The TTTT

The fourth T is for 'terrible'. Well, not the fourth one. I mean the first one. The extra one.

Team Time Trials are back in a big way. There was a genuine, actual, standalone team time trial at the Challenge Mallorca this week. If we ignore the weird events at the World Championships, it’s the first standalone team time trial since the cycling calendar lost the fabled Eindhoven TTT. I’m still mourning the loss of this glorious grand finale to the ProTour season. It lasted one year. 2007. The industrial streets of Eindhoven will never forget. The narrative has never recovered.

I struggle with TTT’s in general and I’m ashamed to admit I only really pay attention to them when teams get things horribly horribly wrong. And teams do sometimes get things horribly wrong.

One of the most memorable in recent years was BBox Bweeg Telecom at the 2010 Tour de France when most of them wiped out into a field.

Here they are trying to cycle their bicycles.

Another one which sticks in my memory is when Chris Boardman’s GAN team made a complete bollocks of things in the 1994 Tour de France.

The primary reason I remember this is that it involves what, I believe, is the first cycling stat that ever piqued my interest. This was the Tour which visited the UK for the first time in 20 years and only the second time ever. There were only two British riders in the race - Chris Boardman and Sean Yates - and they both ended up wearing the yellow jersey that year. I remember the feeling of that fitting quite nicely into my brain.