CARLOS ARRIBAS - Vienna - 01/02/2010
 
Clearly visible on the front of their tops, on the collar and the hood, the Astana riders, led by Alberto Contador, wear a tricolor lining—red, white and green—with the impressive shield of the Italian air force. It’s one of Giuseppe Martinelli’s main and visible contributions to the team that he’s going to direct. Another is a purely classic style in the manner of setting up the team—quintessentially Italian, if that’s not too much to say.
 
“The first time that they spoke to me about the possibility, when Shefer (Alexander—deputy director of Astana) proposed the idea, I immediately thought of a strategy, one that made something available to Alberto that he had never enjoyed before: a team for him, just for him, in which he was the leader of them all,” says Martinelli, a 55-year-old native of Brescia with the melancholy look of someone born on the shores of a lake, the one in Garda, his home, and the creased eyes of someone who has spent hours scouting the waters.
 
Shefer is Alexander Shefer, a Kazakh ex-rider who rode with Martinelli in 2003 at Saeco, directed by the Italian, and who is now one of the people that must decide the future of Astana. The organization launched its Astana 4.0 version last Saturday in Vienna, turquoise club neckties, matching turquoise flowers with sun-yellow rings decorating for the occasion the exuberant baroque Redouten Hall of the imperial Hofburg Palace.
 
“The team is from everywhere and nowhere,” says Martinelli in the Austrian capital, where Astana was presented because it is the seat of the Organization for European Security and Cooperation (OSCE), an organization presided over in 2010 by Kazakhstan, the country of the Asian steppes wedged between Russia and China. “We’re made up of Spaniards, Italians, Frenchmen, Kazakhs…, and we bear the name of Astana, a city that they say exists, but whose whereabouts are known to few, like Kazakhstan itself, like an entelechy.” But the topic is not about Tartars. It’s about cyclists, about Contador.
 
“All champions are special, phenomena. His head is a bottomless well. He marches to a different drummer than normal people like us. Contador is one of these, but he has his head screwed on right. At 27, he has won a lot and can win much more,” says Martinelli, who knows what he’s talking about, because for more than 10 years of his life, practically his entire life as a director, he was occupied with the dominant figure of Marco Pantani, the Italian climber with whom he achieved the height, victory in the Giro and Tour in 1998, with whom he knew the greatest anguish, expulsion from the 1999 Giro, the depression and fall into the void of the rider, who died on February 14, 2004.
 
Martinelli, won back to cycling, remembers and compares: “What I like about Alberto is his humility. He’s a person that likes to speak and to listen. He has confidence in me or, at least, he doesn’t make me feel inferior when I talk to him. He looks me in the eye. When I spoke with Marco, on the other hand, often I didn’t know if he was listening to me or not. Alberto, when he’s listening, is listening. He’s a champion with humility and, from there, from humility, he wants to create his character, which is difficult when they place you at the highest level, on a pedestal.”
 
Everyone who has known him, even slightly, is surprised when they first meet him, is astonished at one particular sign, a symptom of excellence, a characteristic of a champion. Johan Bruyneel, his last director, emphasized his stubbornness, his extreme persistence. Íñigo Millán, one of the trainers with Garmin, was also surprised by him, back in 2003, when he worked at ONCE, when Contador was a lad of 20.
 
“He was just a kid, but he was the one that got farthest in the effort tests until exhausting the protocol. He suffered and suffered, but didn’t stop,” says San Millán; “he stood up on the bike from the beginning and I thought that he’d stop it right away, but he kept it up. That’s why when I saw him win the Tour, the Verbier stage, without showing signs of suffering—and I know how he is when he’s suffering because I’ve seen him suffer—I said to myself “Alberto’s going to take a lot of time.”
 
And his trainer in recent years, Pepe Martí, one of the people that knows him best, is surprised at how well Contador knows himself, how he interprets the signals from his body. “And every year that goes by he knows himself better. He knows how to manage the information that he gets very well, how to self-regulate,” says Martí, who speaks with Contador daily, sometimes three calls a day. “For example, in the time trial at Annecy, in the Tour, he had calculated that in order to beat Cancellara and bearing in mind what he experienced at Beijing and Monaco, he would have to pass the top of the hill (ed. – the 3rd time check at Côte de Bluffy) with 46 seconds advantage over the Swiss. He told me before the start: If I pass through with 46 seconds, I win. He did it with exactly 46 seconds and won by three seconds.”
 
“Directing him will be an adventure, the zenith for a directeur sportif. A huge responsibility. The concern that something goes wrong, that Alberto doesn’t fulfill his potential because of an error of mine, because of bad directing…that’s the danger,” says Martinelli, who is defined as a vintage specimen, one of the few that prefer to direct from behind the steering wheel. “The Astana of last year was, without doubt, stronger, but, when a team is with you 100% and you’ve got good legs, you can go very far. The team (Vinokourov, Pereiro, Tiralongo, Zeits…) is going to function this year, they’ll do whatever it takes. With Alberto it will be much easier, anyway, than with Pantani in 1998, when we had a really great team, but Marco only liked to go at the back of the pack. And so the whole team had to do that, surrounding him. They will also all be with Alberto, but ahead, at the front of the pack,” he warned.