We still have the Tour of Italy circulating in the blood and in the head, but with the start of the Dauphiné tomorrow we will already move on Tour de France. And inevitably we end up talking about her interpreters. Among these there will also be Tao Geoghegan Hart.
There is a lot of curiosity around the Englishman who arrived at Lidl-Trek this year. And we learned part of these curiosities precisely at the Giro when one morning we met Josu Larrazabal, head of the performance sector of the American team.
We remember that Tao Geoghegan Hart had a disastrous fall just last year during the pink race. A terrible injury, among the various fractures including that of the femur. A very long rehabilitation and an uncertain or at least complicated return. So far the former pink jersey has competed in 24 days of racing, also showing some good performances, but the road to fighting with Pogacar, Roglic and Vingegaard certainly appears long.
Josu, how is Tao?
It’s going well, obviously it took a little more time… And then I don’t even know if saying “more time” is right or wrong, because we didn’t know where Tao would start again after such an intervention. But it’s true that the winter went very well, perhaps also for this reason we were already expecting to see something at Catalunya. But what we didn’t see at Catalunya we saw at Romandia a month later.
So is it on the schedule now?
Let’s say that up until now we were a month late. Now Tao is in the midst of preparing for the Tour, he is in Sierra Nevada (he came down just a couple of days ago, ed.) with the team. In my opinion at the Dauphiné we will see yet another step compared to Romandie and we will be ready for the Tour.
After an important accident like yours, Josu, have you noticed any moments of inflection? Not only physically, but also on a moral level?
I don’t know the runner that well, because he arrived this year. I’m getting to know him. In conversations with him there was that trait of uncertainty about himself, which continually searches for confirmation. In December, in every test we saw that it had, in quotes, the stress of confirming that he was on the mend, which was fine. He always wanted more. Let’s also consider that in today’s cycling everything is measured and the kids have constant numerical references. He cared a lot about it and we tried to get him out of this aspect.
And how?
Our expectation in the first part of the season was to return, to race again. Put him in a team, make him work. And Tao did this very well. In the Basque Country he worked for Skjelmose giving an important contribution as a leader and then in Romandy he showed up. A result that is below his standard, but given where he came from it was an excellent top 10 (he finished 9th, 1’02” behind Carlos Rodriguez, ed.). There he had good confirmations and good sensations. But now it’s not enough.
Meaning what?
We haven’t closed the circle yet. In my opinion it will be important for him to compete at the Dauphiné, to arrive at the Tour with top confidence.
Josu, we talked about numbers, what did you miss most after the accident? Peaks in power, endurance, recovery?
Efficiency I say. In the end, with training you refine, refine something every day and bring all the components to a level of excellence. A level that allows you to arrive at the end of the race as fresh as possible and with more chance of hitting the maximum numbers. When you do a maximal test the data is there, but cycling isn’t what you do when you’re fresh, cycling is what you do after 5 hours. Is that fatigue resistance that you lose when you undergo an operation like this.
Efficiency in general, in the running…
The body loses those many little things that are necessary. Cycling is a technical sport and not just a tactical one. Pedaling is a movement that is repeated a thousand times and that is where the efficiency lies. That’s where good efficiency makes the difference. And if for each of those thousand pedal strokes you lose even just a little, after 4-5 hours the gap you have to fill is enormous.
Have you also worked a little in the gym? Or rather, given the muscle you needed to recover, did you continue it during the season?
Yes, we worked a lot on it. The gym was the basis of his rehabilitation. Tao did a great job in Amsterdam, in this center where they did the surgery. They worked a lot in monopodalic, that is, with their legs separated so that everything returned to its top, measuring each value of the strength of that limb. And in fact from that point of view he was already in good shape in the winter, however, it’s one thing how you are on a physical level in a test, which is non-specific among other things, and another thing is like you are on a bike pedaling with both legs together, with that necessary coordination. Here we return to the issue of efficiency.
