Cycling: Racing into the Headwind

In this sense, Aldag was the team’s lubricant; he needed to ensure the smooth operation of all 29 riders on the roster.

After the UAE Tour, the next World Tour race on the calendar was Italy’s Strade Bianche, held on March 2nd.

This race was extremely important every year and was hailed as the "Sixth Monument" outside of the five major classics.

Furthermore, the number one man in road cycling, Tadej Pogačar, adored this race and had long since announced he would make his season debut on this course, so the hype surrounding it was immense.

The Bora Team’s lineup for this race was built around Daniel Felipe Martínez as its core, with classics rider Leonard Kämna and climber Sergio Higuita, among others, serving as his support riders.

However, after the race, the results were clearly less than ideal.

Their best finisher was Kämna, who only managed to cross the line in 20th place, securing a mere 24 UCI points.

Meanwhile, the designated leader Martínez and Higuita only managed 37th and 34th place, respectively, earning a combined total of just 10 UCI points.

As for the other four riders, after Pogačar launched an early solo attack, they fell more than 30 minutes behind and were mercilessly eliminated by the time cut, failing to even finish the race—

After Strade Bianche came two concurrent week-long stage races: France’s Paris-Nice and Italy’s Double Sea Race.

Both of these were among the seven major week-long stage races.

Aldag naturally sent the team’s two core commanders, Roglič and Sindel, to compete. He also built two of the team’s most elite squads, one centered around each of them.

Huang Chong was, of course, envious of these two leaders. ’Such a deluxe lineup of support riders... If they were working for me, wouldn’t that be fantastic?’

Moreover, these two week-long races were considered the truly important, top-tier events on the World Tour, on a completely different level from the UAE Tour and the Tour of Australia, which were far from the heart of Europe.

The fields for these races were also stacked with top-tier competitors.

Take the week-long Paris-Nice, for example, where Roglič was the Core Commander and Vlasov his lieutenant; other teams were also sending their top riders to compete.

These included Evenepoel from Quick Step Team, Mathias Skjelmose from Trek Team, Jorgenson from Visma Team, a recently recovered Plapp from Jieke Team, Egan Bernal from Ineos Grenadiers Team, and Almeida from UAE Team, to name a few.

As for the Double Sea Race, which featured Sindel as leader and Kämna as his lieutenant, the competition included Visma Team’s undisputed leader Vingegaard; Ayuso and Del Toro from UAE Team; O’Connor from Decathlon Team, who had just lost to Huang Chong at the UAE Tour; Thymen Arensman and Pidcock from Ineos Grenadiers Team; and Enric Mas from Movistar Team, among others.

In short, many of the riders competing in these two week-long races were opponents Huang Chong had personally defeated in the three World Tour events he had participated in thus far.

He, on the other hand, could only remain with the team to rest, recuperate, and participate in routine training.

With Roglič competing, Aldag and Denke had, of course, traveled to France together for the race.

Unfortunately, after the race, Brother Luo’s season debut results were not very good; he only managed to place tenth in the general classification.

Ironically, his support rider, Vlasov, finished in fifth place.

As for the Double Sea Race, which ended on the same day, March 10th, the results were markedly better than Paris-Nice: Sindel and Kämna finished third and eighth in the general classification, respectively.

Overall, such a report card was definitely considered a failure.

Across the two week-long races, a total of 15 days of competition (eight for Paris-Nice and seven for the Double Sea Race), only Vlasov managed to secure a stage win, in Stage 7.

Beyond that, there were no other victories to be had.

For riders, comparison is the thing they fear most.

This was especially true given that since the start of the new season, aside from the Ocean Road Race from which they had to withdraw, Huang Chong and Welsford had delivered a string of victories at the Tour of Australia and the UAE Tour for the Bora Team.

They had started the season as the best-performing World Tour Team.

Yet, when the important races came around, and even after dispatching their strongest, first-string lineup, they completely fell flat.

This left Aldag and Denke feeling rather disgruntled on their return journey.

Even though the team’s core commanders had only just returned for the new season, their performance was still worse than that of a team rookie, which was somewhat inexcusable.

Especially for the Paris-Nice race, the team had placed enormous expectations on Roglič, their big-money signing.

Not only was Pogačar absent from this race, but the schedule also conveniently kept Vingegaard away. Naturally, the team had hoped to clinch the overall championship.

After all, Pogačar had effortlessly won his season debut at Strade Bianche, and Vingegaard had smoothly secured the overall title at the Double Sea Race.

They had poached Roglič from the Visma Team and even built a Grand Tour squad around him. If he couldn’t even win a week-long race that the two "Mars People" weren’t in, how could he ever contend for the Tour de France championship?

And so, on the very night they returned to the team’s headquarters, Denke sought out Aldag and spoke in a low, heavy tone.

"Rolf, we need to make some changes, try something new.

"Compared to the first two stage races—the Tour of Australia and the UAE Tour—our overall results this week in France and Italy have taken a complete nosedive.

"It’s true that in South Australia, a tactical error cost us the overall title, but we still swept up five stage wins. Five!

"And as for the United Arab Emirates, we were the biggest winners there by far, weren’t we?"

Hearing the team owner’s words, Aldag felt a sudden sense of unease.

’Don’t be fooled by Denke calling him ’good brother’ left and right when they were winning; a businessman is always a businessman.’

World Tour teams were commercial entities, after all. Interests always came first.

And the team’s interests were, of course, directly tied to winning championships.

But Aldag had never imagined that this would be the outcome after two incredibly important week-long races.

The team’s whole stable of long-established star riders had been utterly and completely shown up by a complete rookie who had just joined the World Tour!

’What kind of mess was this!’