Cycling: The Tour de l'Avenir is a real highlight in the cycling calendar, especially for the youngsters in the U23 class. It is not for nothing that the tour counts as the Tour de France for the Espoires and is therefore of great importance. This can also be seen from the fact that Team Sky directly secured the winner of the yellow jersey, the sprint classification and the mountain jersey for the next season. Also present was our editor Florian Nowak, who, in addition to his watt values on Strava, also gave us a few impressions.
After I was able to convince this season with a 4th place at the German U23 championships and a 7th place at the professional championships, I was nominated by national coach Ralf Grabsch as one of 6 German drivers for the Tour de l'Avenir. The importance of this tour only becomes really clear when you are there. All the infrastructure is similar to the grand tours and the TV coverage this year makes it all the more important for young riders to show themselves.
Each of the starters has several days of racing to prepare for, and yet the start was a very special affair for many drivers. At the start you could literally feel how nervous everyone was, because everyone was curious about what to expect and just wanted to get started. The day before, after an official safety meeting by the UCI, there was still the start number - for me it was 13, which of course I always put on my jersey the wrong way out of superstition for the next 10 days.
I could tell and explain a lot about the individual stages here, but after almost 2 weeks you can't really remember anymore. It's simply because I think you have to tick off the days so quickly and be stuck in the next stage that you often just forget about all the pain, actions and race situations or don't even think about them too much. But what you can say in any case, and across all stages, it's crazy how tight the races are here and what a rush and unrest there is compared to other races. If you weren't careful you lost a good 10 positions within 50 seconds and you've only just worked hard over the last 5 km. That also makes it really tough for us drivers mentally, because you always have to be focused, of course also because of the crashes that you would like to avoid. For all those who want to learn more about the driving style and the race itself, I have uploaded my Strava files including watt values to give a small impression of what it takes to get through such a tour.
But I find it much more interesting to tell you a little bit about the not so obvious things of a tour. It is just as important for the riders to have a good team as being in good form, and by that I don't just mean the performance of the individual athletes, but also the interpersonal aspect. During a tour like this you quickly reach your limit and it is very important to have a good atmosphere in the team. With Johannes Schinnagel, Patrick Haller and Georg Zimmermann, I had three friends with me from my youth in the Bavarian Cycling Association and in the Auto Eder Bayern team run by manager Ralph Denk. Konrad Gessner and Leon Rohde completed our cool squad and it was a good mood to be on the road with the guys right from the start.
But back to the stress away from the race: Of course, during a tour like this, you also have a lot of transfers from A to B to the next hotel. At some point it can get quite tiring, if you have to pack your bags right after getting up in the morning, drive to the stage, then get back in the car at the finish and then drive to the next hotel to repeat everything the next day. It's a real luxury when you're in the same place for two days and don't have to change hotels. The 300 km transfer before the rest day was still a bit difficult for me because I was drawn for the anti-doping control. After such a hot stage, it wasn't that easy and took a little longer for me, but we were on time at the next hotel for dinner. Incidentally, we don't yet have a team bus like the big ones, so we often have to fend for ourselves if, as is so often the case in France, there are no showers at the finish and the next hotel is still a few hours away. But we managed well as a team.
But after the tour I'm glad to be back home. I ran out of breath at the back, because the team and I invested a lot in the first 6 stages to get a good result. So it wasn't exactly helpful to have a hotel at over 1800 meters in the end. Nevertheless, the big mountain stages were incredibly beautiful, especially from the backdrop, even if you don't have enough time to enjoy the race. For me, the Tour de l'Avenir was a super great experience and I'm happy to have tackled this tough challenge. Even if it wasn't enough for us as a team with the hoped-for big thing, we can be completely satisfied with our driving style and our morale. At this point a big thank you to the boys and the whole team including coaches, supervisors and everyone who kept their fingers crossed.