There was a moment, with approximately seven seconds of his sprint remaining, where Jonathan Milan’s head dropped in the final metres of stage eight of the Tour de France. The movement was fleeting and subtle, the kind of thing that can only be spotted by rewatching those chaotic closing pedal strokes a couple of times, but it meant something. It was a sign of the work he has done over the last year alongside his team, Lidl-Trek, to get lower, to get stiller and to get faster during these sprints. For a long time, Milan has known that it takes everything to be the best at the Tour.
Speaking a few days before the Grand Départ in Lille, the Italian admitted to a group of journalists that he knew his sprinting style wasn’t perfect. Realising this was the first step, then came the hard bit: changing it.
“I am working a lot to try and move as little as I can in the final sprint. Those 20 seconds of effort, I cannot control, it is just how it is coming,” the Italian rider said last week. “When I am training for sprints at home and also in the gym I am working a lot, as you spend a lot of energy doing that. It is not good for the aero or power we are trying to improve here.”
It is a testament to Milan’s character that he is able to admit his downfalls and act on them. This is a rider who has won four Giro d'Italia stages with his current sprinting technique, alongside stages of Tirreno-Adriatico and the Critérium du Dauphiné. Others with this level of palmarès might be reticent when it comes to listening to people telling him he is doing anything wrong. Jonathan Milan is not that kind of person.
“He's someone who works really hard, trains hard and gets the team around him,” Koen de Kort, former pro and team support manager at Lidl-Trek told Rouleur at the end of stage eight, just a few moments after Milan had sprinted to a dominant maiden Tour stage victory.
“Everybody knows Jonny's sprint style, I think that was pretty obvious, so we put a lot of work into that. We mainly tried road testing – we have this partnership with Aerosensor this year, which we used. I think that's something that was really valuable and really helped us. In the wind tunnel it is hard you can’t really sprint all out and it is the same in the velodrome as you get velodrome techniques involved. We did a bit of road testing combined with videos and photos. We looked at a lot of stuff with helmets – a lot of teams have been using aero helmets in sprints but turns out our road helmets sprint very fast so that was a good thing for us to know. The other thing we tested is tyre rolling resistance and wheels. You use a lot of computer simulations for aerodynamics – it is anything you can think of to try and optimise.”
Lidl-Trek invests heavily in its riders, often a team at the cutting edge of innovation. Much of De Kort’s work is ensuring that his squad is on the fastest set-up possible – he added that while Milan wore the Tour’s green jersey skinsuit today, the rest of the Lidl squad were in new, specially-designed aerodynamic road suits. Dialling the team’s lead-out train to perfection has been a big part of the work the American squad have done this winter, something that has finally paid dividends at the Tour de France.
“All the intermediate sprints have been slightly uphill in the race so far and he’s been untouchable in those so we know today was going to be really good for us,” De Kort said. “Jonny has got the power to do it without much of a lead-out for the last kilometre. The goal was to get him in position before that because you know they aren’t going to come past him with 15kph difference. He’s always able to find his way in, and then he shows how strong he is when he jumps from wheel to wheel. When it was his moment to go, no one could get close.”
Milan also gave plenty of credit to his teammates for helping him to his stage win today: “This team has experience and knows how to lead and guide me. One of the most important things in our train is how quickly we can change it. Eddie [Edward Theuns] helped us in position in the kms before, Simone [Consonni] came up with two kilometres to go,” he said after the race.
“It was really difficult to stay together and Simone helped me with the positioning until the last kilometre and a half, this is making a difference in the end. I think when you have people who are really pushing and looking for this victory this makes it easier to change and easier to do. In the end this makes a difference to other teams. It doesn't always work but sometimes it goes well like today, so we are really happy. We deserve it”
De Kort joked that Milan can be “very Italian at times – if something doesn’t go his way he tends to get upset very quickly, it is a trademark of Italian sprinters,” but there was no sign of distress from the 24-year-old at the finish in Laval on Saturday. Instead, this was an elated rider, reaping the rewards after months of hard work. Milan told the media before the race he’d lost “some kilograms” to get better in the mountains, as well as working on his sprinting technique, putting everything into a possible victory at this the biggest bike race on the planet for the first time in his life. In the end, it has all paid off.
“It is really nice after all the effort we put in to arrive here. I have to say thanks to my coach, my sports directors and all the team, it is a team effort what we are doing,” Milan grinned after the stage. “When you have a full team believing in this then it is all coming. We will enjoy this and tomorrow we will try again.”
