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Phil Gaimon Journal: Pickle juice and goose bumps
- Updated: May 31, 2016
I’ve done 30 race days this year, and you treat them all about the same: you have breakfast, you have a race meeting, you win and drink champagne, or you lose and drink beer. When you’re a professional, you don’t get nervous and you don’t stress. We’ve done hundreds of races, and this is our job. But there’s just something about nationals.
If you measure what’s at stake, nationals should be relaxed. We all want to win, but WorldTour teams don’t put a ton of focus or resources into national championships. Most of the recent national road race champions didn’t even get a WorldTour contract the following year, so a national championship wouldn’t make a huge difference on my next contract or change my life like a stage at Tour of California or a WorldTour race could.
Most of Cannondale’s Americans are in Europe, either at the Giro or focusing on the Tour de Suisse or the Dauphine, so we only had three riders in Winston-Salem: me, Ben King, and Alex Howes. That meant less staff, no fancy RV, and no chef. Mike Creed was our director, and we’ve all been friends for years before he was bossing us around.
My flight landed in North Carolina at 9:30 the night before the race. I carried no suitcase. Just a backpack containing a San Remo skinsuit, an extra t-shirt, a pair of underwear, and a bar of dark chocolate. Soigneur “Disco” Jonny Adams picked me up at the airport wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and riders and staff — usually segregated — shared take-out Thai food out of Styrofoam containers in the lobby at the Fairfield Inn, all laughs and smiles. We were just hanging out, ready to race bikes with our friends.
But during the pre-race meeting, when Creed talked about how we were going to win the race, I looked down at my arm and saw goose bumps.
“Really, skin?” I thought. Paris-Roubaix didn’t get you, but goose bumps? Here? “Yes,” confirmed my skin.
There’s less at stake in Winston-Salem, but tell that to my goose bumps. You …
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