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This is a combination of all my explanations of cycling tactics, these are not specific to any race, but instead cover all the main elements of riding a bike professionally. I’m posting this in a separate thread for a few reasons, one so that it’s all together, and much easier to see. Also, I’m hoping more people check this out instead of people who don’t want to search through the other threads. Anyways, if you have questions about racing, feel free to read and ask.
The Pace Line
The line draft is the simplest form of drafting, effective and easy to co-ordinate, as well as a good idea for smaller groups. To understand it better, I've created a series of very, very simple JPGs (and yes, I did them with paint, where I am now it's the only thing I have to work with, and it serves it's purpose just fine for this). Each circle is a bicycler, simple enough.
Here we see the cyclists all lined up (meant as an explanation, not a pun ). For the moment, ignore the red rider, we'll get to him. The blue rider is now in front, "taking a turn at the front", or "leading-out" the group (normally associated with leading out sprinters, this phrase gets a lot of other uses as well). He's creating a slipstream for the other riders, making their air-resistance significantly less so they have to do less work. The other riders simply stay behind him, within his slipstream. The closer they are the better the slipstream, but the more dangerous the riding becomes. How close the riders get depends on how they’re feeling, and what level of bike handling they’re at. The really experience pro-riders will get with wheel all lined up with barely a foot, and sometimes less, in between.
Now what happens when the front rider gets tired and needs to take a break? Well let’s go back to our red rider. He used to be the front rider, but he finished his “pull at the front” and is now in place for a break. He veers off to the side and falls back, letting the blue rider take out the lead. He then cruises to the back of the line and the pattern is repeated. The following figure shows the red rider latching onto the back:
How long these turns at the front last depend completely on the riders, the course, the wind, and just about everything else. They can last for minutes or seconds; sometimes they don’t last at all, where every time a rider makes it to the front and starts leading out, they fall back, in a continuous cycle. However, that turns into what is called “echelon” forms, and is no longer line drafting.
There are various things to avoid in this format, let’s see a few of them.
Here we see a rider who didn’t latch onto the back fast enough (the red rider). He came back to the end of the line and went too far. Now there’s a gap between himself and the rider in front, and as a result, he no longer gets the benefit of drafting. He and the front rider are doing equal amounts of work, for no gain. The trick to avoid this is to start accelerating before you reach the back. When you come off the group you go much slower than the others, letting them pass you by. To join on again, you need to accelerate back to their velocity. And you need to do that before you reach the back or you’ll loose precious feet while accelerating.
Here we see that the blue rider has taken over the lead of the group; but now he’s surged. When you come to the front of the group do not accelerate! This is key, keep up the same speed, the rider in front will fall back, you do not accelerate by him. The blue rider here has screwed up and accelerated, the rider behind him did not accelerate at the same time (since that would require instant reaction time, which no one has), and when he accelerates, the rider behind him develops a gap. This goes all the way back to our poor tired red rider, who just finished his own, difficult lead-out. Now each rider is breaking a new slipstream for themselves, and not getting any benefit of drafting. Accelerating the lead-out is a big no-no.
So we’ve seen how the line draft works in basic conditions, let’s take a little more detailed look. First off, what happens when there’s a cross-wind?
This shows a lot of stuff. The first, and most noticeable thing is the way the riders are aligned (note: the green arrows represent wind). When drafting you always want to stay in the slipstream of the rider in front of you, and when there’s a cross wind, the slipstream moves. Let’s understand this a little better, and then get back to the complicated figure 1.
Here’s a hastily drawn picture of two riders, blue is leading out against the slip stream, and black is drafting behind him. The green arrows represent the direction of the force of the air pressure; as you can see, not only are not all of the arrows directly against the riders, some of them are pushing them forward! In perfectly laminar flow (basically, smooth flow) the air actually has no effect on an object, backwards or forwards! Well of course like many things, no one has ever achieved perfectly laminar flow, though it’s certainly been attempted (much of aerodynamics is to try and get the laminar shell to “attach” to an object for as long as possible, creating the least amount of drag, or “skin friction”). However, the back of something, even something that’s not perfectly laminar, will receive a forward push while the front is being pushed back. Two riders close together actually act like a non-laminar, single object. Meaning, that the back rider will get some push forward from the air.
Now this effect isn’t pronounced, and in our two rider system, the push backwards on the second rider is greater than the push forward (as they don’t act as a perfectly singular, laminar object), but you’ll often see guys at the back of the peleton (the huge group of riders, that bunch together for just this reason) coasting and keeping up. Of course at these speeds they still have to work to stay with the group, but the air is actually helping them go forward!
So now, let’s go back to the wind with another figure, and then return to our good ‘ol figure 1.
Here we see wind in green (on the blue rider), and the rider’s forward progress in black. There is a wind exactly opposite to that rider’s forward progress, pushing him back, and then there is the cross-wind. Figuring out the overall wind on the rider is simple vector addition. The rider has a wind on him with magnitude and direction equal to the green line with a black line through it. Simply add all the wind vectors (velocities) together to achieve the final wind. And directly behind that wind from the blue rider will be where his slipstream is (where the other riders want to draft).
So let’s go back to Figure 1. Keep in mind while looking at this picture that the black and blue riders (ha ha! ) are all going straight up the page, not to the left! The brown lines represent the rider’s individual slipstreams, and as you can see, each rider (besides the lead-out blue rider, and the red rider who’s falling back) is in another rider’s slipstream, making their wind resistance significantly less.
One thing to note when riding in a cross-wind, the lead-out rider always pulls back into the cross-wind. This is because the rider behind him will be overlapping wheels on the other side, and if the rider pulls off away from the wind then the will slip wheels, and most likely fall.
The riders, when there is no wind, signal by flicking their elbow’s in the direction they’re pulling off (and when there is wind too, but it’s always a pre-determined direction). Then the rider behind them takes over pace-making (remember, no accelerating!) and the other rider drops back to the end of the line.
Echelon drafting
This more complicated than simple line drafting, and more effective. Hopefully it’ll be simple enough to understand, but unless your really going strong on your bike with at least 8 (and better with more) riders at similar levels, this one will be more for you to understand cycling than to practice, because putting it into play is much more difficult than understanding it. Let’s start out with a fun figure, one that should show all of what’s going on (should being key ).
Let’s start off with the right side, the yellow rider is in the back, blue in the front. Think of each side as individual line drafts. So we have blue leading out the line, with yellow in the rear. On the left side we have red leading out the line with purple in the rear. There we have the basis of echelon drafting, two line-draft lines right next to each other.
Simple enough, right? Well let’s move onto the more complex part of it, first, look at the black arrows on top and bottom. Red, it appears, has just moved over into the left lane (I’ll call them lanes from now on) from the right lane. It’s exactly the same move red would make if he were in the right line draft and just finished the lead-out (so think of him as now dropping back to the end of the line to work his way back-up).
Purple is about to switch over into the right lane, get back into that draft and work his way back up to the front. Simple enough so far, at least if you look at it separately. Now let’s take a look at what blue’s doing. Red just dropped out of the lead and fell into the left lane, so blue is clearly taking over the pace making. Only he’s also moving over from right to left. What this means is that no one takes “pulls at the front”, as soon as a rider makes it to the front, they move to the left, and the next rider comes up and move to the left. This means that the riders will only be breaking the wind when they’re moving over, never taking durations of lead-outs.
And finally, let’s look at the big arrows for either lane. The one on the left is point backwards and labeled 25mph, the one on the right it forwards going 27mph. This does not mean the left lane is moving backwards at 25mph! It means they’re moving forward at 25mph, but since the right lane (fast lane) is moving two miles an hour faster than the left lane (slow lane), the overall effect is that the slow lane riders are dropping back in comparison to the fast lane riders. Here’s the best way to visualize this:
You’re a biker on this big tread like thing (the oval). You keep going around and around and around, on one side you’re going 1mph forward, on the other you’re going 1mph backwards, and you just go around like that. However, at the same time, this whole oval is moving down the road at 26mph, so your total speed is 27mph on one side and 25mph on the other. Can you visualize it now? If not, ask questions!
This type of drafting is incredibly effective, especially in cross-winds, because then the slower side (always on the side the wind is coming from) will break the wind for the fast side, which is handy since you don’t have to do as much work on the slow side normally. Also, no one takes long pulls at front, everyone starts moving back the instant they hit front, so no one gets worn out if they spend too long pulling. And finally, instead of losing all that time where a rider will basically just drift to the back of the draft-line, they pedal now, and go fast, so their time is actually spent moving forward, not de-accelerating and then re-accelerating.
Breaking Away
You’re riding along in a typical group (we’ll make it small for now, but the break-away tactics themselves are pretty much the same all through-out), and all of a sudden, you decide it’s time. Your legs are feeling good, you’ve noticed a slow down in pace, whatever: you want to go now! So how do you do it? How do you create a break-away? Well let’s start by looking at the situation with a good ‘ol figure.
You’re the red rider, blue is leading out the group. You’re in the very back of the group for now, you’ve gotten a little rest there (hopefully) and are ready to go. The way to start the break away is to drift back. One of the key elements of a break is surprise, that’s why you start at the back, and that’s why you drift back now, so when you blow by the group they wont realize it until you’ve already accelerated.
There you are, you’ve drifted back and a bit to the side (so you can accelerate by them, if there’s crosswind, you’ll always go on the opposite side incase the leader pulls out just as you go by and crash, and because then you’ll get a little extra wind protection). Now you begin to accelerate, and hard. This will not be pace you can keep up, but you need to put definite space between yourself and the group, so you jump on the pedals and go!
And you’re off! By the time you’re back up with the group, you should be going much faster than they are. This way when they see that you’re going, they have to work to catch up. No one can accelerate instantly, so you’re guaranteed at least a few seconds on them by virtue of your much higher speed. It makes it much more difficult for someone to try and jump on your wheel and draft off of you as you go by.
After you’ve jumped past the group, you’ll have to keep your speed high for a little while, make sure a big enough gap develops that they can’t draft you, and preferably, big enough that they can get back to you for the rest of the race. At some point you will have to slow down since you can’t keep your break speed up for the whole race (if you can, you’re going to slow!) Once this has happened, there is no strategy left for you, either you can tough out to the end of the race, or you can’t and the group behind you catches you.
So let’s go back to the group, and see what they can do to react. First, the biggest mistake that is made in catching a break-away:
Here the red rider has gone, they’re in front of the break, and now the group has to chase him down. It will start with the front rider accelerating, and then the rest of the group has to go or be caught out. What we see happening here is that the blue rider has sped up, but the other riders sped up to slowly. They waited for the rider in front of them to start accelerating before they did, and that means that between each rider is a gap the size of their reaction time. Now the group is split up, and each rider is facing the wind by themselves, instead of creating an effective line-draft. The trick is to start accelerating the instant you see the lead-out man going, this way everyone accelerates at exactly the same time, and no gaps form. It’s tricky, but it’s all part of being a professional racer.
So that’s the main mess-up, now let’s look at the ways to effectively control the break. There’s two main tactics you can choose to do so, and let’s start with the individual one.
Here the red rider goes again, and blue is leading out, but this time you’re yellow. You notice red coming up behind you, or going past you, and you decide to try and catch him. You jump out of line and start accelerating as hard as you can to get on Red’s tail.
You make it! Chances are you’d have caught onto red’s tail a little slower than this picture would show, but only by a few meters down the road. Now you’re in red’s slipstream, and you’re drafting off him. This means you can follow his break (probably) and not do as much work. Now one of three things will happen: he’ll realize he’s caught and slow down to return to the group, he’ll decide that even with you in his slipstream, he can still loose you, ant try to continue the break (at a high velocity to try and get you to fall off his tail), or, he can decide to break with you. If he does the first thing, you can try your own break off of him, or just go with him. If he does the second, you’ll just have to try and hang on, and if you do, you’ll end up with fresher legs than he has since you were drafting. If he does three then you can work with him to get this little break to the end of the race. That means two person drafting (if someone else breaks with you this is exactly the same for all of these possibilities, just a bigger break now).
If you try to catch onto his wheel and don’t make it you have to either give up and go back to the group, or try your own break-away behind red’s. But what if no one catch’s red’s wheel and he breaks alone? Well you’ll try to bring him back (catch up to him, otherwise he’ll win the race!) and you’ll do it in the group. This is more typical if you’re in the peleton with a hundred other riders, but it’s still very standard for small groups.
You don’t need a picture for this one, because now we’re back to the line draft. What’ll happen is that the group will pick up their pace. They wont accelerate to the speed of the red breaker, he’s going faster than anyone can really catch up to. What you do is let him break, give him some distance, but keep the tempo high. It’s using the fact that you’ve got multiple guys there to draft from and he has to fight the wind the whole way. Basically you hope that as a group you can keep a speed higher than his to the end, and then you’ll catch him out.
As a note, when most break-aways are caught by the group this way, the breaker (red) will fall behind the group. A break takes a lot of energy since you have to fight the wind the whole way by yourself, and a break-group is much fresher since they can draft, so chances are they’ll “drop” you if they catch you. Meaning pass by you and you wont be able to hook onto the group.
The art of blocking
Your teammate is up ahead in a break that you want to succeed. You’ll do whatever it takes to keep the group your in now from chasing him down and forcing him to loose the race. So you decide to block. Blocking often takes close to, or more energy that the attack up front, but when done right, you’ll be what let your teammate win, not him.
There’s many ways to block, let’s start off with the most obvious, most straightforward, least practical way.
Here you’re the red rider, and you’re trying to keep blue and green from getting past you, so you literally just get in front of them. This is body blocking, and it’s not very effective. If you’re in a rush, and the end’s in sight, it can work, but it wont stop people for very long, it’s very dangerous, and it’ll get a lot of people very unhappy with you.
The best blocking is more subtle, so that people don’t even realize you are blocking. So let’s see a still aggressive, but more practical and effective blocking method.
In most cases you’re in a little group trying to chase down your teammate (you’re red), and you’re doing it by using the fact that you can draft better than your lone teammate (or your teammate with a smaller group, and thus, less people to draft off of). Well of course you don’t want to actually catch your teammate, so you block the group you’re in.
In that figure we see a good way of doing it. You (the red) are in second to blue, who is leading out the group. You start going at a slower pace than blue is, and let a gap develop. Now the no one is benefiting from the drafting, and the group behind you has to either go your speed (not likely) or get by you, which means getting out of the pace line and fighting the wind on their own, not to mention accelerating to catch up to the blue rider. You make them do a lot of work by slowing down here. Technically you can get back in the line after someone passes you and keep doing it over and over, but the riders, when they see you blocking will try to keep from letting you in. However, this is still an effective blocking method.
This is another good way to slow down the group. It’s more obvious and less effective, but it can really screw with the mental composure of the group. You’re red, blue was leading the pace line and green is behind you. Blue finishes his turn at the front and pulls off to head to the back of the line. You pull off with him. This will really unnerve blue and green, cause the pace line to loose an extra bike length on the breakaway, and possibly slow it down as green wont be expecting to take the lead. You should try and get back into the pace line and do it again if you can, but now the riders will be wary and try to keep you out of it.
Here’s probably the most effective blocking tactic. You lead-out and chase down your teammate. Or make it look like you lead out and chase down your teammate. What you do is go to the front and take long, hard turns there. Keep the pace up so no one else attacks or tries to force you off the front, but keep your speed under the speed you know your teammate will be going at. This is very effective, very subtle (so you can do it for a long time), and the best way to block.
If you have a teammate in the pace line with you, then you can do some team blocking. Stay separate from your teammate, one towards the front, and one at the back. At the front, employ some tactics like pulling off with the leader and creating gaps. Hopefully you can get back into the pace line with the help of your teammate. The guy at the back is there to check for breaks. Most breaks will develop from the back, so he has to be ready to chase them down. In the figure you can see green is attacking the group and your red teammate instantly gets on his tail. If he manages to stick there green will know that he’ll have to drag this guy all the way up, and the red man will have done a lot less work since he’ll have drafter the whole way. So green will probably give up and return to the pace line.
Some times you want to let guys go. If they’re strong and you think they can help the break that your teammate is in, you may want to let them catch up to that break to help out your teammate. Or you may want to let guys go that you don’t think can catch up, don’t bother wasting energy on them if they wont be able to make it anyways.
Finally, here’s an example of when that basic body blocking actually works. It’s more in the sprinting category than blocking, but it relates so I wanted to throw it in anyways, just to show that almost any strategy can be well employed if you just know when to do it.
Here you’re the red man in front, and the red behind you is your teammate, a sprinter. You’re at the end of the stage and you just led out your sprinter for the final push to the end. Now you’re pulling off and letting him take it the rest of the distances. While you’re pulling off the green rider (also a sprinter presumably) is trying to get by your sprinter to take the stage. So you simply pull off right in front of him. You’re going much slower (not pedaling) than he is, and you’ll cause him to slow down or get behind your rider instead of pulling out. In a sprint finish that split second difference is all the difference, and you just handed your red sprinter the win. Good blocking!
Sprinting
I’ve touched on some of the sprinting elements before, but let’s go in depth and see what it’s all about. Sprinting is undoubtedly the most exciting part of the race, and certainly the fastest. The sprinters can sustain for short periods, speeds of over 70km/hr (close to 45 mph) over completely flat courses, and when you see the group finishes, it’s just exhilarating.
Let’s start off with a nice, complete picture of the sprint:
There it is in a nut shell really, we see the red team “leading out” the blue sprinter (presumably on that team). The “train” (basically line of riders blocking the wind) in front of blue is giving him a lead-out so that he doesn’t have to face the wind by himself, nor maintain such a high pace as they’re giving him (often up around 60km/hr on a lead-out, almost as fast as the sprint) by himself until 200-100 meters before the finishing line.
Is that simple enough? The red guys in front are setting a very, very high tempo so that blue can draft off of them, and to try and keep anyone else from trying to sprint early since they wont be able to maintain such a high pace all the way to the line.
However, you can also see that there is a red guy behind the blue sprinter, who is this? This is the “sweeper”. Everyone knows who the sprinter is (even when it’s not quite as obvious as this picture makes it ), and everyone knows that the sprinter will get a draft until the last possible moment. So if you manage to get onto the sprinter’s wheel, you are also guaranteed that drafting, and you can follow the sprinter most of the way to the line, and then try to break past him at the last moment.
The green lines are those other riders trying to get onto the sprinter’s wheel. It’s dangerous and it’s risky, but the sprints always are, and some guys are willing to take the risk to win the race.
One strategy to try and stop that is the “sweeper”, someone from the sprinter’s team who sits on the sprinter’s wheel so that no one else (especially a rival sprinter) can. The sweeper is a actually a difficult and dangerous job, since there will be many, many riders trying to latch onto the back of that wheel. It’s also not incredibly common in European stage riding for some reason. Some teams don’t have enough guys on their team to designate one of them for sweeper, some times they just feel they don’t need one, but if you can do, it can be a big help, since it will make sure your team only works for one guy, and not for some other team.
Here we see the leader of the train pulling off, he’s done his pull and it’s time to let the guy behind take the lead-out. However, he notices, or his sprinter shouts up to him (or his coach for that matter) that the riders on the left are surging forward. Of course he doesn’t want this, he wants his sprinter to be ahead, and not swamped by this left side surge. So he pulls off to the left and actually blocks those riders by simply putting his body between them and the open road.
Here we see what it’s like to try and run a longer lead-out. Most of the time, the sprinter’s team will run a lead-out that is long enough that the riders doing the lead-out will have to take multiple turns at the front, not just do one and then pull off to the side. So basically what happens is that a pace-line consisting of the sprinter’s team gets set up in the middle of the peleton. Here we see the rider at the front trying to break-off from the lead-out and get back into the back of the pace-line. It’s something that has to be done, but it can be difficult to get back in. The front of the peleton is incredibly crowded at the end of the race, and there will be plenty of people that don’t want him to get back into that pace line.
Here we see the end of the lead-out; the last man in front of the sprinter has taken his last pull, and is now moving off to the side. The blue sprinter now goes for the line (something I’ll explain at the end of this). The sweeper does not make the sprint, he just goes along at his pace, which means that everyone behind him is stuck, and can not take the sprint (meaning they’ll all loose, since they can’t move forward at the speed they need). Around this time all sorts of other sprints will be launched. You can see the brown rider on the side is making his move, also, everyone who can is trying to grab onto blue’s wheel, or make sprints of their own.
Here’s two teams making a lead-out. This is incredibly common, most stage finishes two trains set themselves up and then basically drag-race to the finish, sometimes more than two teams set up a lead-out, each one for their own sprinter. A lot of times, the sprint winner is determined by the quality of the lead-out, and how fast their rider’s can go.
Throwing your bike Sprints are often decided by inches, and as a result, throwing your bike at the crucial moment is, well, crucial. When you sprint you tend to move your body pretty far forward on the bike, so right at the line the trick is to literally throw, or push your bike in front of you, since the winner is measured by who gets their front wheel their first. This is a rather complicated maneuver, but simple enough in principle: one half pedal stroke or so before the line, just push forwards with all your might on the handlebars, forcing the bike to move under your body so you’re much farther back (or rather, the bike is much farther forward). All serious sprinters do this, but it takes a really talented and practiced sprinter to do it right, and at the right time.
How you sprint We’ve gone over tactics and lead-outs, but what exactly do you do when your lead-out man pulls off and it’s time for you to sprint to the line?
The Jump This is the first move, you push down on the pedals harder than you think you’re even capable of, and do it with complete recklessness. This is why sprints are so dangerous, you can not allow any caution in your riding or you loose. This is a massive acceleration that will take a significant portion of your energy.
The Acceleration You can only keep the jump up for a few second, so you settle into acceleration, you pedal as hard as possible can with (once again) reckless abandon up until you can not go any faster.
Top Speed Then you simply hold onto that high speed until either you get tired, or (ideally) you hit the finishing line and the sprint is over.
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Well I work full-time, I've been writting a hash-table search program for a tape database, I've watched almost the entire first two seasons of West Wing in the last week, following cycling-news and posting on Hatrack and tell Annie how much I Love her.
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). For the moment, ignore the red rider, we'll get to him. The blue rider is now in front, "taking a turn at the front", or "leading-out" the group (normally associated with leading out sprinters, this phrase gets a lot of other uses as well). He's creating a slipstream for the other riders, making their air-resistance significantly less so they have to do less work. The other riders simply stay behind him, within his slipstream. The closer they are the better the slipstream, but the more dangerous the riding becomes. How close the riders get depends on how they’re feeling, and what level of bike handling they’re at. The really experience pro-riders will get with wheel all lined up with barely a foot, and sometimes less, in between.![[Wink]](wink.gif)
) are all going straight up the page, not to the left! The brown lines represent the rider’s individual slipstreams, and as you can see, each rider (besides the lead-out blue rider, and the red rider who’s falling back) is in another rider’s slipstream, making their wind resistance significantly less.
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