Opinion: Team time trial discipline makes welcome but subdued return to La Vuelta as Jumbo-Visma triumph

Let’s be honest – it was hardly edge-of-the-seat entertainment or white-knuckle tension. But then when was the last time you could say that about a prologue or opening individual time trial?

There are far worse ways to start a Grand Tour.

The viewer gets to see all 23 teams line up in their kits, running the rule over all eight riders – or seven, in the case of the Quintana-less Arkea-Samsic, sporting a new yellow kit so as not to be confused with the red jersey they will almost certainly never get to wear now that their Colombian leader is in the doghouse for a banned painkiller he allegedly took during the Tour.

Watching 23 teams leave at four-minute intervals is infinitely more accommodating to the viewer than having to sit through 183 riders rolling down the ramp at two-minute intervals. The spectacle is condensed into bite-size, accessible chunks; the time gaps are not so big as to prove critical for any of the GC favourites – heck, there are even those GC riders who are terrible at the discipline who actually emerge in a far better position than had they ridden the course all alone (Mikel Landa, for instance, whose Bahrain Victorious team lost just 42 seconds).

It’s been three years now since we last saw a TTT on the Vuelta. Prior to 2019, there were eight editions in a row (between 2010 and 2017) when the race kicked off with teams battling it out to set the fastest time while wearing absurd helmets.

Over the years, the distances got shorter and shorter so as to minimise the impact the test could have on the overall standings so early in the race. In 2015, the opening TTT didn’t even count towards the GC – it was merely to decide who wore the first red jersey (although this may have had more to do with the crazy idea of directing the riders along a perilous wooden boardwalk beachfront path covered with sand).

Team time trials are now a dying art form. The World Championships ended their inclusion in 2018; the last one in the Giro was in 2015 when Orica-GreenEdge beat Tinkoff-Saxo by seven seconds at Sanremo; the last one in the Tour was in 2019 when Jumbo-Visma beat Ineos Grenadiers to put a Dutchman (Mike Teunissen) in yellow. Plus ça change…

It’s perhaps just as much testament to the relative youth of today’s peloton as it is the downward trajectory of the team time trial format that 33 of the 183 starters on Friday had never ridden a competitive TTT in their careers before the opening stage.

There’s no doubt that TTTs benefit the richer teams – and that’s arguably a good enough reason alone to ensure we don’t see too many of them going forward. Then again, there aren’t many aspects of pro cycling that don’t benefit the richer teams.

Interestingly, when Tadej Pogacar took the yellow jersey early on in the Tour this July – and seemingly looked on course for his third straight win – many were talking of the reintroduction to the Tour of a TTT as the only possible way Jumbo-Visma could regain the upper hand over UAE Team Emirates. Whatever truth lay in that statement was soon proved immaterial by the individual performances of Jonas Vingegaard.

With the TTT making its return to Grand Tours this week, some of those same people voiced their preference for these particular tests to be employed a little later in proceedings so as to give them more of a purpose than merely setting out an instant hierarchy and easing the riders into the race.

It should be noted that there has been a rule, since 2005, stipulating that TTTs must take place during the first third of a race. Although that seems to be rather flexible: the TTT in the 2015 Tour 2015 was stage 9, that’s to say almost halfway through.

Given the rule that dictates times being taken with the fifth rider crossing the line, any delayed use of a TTT may bring about a tricky scenario – especially in these times of regular Covid withdrawals – where a team, however fast they go, cannot actually post a time because they lack that fifth man to stop the clock.

While there are fewer worst sights that Bouygues or Europcar teams of old struggling to ride in formation, when we see the likes of Orica or Quick-Step or Garmin in their pomp, TTTs can be cycling’s equivalent to a warm knife through butter – poetry in motion as riders exchange turns in perfect harmony, dropping back and then gradually returning to the front of the line in metronomic, clockwork unison.

In that sense, Friday’s stage in Utrecht marked something of a full circle for Jumbo-Visma, who managed to bury those demons with panache – all while putting a local Dutch rider in red.

While no one hit the deck in the Dutch city, freak crashes have been a regular occurrence in TTTs over the years – most notably Dave Zabriskie in the Tour and Dan Martin in the Giro in Belfast. It’s for that reason – as well as the possible occurrence of GC riders losing huge chunks of time on account of their team-mates’ deficiencies – that TTTs should be used sparingly in Grand Tours.

Not so sparingly that they become obsolete or a skill only practiced by those teams with the most resources. But not so often that they become ubiquitous and gimmicky. After all, one of the best things about a TTT is the fact that most of us have forgotten how boring they can be.

Like cobbles or gravel or mountain time trials, TTTs merit inclusion every now and then. But we all know there can be too much of a good thing – even if the adjective “good” is doing some seriously heavy lifting when it comes to describing cycling’s collective race against the clock.

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