Back in January, I was making fun of all those things our beloved ZRL Coaches and Captains have to endure, swearing I would never be one of those losers.
Because who would want to bear the psychopathy and non-assumed frustrations of a bunch of mixed-gen cyclist wannabes, right?
Phase 0: Getting Tricked By Ricardo
That was my mindset on August 8th, 2022, as I was falling asleep while slurping a mojito and contemplating the sea from Playa América’s beach. So you can imagine the level of hatred I experienced when I was interrupted by the following PM from Ricardo:
I was torn between my oath to never be a ZRL Captain and my commitment to COALITION, and especially to Ricardo. That is why it took me a whole day to get back to him. I made up an excuse for my late reply, but eventually accepted the immense honor of being COALITION Sonar Captain.
I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. But I was wrong. Really wrong.
I understood it immediately, as a few seconds after I answered Ricardo I was given access to seven billion additional threads on the COALITION Discord server.
ZRL Captain threads were ordered by category, topic, and region, and filtered by name and popularity. Then, they were ranked by an algorithm elevating the number of participants of each specific thread to the cube and rooted back to the immediate closest primary number. Or something like that. In any case, it was clear someone put a whole lot of effort into making it incredibly well-organized and easy to understand.
The first instruction you get is the following:
“If you are a new captain, please first read the Team’s Captain Manual.”
The concept of manual is misleading here. Calling it “Team’s Captain Definitive Universal Encyclopedia” would match reality much better.
The Captain Manual is a document regularly updated with version tracking to make sure nothing is left unattended. From weigh-in protocol to team naming convention to be COALITION compliant (how the names of COALITION teams originate is a secret I cannot reveal otherwise my fellow COALITION captains will have to remove me from the surface of earth).
I was given access to the origin of Universal Truth, to the source of good on Earth.
I felt like Newton being hit by the apple. I was finally seeing the Matrix.
Phase 1: Building the Team
This whole myth of a very coordinated captain community fell apart when it was time to allocate riders to teams.
If you want to imagine it as a steering group that closely monitors each team assignment, bearing in mind balance and cohesion, don’t read the next paragraph.
The reality is that the only place where I have faced a fiercer negotiation than “I give you Joe and Jack to Sonar if you give me Robert for Telepathy” is bargaining for a Persian carpet in the Zouk of Istanbul back in 2012.
I am joking. With the excellent coordination of the EMEA regional captain, Andreas, all teams were quickly created. A week before the start of ZRL, the Sonar team was definitive, and from the first exchanges with the teammates I knew we would be a fantastic team.
A basic introduction of the felons:
Getting the team to feel like a team was easier than anticipated.
I have to say I started with an advantage. The guys were great, I knew four of them from previous ZRL seasons, and I have a natural tendency to overwhelm the Discord server with nonsensical tirades which at best make me sympathetic, at worst make others feel sorry for me. In both cases I had something to build on.
Phase 2: Managing the Emotion Rollercoaster
What I could not anticipate is that being captain was a little bit like eating an entire jar of fortune cookies, every single day. Each fortune cookie contains a different kind of curse or unrealistic challenge. “Life is a continuous Internet dropout”, followed by “you will find a miscalibrated home trainer on your pathway to happiness”, and eventually the more down to earth “you should appropriately feed your dog if you don’t want him to eat the ethernet cable during the race”.
For every single race I was sure something unexpected would happen, but would not know what until the very last minute.
And those misfortunes made me actually wanna cry. Not joking.
I felt every single detail was the most important thing in the world. From the moment I would announce the composition of the team racing the following Tuesday, to the moment when the WTRL results page displayed our ranking after 5 minutes of frantically pushing the F5 key.
As a team captain, you need also to develop unlimited patience and/or project management skills and/or hunting skills:
- I had to chase some of them to get a proper weigh-in video.
- Remind some of them that there is no advantage to clicking the racepass link at the last minute. That the only thing you get by doing so is to have your captain’s heart going as arrhythmic as the cadence of a sticky watter.
- Repeat that the race is at 8PM CET time. CET time. CET time. CET time…. (this is not a mistake, CET time is repeated many times. CET time. Seems that some do not understand the notion of time zones, they live in their own time zone 🙂 )
- Remind that COALITION kit is pink, and that if you are very dogmatic about the Bike & Beer jersey, we’ll have a problem.
Phase 3: The Competition
Least importantly, we finished 2nd in our Division. I am proud, I am not going to deny it, though I would have been as proud if we had finished 7th or 10th. (From 10th downwards maybe I would have been less proud…)
What is way more important are the incredible moments we lived together. And the most intense ones were not when Callum won the Volcano Stage, or the day Emiel scored points at all FTS and FAL.
Two anecdotes are still giving me goosebumps when I narrate them.
First one: Last stage. 54km. Emiel has a calibration issue just before the start of the race and only manages to start 6 minutes after the pack left the pen. He rides a 54km iTT. Those 4 points he gets finishing across the line made us maintain our 2nd overall ranking in the general classification. The team waited in the audio channel until he finished, laughing and joking at the misadventure of Emiel, but at the same time so thankful for his effort.
Second one: Champs-Elysées stage. The day Tobi earnt his “chewing gum guy” nickname. Tobi was giving it all at the end of each lap so as not to be distanced by the front pack of around 50 riders. In the fifth sprint his HR goes nuts. He is obviously going beyond his limits. I am DSing, and despite all the energy I put in trying to get him to suck the wheel of the guy before him, Tobi is dropped and crosses the lap line alone with 8 seconds delay on the pack. A landslide.
I announce it to the team and all congratulate him for the effort through the audio channel. At this point he had already gone way beyond the call of duty. Tobi remains silent, does not say a word. While I focus on Richard trying to break away for the 700,000th time, I notice that the delay between Tobi and the pack has now been reduced to 6 seconds, and soon 5 seconds.
Tobi would simply refuse to get dropped. Period. He knows, or better said, I know it is impossible for one guy to come back on a pack of 50 riders in a flat like Champs Elysees. Still that word, “impossible”, by all means is not in Tobi’s dictionary nor catalog of acceptable behaviors. So he continues permanently pushing more and more.
4 seconds. That’s when I put myself on Tobi fan view, and start mildly encouraging him again “come on, great effort, you rock…”. I was not totally sure what was happening though.
“Guys, I am witnessing something crazy, Tobi is battling by himself and is now only 3 seconds behind the pack.” I immediately get 4 guys shouting and saturating the line, hysterically rooting for Tobi. And Tobi pushes even more. “2 seconds guys!!!! 2 seconds!!! Come on you are going to make it!!! Dig deep you are making it!!! Tobi you are CRAZY CRAZY but you are going to make it!!! One second!!!! One freaking second!!!! YEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!! You made it!!!!! OMG you made it!!!! WTF!!! You are freaking crazy!!!!”
A friend of mine once told me, “If Elon Musk and I meet in an elevator, on average we are billionaires.” It is kind of the same with Tobi and craziness. If the entire team and Tobi meet in the pen, on average we should all be sent to a psychiatric emergency facility.
Because in my 32 months at Zwift, I had never seen something like that. Just imagining it might be possible is crazy. If I would have calculated the probability of making it I would have instantly dropped the idea.
The celebration from the other teammates while Tobi rejoined the pack was one of the most beautiful moments I have experienced as a Zwifter. This is another perfect illustration of what it means to be a team. To fight and explore new limits to be 30th instead of 50th, just motivated by the commitment to others and your refusal to abdicate. Do you know something more fulfilling, more rewarding as a group than this?
Well, that was exactly the mindset of every single one of us during the entire season. Fighting at the front or at the back of the pack, we would all refuse to abdicate.
Richard, Callum, Stefano, Maxime, Emiel, Tobi, Basti, and Anders: you all rock big time!
Therefore, my selfish advice is super clear: don’t do it. Don’t ever be a ZRL Captain.
Because the fewer of you who are willing to be captain the more chances I have to keep my spot as SONAR’s. What a privilege to be part of this magic team!
wpDiscuz
