Boot camp good, Facebook bad

29 November 2010 | 0:00 - By Anthony Tan

For the first time in 10 years, Saxo Bank won’t be holding their much-despised but highly effective boot camp, which taught the selfish how to be selfless, writes Anthony Tan.




As the stifling Saharan wind is tempered by the ocean breeze, the remnants of the Saxo Bank team (plus whatever boss Bjarne Riis could muster in the transfer season) gather in the Spanish Canary Island of Fuerteventura.

And for the first time since Riis took ownership of the team a decade ago, there will be no training camp led by B.S. Christiansen, the former soldier from the Danish Ranger Corps who spent 28 years as a top-notch commando.

“It’s all about teaching people that they can achieve their goals by cooperating. They have to perform their very best under the worst possible circumstances, where every action has a consequence,” Christiansen said at their winter 2004 camp, where Australian Scott Sunderland began his career as a sport director.

Denmark’s version of Bear Grylls, B.S. Christiansen’s oddball training camps soon became stuff of legend, where Riis’ men donned army fatigues and went into the wild – sometimes desert, other times jungle, always inhospitable – often without food or water and sometimes for two or three days, all in the name of team building. When they finished the camps looking like malnourished cats, they must’ve wondered exactly whose interests Riis had at heart. The only individual who seemed to revel in these fight-or-flight conditions was Jens Voigt, the irrepressible hard-man who probably throws a few nails in with his Weet-Bix at breakfast time.

“We didn't have any clue of time nor place,” said Sunderland after his first boot camp in 2004.

“We didn’t know where they took us and we had to hand over our mobile and watch. They split us up in groups of 13 people and we were on the go for 48 hours. We got the whole military kit, huge backpack and all. Over the last two days, we didn't get to sleep much more than a couple of hours. [We were] under the open sky and on an island, and that wind cuts through you; it was horrible, really. Our feet are all blistered and we were absolutely knackered after the two day ordeal.”

But when the cammo’s came off and the lycra came on, come race time, the team was formidable. Terrifying, even.

When they gathered their troops up front in an early season race like Paris-Nice, it sent shivers of fear down the peloton’s spine, because their rivals knew there would soon be carnage and by the day’s end, just a handful would be left standing. “If they are this strong, this organised, and this deadly now, what would happen in the Classics or Tour de France?” many riders must’ve been thinking.

Many times, they won well before they crossed the line.

“When a rider is under a lot of pressure,” said Christiansen, “he reacts very selfishly, and that’s where I have to work with them.” Former Riis rider turned sport director (who is now at Team Sky), Bobby Julich, said that, “those days in the bush bonded us much closer and gave us the strategies to work as a team in any racing situation”.

Fuerteventura, which has the epithet “island of the eternal spring” for its near-perfect year-round climate, sounds a far cry from Man vs. Wild.

“Will you miss the survival camp?” I asked Richie Porte, who endured his first and last in the European winter of 2009 before Christiansen took a job at FC Midtjylland, one of the top soccer teams in Denmark’s Super League.

“No, not at all. It wasn’t nice... No, it was bloody horrible, spending a night out in the desert,” he told me. “I guess Bjarne’s always going to do something to put us out of our comfort zone, but me personally, I’m not going to miss that. But it really did bring the team together; it was an incredible idea.”

But then Richie owns up to the real reason why it was so bad: “It was harder on most of the young guys because they had to have a couple of days’ off Facebook, to be honest. You can quote me saying that!”

As funny as it was – and I did laugh out loud – I can’t help thinking whether these Facebook-addicted teens and 20-somethings might be missing out on vital social skills that Christiansen was so determined to instill, which, if one thinks about it, are the essence for survival in the real world.

A recent article in the New York Times, ‘Generation wired to distraction’, said the lure of new technologies is particularly potent on younger people and “the constant stream of stimuli they offer pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning”. The risk, researchers say, is that the brains of our wired youth become so used to switching tasks, over time, they may render themselves unable to see a task to its completion.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but jumping to the next thing,” Michael Rich told the NYT, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the executive director of the Centre on Media and Child Health in Boston. “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

In this year’s Giro d’Italia, Porte showed he not only has the physical ability to ride consistently over three weeks, but the mental capability to handle the stress of such an event (though he did admit to me to being extremely highly strung throughout). However in 2011 as possibly the sole Grand Tour leader on the squad, he’ll also need to demonstrate he has the social skills to gather and motivate the troops at Saxo Bank, if he’s to lead them to victory.

And as B.S. Christiansen would have said, that’s something you can’t do on Facebook.

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04 Dec 2010 12:03 AEST

Khalid

From: Sydney

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Paul and Mark, sorry if it came out that way but in no way am I attacking you guys. You are right, I am living at home and yes that does give me alot more time than you seem to have by adding family into the mix. My original point though was that it is completely ridiculous to state that using social networking sites such as facebook will in any way detract from your ability as a cyclist. Different people have different personalities and character traits, but you can't just say that because someone is using facebook, that they won't be successful in whatever aspect of their lives.

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03 Dec 2010 13:46 AEST

Paul

From: Gilgandra

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Khalid, you miss my point. Good on you guys....but you are not the norm, believe me. I work with young people and they do not have your drive and determination as a 'general rule'. As to your ability to use social networking, lead a busy working life and train 2 hours a day at 20 years of age, let me guess.....single and probably living at home...I cannot speak for Mark that you also attack here but you have the time and life to do all that you mention. Wait till you are 43, work a full time job, study a second university degree by correspondance, are raising four very young children, a wife working full time, renovating an old house, running kids around for sport, paying all the bills, getting approx 5 hours a night sleep with a crying baby and finding 1-11/2 hours a day to train (with Sundays off) and get back to me....

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02 Dec 2010 16:59 AEST

Mark

From: Perth

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Khalid, I think you're experience is an exception considering what type of people I have dealt with both professionally and personally. Pain, whilst not enjoyable is not something many people are able to cope with especially when they can't see the purpose. The idea of team work is almost completely lost especially when the going gets tough, experience from playing contact sports, teams split apart. Facebook and co are not as social as people believe. The idea is also to get the lads of Saxo Bank or any team o switch one learn reliance on your team and to know there is something bigger than yourself and posting the sometimes inane status updates that go with it.

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02 Dec 2010 16:47 AEST

Murray

From: Melbourne

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Not sure what Facebook has to do with anything but Paul and Anthony inspire me to hurt myself.

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01 Dec 2010 23:35 AEST

stan

From: nt

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paul, I am in my late forties and have just taken up road cycling. It is people like you that give me the inspiration to give it a go. I will never race in the TDF but I know that the benefits to my health and the environment far outweigh the difficulty of going riding. As for this article... If it works well, do it.

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01 Dec 2010 22:25 AEST

Khalid

From: Sydney

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@Paul and @Mark, I've only just turned 20, am working full time at an accounting firm that more often than not requires me to stay back at the office until 7 or 8pm, going to uni doing 4 subjects, yet I still find time to get 2 hours of riding in a day. I am also frequent facebook user. I wouldn't even consider myself an exception. Many other guys my age I ride with have similarly busy lives yet still use social networking devices and lead fulfilling lives. I think your generalisations are just as ridiculous as those in Anthony's article.

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01 Dec 2010 15:53 AEST

Shazbucket

From: Rose bay

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Khalid you obviously race for MacArthur or penrith!

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01 Dec 2010 12:56 AEST

Paul

From: Gilgandra

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The correlation is clear and the point simple...it is about the ability to 'endure'. Watch Stewie O'Grady living in a world of pain on the front of the peloton hour after hour or think about those cutting winds on the daily training ride for us mere mortals...it is about testing the mind and body to cope with discomfort and actually enjoy it! I am mid forties, old, unfit by my old standards. I cycle alone and have tried to encourage young guys in their teens and twenties to take up the sport I love. These guys are fitter than me and truth be known better than me....but they only come out once or twice....I always ask why they never come back after (wait for it) a 20-30km ride and the answer is always the same. 'I found it a bit hard, I never knew it would be so hard and I didn't like having sore muscles the next day'. The point is, I am finding the younger generation on the whole does not want to do anything hard or experience the challenge of 'battle' of sport or the 'challenge' against the environment cycling can provide. I have a son who would rather turn the xbox off and restart the game and know he is going to win rather than face the possibility of possible defeat. It is a sad state of affairs when the young do not want to dare to experience real life for fear of personal failure. It does not build character. "That's not livin" (as the tv ad suggests) it just makes for a generation of people deluded into believing that nothing in life should be hard and things should simply come without effort and as for testing their own pain threshold...forget it! As a post script to this and before the 'in my day grandad' bashers get into me, I really admire all the young and passionate people I see embracing the challenge of endurance sports and writing on this site. To you guys and girls, thanks for keeping the glimmer of hope going in guys like me who will continue to cycle in the hope one day a young, bright eyed youngster will see me, pull on a jersey and take up the passion. If every young Australian was made to go on one of these 'boot camps' as a compulsory school thing, imagine the potential we would unleash...not just in this sport but across every facet of Aussie life.

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01 Dec 2010 0:01 AEST

Mark

From: Perth

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Thats so cool. As an ex military man myself and now a Persoanl Trainer I can understand why they do it and definately the correlation between using facebook and winning a Grand Tour. People today are so busy doing using time doing nothing things like updating their facebook frequently rather than planning and perfoming grander things. Also as social as these sites are meant to be society is less social now and the idea of team before self does not compute with many people. Maybe Pegasus Cycling should think about doing something similar.

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29 Nov 2010 15:59 AEST

Nick

From: Victoria

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Ironically Richie won't add me on Facebook?? :(

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