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The Chris Davidson diary
Chris Davidson is a former mechanic for Bontrager Racing Service, now in the service of Shimano Multi-Service.
Chris' diary entries will show you what life is like inside the pits and an insight into the mind of a mechanic.
On the road with T-Mobile
Day 1 - May 24: First stop: T-Mobile Service Course
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Early AM: Hi all, Chris Davidson here and I am taking on a little change of direction for the next couple of weeks as I will be working for the T-Mobile women's team as we travel to three important races: the Montréal stop on the World Cup, the Grand Tour du Montréal and the USPRO Liberty Classic. As opposed to my normal situation with Shimano where I do technical support at NORBA/World Cup mountain bike events, I am heading out on the road with the truck for some long drives as I start this trip in Denver at the T-Mobile Service Course.
The life of a road team mechanic is drastically different from the neutral support mountain bike mechanic. While at a NORBA event I will spend eight hours a day working on bikes, the job requirements for a road team mean new challenges every day. Today, I leave Salt Lake City for Denver and the T-Mobile Service Course. This is the center of operations for the T-Mobile team. There are a set of race bikes arriving today from Europe (after the recently finished Tour de l'Aude) that need to be washed gone over and packed in the truck for the trip to Montréal. The trip to Montréal involves a stage race as well as the World Cup race, so we are going to need the whole fleet of TT bikes as well.
When on the road with a road team, a surprisingly small part of my day is spent working on bikes, as other tasks such as driving the truck, washing vehicles, packing/unpacking, sourcing water and electricity take a large part of the day. Then there is sleep, food, communication with significant other, web surfing and writing stuff like this. I was joking with my significant other last night that life on the road involves 20 hours a day of work, 6 hours a day of sleep, 30 minutes of eating, 30 minutes of miscellaneous time and 2 hours of decompressing. The people who excel at this profession get all this done in about 18 hours a day and then have time for real 'life'. Sad but true. These two weeks will be a challenge for me to get up to speed quickly, to hopefully integrate seamlessly into the team in the shortest time possible.
I am very excited about the prospects of this trip as the women have been on fire recently (see Tour de l'Aude results) and are coming back home. Dede has won the Montréal race before, and the team is deep with strength right now. I look forward to working with Kristin Armstrong again - last time I worked on her bike was 2002 at the HP Women's Challenge. She was an up and coming triathlete mixing it up with the best women in the world for the first time. At the time I jokingly called her just 'local dork'; in the following two years she has emerged as one of the strongest women in the world. Hopefully she will forgive me. It will be good to see her again.
Late PM: Got in from the airport, straight to the Service Course. First up was washing three vehicles and get the inventory ready for packing the truck. For these two weeks, all the road and TT bikes plus two spares, it turns out all the women, including the rather tall Dotsie Cowden and Kim Anderson, ride medium frames or smaller. All the wheels we set up today have 12-27 cassettes for Montréal - the climb is steep. Everyone is riding the 7800 wheels. We had to install roof racks on one car in the warehouse, and as we were doing that the rain started to fall on the freshly washed cars outside. Tomorrow we will intake all the race bikes that arrive tonight from Europe and pack them in the truck. The scheduled depart time is noon from Denver; it is ~1750 miles to Montréal.
I took some photos from inside the Service Course. The standard inventory of wheels, spare parts, extra frames and race clothing. It is a lot smaller shop than one might expect for a top pro team, but the T-Mobile home base operates with just one in-house guy, Dan.
Some more work remains tonight before I can head for food and sleep. Every small bit that I can get ahead today means an earlier end to the drive tomorrow.
I will have more updates when we reach Montréal.
Thanks for reading,
CD