I’ve been watching the and the stages in the mountains are fascinating. It helps the best riders if they have teammates riding up the steep slopes in front of them, but surely they are travelling too slowly for this help to come in the form of a slipstream, like on the flat, fast stages. So why is it easier to follow another rider up a mountain slope? Is the effect purely psychological?
• The effect of slipstreaming at the low speeds involved when mountain climbing is small, at best, and perhaps not significant. However, the psychological effect of having a teammate’s support is hard to quantify but it is very real.
“The psychological effect of having a teammate’s support is hard to quantify but it is very real”
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This goes hand in hand with the physiological benefits of team support. A cyclist like current Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins can climb mountains very fast at a steady pace. He is not, however, a true climber like the late Italian cyclist Marco Pantani, who had the ability to accelerate rapidly while climbing. For Wiggins, having his teammates set a fast pace that he can sustain suppresses attacks from the Pantani-like climbers, who can struggle to match the constant high speed. At the same time, this tires them and reduces their ability to attack with rapid acceleration later on. Near the end of a stage Wiggins is able to increase the effort (as is his teammate Chris Froome) to a speed that most other riders are unable to match.
Wiggins is an outstanding time-trialist, able to maintain a steady but high level of speed over long distances, and the tactics he used in the Tour de France effectively turned the mountain stages into uphill time trials, which played to his strengths.
Michael Newman, Durrington, Wiltshire, UK
• As long as there is air movement, caused either by local winds or a rider’s speed, then there is at least some benefit in having the slipstream shelter of a teammate.
Additionally, the teammate climbing the mountain with his team leader will carry food and drinks, lightening the load that the team leader has to carry himself. This helper can be replaced and rested the next day, but the leader cannot.
The helper will also give up his wheels or even his bike should the leader encounter a problem, and this prevents the leader losing time on his rivals in these circumstances. There is therefore a degree of moral and mechanical support in having a teammate ride with you.
Finally, speaking from my own long personal experience, there is considerable psychological advantage in following a wheel. This is especially noticeable when you are hemmed in by other riders behind and to the side of you, which gives you little choice. Remember that the leader is the one setting the speed at which his teammate rides, by shouting out a certain tempo or power output. The pace is therefore one he knows he can sustain. All he has to do is follow the wheel in front.
Martyn Ellis, Bicester, Oxfordshire, UK