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Pssst! The latest insider news: Jan Schaffrath on his work as sports director
15/06/2024
Dear Team MILRAM fans,
I have been one of Team MILRAM’s four athletic directors since the beginning of the year. Personally, I found the transition from being an active rider to a sports director quite hard. As a professional cyclist, I always had a support team behind me in the past. This has of course all changed now. Nevertheless, I just love my new job. Naturally, I spend most of my working day at the races. I then spend up to six hours on location looking after the riders and following the race. But of course that is by no means all there is to a directeur sportif’s working day. There’s a great deal of organising to be done to ensure that a race runs smoothly for the team. It starts with me finding out about the exact route of a race. In some cases I can do this from home. But especially with smaller races I like to take a personal look at the conditions on site. This information is extremely important in the run-up to a race, to ensure that every member of the team knows what to expect and to enable us to plan, for example, where the main areas of a stage are. Besides making athletic preparations, I also have to organise the logistics. This involves arranging travel to the race venue, organising transfers from the hotel where the team is stationed to the race start and the schedule for the day of the race itself. In other words, the particulars of when things like breakfast, packing suitcases, transfers, massages, dinner, talks, etc. take place.
After the races there is not much time to digest the results and bring one’s emotions back to a normal level. Whenever drug tests are performed after the race, the riders are always accompanied by the team doctor and the sports director. In the evening, back at the hotel, I then do a round of the rooms. During these rounds I give the riders feedback on the race, tell them what went well, but also where there is room for improvement and where the rider may have to put in a little more effort in future. After dinner I then get together with the care staff, mechanics and the rest of the crew to talk over the day just ending as well as the schedule for the following day.
Although there is a huge amount to do behind the scenes of Team MILRAM, we all try our very best to do it all in as informal an atmosphere as possible and with a maximum level of professionalism. In this context, it is a pleasure to work with the Italian team members, because they of all team members live and enrich this familiar atmosphere. This in turn benefits the whole team.
When no races are scheduled, I spend my time scouting for promising young riders for the Pro Tour Team MILRAM. At the moment, I’ve already got my eye on a few potential candidates. I’ll tell you all about them in a future insider report here on the Team MILRAM website.
Best regards,
Jan
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