Dan Martin: Ready for the big stage
Monaco. 2009. Tour de France. Grand Depart.
The race hadn’t even begun but already Dan Martin had enough.
His body was broken and his mind was about to crack too if he didn’t get out of the suffocating scrum of pandemonium.
Journalists were everywhere about the team hotel. Some of them didn’t know his name but those who did from consulting the official team list were asking the same old questions in any number of languages. How do you think you will do? Will you look to go well in the mountains? It’s your first Tour, are you nervous? Over. And over. And over.
He didn’t have the energy and heart to tell them. No, he wasn’t nervous; he was gutted. It wouldn’t be his first Tour. His knee had flared up again and the team medic and thus the team had declared the tendinitis could cause long-term damage if he raced. He was pulling — or being pulled — out of the race.
For a while, he didn’t have the energy to leave the hotel either. But the questions kept coming like bullets until they finally overwhelmed him. He rushed out, called his dad, Neil, a cyclist himself who once rode in the Olympics but never got to fulfil his dream of racing in Le Tour. Now he was about to discover neither was his 22-year-old son, at least not for that year.
“Collect me in Monaco. I have to get out of here.”
Knowing his son was distressed, Neil floored it over from the Roche Hotel in Villeneuve-Loubet in France where he was staying. As he approached the city’s outskirts, he could spot in the distance a familiar figure ahead on the hard shoulder of the motorway coming right at him, bike in one hand, bag in the other, still wearing his Team Garmin gear.
There could only be one lunatic who’d go against the tide like that. His own Dan.
Four years later, on the eve of another Tour, and the Dan Martin taking to the roads of Corsica today is almost unrecognisable from the kid who had to be emotionally helicoptered out of Monaco.
He’s a mature rider now, though as Sean Kelly has pointed out, at a month shy of his 27th birthday, he’s still young by professional cycling standards.
He’s ranked sixth in the world, looking to climb higher. His mother’s brother, one Stephen Roche, reckons he might win one, two, three stages in this Tour, maybe even the Tour itself, at least some year.
And if by chance he did, then for the first time in a long time the grand race would have a champion without a question mark. For Paul Kimmage, Dan Martin’s already a champion for clean cycling. He doesn’t agree with his old colleagues Roche and Kelly on much these days but one thing they’re unanimous on is that Martin’s integrity and talent is beyond reproach.
For Kimmage, how Martin goes in the Tour will say as much about the Tour as it will say about Martin himself.
“I love Dan Martin, I love the way he rides,” the acclaimed writer commented recently. “Someone like him should be winning mountain stages. Will he be able to compete when the Tour comes along? It’s dangerous to use people like Dan as a barometer but he would certainly be an indicator for me in terms of the state of cycling.”
Cyclists who once cheated and are now reformed salute him. Just last week David Millar tweeted: “Felt great in training today, sadly I was with @DanMartin86 who made me look like a fool. My new mantra? He won Liege-Bastogne-Liege’.” But then Dan Martin has been making people shake their heads in incredulity his whole life.
If you wondered why Martin is such a supporter of Temple Street Children’s Hospital, he himself was born six weeks premature and spent most of that time in an incubator. Up until he went to school, he was plagued by a recurring wheezy cough and would sporadically suffer asthma-like attacks that would require a visit to the hospital and the use of a nebuliser.
Turned out though something else about his physiology was extraordinary — and advantageous.
When Jonathon Vaughters was recruiting promising young cyclists over six years ago for his new all-clean Team Garmin-Slipstream, it was harder to know who was more excited: Martin to find a team so anti-doping or a gleeful Vaughters who couldn’t believe his luck when discovering it was literally in Martin’s blood to be an exceptional cyclist.
A DNA component called mitochondria is the energy producer for the body; more than lung size or heart size, it is the greatest determining factor when it comes to endurance athletes. Stephen Roche had it. Stephen Roche’s son Nicolas had it too. Stephen’s sister — and Martin’s mum — Maria, passed on Stephen’s rare gift to Dan.
That might explain why when he was only 14, he climbed the perilously steep Alpe d’Huez in just 68 minutes on an excursion there with his dad.
Or why he has never taken an injection in his cycling career, not even for something as routine as vitamins: why do you need any drug running through your veins when you such an abundance of mitochondrial DNA?
Invariably when he arrives at a training camp like this year’s one in Calpe, Spain, he’ll be marginally the least fit of his team, maybe carrying 62k, when his real racing weight would be nearer 58. “They’ll all start jibing me,” he says in that mild-mannered voice that belies an inner confidence, “but by the end of it I’m smashing them all!”
They’re in good company. This past March he shot into the top three of the world rankings and the Irish national consciousness by winning the famed classic Liege-Bastogne-Liege. It ultimately came to a duel between himself and last year’s world number one, Joaquim Rodriguez, and in that showdown Martin, as he has put it himself, got “to play a bit of poker face and stare him out a little bit”. Play poker face and stare out at the world’s number one? When you’re Dan Martin and think you can be number one yourself some day, why not? Little quirks of his have long bemused and amazed the rest of the peloton. After a Tour stage last year he was spotted helping the mechanics with the bikes; cleaning frames and oiling the chains, as if back in Girona helping Neil out in the bike shop he works in. He’d be known for not taking food if he was on a spin of less than two hours; still hardly anything if he was out for six.
During interviews with journalists he’d be known for having a beer; indeed he’s able to rattle off quite a spiel on most of the brews in the River Cafe in the old part of Girona.
In school he was a bit exceptional too, and not just because he considered himself distinctly Irish even though he was born and reared in Birmingham like the rest of his schoolmates.
He finished in the top one percentile of the country in History in his A levels, something he attributes to a fondness for Blackadder and a penchant for filling his head with facts and figures, “mostly of the useless category”.
His real specialisation subject though was languages. He took as many of them as he could. “People thought I was crazy because there was no question of me going to university.” Where he was going though, he’d need languages. Even before he was a teenager, he knew was going to the continent. “I did everything I could to help me be a cyclist.”
And when he was a cyclist, he wanted to race for Ireland, the home of his mother. The same year her brother Stephen won the Giro, the Tour and the world championships, the family, including Dan, lived in Ireland for six months. Every summer and every Christmas, they’d also travel back to her home in Dundrum. Though Dan cycled at junior level for Britain he says that was more out of convenience at that age. In his second year in the U23 ranks, he declared for Ireland.
“I can blame the horrible accent on living in Birmingham,” he’s said, “but I’ve always felt Irish. I spend a lot more time in Ireland these days than I do in England. It feels like home.”
For the most part though the continent has been home — or more specifically, Girona. Right away he attracted the interest of the top professional teams but again his independent streak showed itself when he decided to remain amateur for another season, because, he says, he wanted to learn how to win. In 2008 then he signed for Vaughters’ Team Garmin Slipstream and won the mountainous three-day Route du Sud in France as well as becoming Irish national road champion. By 2009 he was deemed good enough to race Le Tour, at just 22. Then came the meltdown in Monaco.
In hindsight it was nearly a blessing in disguise. “At the time you think ‘Ah shit’ but looking back, I don’t think I was ready. I definitely wasn’t ready. We had Christain [Vande Velde] and [Bradley] Wiggins in the top 10 and I would have been killing myself going back for bottles and riding in the front for those guys.” He wouldn’t have lasted the three weeks, maybe not even two. He was too erratic for races of that duration. In 2010 and 2011 he would be overlooked by Vaughters again. He still wasn’t ready.
It turned out he wasn’t healthy enough, at least for those long, gruelling high-summer months. All the time he was suffering from an undetected pollen allergy that prevented him from breathing properly. Last year a Dutch specialist finally identified the allergy — a particular kind of tree — which he now has an inhaler to tackle.
If his variation in form and source of allergy was a mystery for years, his talent wasn’t. In 2010 he showed up at the Tour of Poland and texted his father: “I don’t think there’s anyone here better than me.” There wasn’t either — he won it and the Japan Cup that year as well. The following year Vaughters felt he was ready for a long tour — not Le Tour, but the Tour of Spain. He finished a highly credible 13th, and would probably have finished sixth or seventh only for a disastrous time trial. He also won a stage there, and so with it, Vaughters’ trust and a ticket to the 2012 Tour.
He admits starting out he wasn’t sure he’d finish it. By the end when bodies were breaking down all around him, he was wishing it was four weeks long instead of just the three. He’d finish 93rd in the classification but 10th in the King of the Mountains and have three top-10 finishes. He also did all that in the knowledge that his preparations had been hampered. He picked up another chest infection during the Tour. He’d crashed badly enough in the Dauphine. His back was hurt enough to restrict his racing but not stop it, so he didn’t stop.
This year he’s better prepared. He knows now he’ll finish, finish well up probably too. For one, there’s the sheer knowledge he now has of the race, and the endurance mounted up from racing it and all of last season too.
“Last year I went in a bit more nervous but this year I’m ready to race really proactively. I know what to expect. In a way I can’t believe it’s here already, the year has gone so quickly, but I’m excited because I know training has been good and that I’m in such a good position now.”
He’s undergone a punishing daily core stability programme to rid him of the back pain in he incurred in that crash last June. He’s more conscious of his diet. He’s been working with world-renowned physiologist Andre Van Diemem to help him become more explosive for when the road kicks up.
He’s particularly worked on his time trialling, knowing if he’s going to contend for a podium place, he needs to test against the best.
“My core is a lot stronger now. I feel a lot more power coming from my lower back. That’s the same for the road bike as well. That’s one of the main things I’ve changed over the winter.”
Yet as much as he’s worked harder, he’s learned to rest better too. He enjoys a good relationship with his cousin Nicolas but during races, especially the big ones, chit-chat is minimal because recovery is essential. On his days off, instead of walking all over Girona to meet up friends, they tend to come to him. That’s when he’s feeling sociable; now he tends to read books, watch DVDs. As his dad Neil puts it, “Dan’s become excellent at doing nothing.”
His nose and eye for detail remains, mind. Last week he spent nine hours in his car on a reconnaissance of Stage 17: a 32-kilometre test against the clock the day before they scale Alpe d’Huez twice.
He’s not promising that he’ll finish in a particular place or that he’ll win a particular stage — his one outcome goal for this year is to medal at the world championships which has a hilly route ideally suited for his talent — but he’s open to being on that podium a few times this coming month.
As his famous uncle says, “Dan’s capable of anything.”
