TCRNo11 Day 6 // A Bike Race, or a Boat Race?

Words by Jake Thorpe

Photos by Matt Grayson, Michael Drummond, and Tomás Montes

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Grandmother’s Footsteps

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From the third control, the leading pack bisected, with Martin Moritz (297) and Nicolas Chatelet (046) racing neck and neck for the lead through the corridor of the Via Francigena, while Christoph Strasser (002) and Victor Bosoni (232) traded places 30 km behind them. By Friday evening, however, now in the Ligurian Apennines, the four riders had begun to regroup. 

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Riding with a marginal advantage over his chasers, while the others bedded down, Martin pushed on into the night, stringing out his lead to 50 km before stopping to rest in Pisa at 03:30.

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An hour later, three of the front five dots – Victor, Christoph, and David Tschan (006), back to contest his third consecutive edition – appeared to be back on the move. While the debutant riders slept, the TCR veterans crept forward, engrossed in a game of grandmother’s footsteps – a game that has now played out across half a continent.

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Glass Half Full, or Half Empty? 

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The small issue of crossing the Adriatic has come to dominate the racing strategies of the leading pack. We know that Christoph has Sunday’s last ferry – the 23:58 sailing from Bari to Durrës – squarely within his crosshairs. And when Christoph sights a target, he isn’t easily dissuaded from missing its bullseye. 

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Having first heard of Christoph’s ferry plans back in the Pyrenees, at the race’s second control, we can safely assume that the Austrian has moulded his entire strategy around the crossing. With available sailings spaced so sparsely, working backwards from the Adriatic would have allowed him to consider the minimum daily average necessary to reach the earliest feasible sailing – an optimising calculation, the results of which would have provided Christoph with a formulaic pace to maximise energy reserves.

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Having caught up with Jocelyn Roth (272) – 8th to CP3, only 8.5 hours behind Christoph – on the Assietta a day earlier, we heard his plans to catch Monday’s sailing. Jocelyn seemed to feel that he was cutting things fine. But, given his scheduled crossing leaves almost a day later than the Austrian’s planned departure, Jocelyn’s concern begs the question: is the Swiss rider being pessimistic, or the Austrian wildly optimistic? As anyone familiar with Christoph Strasser well knows, baseless ebullience doesn’t feel particularly on-brand.

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Strada Bianche

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Before the leading riders dash headlong towards the heel of Italy’s boot, however, there remains the small matter of a double parcours to contend with: two discrete sections of mandatory riding, separated by over 300 km of rolling, rural Apennines. 

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The first of these parcours begins in Il Campo, home of the Palio – a brutal, bareback sprint on cobblestone around the tight, irregular, steep-canted perimeter of Siena’s medieval piazza. This is an enduring contest, held in the same square twice a year for the last 400 years – (and thrice on special occasions). Ten of the city’s 17 districts, or contrade, each denoted by a different symbol – whether Giraffe, Snail, or Great Crested Porcupine – compete per race; it’s a field composed of the seven who missed the last Palio, and the winners of a lottery drawn for the final three places. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide what sigilli our leading riders might fly should they be racing under their own banners.

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Escaping the Piazza – with a ceremonial lap likely avoided for fear of collateral collision with the thronging tourists – riders are cast out onto the lattice of strade bianche, the white chalk roads that decussate the Tuscan countryside. Home to the Strade Bianche, a race that has quickly become a modern classic in the pro calendar, these eponymous roads have become hallowed ground in the world of cycling. It’s not hard to see why. 

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The race beggars belief. A little under half of the course sees riders barrelling along these gravel tracks in peloton, on 30 mm tyres, at average speeds of almost 40 km/h. Anyone concerned by the off-road parcours need merely refer to these figures to appreciate just how much the modern bicycle can handle.

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And, in fact, it’s not just the modern bicycle that can claim such proven proficiency. The strade are also home to an annual celebration of vintage cycling, L’Eroica, which has taken place there for nearly 20 years. Enthusiasts gather from far and wide to test their off-road handling of pre-1987 road bikes, complete with period-specific componentry and clothing. Downtube shifters, low-profile rims, leather helmets and toe cages abound. Thirty millimetre tyres, on the other hand, would, among this crowd, be banished to the realm of fat-bikers.

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Visceral, Not Visual

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These rolling Tuscan plains possess a linear quality. Corduroy fields scored by combine tracks, cropped and scorched brown, undulate beside the meandering pathways. Barcode shadows are cast across the path of the strade by colonnades of Cypress trees, defined in sharp relief against the chalk-white gravel.

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But the terrain of the parcours are more visceral than visual. The acrid tang of dust stings the eyes and catches the back of the nostrils. Riders, slick with sweat after a day spent slowly baking in the Tuscan sun, will emerge from the parcours wearing a souvenir of the terrain just travelled – a pallid second skin.

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An Artistic Disembarkment

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Baked into the relatively short history of the Strade Bianche is a symbolic honour, awarded to any rider fortunate enough to have secured a race hat-trick; naming rights for a section of the Strade’s gravel. Christoph is competing this year for his own race hat-trick, hoping to become the second person in TCR history to hold the title. The irony is not lost on us. Given his well-known animosity for the rough stuff, we’ve no doubt the TCR veteran, should he qualify for the honour, might decide to decline. 

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Christoph has good reason for his suspicions of the looser terrain. When we caught up with him, it was clear that the parcours was already testing sinew and spirit. Slipping up one of the section’s steeper climbs, he explained how, not moments before on a washboard descent, his front wheel had jumped and he, in turn, had been thrown from the saddle. Perhaps due to anxious premonitions of such an incident, or perhaps due simply to his innate, cat-like reflexes, Christoph was able to leap clear of his bike “like an artist”, to land, upright, on the gravel. Maybe the two are warming to one another after all. 

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Man versus Machine

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About the race as a whole, Christoph held only favourable impressions. “I don’t know if there’s been such a tight race so far”, he said, reflecting on the competition of his fourth edition.

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He may be right. After nearly 6 days on the road, and with over 2700 km covered, at 17:30 CEST, the dots of the race leader’s three closest chasers all pinged within 100 m. For such a tight grouping, however, the racers seemed far less concerned with their proximity to one another, as they were with their proximity to the ferry. As Martin acknowledged, for the moment, this has ceased to be a race between fellow riders.

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For the leader, an all-out effort is the only feasible tactic. Either he’ll make the sailing and the others won’t, leaving him with a decisive lead, or his chasers will join him on deck, in which case the race will neutralise, only to resume on Albanian shores. What remains certain, however, is that he can’t afford to miss that boat; an all-out effort is his only option.

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Triple Trouble

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Speaking to Victor, not far behind Christoph on the fourth parcours, the Boy Wonder was once more making good progress. Despite a hot day of hard riding, and the gremlins wreaking havoc in his electronic shifting, Victor was gaining ground within the leading quartet.

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Control Team 1, waiting in the wings of the winding parcours to snap an action shot of the Pocket Rocket carving along the strada, admitted that, when Victor arrived, they nearly missed him altogether. The combination of his blistering pace and his dynamo-powered Supernova – a headlight well deserving of all cosmic connotations – looked more likely to be signs of an approaching motorbike than a 23-year-old French cyclist.

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His pace should have come as no surprise, given the stage. The Points Classification – new to this year’s race – will be celebrated by the Maglia Arancia, an orange jersey awarded to the rider with the lowest cumulative time spent on the race’s final five parcours. As we might’ve predicted, Victor currently commands a considerable lead on this front. When we caught up, he admitted his initial advantage in the category had come as a happy accident – a windfall of his youthful vigour. Its consolidation, however, has been more deliberate. Victor is now explicitly contesting the classification.

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Some, on the other hand, clearly aren’t. Julien Klose (158), for one, was spotted by one volunteer up on the Assietta sitting bolt upright, helmet resting against a rock, sound asleep. We can’t imagine the category leader will be opting for such a strategy come Pacentro, especially with a boat to catch.

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Interestingly enough, given his overland travel to and from the race, with Victor now leading the points classification, and staying well within the running for the solo category, he could be within striking distance of the TCR’s first triple classification win; the Maglia Arancia, the Green Leaderboard, and there GC Victory. But none, at this point, are guaranteed. Among the top riders, there is stiff competition for spots not only on the podium but also on the Green Leaderboard; Nicolas, too, is in contention – if not for the triple, then the double classification win. 

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Borrowed Time

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Overnight on Friday, we watched as Cynthia Carson’s (137) dot edged towards a stationary Jana Kesenheimer (001), the race’s current fastest woman and 12th place in the overall standing. While Jana slumbered in Sestriere, Cynthia chose to gain ground on borrowed time – resting roughly 2 hours to Jana’s trademark 4. Beginning the third parcours, the Strada dell’Assietta, barely an hour apart, the riders were the closest they’d been in days. 

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Tackling the high-Alpine gravel track concurrently, before descending the Finestre’s famed switchbacks, the gap remained consistent, despite reports from Cynthia of multiple punctures and a tyre sidewall sewn shut. Both had made substantial progress through the field since the last control, with Jana having made up 10 places and Cynthia, who arrived in 17th, having leapt forward 13. One of the places Cynthia gained was over her partner, Steven Davis (330). Steven had left Cynthia a message of encouragement with the volunteers at the second control. Perhaps Cynthia can return the favour from here on in. 

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By that evening, however, Jana’s lead hung less precariously in the balance. Better rested, she had managed to regain her advantage, putting 3 hours between herself and Cynthia by 22:00. Yet as we’ve begun to see within the leading pack, such margins could be quickly eviscerated come the Adriatic, should schedules not align between bike and boat.

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Scratch Report

Benjamin Cordes (332) – Rider scratched 15:35 CEST 2/8 via WhatsApp due to illness.

Andrew Speers (179) – Rider scratched 15:00 CEST 2/8 via phone call due to Shermer’s neck.

David Audebrand (284) – Rider scratched 13:01 CEST 2/8 via phone call due to logistical issues.

Amy Lippe (120) – Rider scratched 4:56 CEST 2/8 via WhatsApp - no reason given.

Luka Moscherosch (211) – Rider scratched 9:28 CEST 2/8 via WhatsApp due to missing CP2 cutoff.

JunNing Lai (365) – Rider scratched 8:02 CEST 2/8 via email due to leg injury.

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