• Rider Diaries

Fresh Korn: Here’s a toast to team-building!

by VeloNews.com

• December 02, 2008
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By Will Frischkorn

What brings a team together? CSC’s boot camps are legendary. Often teams bring in consultants that help with “team building” activities. Ropes courses are status quo. A little trust-tree action from time to time is surely part of the deal.

Last year on Garmin we realized that while all of this is well and good, and does form solid ties, we found something even better — booze, and bar-food-fueled attempts to stimulate Boulder’s nocturnal economy.

Garmin-Slipstream has come a long way in my three years with the team, growing from the small, homegrown roots of its first two years to a full-fledged ProTour operation housed at Boulder’s finest hotel, catered to by the most amazing group of sponsors you could possibly assemble. It’s been exciting, to say the least.

When I first came to the team, then called TIAA-CREF, Jonathan Vaughters laid down some rules of the road. Clean sport has always been at the top of the list. Right up there, though, is keeping a bit of balance in life and having fun.

Cycling is a damn hard job. Sure, there are good times, and those are shared freely. Crossing the line on the Champs-Elysees this year was a moment I’ll never forget. But for every moment like that there are far, far more that I strive to erase from memory. Nobody wants to look back on the days spent slogging through rain, snow, sleet, wind and manure-filled single-lane roads; the days when you know before even getting on the bus to go to the start that it’s going to be awful. Those could disappear.

What gets you through those days — or the brutal slogs in the mountains, or the heat that’s so overpowering that people are warned to stay indoors — is the team around you. I’m lucky in that Garmin is an amazing group. Every rider, soigneur, mechanic, director, accountant, logistics coordinator — everybody — is part of that team. A lot of work went into crafting that and finding people that fit, and a hearty thanks goes out to Jonathan for that.

Sharing experiences beyond the bike helps make that team as tight as it is: watching Steven Cozza play paintball, shirtless; seeing Bradley Wiggins and one of our chiropractors running naked through parking lots in east Boulder after losing an initiation competition at Avery Brewing Company; seeing Louise, our European logistics manager, riding the mechanical bull.

These shared experiences, and many more that for the good of all don’t need to be explored in public, are what you draw from when the going is tough. When the whole team is on the front, suffering, together, in defense of a race lead, or on the final few kilometers of a lead out, you know that the guys you’re racing with are more than just teammates. When it gets really bad and all you want to do is quit, you think of the team around you, and you know that in addition to disappointing yourself, your fans and your sponsors, you’d be letting down the crew.

In the season ahead we’re once again stepping up this program to another level, the top of the sport. While this past year exceeded expectations, it was easy. They weren’t that high to start with. For 2009 the expectations are a lot higher, and when the going gets tough we’ve got the bonds built in the bars of Boulder to help us dig just that bit deeper.

And once the suffering is over, we’ll find something to laugh about back on the bus, once again just a bunch of friends.