The Wheelysports Crash Course in Cycling

Most of what you need to know in order for cycling to make sense.

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Cycling is a weird and wonderful sport, full of bizarre conventions, inscrutable French jargon, and conflicting goals. Understanding it fully can take years. This quick start guide, I hope, will get you pretty close in about 20 minutes.

Photo by Rob Wingate on Unsplash

These Aren’t People, They’re Birds

In order to understand cycling, the first thing you need to do is stop thinking about these athletes as human beings. At least, they don’t move like human beings.

The table stakes for joining the professional peloton is the ability to ride at high speeds over long distances. Over flat ground, the peloton at the Tour de France will average 25 miles an hour over 150 miles without breaking a sweat; the all-time record is 31.3 mph over 120 miles in an afternoon. Going downhill, a top-tier cyclist will hit 60 or 70 mph.

At those speeds, only a little more than half of a cyclist’s effort goes into turning the wheels. The rest goes into moving the air out of the way. This is why cyclists ride in a peloton, and why they form echelons, like migrating geese, when they encounter a crosswind. Breaking through the wind to provide a draft is such a valuable service that it’s become a full-time career for some riders.

Consider the Belgian rider Tim Declercq. He doesn’t sprint, doesn’t climb well, doesn’t perform well in time trials. In seven seasons at the top level of the sport he’s never won a race; he didn’t even finish in the top 10 in any individual stage or race in 2023. But he’s been one of the most important riders on one of the best teams in the sport, because in a peloton of tiny, waifish dudes who get blown all over the road in the breeze, Declercq is 6-foot-3, 172 pounds with broad shoulders. He can get on the front of the peloton, put his head down, and haul ass all day while his teammates tuck in behind him like geese behind their mother. They call him “The Tractor.”

All things being equal, if 150 riders set off together, they’ll ride the whole race together, and the winner will be whoever is able to sprint fastest in the final few seconds of the race. The road racing calendar has plenty of events like this, many of them quite prestigious, but if that happened in every race, things would get very monotonous very quickly.

Every decision in course design, in team selection, in in-race tactics, is made with the wind in mind. Over a long enough distance, a group is always faster than the individual; how can I, as the rider, the directeur sportif, the race organizer, falsify that central tenet of the sport?

Burning Matches

If you’ve ever worked out, or read a book about working out, or been on the internet, you’ve heard about aerobic vs. anaerobic exercise. In aerobic exercise, the body burns oxygen to deliver sustained energy over long periods of time; in anaerobic exercise, the body burns sugar over short periods of time.

Every cyclist in the pro peloton can ride their bike fast enough to keep up with car traffic, all the live long day. They’re physical freaks. That’s what they’re doing for most of the race, while riding together. The race is actually won or lost when the group breaks up. That can happen because of variations in terrain (which I’ll explore in more detail in another post), or because one or more riders puts in an effort their competitors can’t or won’t match.

When the race reaches a critical point, riders will go as fast as they can without crossing the threshold into anaerobic effort. Keeping a steady tempo is more sustainable over the long run than peppering the race with repeated trips into the anaerobic zone. All riders have a limited number of anaerobic efforts to make before they run out of gas and succumb to exhaustion; the fashionable way to refer to these efforts is as “burning matches.” Try to sprint off the front of the peloton, that’s a match burned. Chasing down another rider’s attack burns a match. So does hauling yourself back to the group after a crash or a flat tire.

The key to winning a cycling race is not just being strong enough to make these efforts, it’s about measuring one’s own exertion, not spending these matches wantonly. Because when a rider runs out of matches—“cracks” is the term of art—it’s all over. Watch a cycling race, particularly a mountain stage in a grand tour, and you’ll see riders go from in control to barely moving in a matter of seconds. And from that state of physical exhaustion there is no recovery.

Time Trial vs. Mass Start

There are two types of road cycling race: time trial and mass start, with subcategories of each. In a time trial, each competitor (or team, sometimes) sets off individually and races on their own. Whoever completes the course in the shortest time wins. In a mass start stage, every competitor in the race departs together and races together. First one across the line wins.

Because there’s no drafting in a time trial, each rider wears special aerodynamic gear—skinsuits, gloves, helmets, and so on. They ride special bikes, equipped with aerodynamic disc wheels and handlebars. Time trials are usually very short, hardly ever more than an hour. Stage races will sometimes start with a prologue, or a short time trial around a spectator-friendly urban course; these can be over in a matter of minutes. Mass start stages, by contrast, are usually several hours long, sometimes as much as seven or eight hours, and 300 kilometers.

In a normal time trial, racers depart one by one at set intervals, usually about a minute. That means stronger riders will often catch slower riders who drew an earlier start time, but even in those instances, drafting is strictly forbidden. The brutal simplicity of time trials, and lack of team tactics, has caused the discipline to be called “the race of truth.”

Team Time Trial

The one exception to the no-drafting rule in time trials is a special event called a team time trial. In these races, the entire team sets off together, usually riding in a line, taking turns setting the pace at the front of the group. The clock only stops when a certain rider (usually the fourth rider in an eight-person team) crosses the finish line.

Mass Start Stages

The overwhelming majority of road cycling races are of the mass start variety, so much so that you’ll see “road race” used synonymously with mass start most of the time.

Sprint Stages

A mass start stage over level ground will usually end in the bulk of the peloton working together to complete the course at around the same time. When this happens, the race comes down to one big effort, the sprint.

Sprinters are a highly specialized and highly glamorous subset of riders. They optimize their bodies and riding styles to put out maximum effort for a matter of seconds in a final mad dash for the line. Think about the biggest number you ever hit on your Peloton at home; maybe a few hundred watts? Sprinters peak in excess of 1,500 watts in the final few seconds of a race.

It sounds crude, but there’s a lot of team effort that goes into this discipline. Great sprinters not only have to be fast, they have to position themselves well. A peloton can be a couple hundred meters long; if you’re not at the very front of the race in crunch time, you’re lost.

Over the final few kilometers of the race, a sprinter will follow one or more teammates—leadout men—from the middle of the pack to the front. The leadout riders will then ramp up the pace, one after another, before at the last moment the sprinter bursts out of the slipstream and dashes for the line. It’s highly exciting, but it can get nasty. Riders are weaving through the field to get to the front, where one twitch on the handlebars or slipped gear can lead to a life-threatening crash.

At the Tour of Poland in August 2020, Dutch sprinter Dylan Groenewegen nudged countryman Fabio Jakobsen into the roadside fencing during the final sprint to the finish. Jakobsen suffered life-threatening injuries and briefly had to be put in a medically induced coma. Groenewegen broke his collarbone in the crash and served a nine-month suspension.

It used to be even worse; back in the 1980s and 1990s, when riders only sometimes wore helmets that barely qualify as such, one of the best sprinters in the world was a Soviet-Uzbekh rider named Djamolidine Abdoujaparov. Abdoujaparov had a chaotic sprinting style and wasn’t afraid of contact, which earned him one of the best nicknames in the entire history of sports: The Tashkent Terror. In the final stage of the 1991 Tour de France, Abdoujaparov clipped a barrier, somersaulted head over heels, and landed in a heap on the road, in one of the most spectacular crashes in the sport’s history.

Abdoujaparov had won the green jersey (more on that later) in that year’s Tour, but he needed to actually cross the finish line in order to claim it; after several minutes on the ground in a heap, he got back up and finished the race. Then he skipped the podium celebration so he could catch an ambulance to the hospital. Hardcore stuff.

All of this is very exciting, of course, but race organizers want some variety. In order to achieve that, they have to break up the peloton by putting stuff in the way. What kind of stuff determines the nature of the race.

Cobblestones

Almost every sport on the planet, from basketball to curling to golf to NASCAR, requires a meticulously maintained playing surface. You’d expect the same from cycling—every inch of asphalt must be meticulously maintained.

That isn’t really possible for a sport that needs 100 miles or more of public roads, every day. So dealing with changing road conditions is part of the game. Riders need to be ever cognizant of their playing surface, down to where and how it’s been painted.

Differing road quality is more than a necessary evil, it’s something race organizers seek out. One of the oldest and most prestigious races in the sport—maybe the most famous race apart from the Tour de France—is Paris-Roubaix, a one-day race of about 160 miles across northern France, usually in cold, wet conditions in early April.

This race is mostly over flat ground; it’s decided on numerous sectors of cobblestones. And not manicured, level brickwork like your patio—giant, ugly, squared off rocks set almost haphazardly in the dirt. . It’s called “The Hell of the North,” and its brutality has become iconic to the point of fetishization. At the end of the race, tradition dictates that the survivors—usually covered head to toe in dirt or mud—shower at the Roubaix velodrome, where the race ends. The winner’s trophy? A big rock.

This kind of racing became popular in northern France and Belgium, because that’s just what the roads were like up there. The first six to eight weeks of the proper cycling calendar, from late February to early April, are called “classics season,” dominated by one-day races in northern Europe, most involving some cobbles. Race organizers will seek out cobbled sections, even when perfectly good asphalt is available. In 2015, the World Championships were held in Richmond, Virginia, with the course set up for a climactic sprint up a cobbled street to Libby Hill Park.

This is where riders start to get separated by body type. The slower speeds and uneven surface mean the drafting effect isn’t as powerful, so to some extent every rider has to make it over the bricks on their own. Riders who excel on the cobbles tend to be big and powerful enough to keep their momentum as they’re jostled over the bumpy road surface. The lighter climbers who can make it over the Alps to win the Tour de France get bounced off the road when they hit the pavé sections at a race like Paris-Roubaix.

As a result, the disparate challenge presented by mountains and cobbles led to a split among the sport’s stars. In 2023, two-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar won the Tour of Flanders, making him the first male rider in 35 years to win a grand tour and a cobbled monument in his career.

Some cobbled races, like the Tour of Flanders, combine cobblestones with short climbing spurts. In the 21st century, gravel racing has come into fashion, not only as its own discipline distinct from road racing, but as an alternative to cobblestones. Ask a traditionalist what the best one-day race is, and they’ll usually say either Paris-Roubaix or one of the older cobbled races. The hipster answer—and I count myself among them—is Strade Bianche, a race that features not only a cobbled climb to the finish line in Sinea, but dozens of kilometers of gravel interspersed throughout the course. These are the “white roads” that give the race its name.

Hills

Cobblestones serve to slow the peloton up, reduce the drafting effect, and separate stronger riders from weaker ones. The other way to do that is to make the riders climb. The big mountains made famous by stage races can take the better part of an hour to climb, even for world-class riders, and reach 2,000 meters in elevation or more. Alpe d’Huez, the famous climb of the Tour de France, is 13.9 kilometers in length, with an average gradient of eight percent, a climb of 40 minutes or more.

That’s an aerobic nightmare. Shorter climbs, like cobblestones, are about putting power down over a matter of a few minutes. The most famous of these are found in the Ardennes region in Belgium, where La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège make up the heart of the calendar for this sub-discipline.

These races are dominated by short, steep climbs up hills that are known colloquially as walls. In La Flèche Wallonne, the Mur de Huy—literally “the Wall of Huy,” a climb of a little more than three quarters of a mile, with 400 feet of elevation change. After an easy start at the bottom of the hill, the gradient maxes out at 18 degrees. The course record for men: two minutes, 41 seconds.

In fact, one of these walls is probably the most famous cycling climb in all of North America: the Manayunk Wall in Philadelphia, which hosted a one-day classic race from the mid-1980s until 2016. If you saw Hustle on Netflix, you undoubtedly remember Adam Sandler making Bo Cruz jog up a steep, pro cyclist-killing hill every day until he got into shape. That was the Manayunk Wall.

Riders who excel on walls are called puncheurs, though these hills represent a middle ground that makes them accessible to both classics riders, who are after pure power, and climbers, who train to maximize their power-to-weight ratio. Puncheurs not only need to be able to climb, they need the raw acceleration to put a gap in over their opponents quicky. That explosiveness and aggressiveness makes them exciting secondary players in stage races, like the Tour de France.

Mountains

But the big glamor races are won on the mountains. Physically, the most desirable characteristic for a climber is power-to-weight ratio; cycling analytics folks measure effort on climbs in terms of watts per kilogram. In the men’s game, world-class climbers don’t get much bigger than Welshman Geraint Thomas, who won the 2018 Tour and finished on the podium in three other Grand Tours. Thomas is 6-foot, 155 pounds. Pogačar, at 5-foot-9, 145 pounds, is on the bigger side as far as climbers go, and it’s not uncommon for male riders with Tour ambitions to show up weighing 130 or less.

That’s because, when you’re riding uphill, an extra five pounds of muscle is just dead weight. It’s why cyclists have such skinny arms. Over a short hill, you can get away with that, or just brute force your way past it. Not on a mountain stage that might feature three or four ascents of 30 or 40 minutes each.

On a mountain climb, teamwork is important not just for drafting purposes—some relatively shallow climbs go fast enough that there’s still an appreciable aerodynamic benefit to following a teammate—but for pacing as well. This goes back to burning matches. A rider who has a teammate setting a steady tempo doesn’t have to worry about how fast to go. Getting up the climb is still difficult, but there’s less risk of burning a match unnecessarily with a teammate in the lead.

Mountain stages, like time trials, are rarely standalone events. They’re mostly held as part of a stage race, and are usually decisive.

Classics and Stage Races

This one is pretty simple. One-day races take place over one day. Sometimes the term “classic” gets used interchangeably with one-day race, sometimes it’s reserved for the older and more prestigious races. Either way, everyone starts in one place, rides around for a little while, and whoever crosses the line first is the winner.

A stage race is any race that’s held over more than one day and comprises multiple timed sections, or stages. These races can have as few as two or three stages, or as many as 21. (Back in the olden days, it was routine for the Tour de France to go longer, with some days featuring two stages, but that’s a thing of the past.) There are only three races that go three weeks: the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and the Vuelta a España. These are called Grand Tours. Other races tend to last for about a week, but can go on for up to nine days.

This includes, regretfully, the three grand tours on the women’s calendar. In 2023, for the first time all three grand tours held stage races for women, but none of them went longer than nine stages. Women’s cycling has made huge strides in terms of popularity, professionalism and media attention just in the past decade, but the bigwigs of the sport still aren’t ready to give the women a full three-week race yet.

A stage race can feature any combination of parcours: There’s usually at least one sprint stage and at least one mountain stage, if the terrain allows. All grand tours have at least one individual time trial, as do many, if not most, one-week stage races. The Tour de France organizers like to throw a stretch of the cobbled Paris-Roubaix course in there on one stage, and the Giro will sometimes run a stage along the roads normally reserved for Strade Bianche. So a stage race tests a rider’s all-around ability, as well as the mettle and stamina required to race multiple days in a row.

How do you win a stage race? Well, the simple version is that the clock starts at the beginning of each race day and stops when the riders cross the finish line. Riders who cross in a group (usually defined as finishing within one second of the rider ahead) get the same time. Add all those times up at the end of the race, and whoever has the lowest time is the winner of the general classification.

The truth is a little more complicated. To spice things up, race organizers set multiple secondary classifications. There’s a special category in most stage races for young riders, usually 25 years old or under. Most races also have two categories that have nothing to do with time. Climbs in stage races are categorized based on difficulty—climb length and gradient—and the first racers to get over the top are awarded points based on how hard the climb is. At the end of the race, those points are totaled up for a king (or queen) of the mountains classification.

Organizers will also award a descending number of points based on who actually finishes each stage first, with additional bonus points awarded to riders who cross certain markers in the middle of the stage first. These go into the points classification. (In a sport full of incredible idioms, this is one they kind of mailed in.) These points also frequently come with bonus seconds—finish the stage first and get 10 seconds knocked off your GC time, with six points for second and four for third.

This can complicate the GC standings. In the 2020 Vuelta, Primož Roglič, a rider who possesses an unusual combination of climbing and sprinting ability, made a point to poach bonus seconds wherever possible. At the end of the race, he had more than 30 bonus seconds in the bag, and ended up with the lowest time even though second-place Richard Carapaz technically finished the race in less time.

In addition to the secondary classification, many riders treat individual stages of these races as their own one-day races to be won, particularly at the grand tours. The effect of all this is that the overwhelming majority of the riders in a stage race don’t give even a little bit of a damn what their overall time is, because they’re not in it for the GC. They’re pursuing individual stage wins or secondary classifications, or helping a teammate achieve his or her goal.

The Races You Need to Know

The UCI World Tour is (basically) the world’s top road cycling league, with a race calendar that runs from mid-January to mid-October. There are 35 races for men and 28 for women, plus dozens and dozens of lower-level races that attract teams and riders from the top tier. Over the course of the season, I’m sure we’ll talk about all (or at least most) of them. For now, you need to know 11 races.

The Grand Tours

These are the three three-week stage races. Each has its own quirks and idiosyncrasies, but all three are very similar in format: 21 stages, with two midrace rest days pushing the total length of the race to 23 days. They are:

·       The Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy), held in May

·       The Tour de France, held in late June and July

·       The Vuelta a España (Tour of Spain), held in August and September

The Monuments

Apart from the grand tours, the most prestigious races are the five Monuments, all very old and very long one-day races. They are:

·       Milan-San Remo: close to 300 kilometers of boring as hell racing over flat roads in northern Italy, culminating in about 15 minutes of the most balls-out, suicidally aggressive, bunnyhopping curbs at 60 miles an hour-ass racing on two wheels. This race is decided on one small hill, the Poggio, with a descent through narrow, twisting roads lined by stone walls. Australian cyclist Michael Matthews finished third in 2020 after brushing his knuckles on one of these walls, and described the effect as “like a cheese grater.” No other race offers such a vivid juxtaposition of the crushing boredom of the routine and the frightening brutality of crunch time.

·       Tour of Flanders: A cobbled monument through northern Belgium, with frequent ascents of small hills. The combination of climbing and cobbles usually leads to an interesting set of contenders. The race winds through a number of Flemish towns, where fans will post up at the local bar all day, then head over to the road when the cyclists come by. The resulting atmosphere is as close as you’ll get to holding a major sporting event inside an SEC football tailgate.

·       Paris-Roubaix: The Hell of the North, usually held one week after the Tour of Flanders. Probably the most miserable you can be while participating in a high-level sporting event without having to block Aaron Donald.

·       Liège-Bastogne-Liège: The Old Lady, held in late April, a few weeks after the two cobbled monuments. Usually somewhere around 250 kilometers of undulating terrain through the Belgian Ardennes, with a series of short, steep climbs in the approach to the finish. This race is built for puncheurs, but it sits in a middle ground where it’s winnable for riders of a number of different styles.

·       Il Lombardia: The other four monuments take place in the spring, after which we get the three grand tours over the summer, and world championships in the fall. The Tour of Lombardy takes place in October, and is the last major race on the calendar. It’s the closest thing there is to a monument for pure climbers, but by October everyone’s running on fumes, so occasionally it throws up a wild result.

World Championships

In addition to the standard racing calendar, the UCI (the global cycling government body, equivalent to FIFA) holds road cycling world championships, usually in the fall between the Vuelta and Il Lombardia. These races are unique, as they’re the only annual event where riders suit up for their national teams, instead of their trade teams. Championships are awarded for both the road race and individual time trial, for men and women, and at age group level. (The UCI keeps trying to figure out a team time trial format that will make people care, but so far no dice.)

The site of the world championship rotates from year to year, and therefore so does the terrain. Sometimes you’ll get a flat sprint, sometimes, cobbles, sometimes there’s climbing. As a result, you won’t see all the stars at every world championship, particularly stars from countries like Belgium and Italy, which have deep enough rosters to tailor their squads to the parcours.

But the most important thing about worlds is…

Special Jerseys

If you win, you get to wear this sweet white jersey with rainbow stripes for a whole year.

Those of you who have followed my baseball writing already know this, but I think it’s sick as hell that in cycling, you wear your CV on your jersey. The world champion wears the rainbow jersey until he or she is dethroned, and thereafter is entitled to wear rainbow bands on their sleeves forever. Which is a big deal; here’s Lance Armstrong toodling around in 2023, more than a decade after, you know, all that. He’s still wearing the rainbow bands he earned by winning the world road race championship in 1993.

Mark Cavendish pulls on the stripes after winning the 2011 World Championship. (Wikimedia Commons)

The Olympic champion will also usually jazz up his or her kit by wearing a gold helmet or riding a gold bike. Winners of national championships also get to wear special jerseys based on their national flags, and sleeve bands for the rest of their careers. The same for European champions, who get a white jersey with blue stripes and gold stars, based on the flag of the European Union.

The most famous specialty jersey in the sport, of course, is the maillot jaune, the yellow jersey of the Tour de France leader. Just wearing this jersey for a day, much less winning it, can make a rider’s career. Stage races will usually put the leader of each of the various classifications into a distinctive jersey that makes them easy to spot. The top rider usually wears white, but otherwise the color changes by race. Yellow is the most common color for the GC leader, because of the Tour de France, but the Giro uses pink, the Vuelta red, Tirreno-Adriatico blue, and so on.

The UCI also assigns a point value to finishing positions in every race; this doesn’t matter for the most part, but in the Women’s World Tour, the rider who’s scored the most points over the season gets to wear a sort of magenta(? I guess you’d call it?) jersey. It’s supposed to be distinctive, but it tends to blend in because half the teams in the WWT have some variation on pink or purple in their jerseys.

Race Naming Conventions

Looking at the race calendar, seeing all these French and Dutch names, might be a little intimidating for a new English-speaking fan. Fear not. There are a handful of races named in honor of a famous cyclist (Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race) or a historical sponsor (Criterium du Dauphiné). Then there’s Strade Bianche, which because it’s one of the few races founded in the 21st Century got to have modern branding.

Almost every other race is named after where the race is. Milan-San Remo goes from Milan to San Remo. Liège-Bastogne-Liège starts in Liège, goes to Bastogne, turns around, and heads back to Liège. I hope Tour de France (or Tour de Suisse, or Tour of Flanders) is self-explanatory.

The Belgians like to have some fun with this. They have a Dwars Door Vlaanderen (“Across Flanders”), a race whose origins might merit a post later on. They also have Brabantse Pijl (Dutch for “The Brabant Arrow”) and La Flèche Wallonne (French for “The Walloon Arrow”). Either way, the race is named after the place where it is. Simple enough. Plus you’ll get really good at European geography.

A Guide to Tactics

Let’s go back to the beginning. Riders are birds. They go fastest when they go together, and all things being equal, the strongest rider will win if they go together.

How do you get around that?

At or near the start of every race, a handful of riders will jump out of the peloton and form a breakaway. This small group of riders—sometimes just two or three, sometimes as many as 30—will work together to build up a lead on the peloton in the hope that the main bunch won’t work together well enough to bring them back.

This is usually a low-percentage play, performed by riders whose odds of winning from the peloton are close to nil, but who might improve if they build up a head start and the peloton doesn’t work together to chase them down.

Why might the peloton not work together? This is where the brutal cardio of cycling intersects with game theory. The race favorites, and their teams, want to control the tempo of the race, but they don’t want to spend more energy than they have to in order to do it. If they wear themselves out chasing down attacks early in the race, they won’t have anything left in the tank when it’s time to make the final attack.

So when a smaller group attacks and works together, it can sometimes go faster than a larger group that fails to get organized. The race favorite’s team usually knows this, and accepts most or all of the responsibility of chasing down the breakaway. Rosters are usually structured accordingly, and the top teams will devote one or more riders solely to the thankless task of getting on the front of the peloton and dragging the group along. This is how Tim Declercq pays his mortgage.

There’s also an art to selecting who goes into the breakaway. The strongest riders tend not to go. Opposing teams know that if a race favorite gets into the break, they might never see him again. Over the course of a stage race, you’ll see riders lose time on purpose so they’ll be allowed to get into the break and try for a stage win. By week three of a grand tour, there could be dozens of such riders in the breakaway, while the peloton—exhausted at the end of a long race—lets the breakaway gain an advantage as big as 20 minutes on a stage. If everyone in the break is an hour down on GC, who cares?

But riders from smaller teams are usually allowed to get into the break. These teams have zero chance of winning a race, and they know it. But if they get into the breakaway, they’ll get shown on TV a lot, which is meaningful to the sponsors who fund the team. During stage races, riders who are interested in the points or mountains classification will also get into the break and cross those intermediate climbs or sprint points first. These riders are useful when forming a break because they can expend more energy early in the stage, and help the breakaway overall go faster.

Top teams might not be able to get their top riders into the breakaway, but they will sometimes send a teammate into the break as a satellite rider. The deepest team in the sport is the Dutch outfit Team Visma-Lease a Bike (formerly Jumbo-Visma). Last year, they became the first team to sweep the grand tours, and since 2019 they’ve won a Giro, two Tours, and four Vueltas.

Team Visma likes to send American climber Sepp Kuss and Belgian all-rounder Wout Van Aert into breakaways. Kuss and Van Aert are both stars in their own right, but in the grand tours they tend to ride in support of the team’s leaders: previously Roglič, currently Danish climber Jonas Vingegaard. So when Kuss and Van Aert get into a breakaway with a leader behind, one of three things happens.

First, the breakaway gets caught, and the satellite rider can take a break, drop back, and have fresh legs to help the team leader up a pivotal climb. Second, if Vingegaard doesn’t need help, Kuss or Van Aert can stay in the break and contest the stage win. And because Kuss is one of the best climbers in the world, and Van Aert one of the best sprinters, they have a good shot at winning the stage.

Third, they could shoot the moon. In last year’s Vuelta, Kuss got into a breakaway early in the race, and none of the other teams chased it down. Kuss built up a huge lead and held the red jersey all the way to the end of the race, and Jumbo-Visma locked out the podium. With three contenders in the team, Jumbo-Visma’s leaders could take turns attacking, while their opponents had to burn a match to chase down every attack.

That’s what the sport is about: Picking your spots, reading your opponents, conserving energy until the right moment. Only rarely is a rider so strong that he or she can just win by brute force. Most often, the race comes down to teamwork, tactics, and game theory.