Little Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect

To complete the TTT vibes, I’m actually rewatching the Tour de France team time trial as I’m writing this. So don’t expect any takes on that race just yet.

To be blunt: We came here to win this TTT. So coming home with P4 is disappointing. I’ve ridden this 'Dutch Club Competition' team time trial twice before (2022 and 2023). We finished second and third, despite actually riding +-1.5km/h slower than we did this year.

That probably says enough about how much the level (and tech) has gone up. On paper, this was probably the strongest TTT squad I’ve ever been part of. Plenty of watts, a mix of TT engines and riders who thrive on short, hard efforts, exactly the type of riders you’d want for a relatively short team time trial.

But it didn’t work. The best team time trials feel like flow state. The full group settles into a rhythm, everybody knows exactly when to pull through, when to recover and how the group moves through corners.
Today we never found that rhythm. From the very first kilometre the rotation felt restless. Nobody was really comfortable. The road surface wasn’t helping and the wind made it difficult to recover after each turn, but of course every team had to deal with that. The bigger problem was us.

I think we started just a little too hard, or at least it felt like that. People hit their limit early, started skipping turns and after only one and a half laps we’d already lost two riders. Suddenly you’re doing a team time trial with four. And that changes everything. Every rider you loose has double effect, recovery decrease while pulls increase.

Personally, I never really felt comfortable either, especially in the first lap. Not necessarily because of the power, but because there simply wasn’t any calm in the line. Normally, once you swing off after your pull, you can briefly relax. Today I couldn’t. Everyone was constantly adjusting. Bad corners, closing gaps, braking and accelerating.

Several times we even had to slow down because someone was on a few bike lengths. During a good TTT this shouldn't happen.

At one point I heard that we’d lost a rider, so I eased off slightly to let him return.
The rider behind me assumed I was simply done pulling, accelerated past me and the whole catch-up process started again. This costs you 5 seconds easily.

In the end we finished fourth. And honestly, that’s exactly what we deserved. The biggest takeaway? We probably need to practice more on unfamiliar courses. We often train our TTT on the same lap.. Everybody knows every corner by heart, so you can focus entirely on riding. Today the course demanded attention.

Still, I love team time trials. Precisely because they’re so difficult. In ITT everybody talks about aero and watts. But the best TTTs are usually won by the team that wastes the fewest of them.

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