Tag Archives: soigneur diaries

The Soigneur Diaries: A violent crash at the Peace Race

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Soigneurs may very well have the most thankless job in professional cycling. They take care of the grunt-work details necessary to keep a pro team running smoothly while remaining mostly anonymous. Sara Clawson is a sports massage therapist in Greensboro, North Carolina who’s making inroads to a soigneur career. This spring, she spent two months working as a soigneur with the US elite junior team at USA Cycling’s training center in Sittard, Netherlands. Over the next month, Sara’s writing (originally posted on her blog) will shed some light on the “swanny life” as she recounts her experience traveling around Europe working with the next generation of American professional road cyclists. In part four, Sara takes us through the four stage Peace Race in the Czech Republic which saw American juniors racing to the podium and crashing hard enough to warrant a ride in a Soviet-era ambulance.

We’re back home in Sittard after a whirlwind tour of Bohemia with another race on the books, this time the Course de la Paix, or Juniors Peace Race. Litoměřice, where we stayed, was a rather beautiful old town with a feeling of old-world European grandeur reemerging from the Soviet era drabness. The area has a rich history as one of the oldest Czech towns. It dates back to the 2nd century and served as a major trading capital of the region in medieval times. More recently, the whole region underwent German occupation during WWII and the nearby walled city of Terezín, where the race was headquartered, was used as a Nazi concentration camp, crematorium, and Gestapo prison. The Peace Race was originally established after WWII as a symbol of international goodwill and sportsmanship.

We were housed in the hockey training center, which was a perfectly convenient and serviceable facility with dormitory-style living arrangements and an eating area for meal, bottle, and race food prep. The hockey facility housed our team as well as the British, French, and Russians. A total of 23 national teams competed from Europe, North America, and the Middle East. The Peace Race is part of the Juniors Nations’ Cup races, a series of events all around Europe, one in Kazakhstan, and one in Canada in which national teams of 17- and 18-year-olds compete among the highest-level junior road cyclists to earn Union Cycliste Internationale points for World Championships entries. Of the 11 races in this year’s Nations’ Cup, the Peace Race is considered by many to be the most challenging.

This year’s edition certainly proved a challenge for everyone involved. We had mechanical issues with the team car halfway across Germany, and the mechanic and director ended up having to send me ahead with all 6 riders while they got the car towed for repairs. The one rider on the team who had been to the race the previous year alerted me to the getting an entry permit sticker for the van and helped guide me through the tortuous single-lane mountain road to Litoměřice. The director and mechanic arrived shortly thereafter and we headed to dinner in the beautiful and expansive cobbled city square.

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The Soigneur Diaries: Race Days in Bretagne

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Photo by Sara Clawson.

Soigneurs may very well have the most thankless job in professional cycling. They take care of the grunt-work details necessary to keep a pro team running smoothly while remaining mostly anonymous. Sara Clawson is a sports massage therapist in Greensboro, North Carolina who’s making inroads to a soigneur career. This spring, she spent two months working as a soigneur with the US elite junior team at USA Cycling’s training center in Sittard, Netherlands. Over the next month, Sara’s writing (originally posted on her blog) will shed some light on the “swanny life” as she recounts her experience traveling around Europe working with the next generation of American professional road cyclists. In part three, Sara explains the nitty-gritty of a race weekend in France as the juniors and U23s do their best to perform at pro-tour level.

Working a major race as elite cycling team staff is not for the faint of heart, and I am coming to understand why the turnover in the industry is comparatively low: people who aren’t up to the rigors of the work for whatever reason burn out quickly, and the few who make the cut tend to become career team staff. I’m not sure who works harder: mechanics or soigneurs — both jobs require long hours of exhausting work.

The Tour de Bretagne was a UCI 2.2 stage race, which means a limited number of national teams were invited (in this case, two: the USA team, and the Australian national team) along with European continental teams, pro development teams, and pro tour teams. It’s a very high-level race in which stage winners and riders high in the overall finish ranks have historically continued on to successful professional careers. The race consisted of seven stages between 145 and 200 kilometers over challenging terrain in the rural northern coastal country of France. The six USA national team riders selected for the race were charged with two major tasks: return some good results and, perhaps more importantly, to learn the skills needed to race at the level professional teams look for in prospective riders. To paraphrase their director, former pro rider Michael Sayers, racing at events like these presents a goal that isn’t necessarily meant to be attained, but for learning to occur in the process of striving toward that goal. Bringing away a couple good results and a wealth of experience constitutes success, and in that respect the Under-23 riders of the USA national team were very successful.

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The Soigneur Diaries: A Day in the Swanny Life

SaraClawsonsoigneurdiaries_usacjuniors
Photo by Sara Clawson.

Soigneurs may very well have the most thankless job in professional cycling. They take care of the grunt-work details necessary to keep a pro team running smoothly while remaining mostly anonymous. Sara Clawson is a sports massage therapist in Greensboro, North Carolina who’s making inroads to a soigneur career. This spring, she spent two months working as a soigneur with the US elite junior team at USA Cycling’s training center in Sittard, Netherlands. Over the next month, Sara’s writing (originally posted on her blog) will shed some light on the “swanny life” as she recounts her experience traveling around Europe working with the next generation of American professional road cyclists. In part two, Sara delves into her day to day as she preps for a race in France.

We’re in the car on a long drive to Bretagne, so I have a little bit of down time to write an entry — the first down time in a while!

I’m into my second week as a soigneur and learning fast — mostly from watching and doing, but a lot from making mistakes too. It’s a job with long expanses of furious intensity punctuated by periods of absolutely nothing to do, and at first it’s actually difficult to recognize when it’s appropriate to take a break. But I’m learning the general routine of everyday functions at the USA house, preparations for a race, and the things that need to happen once riders return from racing.

No two daily schedules are the same, but we generally start early with breakfast and a trip over to the Service Course, a separate location where all of the maintenance operations take place. If vehicles have just returned from racing, they need to be unloaded, thoroughly cleaned inside and out, and items inventoried. If the vehicle needs to make an immediate turnaround for another race, many of the items are re-stocked as needed and loaded straight back into the truck. If they won’t be used for a few days, everything is put back into stock, including things like sports nutrition products and race food, medical kits, chairs, laundry, and coolers. A running shopping list is kept of everything that needs to be kept on hand in supply and soigneurs shop nearly every day.
We head back to the USA house for lunch and typically start massages early afternoon, after the riders who aren’t away racing have finished their training rides and gotten a chance to shower and eat. I’ve been doing anywhere from 3 to 7 massages every day, around 30-45 minutes for each. Riders who have just returned from races, are heading off to races, or experiencing particular issues are the priority.

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The Soigneur Diaries: Adventure Awaits

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Soigneur Sara Clawson (center) with the USA Cycling juniors in Sittard, Netherlands.

Soigneurs may very well have the most thankless job in professional cycling. They take care of the grunt-work details necessary to keep a pro team running smoothly while remaining mostly anonymous. Sara Clawson is a sports massage therapist in Greensboro, North Carolina who’s making inroads to a soigneur career. This spring, she spent two months working as a soigneur with the US elite junior team at USA Cycling’s training center in Sittard, Netherlands. Over the next month, Sara’s writing (originally posted on her blog) will shed some light on the “swanny life” as she recounts her experience traveling around Europe working with the next generation of American professional road cyclists. In part one, Sara talks about her path from aspiring soigneur to the USAC house in Holland.

The French word “soigneur” literally translates to “one who cares for the troubles of others.” On a bicycle racing team, a soigneur performs a multifaceted job of keeping the cyclists’ bodies and minds optimally primed for competition, doing everything from sports massage and minor first aid to food and bottle prep to tasks like laundry and chauffeuring riders.

When I was first getting into cycling as a teenager, I read a USA Today article about soigneurs that described it as one of the “10 Worst Jobs in Sports.” The article is a fun read (and to my experience thus far, quite accurate), making the soigneur’s job sound like a lot of hard, thankless work. It sounded exactly like the kind of job I wanted to make my career.

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