairs, generally by the elevator and one on the soignies door. Other information to put on the room list is dinner time, massage times, internet access codes, breakfast time and departure time for the next day. Time to check where the dining room is, internet, laundry facilities and get a map of the local town including supermarket, chemist and perhaps the bike shop. Then it’s time to head off for a grocery shop.

There are 3 main questions the riders ask me on the way to a new hotel. “What time is dinner?”, “Do they have the internet?” and “Is the hotel any good?”.

Obviously, as you work your way through setting up the transfer, most of the answers appear to you. The “is the hotel any good?” question always gets me. I dunno, it has a bed and a shower… I guess I’m too much of a simple man to get too excited about hotels. But it’s never, this is a great hotel, it’s always, this is a crappy hotel. One of the strangest things that has happened to me, was being in a hotel that had hot water but no cold water. Go figure. Kind of a pain when you are trying to fill water bottles from the tap. Back to the question though, I figured I needed a standard to be able to answer in regards the quality of the hotel. So to tick the quality hotel box, I ask myself, “would the podium girls be staying in this hotel?”.