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Bradley Wiggins came fourth in the 2009 Tour de France, but he was standing on the shoulders of giants. Superb and very visible support was given to him by two of the most experienced and talented domestiques in the peloton — Christian Vande Velde, who was Wiggins’s last man in the mountains, and David Millar, who led Wiggins out into two of the Tour’s most crucial climbs at Verbier and Mont Ventoux. But the most valuable contribution of all might have been from Ryder Hesjedal, who did one of the best rides of the entire Tour by any competitor at the team time trial. Garmin started fast, unsurprisingly, given the team roster — Millar, Vande Velde, David Zabriskie and Bradley Wiggins are four of the best time triallists in the world. And they quickly shed their weaker riders. Tyler Farrar, Danny Pate, Julian Dean and Martijn Maaskant were cast to the winds before halfway. The time of the team would be that of the fifth rider over the line — Hesjedal was about to enter purgatory. If he’d faltered, Wiggins’s superb Tour could have been stillborn.

“To be the guy who was simply in the middle, who didn’t come off, but wasn’t good enough to contribute to that effort was a pretty hard position to be in, obviously,” says Hesjedal.

This is a typical understatement from the Canadian. He suffered on the wheels of his four team-mates, occasionally contributing, but more often sitting on the back, stubbornly hanging in. A measure of how much he must have suffered, as well as the quality of his team-mates, is that Garmin were only beaten by Grand Tour GC bullies Astana, who finished with all nine riders, only 18 seconds ahead.

After the opening time trial in Monaco, Garmin-Slipstream had two bona fide contenders in Bradley Wiggins and Christian Vande Velde. Wiggins was the team’s secret weapon, while Vande Velde was off peak form, having been seriously injured earlier in the season. But a good team time trial was crucial to their strategy. Not only did the team want, very badly, to win the TTT, but the time gaps to their rivals would be all-important.

Vande Velde describes the team’s strategy. “Our game plan was just to go. We were really tentative in the Giro and that was still in the back of our minds. We were still pretty upset about how we rode the team time trial in the Giro. We wanted to leave nothing behind, so we went for it right from the gun. That’s what happens when you do something like that. You might lose some riders. That’s the chance we had to take.”

But when they lost the riders, nobody panicked. “It was pretty relentless,” continues Vande Velde. “There were no big flat roads, and even if it was straight it wasn’t flat. If there was a downhill, there was a corner at the bottom. So there was never time to regroup in that first third of the race. When we hit that climb, the guys who hadn’t recovered were out of it right away. It was really hard to get your rhythm.

“I had confidence in Ryder. I knew he was definitely on the limit, if not over it, going up that hill. I knew as a whole we would be OK. Ryder has been through a ton of team time trials with us. I knew that after that hill it wasn’t so hard to sit on.So,Iknewifwegottothatwewere pretty much apples.”

And Hesjedal panicked the least. In his eyes, there was a simple job to do: stay with the team. In doing so, he laid the foundations for Wiggins to finish just a few seconds off the podium in Paris.

“Knowing that you can’t come off. That is a pretty simple motivator at that level,” he says. “When you have gone through more than 10 years of being a professional bike racer you have been through moments where you can muster what you need to do to do it. That’s simply what it was for me.”

And rather than be satisfied that he’d done possibly the best individual ride of the day, Hesjedal was initially disappointed that Garmin had missed out on the victory. “At the time, you are really bummed not to win. But it didn’t take me long to think, ‘That was one of the most amazing things I have ever been a part of... going that fast with only four guys pulling.’ Then you start to see other teams like Lotto, with Cadel, and even Cervélo, and other teams who got their doors blown off. When you start to think about that you are like, ‘OK. We need to put things in perspective,’” comments Vande Velde. “It was easy at first to be short-sighted, but when you looked at the results that night at the dinner table you realised that, wow, we were really fortunate to do what we had done.”

Always there

The 2009 Tour team time trial wasn’t the first time Ryder Hesjedal had played such a crucial role in saving a Garmin rider’s Tour. It was Hesjedal who paced Vande Velde on the Col de la Bonette, in 2008, when Vande Velde lost contact with the yellow jersey group.

He just seems to be there when it counts. When the critical moments of a Grand Tour hang in the balance, such as on the Bonette or in Montpelier, he is there to do his job and save the day, making him the consummate team player.

It’s a bit odd that Ryder should play such a role on the Garmin team. He got his start in cycling by racing mountain bikes, where a solo effort is required to succeed. He won a silver medal in the under-23 cross-country event in 2001, and a silver medal in the men’s cross-country race in 2003. “I really believed I could contend for a gold medal in Athens and be in the hunt for a medal coming off a silver in Lugano in my first year as a senior,” remembers Hesjedal.

In 2004, Hesjedal prepared for Athens by riding some road events for Lance Armstrong’s US Postal Service team.

“All I thought about in 2004 was trying to get that Olympic medal under my belt. That was my focus. It just didn’t pan out at all at the Olympics and later on at the World Championships,” he reflects.

But with an apparently bright future in mountain biking, in 2005 Hesjedal signed on full-time to ride the road for Discovery Channel.

“I could continue on the mountain bike or take the opportunity in 2005 to commit fully to the road. That is what I did and haven’t looked back from that. I am very pleased with that decision.”

Road cycling is very much a team sport, unlike mountain bike races, which are basically two-hour individual time trials.

“At first it might have been a hindrance for him being a professional and coming from mountain bikes, where you are your own team, but here you have to learn how to be amongst everyone. But I think he has really embraced it,” notes Vande Velde.

Hesjedal recalls his first full season on the road: “It was the first year of the ProTour, and racing at the highest level on a team like Discovery Channel, everything was new at that point. It was a hard year. It was as full a road year as you can do. I simply had to go through the bumps and that was a big part of that season. There were a lot of hard races, like the northern Classics. You learn how to race your bike pretty quickly in that environment.”

That season also included Hesjedal’s first Grand Tour, the Giro d’Italia. “It was brutal. I crashed. I remember it vividly. I had gone off the road in a bad situation and had hit hard. It was an epic day and it was only day five of my first Grand Tour. Eventually winning it with Savoldelli, I went through it all. I left the day he went into pink. I mean, how hard is that?”

Crashing

“That was my first Grand Tour experience, and all I knew was that I wanted to go back and tackle it again. Crashing is just part of racing, but that was a hard first taste, to crash early on and then try and go as far as you can until you just can’t go any further.”

In 2006, Hesjedal switched to Phonak and came fourth overall in the Tour of Catalonia before starting his second Grand Tour, the Vuelta a Espana. Unfortunately, he was forced to drop out on stage 17. When Phonak folded at the end of the year, he went back to North America to race for Team Health Net.

“I had pretty much been going full gas, as hard as I could for two years, with Discovery and moving over to Phonak. I did the full ProTour season again there. Going through that whole year, and just the state of everything, I didn’t see myself starting over again on a new team in Europe. It just didn’t seem like something that was going to make sense.”

Racing well in the big US events brought interest from the Slipstream team who were looking to make the big jump to European racing.

“It didn’t take long to know that this was going to be a good fit for me. Once I showed myself racing in California and Georgia, and even Tour of Gila, they knew I could contribute and I was a guy who had that European experience coming to the programme and living out of Girona [Spain],” said Hesjedal.

When the 2008 season opened in Europe, it didn’t take long for Hesjedal to prove his worth, contesting the finale of GP d’Ouverture La Marseillaise and eventually taking third. But it was in May, at the Giro, that he really began feeling more comfortable about his racing.

“Pumping through Sicily and getting the jersey right away, we were pretty comfy. It was, ‘The Giro? No problem. I know the Giro.’ It was easy to get through that one. Everyone who was there looks back and knows just how hard that Giro was on so many levels. I am always going to be proud of that.” But even more importantly, the curse of the Grand Tours was finally broken.

“That Giro was crucial for me, especially simply to finish it. In 2005, I made it 14 days. In 2006, in the Vuelta, I didn’t finish the 17th stage, so I was 0-2 in finishing Grand Tours. I knew that was important in the steps for me to get to the Tour de France. To simply be there after two weeks and get through the last two days over the Gavia, the Mortirolo, Aprica, and be second in the second bunch, that was a huge day.”

Slipstream received a wild card invite to the Tour de France in 2008, and Hesjedal was selected for the team.

“IthinkthewayIgottodotheTourde France for the first time with a new team, that the environment was as good as it could be. The pressure was pretty nil. I think the goal for the organisation was just simply to be there.”

Even with that little pressure, however,

it is still the Tour de France. “I was a bit paranoid that I couldn’t finish and where I would be in the final week. That was always in the back of my mind, and I knew that if I could get to the last week in good shape, I had shown [in the Giro] that I could get through the big mountains in those long days and be in the mix, whatever it may be, or a break or late selections or what have you.”

And that is exactly what happened on stage 16 over the Col de la Bonette to Jausiers. Hesjedal got in an early break and when his team leader, Vande Velde, was dropped from the yellow jersey group on the Bonette, Hesjedal was there to pace him over the climb and save the day.

“That was an epic day. To be chasing or trying to hold the yellow jersey group, on a climb like that, at the Tour, for my leader, that’s what it is all about. I would hope that one day there would be someone who could do that for me if I am in that situation,” recounts Hesjedal.

A year on, and the Garmin-Slipstream rider once again proved his worth up in the Alps, in week three of a Grand Tour, with a stellar ride on the 2009 Tour’s most critical day, the stage from Bourg Saint Maurice to Le Grand Bornand.

“The goal there was to help Christian and Bradley as late as possible. And it just turned out that we were doing well in the team competition, and the third guy is always counting for the team, so it is easy to stay in an effort and get to the finale. That was a hard day. I think I

came off on the second to last climb, but that day was so filthy that there were not too many guys left by then,” he explains.

Vande Velde gives Hesjedal’s ride an interesting perspective: “I think it comes down to a lot of confidence. He was one of the strongest guys in the whole entire race that day. Once Ryder realises that he can be up there on the big climbs, he will be up there more and more. That’s his place and he will be there every time.”

For a racer who had spent most of his career trying to be the perfect team-mate, it is both ironic and fitting that Hesjedal would finish his 2009 season by winning one of the most mountainous stages of the Vuelta.

“We went to the Vuelta super-relaxed,” says Hesjedal. “Obviously, what with Tyler [Farrar] doing what he did at the Eneco Tour and the Tour de France, leading into the Vuelta we were super- motivated. I was ready to contribute to the team effort as long as the team felt Tyler had a chance. My role was to be there to ride on the front, or do whatever, to help Tyler,” he adds.

Game plan

On stage 10, Hesjedal was a close second to Simon Gerrans, and then Farrar won stage 11 for Garmin-Slipstream’s first ever Grand Tour stage win. But when Farrar retired from the race on the rest day, it left the team’s game plan wide open when the race resumed with stage 12, a very mountainous route from Almeria to the summit of Alto de Velefique.

“It was a hard start. The guys on the team were having a hard time because the break wasn’t going. It was mainly Svein [Tuft] and [Christian] Meier, two Canadians, so I felt I had to contribute. I

got myself to the front. I just rolled off the front real easy, right at the right time, and got into the break. The break formed pretty quickly,” remembers Hesjedal. “As soon it happened I just knew that it was going to be a big day. The break was going to go a long time and there was going to be a chance, no matter what. I just believed the whole time and rode the break with that motivation. I think I was motivating to other guys in the break. It was mostly Spanish guys. That is always good. It was such a huge day. It unfolded in so many ways it needed to.

“When I got to the final climb, I knew the way I felt, I just knew I was going to be able to go up that climb and be in the hunt. You are always assessing. ‘Am I the eighth best guy here? Am I the fifth best guy here? Am I the best guy here? Oh, there are only six guys. OK.’ It played itself out and eventually it was just me chasing one guy who had gone early. As soon as I bridged up to him I knew I was in the mix. I wasn’t going to give it up.”

Clearly, 2009 was a breakthrough year for Hesjedal. “If I can go through next year in the same way that I did this season I will be pleased,” he says. “You get to that point where you just have to try to keep doing what you are doing, but I always think I can improve on everything I have done at this point still.”

My Liège

To that end, Hesjedal would like to show well at the Ardennes Classics.

“Next time I ride Liège, I definitely want to be in the top 10. That’s what I was around in 2009, and I feel like I can battle there again. It just seems that as I have evolved, the Ardennes seem to suit me a lot better. I am more comfortable in that region. I can easily gear up for those events. That week is so hard and it fits into the schedule well.”

Hesjedal has proven to be a key player for the Garmin team. He always seems to be in the right place at the right time, though his laid-back demeanour belies his talents on the bike.

“It is just my style. I just do my job in a cool, collected way. I don’t get all crazy. I have been doing it since I was 15. I know what it feels like to have lactate burning and knowing that you have to get over that climb or stay on that wheel.”

Hesjedal is not an emotional fellow. It's just not how he rolls. Those fist pumps and the ear to ear smile on his face when he stood atop the podium that day in September are about as excited as you'll see the Victoria, B.C. native.

Unusually relaxed and even-keeled, Hesjedal coasts through the emotional ups and downs of professional bike racing without letting much affect him.

There was the time in 2003 when he seemingly had the World Cross-Country mountain bike championship race locked up, only to have a suspiciously-fast Belgian rider, Filip Meirhaeghe, come from 55 seconds behind him to take the win.

Hesjedal had led nearly the entire race and was passed on the final lap.

The following year Meirhaeghe was busted for doping at a World Cup race and was suspended, casting doubt over his remarkable performance at the World Championships, but Hesjedal took it in stride. He was in Victoria that summer preparing for the 2004 Summer Olympics when he heard the news. "My first reaction was 'that's one less guy I have to worry about in Athens'," he said. "It's not worth dwelling on the past."

Hesjedal is quite used to the roller coaster of pro cycling. Though he's known more as a road racer these days, Hesjedal got his start in mountain biking and first raced at the top levels of the sport in North America for the Subaru-Gary Fisher team. He won a UCI World Cup race in Les Gets, France in 2002 and won the overall under-23 title that year. In addition to taking the silver behind Meirhaeghe at the World Championships in 2003, he won the National Off-Road Bicycle Association (NORBA) XC championship that year and was the first-ever professional rider to race a 29"-wheeled mountain bike in a NORBA championship event.

But in 2004, he left mountain biking behind and turned his attention solely to the road. A stint with Lance Armstrong's Discovery Channel team made him realize just what a career as a road rider could mean. For a guy who once wanted to play professional baseball, this was like playing for the New York Yankees.

"To be around Lance and that organization, it was just a big year. But it felt like that's where I needed to be, and should be," says Hesjedal. He made the switch to Phonak in 2006 riding for Floyd Landis on the Swiss-based team and had a good year results-wise, but it all hit the pavement in August when Tour de France winner Landis was fired after being caught for doping. The team quickly folded and Hesjedal was out of a job. "All I wanted to do was get home and be with my friends and family," he says. "That was a hard part of the sport, which is very real."

In 2007, he decided to step away from Europe and joined the American Health Net-Maxxis squad. "I wanted to be in control and I knew with a team like that I could be one of the top riders and pick my schedule and get back on my feet," Hesjedal says. "But as soon as I signed the contract, all I could think about was getting back to Europe. And I just went to work."

Watching from the outside was Jonathan Vaughters, the directeur sportif of Team Slipstream, who signed Hesjedal the following year. His impact on the team was immediate. Hesjedal raced the Giro D'Italia and his first Tour de France that season - helping teammate Christian Vande Velde finish fifth.

"To be able to ride through the Tour and finish on the Champs-Élysées," Hesjedal says, "those are things that have changed my career. It's just where I envisioned myself being." Making a 2008 season even better, Hesjedal represented Canada at the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

"He was underutilized and was always a rider that had enormous talent," Vaughters says. "But he had never been in a good team environment for him. Ryder has a pretty unique personality for a bike rider. He's pretty laid back and he likes white Gucci shoes."

Hesjedal admits he's a fashion guru who's willing to spend $400 on a pair of shoes or $250 on a pair of Hugo Boss jeans. Hesjedal's family and friends kept him grounded when he was young, but he was always willing to pay for the stuff he wanted. "I liked to express myself with my vehicles," he admits. At 20, Hesjedal ordered up a brand new and fully loaded 2001 Lexus IS 300 sports car in canary yellow. "To be able to roll a brand new Lexus out of the showroom was pretty cool. But it was the bad-ass mountain bike attitude. Sometimes I think I was an idiot."

Today he still likes the fine things, but tries to make better choices. He drives a Chrysler 300c with 22-inch wheels ("It's the working-man's Bentley," he explains), and an Izuzu Trooper SUV. Hesjedal admits he would rather splurge on good food or Hawaiian plants for his garden than on the things he used to buy. Hesjedal owns a home in Maui, where he trains during the off-season, and another house in Victoria, which he still considers home. During the season, he rents a place in Girona, the home base for the Garmin-Transitions team.

He likely would have owned three or four more houses and a Lamborghini or two had he followed through with his first dream of becoming a pro baseball player, but pretty early on, Hesjedal came to the realization he was more into individual sports than those with a team.

As a child, Hesjedal excelled at just about any sport he tried. "I was super active and athletic and I just took to any kind of sport. Baseball, basketball, soccer, football, I played everything as a youth," he recalls.

Being a professional athlete was always Hesjedal's long-term goal. He idolized those well-paid pros he saw on television and as a daydreaming eight-year-old, it was more a matter of picking a sport to turn pro in than picking a career.

It's not that bikes weren't around. Growing up in Highlands, a small community of a few thousand just north of Victoria, Hesjedal's sports mostly took place in Langford, about seven kilometres away from his home. Getting to and from practices or friends' houses typically meant hopping on his bike and pedalling the mostly downhill route there - and uphill route home.

"That was a huge part of where I grew up," Hesjedal says. "It was a pretty far ride when I look back. I'm sure I would get 10 or 15 km a day biking as a kid."

The older he got, the more cycling got into his blood. But it wasn't about competition until his final year of elementary school, when family friend Jeff Green put on a mountain bike race in the area. Hesjedal decided to take part, but was in a basketball tournament the same weekend.

"There was this big battle. I didn't really want to be at the basketball tournament and I remember sitting there thinking 'I hope we don't advance' so I could get the hell out of there and get to the race."

Just like that, a competitive mountain biker was born.

"There were world-class trails half a kilometre from my house and after school I would do two- to three-hour rides on singletrack. Now that I look back," he said, "what I did from 13 to 16 or 17 gave me the foundation and allowed me to get to that level."

In Grade 8, Hesjedal's first year of junior high, he started racing in a school mountain bike series and realized this was the sport for him. "I don't know how or why, but pretty early on I knew cycling could be good. I got my head around that and stopped all the other sports."

That dream of being a professional baseball player changed into wanting to be a professional rider like the guys he saw on the posters at his local bike shop. Hesjedal started working with coach Juerg Feldmann, who put the wheels in motion for his career. As a teenager, Hesjedal was riding on a Feldmann-coached junior development team alongside Geoff Kabush, where the focus was well into the future.

"He always had a lot of confidence and high aspirations," recalls Kabush, who is now Canada's top male mountain biker. "There was never a doubt in his mind that he was going to accomplish his goals."

By the winter of 1995, at the age of 14, Hesjedal's future was set. "I knew I had to commit to it 100 per cent or it wasn't going to work. I remember thinking, 'yeah I really want to ride the rest of my life'," he says. "I can remember my dad, when I said I didn't want to do these other sports not being very happy."

Understandable, considering the average salary of a pro cyclist is comical when compared to that of most other pro athletes. "But it worked out in the end," Hesjedal says. "My parents were always supporting me. I would never be where I am without them. They've given me the means to do what I needed to do."

Hesjedal's parents Paige and Leonard are longtime employees of the regional government in B.C. They simply wanted to give their son the freedom to choose what he wanted to compete in as a kid. And no, calling their son Ryder wasn't an effort to determine his future.

"I can't make any great claims of being psychic or anything," Paige Hesjedal says when asked about her son's remarkably appropriate name. "I try to cash in on it, but it's not working."

One would think that for parents to call their first-born child Ryder they would have been competitive cyclists themselves, looking to predict a future career path for their son. But they just wanted to call him something different. "Honestly we just picked the name because it sounded cool at the time," Paige Hesjedal says. "Be careful what you name your kids."

She remembers being told Ryder wanted to be a pro cyclist. "I guess I didn't even realize there was a career in bike riding at that point. He just started getting into competitions and then he realized there was a future in it," she says. "My biggest shock was the cost of bikes. He always needed a better bike and a better bike. But he obviously had that potential." Now, Hesjedal's parents are his biggest fans.

While Leonard Hesjedal was at work on the day of the 12th stage of the Vuelta last September, Paige was at home, glued to the computer monitor as she watched the race unfold online. "I had it streaming live on the computer, just watching it and screaming at the screen all by myself," Paige Hesjedal recalls. "As he was getting closer to the finish I grabbed the landline to start calling people because I was freaking out."

It was a mountainous stage with a summit finish atop Alto de Velefique, located 179 km from the day's start in Almeria, Spain. Hesjedal had made it into a long breakaway - just like he had two stages earlier when he finished second to Aussie Simon Gerrans. This time, Hesjedal had to do most of the work as his breakaway companion, Garcia, of Spain, had a high-ranking teammate in the chase group and no motivation to keep the break away.

Hesjedal kept the pace high and easily out-duelled Garcia to become the first Canadian to win a stage of the Vuelta and the first to win a Grand Tour stage since Steve Bauer at the 1988 Tour de France.

Paige and Leonard Hesjedal were ecstatic. "It was thrilling. After being over there, you realize how big it is and what an accomplishment it is," says Paige, who followed Ryder through much of the 2009 Tour de France with her husband. "It was long overdue. It was a lot of years he fought back on the road to get to that point."

Indeed. Hesjedal had come a long way from his first bike race as a 10-year-old.

* * *

Standing on the podium after winning Stage 12, Hesjedal took a moment to think about what had just transpired. He had just beaten the biggest names in the sport on one of the toughest days of the Vuelta. "You have to visualize you can do it and when it actually unfolds, that's the magic of the sport," Hesjedal says. "It was just an unbelievable feeling."

Vaughters, for one, knew it was coming. "I think it was a natural progression for him as a rider," he says. "Was it a surprise to me that he was capable of winning a mountain stage in a Grand Tour? Not at all."

At 29, Hesjedal is content with where he is in his professional career. He recently signed a two-year contract with the renamed Garmin-Transitions team through 2011 and knows the best is yet to come.

"I'm very happy I was able to do this whole career as a mountain biker at the age I did it and then transition over," he says. "When I envision myself in another five years I get really excited because I know I can still be performing consistently."

Hesjedal knows the bar has been raised, but it's a challenge he's looking forward to. "I think they'll be expecting that from me, but it's good pressure. I want to better my results at every race."

That's good news for the future of cycling in Canada.

by Richard Moore (March 6) courtesy cyclingnews.com

Garmin-Transitions rider looks ahead to Catalunya and Ardennes

Ryder Hesjedal (Garmin-Transitions) was the fourth man as the leaders tackled the final, steep and narrow climb that, in the end, proved decisive at the end of Saturday’s Montepaschi Strade Bianche.

When Thomas Löfkvist (Team Sky), the defending champion, accelerated at the bottom, Michael Rogers (HTC-Columbia) and Maxim Iglinskiy (Astana) were quickly on to the Swede’s back wheel. Hesjedal reacted too, but, as he later admitted, he didn’t have the legs to stay with them as the gradient steepened to 16 percent, and Löfkvist continued applying the pressure.

With the top of the climb just 500 metres from the finish, the Canadian had no chance of regaining the leading trio, and he was caught and passed by Filippo Pozzato (Katusha) as they negotiated the bumpy, uneven streets around the back of the Piazza del Campo. But he was happy with fifth, he said, as he looks ahead to a diet of stage races, followed by one of his big targets of his season: the Ardennes Classics.

“I didn’t really feel that great, and I had to dig deep all day,” said Hesjedal at the finish. “I really like this race, and I wanted to do a good ride, but I was cramping a lot at the end. To be honest, I was bluffing a bit as I was coming in with these guys. In the end, I couldn’t go with the top guys.

“It was a hard day,” Hesjedal continued. “But you saw there were a lot of good guys in that front group [which also contained Fabian Cancellara (Saxo Bank) and Juan Antonio Flecha (Team Sky). To get fifth with the field that’s here, I’m pretty pleased with where I’m at."

Looking ahead, the Garmin-Transitions rider said that Tirreno-Adriatico, which gets underway in nearby Livorno on Wednesday, is, “a pretty big goal, then I’ve got the Tour of Catalunya, Pays-Basque, and then I want to show well in Fleche-Wallonne and Liege-Bastogne-Liege. That’s my plan for the spring."

Hesjedal Is Ready For More

Following a breakthrough 2009 season, highlighted by a mountaintop stage victory in the Vuelta a España, it’s no surprise that Ryder Hesjedal is hungry for more. What is somewhat surprising is the race where he says he has some unfinished business – the Monte Paschi Eroica across the dusty dirt roads of Tuscany, where he’s finished 10th two years in a row. The tall Canadian has twice figured in the late-race decisive moves  on the strade bianche, a kind of Italian-style Roubaix across gravel roads that remind him of the logging roads he trains on in Victoria Island in Canada.

“I have my mind on Eroica, I’ve been trying to get my head around that one,” Hesjedal told VeloNews. “I’ve been close in two tries – that would be a beautiful victory. I love that race.”

Eroica, March 6, will be the first early season goal as Hesjedal motors into his third year with Garmin-Transitions as he builds on the momentum that comes with a breakthrough Vuelta stage victory last September. That mountaintop grand tour stage victory only confirms in Hesjedal’s mind that he’s on track for even bigger things.

“I am very excited to see where we can pick up this season,” Hesjedal said during a break in the team’s training camp in Calpe last week. “I feel stronger than I did going into last season. I just want to continue to create opportunities for myself.”

Creating opportunities

“Opportunities” means being at the sharp end of the action, and the ex-mountain biker quietly nipped at the edge of big-time success since joining Garmin-Transitions in 2008.

In his first season with the team, Hesjedal posted top-10 rides at Eroica and Tirreno-Adriatico along with participating in the team’s stunning team time trial victory at the Giro d’Italia that secured him a spot in the 2008 Tour de France.  Last year, Hesjedal’s consistency and determination paid off. He was in front groups sprinting for the podium at such classics as Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Clásica San Sebástian before carrying strong form into the Vuelta.  Hesjedal snuck into the winning breakaway in stage 12 and delivered what would be the second of Garmin’s three stage victories in the Vuelta.

It was huge for Garmin and an important confirmation for Hesjedal.

“You’re always working hard, but until it happens, you never know. It’s all about confidence. Sometimes it seems so far away and you accept that it might never happen. I know a lot of great riders who have never won a stage in a Grand Tour,” he said. “It’s much sweeter when it does finally happen. You’ll easily commit that much more time again just to taste success again.”

The Vuelta stage victory was no small matter. Not only was it the first Vuelta stage win by a Canadian, but local authorities, taking a page from Alpe d’Huez, are also naming the first switchback on the torturous Velefique climb in Hesjedal’s honor.

“To win a breakaway is difficult; there are a lot of guys chasing a pretty small piece of the pie,” he said. “Most guys out here have been doing it for the majority of their lives, it comes to a point when you’ve been chasing something for 15 years, you’re not getting close to it, so it’s important when it finally happens.”

Bumpy road to success

Hesjedal at the 2002 MTB worlds in Kaprun, Austria. | Andrew Hood photo

More importantly, it was also a personal victory of sorts for Hesjedal, whose road to the elite was sometimes as bumpy as the mountain bike trails he used to race on.

After the 2004 Olympics – where he punctured and did not finish the mountain bike race – Hesjedal committed to racing on the road full-time. Promising results with Rabobank’s U23 team landed him a gig at U.S. Postal Service, then a team completely obsessed with Lance Armstrong’s march to Tour history.

He moved to Phonak in 2006 for more chances to race in bigger events, and he quickly posted promising results in the Volta a Catalunya and the Dauphiné Libéré before the team disintegrated following the controversial disqualification of Floyd Landis at the Tour that year.

Burned out and frustrated by the European scene, Hesjedal made a strategic retreat in 2007, racing in the U.S. with HealthNet with hopes of putting the disillusionment behind him.

When Jonathan Vaughters came calling with a chance to ride for the emerging Garmin team, it was just the opportunity he was waiting for.

“I just lucky in a way and fortunate that it’s come together so well, I am in good place with this team,” he says. “A lot of guys took not necessarily a risk, but there was no guarantees when were signing up for Slipstream in 2007. To be part of that and commit to that, I am very happy, I feel like I’ve established myself in this organization. You want that in any profession. It feels great to be with the core guys that it started with, and the team is improving every year, it’s exciting to have been there from the start.”

In 2008, Hesjedal quickly proved he could be counted on for solid individual results as well as team work.

In that year’s Tour, Hesjedal was riding in what proved to be the winning move in stage 16 across the formidable Bonette climb. When a slightly faltering Christian Vande Velde was gapped off the back of the lead GC group, Hesjedal sat up – and actually came to a complete stop on the side of the Bonnet climb – to help pace Vande Velde up the final 5km of the climb to keep alive the team’s podium hopes.

It was performances like that that Hesjedal say were just as important that his breakout 2009 season capped by the Vuelta win.

“2008 was very big in a lot of different ways. Things that I had been chasing for a long time came together for me,” he said. “I did fine-tune my results a little bit last year. These last two years I am where I always thought I could be. I am the most comfortable I’ve ever been on a team. I feel like I’ve shown myself and the team is confident in my abilities. Puts me at ease with peers and guys I look up to, guys like Millar, Vande Velde and Zabriskie, they know they can rely on me, that’s rewarding and satisfying. I am in a great place in my career right now.”

Aiming for more

At 29, Hesjedal is just reaching the peak of his potential.

For 2010, Hesjedal is putting an early season emphasis on the hilly spring classics before reloading for the Tour de France, with a likely detour through the Tour of California in May.

After Eroica, Liège is the other big European race that drives his ambition. Last year, he was quietly 11th, part of the chasing group behind winner Andy Schleck and runner-up Joaquim Rodríguez sprinting for third. He also realizes that Liège is in a league of its own.

“If there was ever race to win and pick yourself, Liège in my mind is one of the hardest and my grueling races in the world,” he said. “If you can raise your hands in that race, that’s something very special.”

His fifth-place last year in the post-Tour Clásica in Spain has piqued his interest in the one-day races that come in the second half of the season. After watching teammate Tyler Farrar win Vattenfall Cyclassics in August, Hesjedal knows there’s an opportunity for success in such races as Plouay and the two, new one-day ProTour races slated for Canada in September.

While taking aim for classics and sneaking into breakaways are Hesjedal’s forte, he realizes his priority in the Tour is to help out teammate and GC captain Christian Vande Velde.

He’s also hoping that one day the stars will align and he will get the green light to go for a stage victory. With his responsibilities to the team coming first, Hesjedal knows that would mean being in the right move in the right situation.

“I’d like to get myself in a scenario to go for a stage in the Tour. That is a big goal,” he says. “Like in 2008, if Christian wasn’t in trouble, I would have been running up the road looking for a result. Having a rider up the road in a stage like, in a big mountain stage late in the Tour, that is also part of the strategy. You can give support when it’s needed and, if things are going well, I am going to go for it. I will be looking for that opportunity the first chance I get.”

So far, Hesjedal has shown uncanny ability to create his own opportunities.

Ryder Hesjedal’s tentative 2010 racing schedule
• Volta ao Algarve
• Eroica
• Tirreno-Adriatico
• Volta a Catalunya
• Vuelta al País Vasco
• Flèche Wallonne
• Liège-Bastogne-Liège
• Tour of California
• Tour de Suisse
• Tour de France
• Clásica San Sebástian
• Vuelta a España or Tour of Missouri/Canadian one-days
• World Championships