The Team Time Trial - A Forgotten Kraft

Despite its long history, the team time trial is a dying art going by recent trends. Paul Knott headed to the Tour de France paddock in Cholet to see how to execute the perfect ride in a stage that is far from the norm in modern Grand Tour racing.

 

 

“ For me the team time trial is the best stage you can win on a race like the Tour de France because it shows that all the work the team put in — from the directeur sportif, the staff and the trainers — has really worked. They really share the prize,” says BMC directeur sportif Fabio Baldato after his team’s TTT victory on stage three in Cholet — three years after they won the last TTT to feature in the Tour de France, in 2015.

Unfortunately, it appears the course designers of the Tour, and other Grand Tours, don’t really share Baldato’s reverence for the art of the team time trial. There have been just four team tests against the clock in the last 13 years. That’s vastly different from the unbroken streak of TTTs in the Tour from 1976 to 1995 — including 153km worth of TTT in 1978.

When this is combined with only rare appearances throughout the rest of the season it poses a tricky conundrum for teams on how much effort to put into their training and selection for the event. They could take the view that a strong focus on the TTT is a waste of valuable time, but it is rare that an overall winner will have a poor TTT unit around him. Certainly that is the opinion of EF Education First-Drapac directeur sportif Charly Wegelius, who over the winter hired a race track to hone the team’s TTT skills so it could keep pace with team leader Rigoberto Urán’s GC rivals.