Sprint teams know the drill. You stick some sacrificial riders on the front around 10 km out, then somebody to really up the pace around 5 km while the protected sprinter jockeys 15 or so wheels back. Your key riders don't do a thing until you're pretty close to the 1-km-to-go flamme rouge, where they line it out, riding so fast nobody can come around. At 500 meters to go, your final leadout rider is going full gas. And then at 200 meters, the sprinters take over.
It's all about timing. Get it wrong, and even the best sprinter doesn't stand a chance. Get it right, and a slower sprinter can take the win.
Thanks to a relatively recent rule change, team time trials now operate under roughly the same principles. The change is simple but, for anybody trying to wear the yellow jersey at this year’s Tour de France, profound: Instead of taking time at a team's fourth rider across the finish line, each rider gets his own time.
Before, a team had to stay together. The team's leader was only as fast as the fourth rider. Now, with the rule change, that leader can go solo, shooting off alone in sight of the finish line as if the TTT were one giant, half-hour-long sprint leadout.
So, given that Tuesday's TTT at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes was very much a dress rehearsal for the first stage of the Tour de France, how did teams approach it?
It's a leadout
The team time trial at Paris-Nice this spring indicated that this was likely to be the case, but Tuesday's TTT confirmed it. Teams are treating modern TTTs as a giant leadout, selecting key points where riders will take one final pull and then peel off. They are not trying to keep the team together as long as possible, as was generally the case under the fourth-rider rule.
Dane Cash
The third stage of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes – née Critérium du Dauphiné – was a 28.4 km twisting team time trial finishing with a kicker of a climb, 800 meters at 6.3%. The opening stage of this summer's Tour de France is a 19-kilometer team time trial through the streets of Barcelona, finishing with a very similar kicker, 700 meters at 7.9%. Different courses, same logic. Tuesday was the dress rehearsal, and the dress rehearsal was revealing.
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