Transcribed and edited by Peter McCormick.

schmalz Today we’re here with Christian Vande Velde of the Garmin Slipstream team. You’re going to have a new sponsor next year. You’re going to be Garmin-Pom next year?

VDV I really don’t the official name of the team but Pom is definitely going to be part of the family.

schmalz  There’s going to be a Pom there somewhere. Have you had the obligatory Pom Martini?

VDV You know what? I haven’t. That’s a good idea actually. We’re going to the Pom headquarters next week in LA so I’m sure we’ll get the chance to do that there.

schmalz  Sure. Just get to the punch bowl and pour a big flask of booze into there and you’re going to be all set.

VDV (Scandalized giggle)

schmalz  It’ll make that meeting much more interesting than anyone thought it would be.

VDV Someone’s got to spike the bowl.

schmalz  So you’re in the off-season now. I think the Tour of Missouri kind of ended your season for you.

VDV Yeah. It definitely ended my season whether I’d have liked to have or not. It was…damn, that was a long time ago already. It was so far off, I’m already thinking of next season. I’m already thinking of the next few weeks. I’m going to be training in the saddle and in the gym much earlier than I cared to but I’ve had a great month already.

schmalz  So what’s the final bone count for the year there, Evel Knievel? How many did you end up cracking?

VDV I don’t know. Eight? Yeah.

schmalz  There was the Giro where you broke your back and then there was another one where you broke something else, wasn’t there?

VDV No, I probably just re-broke some of the vertebrae that I’d already broken in Switzerland and stuff like that but, whatever; it was neither here nor there.

schmalz  It seems like the entire year was the Year of "Plan B". You get going and then, oh, here’s a crash…

VDV There were a lot of us in that same boat. It’s never fun when you’re constantly chasing your tail. It adds a lot of stress to your life and it’s really not fun. Obviously it wasn’t planned; but it didn’t turn out so bad but it didn’t turn out so great at the end. It was a very bittersweet year.

schmalz  At the end of the year do you just take a complete break and not look at your bike or do anything cycling-related for a while or do you just ride slower?

VDV Actually I ride faster but just really short. I ride and go kill myself for just an hour or two, on my cross bike, and that’s about it. I have a lot of fun doing that. I’d never do that in the middle of the year – killing myself on a cross bike for no reason, just hammering. It’s a good time.

schmalz  So are you back in Illinois. Are you going to do the cold weather training again?

VDV No, not to the extent that I have in the last few years. I’ve smartened up. It’s obnoxious already: it’s 42 degrees and rainy as I speak to you, and it’s October, and it’s been like that all week. It’s been a big bummer. I’m taking that as a cue and I’m leaving Sunday for San Francisco and I’m going to ride down the coast for the Million Dollar Challenge, so that’ll be really fun and a nice way to get out and ride your bike. Then I’m going to Hawaii in December with the family.

schmalz  So you don’t have to break out the Grand Marnier in October and risk that borderline alcoholism at the season start?

VDV No, I’m getting a grip on the Grand Marnier, drinking it when I’m not even that cold.

schmalz  Recreationally?

VDV Recreationally, exactly.

Fame: The Man Who Lives Near Mark Buehrle

schmalz  Do your neighbors in Illinois have a concept of what you do? Do they know you’re the world traveler/international cycling man of intrigue that you are? Or are they just like, “Oh yeah, that guy down the road: he rides bikes or something.”

VDV This last year, a lot of people started realizing what I do. My aunt’s a radio personality and she gets on the radio and so a lot of people hear me on the radio and see me on TV. But for the most part it’s still just kind of weird. You know, "the guy that they see who rides to the Gatehouse all the time, and on his bike and who doesn’t really ever go to work".

schmalz  I guess it must be like living next door to a polo player. It’s great. I have no frame of reference for it. I don’t know what a polo player does. I can respect it, I guess. I know they ride horses, but if you were the most famous polo player of all time I don’t know if it would make all that much of an impression on me.

VDV Yes. We have some friends who are professional sailors and they take things just different – especially here in the states in Chicago.

schmalz  Do you get more attention when you’re in Girona than when you’re in Chicago?

VDV No. No one says anything in either place. They just say "hi" and that’s about it. I’m in the middle. I’ll give you an example. Mark Buehrle lives down the street from me.

schmalz  Right. I have no idea who that is.

VDV Well Mark is the only guy who pitched a perfect game in a long, long time.

schmalz  Oh that’s right, he’s the White Sox guy.

VDV He lives down the street, and everyone in the tristate area knows who Mark Buehrle is. I say I live down the street, and people say: “Oh, that’s where you live!” It kind of puts things in context. I’m a professional athlete but I’m not like that. Far from it.

schmalz  I live adjacent to an actual professional athlete!

VDV Exactly! An actual!

schmalz  Yeah there’s a real athlete right down the street. He only pitches one in every five games but who’s counting? Not the same sort of thing. So, you’re just taking a break, getting to know your neighbors again, and trying to explain to them what bike racing is all about. They’re probably more impressed that you were at the Olympics, aren’t they?

VDV Probably. You know, you’re right. The Olympics go along way in the States and in most Anglo countries, the Olympics is a big deal. In Australia it’s massive and in the UK, it’s even bigger, I believe. You get a lot more oohs and aahs when you say you’ve been to the Olympics.

schmalz  You whip out that track suit and they go, “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.”

VDV That’s what it’s all about, man. The schwag.

schmalz  Well, they’ve announced the 2010 Tour route. Have you begun planning for the race the day after? Or five minutes after?

2010 TdF Route and Hotel Life

VDV Everyone definitely checks it out and scours the map to see exactly what we’re doing, but next year, given that it is Pyrenees-heavy, it will be very easy to go and check out a lot of the mountains. It’s only a couple of hours’ drive from Girona. You get a good impression of who it’s going to be good for, who it’s going to be bad for, when you to use your strength – all those kinds of things. Everyone has their own agenda and an idea of what’s going to be good and bad for them. It’s going to be stressful, as usual. There’s always that big week looming at the end of the Tour, and you’re going over cobblestones in the first week of the Tour, being up north in Rotterdam, where the weather can still be atrocious still in the middle of July.

schmalz  It seems like for a contender, it’s going to be an extra-stressful early week. There’s going to be cobbles, cross-winds, rain, there’s going to be all kinds of things out there.

VDV Yeah but they took out the team time trial and there really aren’t too many things more stressful than a team time trial. At all. So they traded it out. There’s no team time trial but we have a ton of cobblestones within the last 30 K of the race, so it’s almost equal.

schmalz  But even though it’s stressful, wouldn’t you have preferred to have a team time trial, because you did so well in the team time trial last year?

VDV For sure.

schmalz  How else are you going to knock Cadel of the race?

VDV He can leave that to himself. I would have loved to, first and foremost, won one of those team time trials in the Tour. We came in second in both grand tours this year and that really stunk. I just wanted a chance to win a big one in the Tour.

schmalz  Well you didn’t lose by much. It was really tight. You had four-and-a-half guys, as I remember.

VDV It still goes down as one of the most amazing things I’ve ever been a part of, being with the two Daves and with Brad that day and Ryder; that was really insane. If I could ever go that fast again in a breakaway, I think you’d win the Tour de France.

schmalz  So did you ever think you’d have such an intimate knowledge of the geography of France? You could probably run a pretty nice bus tour. Or you could run a pretty terrible bus tour that takes you to all the terrible hotels of France. Either way.

VDV Yeah. You know you’ve been over there too long when you start going to the same hotels twice and three times, even when you’re just walking or driving by and you need a place to stay and you think, oh my God, I’ve been here before. That’s starting to happen… it makes me good at pretty lame Trivial Pursuit questions for mid-Europe.

schmalz  “Which section of France is known for its liver cheese?” And you’re like: Oh! I know that! Do you ever find yourself on some French road; you don’t know where you are, but you’re: “I remember this piece of road. I think I took a whizz here or something happened here before … Do you have this déjà vu when you’re in France?

VDV You definitely get déjà vu, but I don’t race that in France that often except the Tour so that stuff on those roads that you’ve ridden up, like Tourmalet, for example. I’ve raced a ton of times, up and down, that and a couple of races, but for the most part I’ve only done, I think, seven Tours now, but it’s not really that many. Not like George [Hincapie] or Eki [Ekimov]. They know every nook and cranny.

schmalz  You’ve probably already done the hotel map when you look at the start and the stop cities. You’re like, “Yeah, this one’s going to suck. This one’s going to be terrible.”

VDV That’s true.

schmalz  No sleep tonight … this one’s going to be terrible. This one’s going to be awful, no shower here. You probably have whole different experience of it, just from travelling from place to place there, because have to worry about where you’re going to go and the logistics of everything.

VDV It is a nice thing but it’s not something you really want to brag about: that you’ve lived in hotels for 200 nights a year and not [incomp]. It’s something I would definitely appreciate getting away from. Unless we’re always staying in a very nice hotel. If you’re going to put me in the Peninsula for 200 nights a year, I’m a happy person.

schmalz  The only other people who spend so many nights in hotels are probably prostitutes, right?

VDV (Laughter) You’re not far away.

schmalz  You’re almost like an escort service, all that travelling. So: how do you handicap the Tour next year? It looks like it’s going to be very good Tour for Alberto and Andy Schleck, for Andy especially, because they have fewer time trial miles.

VDV I think that’s correct. Andy’s improving massively every year in the time trial. In the last two years he made huge steps. With Alberto, everyone keeps going on about that he’s a skinny climber; he can’t time trial. They forget how fast he really goes until he reminds everybody, and he wins. The only thing against Alberto is his agility, to go fast on the cobblestones.

schmalz  It’s Spanish kryptonite, isn’t it?

VDV Andy’s a really great bike rider now and there isn’t going to be any problems for him at all.

schmalz  It’s sweet, because he’s going to be able legally to drink the Champagne on the podium.

VDV That’s always a good thing.

schmalz  It seems that the mountains they’re talking about are going to be more decisive later in the Tour – which mountains always are because everyone gets tired – but it’s the Pyrenees that are going to be later, correct?

VDV Yeah.

schmalz  What kind of rider does that suit?

VDV They say it’s steeper and rougher roads in the Pyrenees. I don’t know if that still bodes true completely, but it is a little bit hotter down there… And then it just depends on how many hard mountains they put back-to-back. You can have a hard stage, but you put the Tourmalet in the middle of things, like they did this year, and you have a hundred-person field sprint. So it really depends on where you place them – what was the day before, what’s on the line, how the weather is – there are a lot of factors that go into it. But you have the perfect storm like this year in le Grand Bornand and then all hell breaks loose.

schmalz  So it depends on the way the Tour is laid out; what they’re looking for that year, which towns have paid enough to the ASO.

VDV But you also need a sick launch-pad, like the Schlecks had last year on the penultimate climb in that stage. The stage wasn’t even five hours long but there was just an amazing amount of climbing. I think it was something like 15 or 16,000 feet of climbing that day.

schmalz  And they had Alberto helping them out.

VDV Yeah. Once.

schmalz  I think that was the only time he helped out. I don’t think he’s going to be helping out much more.

VDV No, never again.

Getting Along in the Rolling High School

schmalz  Now, as far as the off-season stuff goes, you have obviously no say in what the roster changes are going to be. So do you hear about these things just through Cyclingnews or do you just read about it or do you get any information beforehand at all?

VDV Once in a while. A lot of times the things we did earlier in the year, I have a say in. But for the most part, there are things I’ve learned that I want to be involved in and things I don’t want to be involved in, just because I have enough problems on my own plate.

schmalz  And maybe JV isn’t going to listen to you anyway.

VDV Exactly. Or make it work in the wrong way. And at the end of the day, it’s his business and not mine, and I’m an employee of his. Of course if I really feel strongly about it, I’m going to speak my mind. At the same time, I don’t want to get too involved.

schmalz  Well I think the nature of pro cycling, since it’s such a rolling high school of about five hundred guys, everyone knows each other already, and when you get placed on the team, it’s, "Ah well, I already know them or I know of them." I don’t think there are too many riders who would have objections to being together on teams.

VDV You’re right. But it’s trickier than you think. There’s getting people who will all hang out, who would appreciate being on an American team and speaking English around the table, who could gel into something like that – and who could also go very fast and live over in Europe for the whole year. It’s an interesting blend of people you need to get, especially given that we have – and this is a good problem – is that we have Radio Shack and Sky this year, along with Columbia; that’s just doubled the teams we have for Anglos. It’s a great problem to have. Nonetheless this makes it a bit harder to pick riders.

schmalz  You and all the riders on Garmin seem to be pretty friendly with one another. Would you say it’s the friendliest team you’ve ever been on? How does it rate in the whole spectrum of liking the guys you ride with?

VDV The last two teams I’ve been on have been really great in that sense. CSC was an incredibly tight team. A whole lot of us had kids and everyone was married, more or less; everyone had the same likes and interests. That was a really tight team. This [Garmin] has turned into a very tight team. It’s always hard the first year, when you make the team and there’s a lot of people from all different sides and you have to weed out – people start weeding out themselves, actually. At the end of this year and next year, it’s going to be really tight and success comes with that, I think.

schmalz  The team has had a lot of big wins toward the end of the year, which is great because there are only so many second places that you can stand throughout the season until you start to go nuts. Tyler had his grand tour win and Dave Zabriskie was able to pull off the Tour of Missouri. That helps also: success really does make people happier to go to work.

VDV No doubt about it. It makes me more inspired and if you’re sitting at home watching your teammates, you want to be part of that. Success breeds success.

schmalz  Unlike Astana, where everyone’s trying to be rats jumping off a ship, apparently. I don’t know if they can or not. It seems as if they would be the anti-friendly team right now because of the way the whole situation is set up. Everything is gone; they’ve got no buses. I don’t know whether they’re going to get around in horse carts; I don’t know how they’re going to get from one place to another. Maybe Vino [Vinokourov] has a station wagon… Have you had any contact with Bradley Wiggins? Do you know where he’s going to go? He probably hasn’t told anyone anything, right?

VDV I went to Dave Millar’s wedding in London and had a great time. I was with him and the new manager of the Sky team; we all sat at the same table, actually, and we agreed right away that we weren’t going to talk about anything, and just have a good time and drink too much wine.

schmalz Talking business can be boring at a wedding.

VDV We didn’t want to throw any tables or anything like that.

Working With Wiggins and Where the Bottles Are

schmalz  It was interesting during the Tour when it showed that Bradley was going to take over the team leadership role. I heard that you were kind of helping him out because he’s not a neophyte in stage racing, but I think he is new to the role of being the leader in a stage race. So I think you had to tell him about where to position himself, where to be, how to save a little energy here and there. Does that sound right? Were you kind of guiding him around?

VDV Yeah. I definitely helped him out when I could. In some things he didn’t need any help at all. He’s incredibly confident and knows what he can and can’t do, really well. You don’t become a couple-time Olympic champion not knowing those kinds of things. If anything, I helped him out more with public perception and talking to the press, things like that; getting him to relax a little bit. That’s where you can definitely win or lose the Tour de France when those sorts of things begin to mount. That just sucks the energy out of you.

schmalz  It shows something about the way your team is structured and the way you regard each other. He kind of showed he was going to be the team leader as the race wore on and then you rallied behind him, instead of trying to lose him at the hotel or not getting his car to show up at the hotel to go to the time trial. I’m looking at another team that shall remain nameless – there’s a big difference between the way the two teams went about it.

VDV Yeah, but at the same time, to be fair to other guys, I’ve never won the Tour de France. I’ve never even been on the podium on the Tour de France. If I’d won it a ton of times or won every grand tour I’d ever entered, like Alberto, that’s a completely different story; I might have a different mentality. That means, first and foremost, that I’ve been a domestique a lot longer than I’ve been a team leader, so that’s actually more of my normal role. It’s not that I want to be there as much anymore, but I’m happy to help out whenever I can.

schmalz  And you know where the bottles are and you know how to do that.

VDV No, I can’t really find the bottles anymore, I don’t know.

schmalz  You can’t find these bottles? “I don’t know what these bottles are.”

VDV I can’t find them. I haven’t found them in a while.

schmalz  You’re going to have to help me out here. I like that. You’re getting a little bit of the diva thing going on there, Christian. It’s going to help you out. If you don’t expect yourself to pick up bottles then no bottles will be picked up by you.
So what’s the plan for next year? Is it going to be the Giro as preparation again?

VDV That’s still to be declared, man. It’s hard: I really want to be in both places at the same time. I know the Giro really did me well last year and at the same time, the Tour of California – I’ve never missed one and it’s an awesome race. Having such a high-profile race in the United States… It would hurt not to be there. It’s going to be hard. I want to make the decision before the new year, though. It’s always nice to have a plan.

schmalz  Do you get to decide or is the decision pushed upon you?

VDV I think it will be a little of both. We’ll just weigh all the pros and cons, and how much of a big deal it is for sponsors and team-wise and how much of a benefit it is to the team.

schmalz  But if you threw a big enough tantrum, you’d probably get your way.

VDV I could probably get my way if I did that. But I like to keep the peace as long as I can.

schmalz  Something along the lines of, "I’m not picking up my own goddamn bottles."

VDV Aw, I can still do that. It’s not that hard.

schmalz  You’re going to cause as much trouble as you can. Is the winter training routine going to be the same as last year? You were happy with the way that went? It’s just that you happened to fall on your ass at the Giro, and that threw a monkey wrench in everything?

VDV Oh man, I wasn’t happy at all with the way it went last year here. That was horrible. It took so much more energy than I cared for, to be here in the frigid winter. That’s why I’m actually in stage left, going to Hawaii. I think that will make it much easier and a lot more fun for both me and my family. We’re going back to Spain in the first week of January. My daughter will be going to school there and we’ll just get back into the rhythm.

schmalz  That’s the big key, being able to get your family to go with you to Hawaii. Because they’ll be, "Well hell yeah, let’s go there!"

VDV Exactly. Not like: “Let’s go to Silver City! It’ll be great!” No, it won’t be great.

schmalz  “We’re training in Missouri!”

VDV “It’s great down there, really. The’ve got a great Holiday Inn! It’s so cool!”

schmalz  “You’ll love the Ozarks!”

VDV [Recovering] To be fair, the Ozarks in July and August are sick. But not in January.

schmalz  Christian, thank you for your time. The only thing I can say for this season is, stay off your ass. Jesus Christ.

VDV I’ll really try. I’ll try my best. I don’t like it.