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Looking back and looking ahead - Part I
It’s been an interesting end of season for American pro team Garmin-Chipotle and its team manager Jonathan Vaughters.
The Garmin squad saw some impressive late-season performances by Dave Zabriskie, who finished third at the world time trial championship, and young riders Tyler Farrar and Steven Cozza.
Farrar wrapped up his season by finishing second in field sprints behind Mark Cavendish, at the Tour of Missouri, and Tom Boonen at Franco Belge, where the American also wore the leader’s jersey for one stage. Farrar also finished fifth at Paris-Tours — taking the field sprint ahead of Robbie McEwen, Erik Zabel and Boonen — as well as nabbed a stage win at Tour Poitou-Charentes and won a kermesse in Zwevezele, Belgium.
Cozza finished 23rd at his first world road championship, 1:40 behind winner Alessandro Ballan but in the same group as Olympic gold medalist Samuel Sanchez. On October 16, Cozza took 12th in the field sprint at the Giro del Piemonte, won by Italian Daniele Bennati.
Away from the races, Vaughters signed Svein Tuft and Bradley Wiggins for next year and announced that the team will be a part of the 2009 UCI ProTour. Tuft and Wiggins will join the rest of the squad for its second annual pre-season camp in Boulder, Colorado, where riders, staff and sponsors will come together to discuss the 2009 season and present next year’s team to the media.
On the other hand, Vaughters also learned in September that young protégé Taylor Phinney left the Slipstream program to work along with Lance Armstrong and Axel Merckx at the newly formed Trek under-23 development team. And as the leader of an anti-doping squad, Vaughters was also forced to speak up for the sport when retroactive blood tests showed that Tour de France stars Stefan Schumacher and Bernhard Kohl had doped during this year’s race.
Though he’s been busy finalizing contracts and schedules, Vaughters said he’s been staying in shape by riding and weightlifting, trying to get in shape for the downhill skiing that is just an hour’s drive from his home in Denver.
“I learned to ski as a kid,” Vaughters told VeloNews at the outset of a telephone interview. “I’m not that good, but I like it, I think it’s fun. I try to do as much of it as I can.”
VeloNews: With everything that has been going on between the grand tour race organizers and the UCI, what led to the decision to apply to the ProTour? I know you’ve spoken about the team going ProTour in 2009 for several years, but there has been so much confusion over the past season in terms of what the ProTour might look like next year. You obviously applied to become a ProTour team in the midst of all the chaos, before the UCI and ASO mended their relationship.
Jonathan Vaughters: Basically we wanted to try to take on more young riders, and as a pro continental team you are limited to 25 riders on the roster. We wanted to try to run 27 or 28 guys, just to give a few more young guys a chance, and also in the spirit of clean cycling, to rotate the guys a bit more so they are not having to race super tired all the time. That was major consideration for us.
VN: Doesn’t being in the ProTour mean you will have to do more races?
JV: Well if you look at our schedule, this year we had to do X, Y and Z races to get ready for the Tour and the classics. But a race like the Tour de Suisse is a great opportunity for a rider like Dan Martin, to go in and try to win. He is a young rider who might not be doing the Tour de France, but he can really focus on doing the Tour de Suisse full speed.
Those opportunities weren’t there [in 2008]. He was having to do races like Route du Sud, which is great, he won Route du Sud, but for a rider of his caliber that wasn’t overly challenging. So doing the ProTour gives us the option of doing races like the Dauphiné, Romandie, Tour de Suisse, to give our talented young guys a shot at some races that will be at their level, yet challenge them appropriately and not be sort of lower level than what will eventually get them ready for the three-week stage races.
VN: Doesn’t entry in the ProTour mean you’ll be sending teams to Russia, and to China?
JV: There is one five-day stage race in Russia, that they haven’t even determined the dates for, but the ProTour is essentially pretty traditional races — the Tour of Flanders, the Dauphiné, Tour of Romandie, Tour de Suisse, the Tour of Poland, the Eneco Tour, which is the old Tour of Holland, and the Tour of Germany — which was a pretty big consideration considering that Garmin has a big commercial interest in Germany. So us doing the Tour of Germany was something that Garmin really wanted us to do.
VN: What are your thoughts about the Tour of Germany’s cancellation due to the doping positives of Gerolsteiner riders Stefan Schumacher and Bernhard Kohl?
JV: I think it’s very sad that sponsors react to a real fight against doping by shying away. If fans and sponsors want real clean up, it isn’t going to be pretty or nice looking, but it will work. I just think more patience on the sponsor's part would have been good in this situation. Anyhow, the ProTour is that set of races that we wanted to get into, and the roadblock was with the UCI and ASO not getting along. Us taking out a ProTour license, we worried that maybe we wouldn’t get a Tour de France invite if we did that. But I just called up ASO and said ‘if we do this, would this affect our chances of getting a Tour invite?’ And they said, no, absolutely not, we love your team, and we love the fact that you guys are steering clear of all the doping controversies, and we want you back 2009 and 2010 and beyond. If you want to have a ProTour license, that’s fine by us. As soon as we got the nod from ASO we decided it was a good decision.
VN: Can you put into a dollar amount what making the jump to ProTour adds to the team budget for next year?
JV: It’s fairly nominal, honestly. I would say it adds about a two-percent increase. We were already operating as a ProTour team. All our riders were riding at least at a ProTour minimum wage [€24,000 per year for a neo-pro, -ed] and we were already escrowing the proper amounts. We operated pretty much as a ProTour team this year. The increase in cost isn’t really there. The difference is we won’t be able to do some races that we have done in the past. For instance, we may not be able to do the Tour of Utah, which I know the guys would like to do, but instead we’ll be at the Tour of Poland and the Eneco Tour. But if you look at it from a budget standpoint, it adds about a two-percent increase and we’ll just be racing ProTour events as opposed to selecting other, smaller events. But from a budget standpoint, that doesn’t affect us — 10 days of racing is 10 days of racing.
VN: I would imagine that for you personally, not having to try to secure race invitations should allow you to apply your energy to other things — that’s got to be a relief.
JV: Yeah, exactly. Doug [Ellis] called me Willy Loman last year, I was traveling around, selling our team all winter. This year I am going to the Tour de France presentation and the Giro presentation, and we’ll have somebody go to the Vuelta presentation, and hopefully we will do all those races. But it is nice to not have to be pushing the Dauphiné for a wildcard, and they’re not able to do it because they have budgetary restrictions. The Dauphiné is a great race, and they wanted us in the race this year, but they could only take 18 ProTour teams, because from a budgetary stance that was all they could take. Well now we will be one of the 18 ProTour teams — or maybe even 16 teams, I’ve heard they might limit it to 16 teams next year.
VN: When you say hopefully the team will do the Tour and the Giro, that is because those races are not part of the ProTour?
JV: Those races still maintain their independence as far as which teams they invite and don’t invite. I don’t have any reason to think that we wouldn’t be invited. We already have agreements with both of those organizations, but technically are they required to invite us because of a ProTour thing? No, they are not ProTour races. But yes, de facto, we will be racing the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France, of course.
VN: What can you tell us about the team’s 2009 roster? We’ve seen a few names come up, primarily Bradley Wiggins and Svein Tuft, but nothing official has been announced.
JV: Yeah, I can confirm Svein and Brad, although Brad is still under contract with High Road, so I want to respect the conditions of that contract. But Brad will be able to represent the Garmin brand in 2009.
VN: Didn’t you and Svein ride together as teammates at Prime Alliance in 2003?
JV: We did. It was my last year of racing. He was my roommate quite a bit, actually. I tired to get him on team for this year. After his 2007 season I wanted him on the team for 2008. I’d been talking to him and I was going to give him a definitive offer [for 2008] as early as Philly Week, but he said, ‘sorry, I’ve already signed with Symmetrics. I thought, ‘geez, it’s only June,’ but he really wanted to maintain his loyalty to that organization. And that is actually one of the reasons I like Svein so much. He is a very trustworthy person. And he is one of guys we would not have been able to pick up if we had not gone ProTour. And as soon as I knew Symmetrics was sort of gone, I started talking with Svein again, and he wanted to come to the team, and we pretty much agreed on it, but I told him the only thing is that I need to make sure we’re a ProTour team, otherwise I won’t have a slot for you. But as soon as we had a hint that we would be ProTour, I immediately sent him a contract.
VN: So when did you find out that the team was officially ProTour for next year?
JV: We still haven’t finished the actual audit process, so in theory it’s not ink-dried official, but the UCI expressed its intention for us to be a ProTour team in early October. But we had really good indications that it was going to work out, so I went out on a limb and went ahead and signed Svein. It was a lucky risk to take, considering he took second at the world championships about a week after we signed him.
VN: He took seventh in the time trial in Beijing and silver at worlds with a flat tire and finishing on his road bike. Was that a surprise to you, or more a case of him finally having a chance to show the world what he can do?
JV: The worlds course was obviously a lot better for Svein than the Beijing course was. But he was right in the mix in Beijing, too, I mean, you pull 20 seconds off his time and he would have medaled. So he was right in there. But that’s the way those big one-day time trials go, you look at the time gaps and they are super tight, and it’s sort of like there are 10 guys that could have been on the podium. Anyways, for me Svein has always had that ability. I think he’s only decided in the last two years that he really wanted to work — to make cycling a full-time thing and not go and chop wood, and do ultimate fighting, and be a train hobo and whatever else he was doing. He recently decided, okay, I’m going to try to be a bike racer all the time. And as soon as he decided that, he instantly became one of the biggest talents out there. And that was plain as day at Prime Alliance. He was one of the strongest guys on the team, and he was easily 20 pounds overweight. He was kind of this big doughy kid from Canada that could ride really fast. You could see that as soon as he focused his mind, and really wanted it, he would be really fast.
VN: From what I understand he’s also been staunchly against doping since he first came to the sport — even walking away from the sport for a while after the 2003 season because he was disgusted with all the doping.
JV: Yeah, he’s always had that perspective. Always.
VN: Is it a coincidence that the team has so much time trial strength? You’ve got Brad Wiggins, David Millar, Svein Tuft, Dave Zabriskie and Christian Vande Velde — maybe five of the top 20 time trialists in the sport.
JV: Yeah, I know, we’re only missing Cancellara, right? Well we’ve got to add guys to the team who fit in from a personality standpoint, that I am comfortable with pulling on the team and that will fit in with our culture, and our ethos. I think we have a fairly good mix, except that our sprinters and climbers are still young and unproven, whereas our time trialists tend to be a little older and more mature, and at the top of their game. But at the end of the day, the way I built the team, we can win at time trialing immediately, and then over the next three or four years we can develop our sprinters and climbers into riders that can win.
Right now you have Mark Cavendish, who is such a superior sprinter, to hire three or four sprinters, what are you hiring? You’re hiring third and fourth, whereas, a rider like Tyler Farrar is a really good sprinter, also a really good classics rider and also a really good time trialist, he’s more like a Thor Hushovd, and that’s a little bit more interesting. Because as we’ve seen a few times this year, Tyler can ride a top-three, top-five prologue and win a few time bonuses and take the leader’s jersey for a few days, as opposed to trying to go head to head with Cavendish, which is pretty tough.
Climbing is tricky. I have just preferred to stay with younger, up-and-coming climbers and tried to work with them over time. I think we’ve been successful doing that. Trent Lowe is coming along, I think Dan Martin is coming along really well, and Tom Peterson as well. The team time trial in next year’s Tour de France could give us a massive leg up on everyone on GC, especially since there are no weird time limitations. With the team we have, even if we have a Dan Martin in the line up, to help Christian in the mountains, which we didn’t really do this year, with a team of Millar, Farrar, Zabriskie, Svein and Christian, we could put a minute into the next team and really set the foundation for our GC possibilities on that.
VN: Speaking of young riders, Tyler Farrar and Steven Cozza had very strong ends to the season, with results that were maybe overshadowed by the Vuelta a España and the world championships.
JV: Yeah, Tyler had a great end of the season, and so did Cozza. They’ve both had unbelievable ends of the season. Cozza was injured earlier on so he didn’t get as many opportunities as he could have. Tyler just got sick at the wrong moment and probably should have been on the Tour de France team, but he was just a little bit shy on form, and I was uncomfortable sending such a young rider to the Tour when he was just that much shy. But as opposed to curling up in a ball and crying over not getting a Tour selection, he really came back with a vengeance and has raced pretty much every race that we’ve done. He told me, as soon as he wasn’t selected for the Tour, “I want to do every race from the Tour on, because I need to set down a foundation because I am going to race the Tour next year. Quite frankly, those two guys, Cozza and Farrar, are really likely to be doing the Tour next year. And when we’re talking about the super dominant team time trial squad, both of those guys would play a pretty large role in that. Cozza’s ride at the world championships was pretty unbelievable. I think he’s on his way to becoming one of strongest domestiques of his generation.
VN: It sounds like the Tour selection for 2009 is going to be even more difficult than it was this year.
JV: For sure, it will be. We’ve got a lot of strong guys. Dan Martin is going to be old enough to do it. Tyler Farrar has come up a notch. Cozza has come up a notch. Svein will be ready to do a three-week race like that right off the bat. So already you’re floating in five or six riders into the mix of what was already a difficult Tour selection this year. But that’s good. We will have a climber that can stay with Christian in the high mountains, and a better, more experienced team to protect him in the flats. I think all around we will have a better team — a more solid team.
Check back Monday for part 2 of this interview, in which Vaughters discusses Tom Danielson's status with the team, his disappointment at losing Taylor Phinney and his perspective on the AFLD’s testing at this year’s Tour de France.
