It's safe to say that sitting in the corner of a hotel room with an entire professional cycling team, who were crowded around a double bed and small television screen as they had their team meeting before a gruelling day of racing, is not how I expected to spend my Thursday morning. It's not exactly how things are normally done for them, either, but this is part of the magic of the Tour Down Under.
Established in 1999, it's Australia's biggest cycling event and the traditional calendar-opener for the men's and women's UCI World Tours. Held in Adelaide each January with stages across the beautiful regions that surround the city, it was created to boost tourism after the loss of the Australian Formula 1 Grand Prix to the noisy neighbours in Melbourne.
I found myself here not just because I'm an Adelaide local, but because Ineos Automotive offered me a chance to take a peak behind the curtain into just what goes into the world of professional cycling by tagging along with the Ineos Grenadiers' feed team crew for the day.
While I was originally expecting to have a few interviews with the team lined up, the difficulty of this day meant none of the media in attendance could have a chat with anyone. However, the team's director of performance operations Carsten Jeppesen was the one to suggest I sit in on the team talk. As someone who loves talking tactics in any sport, I'll take that alternative any day of the week.
Mind you, both he and sport director Ian Stannard asked how much I knew about cycling, and I had to admit that beyond getting on the bike and pedalling it, I was as clueless as most people, which made this experience particularly valuable.
The curiousity of cycling is that it's seemingly both an individual sport and a team sport at the same time. Much of the morning's talk – something normally conducted in a lavishly-equipped team bus back in Europe, rather than a hotel that's unusually shared by every team – focused on where each rider needed to be placed to put others in the right position for success in individual sections of the challenging 147.5km stage which ran from Norwood to Uraidla via some of the best driving (or riding) roads in the Adelaide Hills.
The team itself is headlined by 2018 Tour de France winner and two-time Olympic gold medalist Geraint Thomas, although it was young American rider Magnus Sheffield – who I sat next to in the team meeting while he attempted to fix Geraint's Garmin navigation unit – who placed best, sitting seventh in the final general classification.
However, despite being part of the crew for the day, I wouldn't be seeing any more of the riders than the average punter parked up at the side of the road, nor having much more clue of where they're at. Again, this is the curiosity of road racing.
My feed team comrades in the Grenadier for the day were physiotherapist Moss Clifford and mechanic Richard Lambert, whose typical duties would all come after the race. During it, we'd be pitching up at the side of the road in designated feed zones to hand the riders any extra sustenance they needed – drinks, gels, or energy bars.
It was Moss who delivered the line of the day, however, during the pre-stage prep while carer Simone Antonini was stuffing ice cubes into ladies' stockings as makeshift ice packs for riders to take from the following car during the race. "Ah, the glamour of elite sport," he joked. Indeed, this is what much of it is like behind that glossy veil.
While much of the prep was done at the publicly-accessible Tour Village home base in the centre of Adelaide, the scramble to get food in stomachs and bottoms on bike seats was done in a thin and chaotic fenced-off strip along The Parade in Norwood. Before we could watch the start, we had to scramble for the Grenadier ourselves as we drove out to Echunga to prepare for the first feed zone.
Amusingly, Moss and Richard both joked that I'd been assigned to accompany the most boring task on offer, as it was "just a lot of standing around and waiting". However, I used the opportunity to pick their brains, so in all honesty, I was having a great time.
For all the talk of tactics – and while positioning in the peloton does save a lot of energy exhaustion – there's really only one thing winning a race like this comes down to, which Richard simply described as "legs", hence the need for their roadside presence with bright orange goodie bags at the ready.
For us in the boxy branded-up support car which wore its livery well, we had to resort to websites and phone apps to track the progress of where the team's riders actually were; there's no fancy direct line of communication here outside of the team WhatsApp group.
As a support vehicle, the Grenadier was a good one with its roomy boot, since it wasn't just eskies but also spare wheels and tyres we were carrying as well. The 3.0-litre straight-six diesel borrowed from BMW certainly had plenty to offer as we ourselves raced to the next checkpoint as well. Plus, having a proper 4x4 meant we could get the best-positioned roadside parking spots, along with taking the odd dirt road shortcut.
In a way, though, the guys were right in that their job during the race was rather easy. Aside from shoving bottles and sachets in bright orange bags, making last-minute unplanned adjustments to what exactly went in them, and handing them to the riders as they blew past, it was quite calm overall. Unsurprisingly, most feed team crews end up simply chatting with each other – and, here in Australia, Koala-spotting – as they wait for the peloton's approach.
Mind you, by the time we arrived back at the Tour Village in Adelaide after the third and final feed zone of the day, that was when all hell was about to break loose. As we sat around in anticipation of the riders – a particularly eerie silence aptly described as "the calm before the storm" – the place all of a sudden became packed, and Moss and Richard became far busier as they returned to their normal jobs.
While Moss ran off to give physio treatment to the riders, who I'm told are very much expecting of it post-race, Richard quickly set about washing each of the bikes before servicing all of them ahead of the next day's racing.
This isn't something done out of sight, either, with each team having a booth in the Tour Village in which punters flock in to watch this work taking place. I was fighting for a place to grab some stills of him doing it, such was the crowd at points. I asked Richard whether the crowd made it any more difficult. "So long as they don't get in the way," he smirked.
Having seen behind the scenes of what is a massive, if in some ways unconventional event on the cycling calendar, it has given me a newfound appreciation for just how much of a team effort it takes in not just this but any sport.
From the outside looking in, you'd think it was during the 150km of the race – or in other sports, the 90 minutes of a football match or four quarters of a basketball game – that you're seeing the hard work. Really, like how the brilliant bits that make your car go are all tucked away out of sight, it's behind the scenes where all the hard work takes place.
2024 Ineos Grenadier Fieldmaster
Price (MSRP): A$118,000
Engine: 3.0-litre inline-six turbo diesel
Transmission: 8-speed automatic
Drivetrain: Full-time 4x4, dual-range
Power: 183kW // 249PS from 3250-4200rpm
Torque: 550Nm // 406lb-ft from 1250-3000rpm
Acceleration (0-100km/h // 0-62mph): 9.9 seconds
Top Speed: 159km/h (99mph)
Weight (tare): 1335kg
Economy: 13.0L/100km (claimed)
