Cycling: Racing into the Headwind

"NICE!! Huang, that was an absolutely flawless victory!!

Your performance was outstanding. It's an absolute honor to have you join my team!

Thank you for choosing Bora from among your many options!"

Hearing Denke's praise, Huang Chong replied with a smile:

"Thank you, Boss. I'm also grateful that the team trusted me so quickly, allowing me to go all out and win!"

...

After the Milan-Turin Race, Huang Chong collected his trophy and had no more races for the time being.

That same afternoon, he returned to Milan with the team.

As it was a one-day race, the event organizers didn't provide full meals like the organizers of a week-long stage race would, so there was no need for them to stay long in Turin.

After returning to Milan, Huang Chong attended the team's celebratory banquet and took the next day, a rare opportunity, to rest completely.

As the champion, he naturally got some time off. He and Chen Junyi went sightseeing in Italy's second-largest city and took the opportunity to buy some gifts for family, friends, and his future father-in-law back home.

During the race in South Australia, his schedule had been too tight to explore the local markets. Now that he had to stay in Milan for four or five days with time off, he certainly didn't want to miss the chance.

There's a saying that traveling ten thousand miles is better than reading ten thousand books. Since he was already in Europe and had such a great opportunity to look around outside of racing, he, not being a stick-in-the-mud, decided to take Chen Junyi out to have some fun.

The reason it could be said that *he* was taking *her* out was because, with the help of his system's learning pack, he had already learned Italian.

So when Chen Junyi saw him frantically haggling with the locals in Italian while shopping, she was completely dumbfounded.

'What in the world?'

She knew Huang Chong had made huge progress with his English and had no problem with basic communication with the team.

But she never imagined that from just fiddling with his phone, learning various European languages on an app without taking any actual classes or hiring a tutor, he had managed to pick up basic conversational Italian so quickly.

"You're really surprising me now, Huang Chong. You've even learned Italian?"

After a lap around downtown Milan and buying most of their gifts, the two found a café to get a drink and rest.

As a Professional Cyclist, Huang Chong would never eat a full meal at a regular restaurant, whether at home or abroad.

But having a cup of coffee and a small piece of cake was perfectly fine.

This was something most cyclists did before and after races, no matter which country they were in.

Seeing Chen Junyi's astonishment, Huang Chong remained completely unfazed. 'I'll have to reveal my language abilities sooner or later anyway,' he thought, but for now, he gave a modest reply:

"It wasn't that fast. I just learned a few phrases for haggling. We're in a foreign country, after all!

These foreigners look sharp as a tack. I was honestly afraid they'd see my Asian face, assume I'm a tourist, and deliberately rip me off!

If I can speak a few words of the local language, they definitely won't dare to quote me some outrageous price!"

Hearing Huang Chong's explanation, Chen Junyi nodded in deep agreement, somewhat impressed by his quick-wittedness.

In these developed European countries, although Chinese faces were commonplace and nothing surprising—students, workers, business people, and so on—if you couldn't speak a single word of the local language, you could easily be treated like a lamb to the slaughter!

After their day off sightseeing in Milan, the two returned to the team.

Although Huang Chong wouldn't be participating in this year's Milan-San Remo, he could still join the team for pre-race training.

This race course was characterized by its length; at a full 288 kilometers, it was the longest of all the one-day races on the World Tour.

For a regular amateur cyclist, especially an enthusiast who could only maintain an average speed of around 30 km/h, a nearly 300 km course would basically take from morning till night to ride.

But for a World Tour Cyclist, because this route was relatively flat with very few climbs, they could generally finish in just over six hours.

The team's training, of course, didn't involve riding the entire course from start to finish. The flat sections, in particular, weren't really necessary to train on.

During the early cruising phase of this race, it was impossible to create any real gaps between riders.

Only riders whose base power output was insufficient to finish, or domestiques who had to pull like crazy for their team leaders, would get dropped from the main group early on.

Having watched this race every year in his past life, Huang Chong of course knew that the deciding point was the final climb: the Poggio di Sanremo.

But for a top-tier classics rider like van der Poel, this climb was far too easy.

162m of vertical ascent, 3.6km long, with an average gradient of 3.7%—

With a gradient like that, even if Pogačar rode so hard on the gentle slope that his cleats started smoking, he still wouldn't be able to drop van der Poel.

Of course, after following the team to Poggio Mountain and riding it himself, Huang Chong's confidence naturally took a bit of a hit.

He and Pogačar were currently the same type of rider, especially with their similar height and weight. If someone that strong couldn't drop van der Poel, he definitely didn't stand a chance either.

Unless he was willing to gain weight and transform himself into a classics powerhouse like van der Poel, a man of pure, brute force.