160 days a year away from home out of pure passion: "Luckily my family understands me"

Àlex Sans (Barcelona, 1976) was clear that he wanted to be part of the cycling world. He first tried it as a cyclist, but when he saw that he “couldn't be professional,” he looked for another alternative. His coach when he was a junior and under-23 was also a masseur for Antonio Pineda's teams, which this year have celebrated 40 years as benchmarks for under-23 teams in Catalonia under the name Club Ciclista Camp Clar. Sans began to learn the trade with them. The leap into professional cycling came in 2000, when he joined the MemoryCard–Jack&Jones team as a masseur and at the same time also as a masseur for the Kelme team as a freelance. He combined races with both teams and at the end of the year, both teams offered him a contract. He chose the Danish team. “It appealed to me. It was more of an adventure,” Sans justifies to ARA in this first week of the Tour. And he continued with a project that later became CSC Proteam, with whom Àlex won the Tour in 2008 with Carlos Sastre. Consolidated in the peloton for decades, he now directs the Pinarello Q36.5 Procycling Team, one of the teams participating in the current Tour de France.

How is it to be a team director?

“At the Tour we sleep little,” explains Sans. At Pinarello there are four sports directors and they share the work quite well. He takes on the part of “talking more with the cyclist” before and after the stage. He also examines the Tour route carefully to see where tactical moves might occur and drives one of the team's official cars on the road. As a consequence of his work, he is away from home 160 days a year and the way he endures it is “with passion”. "Out of passion and thanks to my family understanding my work,” he concludes, although his 7-year-old son “is more interested in the Football World Cup than the Tour”. The best cyclist on his team is Tom Pidcock, who combines road cycling with mountain biking. The Briton is a double Olympic winner with the thick wheel in Tokyo and Paris. With the thin wheel he won a stage in the 2022 Tour at Alpe d’Huez after a dizzying descent from the Galibier, among many other successes. While Sans is talking to ARA, the Briton has momentarily stepped down from the bus to greet his partner and his two dogs behind the safety fences, who don't stop fawning over him when they see him.

The heat at the Tour

In the stage that ended in Foix, his team used more than 200 bottles of water, ice, and also slushies to combat the heatwave. It was necessary to ensure good hydration and maintain an adequate body temperature. After crossing the finish line, the cyclists rushed to a van that the team had prepared with a bathtub of ice-cold water to lower their temperature and cool their bodies. “We also have our trucks and we make ice, in addition to what we have in the hotels provided by the Tour organization.”

After 26 years in professional cycling, Sans did not expect to see “how much cyclists' nutrition has changed.” “They have gone from not gaining a single gram of weight to continuously consuming large amounts of carbohydrates so as never to be in deficit.” Thanks to all this, the speed in competition has also increased, and it is now harder to see the mythical “fades.” Team structures are also much larger now. “In my first Tours, we came with half the vehicles and personnel we have now, and that was when there were nine cyclists per team.”

Sans has experienced emotions “that you dream of when you are little.” Although he hasn't raised his arms winning a stage of the Tour, the Vuelta, or the Giro as a cyclist, he has been able to do so "as a sports director and the emotion felt at that moment is indescribable.” As a sports director, he debuted with a stage victory in the Tour in 2009 in Barcelona with the Norwegian Thor Hushovd. “I grabbed a camera to record the last kilometers when there was no Google Maps, and it was a great help,” he recalls.

Another Catalan cyclist will be Tadej Pogacar's teammate

According to various media outlets, Abel Balderstone, who debuted this year in the Tour de France with the Caja Rural team, will be a cyclist for UAE Team Emirates for the next three seasons. Before the start in Carcassonne, Balderstone said: "I neither confirm nor deny it." After being asked again, he added: “Moving up to a World Tour team is a childhood dream.” Balderstone will be teammates with fellow Catalan cyclist Marc Soler for the next three years.