Cycling: Racing into the Headwind

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Ever since joining the Bora Team, Rolf Aldag had only one mission: to help the team build a roster of cyclists capable of contending for a Grand Tour championship.

He knew the team’s owner, Ralph Denke, was highly ambitious. Even though the team was still young, its owner’s drive to conquer the Grand Tours of road cycling had never faltered.

However, in the years after Sagan, the team’s results had been less than ideal. That was why he had been invited to join, tasked with managing strategic planning and the cyclists.

Ralph Denke gave him a great deal of authority. Matters like constructing the team’s roster and planning race tactics were almost entirely handled by Aldag himself.

His management style was known for promoting youth development and building a pipeline of talent, so an exceptionally gifted young cyclist like Huang Chong was exactly the type of rider he was looking for.

At the same time, the team also had the young local rider, Florian Lipowitz, who had been signed mid-season last year. Adding to that the recent signing of star cyclist Roglič, their team, at least on paper, was indeed transitioning from the sprint-focused squad of the Sagan era toward a Grand Tour team built around a GC Cyclist.

Of course, only someone with an omniscient perspective, like Huang Chong, would know that to win a Grand Tour in this day and age, having an outstanding Core Commander was actually more important than having a perfectly well-rounded team of domestiques.

Take the Quick Step Team, for example. Due to their very limited budget, their lineup of domestiques was unreliable.

With the exception of Landa, the performance of their other domestiques in supporting Evenepoel during Grand Tours was always nothing short of disastrous.

But simply because they had the extraordinarily talented Evenepoel, the Quick Step Team was still considered a top contender for Grand Tour titles.

The betting odds also placed them far ahead of the Bora Team, which was built around Roglič as its Core Commander.

"Today’s physical went very smoothly. In a way, by passing the health assessment, you’re already 80% of the way through the door to the Bora Team.

For tomorrow’s performance test, as long as you perform at your normal level, getting past the team’s minimum standard with your current fitness will be no problem at all!

Remember to get a good rest tonight. Drink your milk before you brush your teeth, and try to stay calm."

After Chen Junyi and Huang Chong finished dinner and returned to the hotel, she brought him some milk she’d bought from a local supermarket before bed, offering a few words of comfort as well.

Huang Chong nodded. He actually felt fine about the pre-season physical and performance tests; he wasn’t nervous at all.

His only real frustration was that he couldn’t get used to German food. Plus, since they were still staying in a hotel, there was nowhere to cook.

There were Chinese restaurants around, but they were ridiculously far from the team’s headquarters.

For the time being, they couldn’t justify traveling that far just for a Chinese meal.

After a few days of it, Huang Chong had completely lost his appetite for local German restaurants.

He was basically surviving on bread, fried potatoes, milk, nuts, and pan-fried steak—basic foods that were hard to mess up.

But after tomorrow’s performance test, the final results would be in.

If he successfully joined the team, he and Chen Junyi would rent an apartment near the headquarters, and life could return to normal.

Besides being his translator, Chen Junyi also handled his day-to-day life, like buying groceries and making him Chinese-style nutritional meals.

For this, Huang Chong felt he had been incredibly lucky.

While in Birmingham, Chen Junyi had not only majored in sports nutrition and knew what a Road Cyclist should eat, but she had also been driven to despair by European cuisine long before Huang Chong was. As a result, she had already honed her cooking skills.

While training in Snow Area Ali, there were several times when Huang Chong couldn’t make it back to the city, and he only avoided going hungry thanks to the ingredients Chen Junyi had prepared in advance.

And Chen Junyi’s cooking was actually quite good. She knew the basics, like how to remove gamey flavors from meat and how to make stews.

While she couldn’t compare to a professional Chinese chef, her cooking was at least at the level of good home-style food.

It was especially impressive that she could make nutritional meals—which had to be simple and clean—palatable.

The next day, after breakfast, Huang Chong returned to the team headquarters to prepare for his performance test.

Aldag had already given him the chart for the Road Cyclist test protocol yesterday. There were quite a few items on it.

The three main sections—power output, exercise heart rate, and max oxygen uptake—were, of course, essential.

And within these three sections, there were many smaller, specific tests.

Of course, as long as Huang Chong followed their instructions and rode for the specified durations, much of the data would be collected simultaneously. It wasn’t as if every single test had to be performed separately.

The first test was for power output on a stationary trainer.

Huang Chong trained on these things year-round, so he was naturally very familiar with them.

However, according to the Bora Team’s data chart, the power test alone was further broken down into:

AP (Average Power)

NP (Normalized Power)

CP (Critical Power)

FTP Power (Functional Threshold Power: average power output over one hour)

And to determine whether Huang Chong was giving his all during the test, they could use the IF (Intensity Factor).

This value is calculated by dividing Normalized Power (NP) by Functional Threshold Power (FTP) and represents the intensity of a ride relative to an individual’s FTP.