A professional cyclist gripping the door of his team car speeding along at 30 miles an hour makes for compelling television, but it is normally because the rider is bloodied or the bike is battered. Andreas Beck-Watt knows that scene well.
At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics Road Race, Michael Woods, Team Canada’s star rider, had avoided a crash, but broke his shoe.
He dropped back to the team car to get a replacement.
From the car’s back seat, Beck-Watt, now Team Israel Premier Tech’s head mechanic, leaned out and over the window and shimmied the shoe onto Woods’ foot.
“There’s always something,” Beck-Watt said.
How Cycling Explains the World
Beck-Watt grew up on a farm in Markdale, Ontario. His career options were farming or working in the local ice cream factory.
Neither was appealing for a teenager who wanted to see the world.
But he had taught himself how to repair and build bikes.
After high school, he spent a few months at the United Bicycling Institute in Oregon.
There, he applied for jobs in Europe with touring companies and he landed his first job in Italy when he was just 18-years-old.
He then went to work at a French touring company whose owner had been involved in bike racing. He sent Beck-Watt to his first bike race to assist a mechanic with the French national team.
He later landed a full-time job as the only mechanic for Team Tibco, an American women’s team (the team is now EF Education-TIBCO-SVB) and the professional South African team, MTN-Qhubeka.
In 2019, he joined Team Israel Premier Tech.
Beck-Watt’s career embodies the global nature of the sport and our interconnected world. He’s a Canadian who has worked for the French and Canadian national teams; an American professional women’s team; and a South African and an Israeli professional team.
The 17 mechanics working for Team Israel Premier Tech, which is based in Girona, Spain, are from 11 different countries.
He’s married to a South African, and they live in Sweden.
On-the-job training
There’s little formal training for mechanics working at cycling’s highest levels.
They tend to fall into two camps. Some trained to become mechanics, but had to learn about professional cycling. Others were steeped in the sport’s history and culture, but had to learn how to maintain and repair bikes.
“There was a steep learning curve, but I had a good idea how a bike worked, and that totally saved me,” he said.
All is quiet until it isn’t
Mechanics are on contracts with the professional teams and they’re guaranteed a number of days a year (the standard is 200 days).
At cycling’s biggest races, the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, and the Vuelta a Espana, four or five mechanics travel with the team.
Each day, two of the mechanics will go to the race. The others will drive the team’s three trucks to the team’s next hotel.
There’s enough room, light, and even air conditioning in what the mechanics call their “fancy truck” so that they can work inside the truck late into the night and avoid any inclement weather.
Otherwise, they’ll be working in the hotel’s parking lot.
Beck-Watt on Race Day
The mornings before the race are typically calm because the mechanics have cleaned, adjusted, or repaired the bikes the previous evening.
At the start of the race, the two mechanics will set up the bikes for the riders. They’ll check the bikes’ tire pressure, double check to make sure that the batteries are charged, and prepare the cars with extra wheels, tires, water bottles, clothes, and shoes.
“It’s either hours where nothing happens or it is total chaos. It can be very quiet and then super stressful,” Beck-Watt said.
The biggest problems occur when a rider has crashed twice. The mechanics can try to repair the first bike while the rider is on the spare bike. But if something happens to the spare bike, the rider is in real trouble because a team typically only has two bikes per rider except at the Grand Tours.
Logistical challenges Abound
Professional cycling is not like a typical NFL week where 30 teams play in 15 stadiums on either Monday, Thursday, or Sunday or professional tennis where the men and women play in one location over the course of a week or two.
A one-day race might start in one city and end in another. A week long race with multiple stages moves from city to city. The Tour de France often starts in another country (last year, it started in Denmark.)
Teams can have riders at multiple races across multiple continents during any given week or weekend. Last week, the team raced in France at the Etoile de Besseges (where a massive crash left a rider hanging from a bridge.) This month, the team will race in Spain, at the UAE Tour, and Andalucia Ruta del Sol.
Servicing two bikes per rider—five to nine riders a race— requires mechanics to bring with them a mountain of equipment, spare tools, and parts.
The logistics of airplane tickets, hotel rooms, and transportation for riders and staff at different races at the same time will be the focus of another profile.
Beck-Watt on Braking
I had assumed the biggest challenge in maintaining today’s bikes would be the electronic shifting.
But it’s the switch to disc brakes from rim brakes that has caused the biggest headaches.
Not only did teams have to buy adapters for the bike racks, they also had to bring many more wheels to each race. There’s no more waiting for a mechanic to repair a flat tire on the course. Now, they just get a new wheel.
A team might have 60 extra pairs of wheels during a big race. Depending on the course, whether it is flat, hilly, or includes cobblestones (like Stage 5 of last year’s Tour de France) the mechanics will change a rider’s wheels almost daily.
The riders also put an enormous amount of pressure on the brakes during harrowing descents, taking corners at high speeds, and riding in inclement weather.
“We spend a lot of time on disc brakes. If you cut corners it will come back to bite you,” he said.
Some professional cyclists are just like us
If you’re at all like me and the thought of changing a tire stresses you out, give yourself a break. While some professional riders know how to maintain a bike, others have no interest. They’ll get off their bike, hand it to a mechanic, and not see it until the following day.
The experienced cyclists can be quite communicative about how the bike feels and curious about how they work.
Some of the younger riders will say everything is fine and that’s when Beck-Watt will find something wrong.
“A half millimeter spacer here and there can be the difference between having a chain that stays on and one that falls off,” he said.
The boss’s bike
There’s one more source of pressure for Beck-Watt: Maintaining the boss’s bike. Sylvan Adams, Team Israel Premier Tech’s owner, is an accomplished cyclist and time trial specialist. The time trial bikes, with their aerodynamic handlebars, are much more complicated to build and maintain.
“At the start it was scary for sure,” Beck-Watt said about maintaining Adams’ bikes. “But now I know what he wants and how to set up his bike. It’s still a lot of pressure.”