Santa Rosa-based BMC Racing wins team stage in Tour de France

PLUMELEC, France - Santa Rosa-based BMC, the American cycling that includes the winner of the opening time trial of this year’s Tour de France, followed up by winning Sunday’s team event against the clock.

The win by BMC, the reigning world champion in the team time trial, was tight, with the team beating Team Sky of Britain by a single second. But regardless of the margin, the result further elevated expectations that BMC’s leader, the American Tejay van Garderen, will be on the podium in Paris in two weeks.

After Sunday’s ninth stage, van Garderen was in second place overall, just 12 seconds behind Chris Froome, Sky’s leader.

Van Garderen, who was born in Tacoma, Washington, but was largely raised in Bozeman, Montana, has long been viewed as the United States’ next great hope at the Tour de France, but his best showings to this point have been two fifth-place overall finishes. So at the beginning of this year’s race, he was not generally regarded as a top contender alongside Froome, Alberto Contador, Vincenzo Nibali and Nairo Quintana.

Asked if he should now be considered a part of that group, van Garderen noted that unlike those other riders, he had never made the podium. But, he added, “these guys have that tag line Fab Four, which is going to get a little irritating to keep reading that.”

As he went to catch a flight to Pau for Monday’s rest day, Froome said he certainly was not dismissing van Garderen.

“Tejay, I’ve said from the beginning of the race, is definitely someone to look out for,” Froome said, adding that van Garderen was particularly strong on climbs in the Critérium du Dauphiné, a race last month in which van Garderen was the runner-up, behind Froome.

For both BMC and van Garderen, the first week of this Tour provided a welcome contrast to the 2014 edition, in which, amid cold and wet conditions, van Garderen fell ill and needed antibiotics. Inadequate eating then led to a weak mountain stage. While he finished fifth overall, he was 11 minutes 24 seconds behind Nibali.

This year, “everything is clicking,” van Garderen said. He predicted that the coming mountain passes of the Pyrenees would show “who’s actually fit enough to win in the Tour” and that the stages in the Alps, which conclude this year’s race, would further sort out the contenders’ stamina.

Team time trials are something of an anomaly in road cycling, a sport that requires teams but usually awards prizes to individual members.

A team’s riders must follow one another in tight formation, each taking a turn of perhaps 15 seconds at the front, into the wind, before dropping back. That constant shuffling, and the sharing of the burden, allows for speeds much higher than would be possible during an individual race against the clock.

Marco Pinotti, a BMC coach who was a leading time trialist during his days a rider, said that a rider during a team time trial would generate 40 to 50 percent more power during those seconds at the front than he would at any point during an individual time trial. That is only possible, Pinotti said, because once the rider drops back into his teammates’ slipstream, his energy demand is 30 percent lower than it would be in a solo ride.

Dave Brailsford, the head of Team Sky, offered a less scientific assessment: “It’s a brutal, violent effort.”

The times in such stages are taken from the fifth rider on each team to cross the line. As a result, teams carefully plan for riders to be shed in the time trials and closely study each rider’s strengths and weaknesses.

“If I have nine riders at the end, something went wrong in the race,” Pinotti said. “I want five riders; I want to use all my bullets in the gun.”

Having an especially strong time-trial rider like Froome can be something of a curse for a team because he can easily overwhelm his teammates and break the tight formation that is essential. Planning for the stage, then, takes on elements of choreography.

“We try to model different setups, rider strategies and formations to see if we can try and optimize what we try to do,” said Brailsford, whose team uses analysis that might seem more like something out of bond trading than sports.

A hill toward the end of Sunday’s course, which was an unusually short 17.4 miles, made that planning difficult. Normally, climbers are dropped relatively early in a team time trial.

But regardless of how things look on paper, Brailsford and Pinotti said, it ultimately comes down to how the riders feel on the road. As a result, Pinotti never gives instructions on who should be dropped or when they should come off the group, he said, leaving the decisions to the riders.

Adding to the anxiety during team time trials is the ever-present danger that the combination of tight formations and high speeds will cause a crash.

Given all that, not all riders share Pinotti’s enthusiasm for the event, and Brailsford acknowledged that team time trials were sometimes unpopular among his riders.

“When the guys feel good, sometimes after the races that we’ve won, they come back and say, ‘We know we were going fast, but it felt easy,’” he said. “Then when we’ve not done so well, it’s an absolute horror show.”