Dan Lloyd In The Tour

As you’re watching the Tour De France, keep an eye out for the Wessex League’s highest profile member, Daniel Lloyd of the Cervelo Test Team. He got the ride at the last minute, after team mate Heinrich Haussler got injured in THAT crash in the Tour of Switzerland.

You may not see him much but remember, anything that Thor Hushovd or Carlos Sastre does is a little bit thanks to him!

The Return of the Native. Daniel Lloyd on club runs, British Roads and Barnsfield Heath

It says a lot about Daniel Lloyd – and quite a lot about Cycling itself – that he still turns up for local events. He graced last the Bournemouth Jubilee Wheelers 50 mile reliability trial with his presence a week or so ago and it’s not as if Rafa Benitez turns up for a kick around with his local Sunday league side. But, with a contract signed for a further two years with top Pro-Tour squad the Cervelo Test Team, Daniel Lloyd still finds room in a busy winter training program to fit in a club run every Sunday.

 “In winter I always schedule Sundays as a group ride that I can go out and enjoy.” He says, suggesting that ‘enjoy’ shouldn’t be taken too literally. “Well, its easier for me than it is for other people but its still quite hard in places. When you’re on the front you have to work hard. I mean I don’t get back from those rides like I did 10 years ago, absolutely shattered and needing to go to bed as soon as I got through the door. This Sunday I rode and then the Monday and Tuesday I did another two days of training. In years gone by I wouldn’t have been able to do that, I’d have been too shattered.”

Ironically, it is largely the same riders that once dished out the punishment to Danny in his teenage years that are now suffering on his wheel ten years on but he remains grateful for their advice. “Going out on the Sunday rides is always good. I started going out with Roland Tilley and Eamon Deane and I got a right hammering but it was thanks to them that I progressed a lot.”

 He has in fact progressed to the very top of the sport, riding the Giro d’Italia in support of Carlos Sastre and Thor Hurshovd and having his own staring roll in the Tour of Flanders, leading a six man breakaway up the Koppenburg. After over five years struggling to make ends meet while riding for continental squads, his move to the big league does prompt the question of why he chose to settle in Bournemouth rather than some sun-soaked pad by the Mediterranean. Family commitments provide the answer, not wanting to disrupt his son’s schooling, but as well as this he is a strong advocate of the good old British b-road.

 “If the weather back here was as good here as it is in the south of Europe then no one would complain. When you get out to the lanes then its lovely, if it’s a nice day you can’t beat it. Where I was before in Hampton in London it was the same. It was even a little easier to get out and then you were in the Surrey hills, box hill, leaf hill, they were bigger than the Purbecks. And it was amazing how many people you’d see out riding, not just in Richmond park but out on Sundays out of Esham going out into the lanes. But it’s good out here, too, I mean how many people were out on Sunday? It’s nice to see.”

 One plus this region has over south-west London is Barnsfield heath, of which he says “There’s no greater off road circuit in the country from what I’ve heard. Most circuits are a mile long at most and this is 3 miles. Its got a hill in it, a few twisty corners, its got everything you need.” The weekly Tuesday evening handicap races even fit rather neatly into his training program. “I used to love doing the Barnsfield races in the evening because I only felt like I was doing a two hour ride and I’d finish that when I arrived at Barnsfield and then I’d follow the wheels and get a good workout and then that’s done and I’d ride home. If you set out and say ‘right I’m going to do five hours’, you tend to look down and you’ve only done an hour and have four to go but if you go out and say ‘I want do twenty minutes warm up, then go and do forty minutes at tempo, then do two hours steady then do another forty minutes tempo, then twenty minutes recovery, then six standing start sprints in the last hour then you’re never thinking of five hours, you’re thinking of the next thing that’s coming up so it goes quicker.”

 Even better for the rest of us, who haven’t just done a heavy training schedule, is the kudos of riding with – and possibly beating – a pro. In his one venture into the Wessex League last August, Dan, suffering the after effects of a crash in the previous week’s Tour of Denmark, pulled out and the race was won by sixteen year old Richard Horton, which impressed him. “I didn’t stick around long enough to see him win because it was raining but Eamon told me about it afterwards. There was no way I’d be winning there at 16. I remember doing a Barnsfield at 17 and I couldn’t even keep up with the juniors so there’s no way I’d be winning against elite riders then.” On the subject, Danny mentions the late flowering of his own talent and wonders whether he’d have benefited from the academies that are in place now to help young riders.

  

 “I’ve never been the most talented rider of my generation so, if the academy that’s in place now had been in place then, I’m not even sure if I’d have been selected. But if I had been selected to go to Italy at eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old then I probably wouldn’t have been able to get the result. So, in some ways I think its been better for me to make my own steady progression. In 2003 when I turned pro, I was 23 then and if you look at what Cav has done at the same age, I couldn’t even follow a pro race at that age. Obviously, things are a bit different now and things are easier to follow – its still hard but you’re on a level playing field – but if British Cycling had said to me at 20 that I didn’t have what it takes to be a pro rider then maybe I’d have believed them and knocked it on the head.”

 Luckily for all concerned, he didn’t and, from the comfort of a proven track record within a high ranking team, thinks that all the sacrifices were well worth the reward. “I felt like I was missing out on an awful lot of life. In fact I probably kept myself away a lot more than than I do now but you don’t miss out as much as you think you do, and it just takes the 3 weeks I’ve had off to get drunk every night and then get bored of that.

Now, with his off season break over, Danny is back training in earnest, finding himself pleasantly surprised at his good form: “Normally I start off after a break out of breath with my heart rates sky high but I don’t know if its from doing the Giro or a big season but I felt fine from the very first day. Hopefully if I can make improvements during the winter then it’ll bode very well for me next year. I don’t have to improve – they’ve signed me for another two years based on what I have done. Its not a case of being signed for 2 years if you get better but I always want to get better. I think a lot of riders rest on their laurels a bit when they sign a 2 year contract, they spend a year faffing about not putting too much effort in and then a year doing better to get another contract. But there’s not really any pressure from this team to get results so everyone goes in relaxed but everyone’s determined. Its one of the best teams for working together. You can tell that, I mean I haven’t been in any other sort of teams but Roger Hammond and Jez Hunt and Thor Hushovd tell me that there’s real team unity and everybody helps everybody else out.”

 With a full schedule for the 2010 season ahead of him – and hopefully avoiding the swine flu that scuppered the second half of his 2009 classics campaign – Daniel sees no reason why his incremental rise in output and status should not continue. And as we watch him helping the likes of Hushovd and Heinrich Haussler to what we hope will be a horde of trophys, we can remember that it’s the same guy that use to race with us, still races with us and will no doubt race with us well into the future. That’s the beauty of cycling.

(See also http://www.bartape.net/ for a documentary on the Cervelo test team, featuring Mr Lloyd amongst others)