The line went almost unnoticed in the middle of his verdict on the tarmac. « It’s a shame too that we only had one lane, half a road, in places. That also made the course more dangerous », Stefan Bissegger told DirectVelo. Of the same course he added that « the roads here are really rotten, it hammers the time trial bike ».
A time trial is watched from above, from the motorbike and the timing screen. Half a road does not show up on television: it is a white line and a cone, and you only notice it when somebody mentions it afterwards.
Half a road, that’s all I’ve ever known. In the club car you’ve got the white line on your left and a ditch on your right, and you learn very quickly at what height you hold out a bidon when there’s no room to pull alongside. At the front they have a clock and a screen. At the back we always had half the road, and nobody ever said it into a microphone because nobody was holding a microphone out. Now a lad says it, and I think it’s a good thing that he says it.
Bissegger normally rides for Decathlon CMA CGM. He has to pin a number on again for the mixed relay, less than forty-eight hours after the individual time trial, with a Swiss squad listed among the big favourites for the title. « It will be different, it will suit me better I think and we are ambitious », he told DirectVelo.
A relay is an office standing up: one of them goes, one of them waits, and the one who waits has the worst moment of the day. De koers, the race, as they say in Flanders, is decided there as much as on the screen. I’ll watch it in the café, when the time trial podium has already been taken apart and there are two coffees left on the table.
It’s true, we checked: DirectVelo.
