Sprint train
In road racing, a sprint train is a strategic maneuver that is used in mass sprints in the finals of bicycle races .
Strategy of the sprint train
To do this, the team of a strong sprint specialist forms a "platoon" of three to six drivers at the head of the peloton during the last kilometers and keeps the pace as high as possible in order to thwart attempts to break away and the sprinter of their own team up to a few hundred meters from the finish to bring an optimal sprint position. As a result, the speed of the main field over the last five kilometers is usually 55–60 km / h, and not infrequently higher. The individual "approachers" of the team - mostly three to five - take over the leadership of the field one after the other in a largely fixed order. The closer the goal gets, the more "starters" fall behind until finally only the sprint star remains on the home straight.
A detail of the overall sprint train formation is the so-called "closer" . His job is to stay on the sprint star's rear wheel and prevent other promising sprinters from "biting into" it.
Variants of the sprint train are mainly practiced with regard to the role of the last driver. In the standard case, he has to drive a somewhat longer lead and drag the speed 400-500 m before the finish again a little so that his captain can show his speed and cannot be easily overrun by the competitors out of the slipstream. Variants of this concept are possible if a team has a “last man” who is an excellent sprinter himself. In this case the last driver takes the lead much later and sprints at the front with his own teammate. This makes it more difficult for the competition to choose the “right opponent” and to pull by from the slipstream.
Well-known sprint trains
The tactic of the sprint train developed in the late 80s and 90s, but has since changed the tactical situation of mass sprints significantly. The Italian Mario Cipollini is considered the first sprinter to have built a sprint train that was consistently tailored to his needs . In fact, the Belgian Freddy Maertens is the "inventor" of the sprint train. In the sprints he drove the unusually high ratio of 54:12 for the time (today generally 53/11). In order to be able to accelerate with this translation, he needed a high starting pace, which is why he used the support of his teammates as a starter.
Especially during his time at Saeco, Cipollini made his team a trademark as “treno rosso” (“red train”). His most important "approachers" were Mario Scirea and Gian Matteo Fagnini . The qualities Fagninis in this "cycling discipline" were very good: after all, he was at that time by the T-Mobile team recruited to Erik Zabel to assist in sprints.
In addition to Fagnini and Scirea, her compatriot Giovanni Lombardi was one of the best starters in the world. Among the athletes who are still active today, the Australian Mark Renshaw , the Belgian Gert Steegmans and the New Zealander Julian Dean are ideal sprint preparers.
In the meantime, the concept of the “sprint train” has been adopted and perfected by other drivers - above all Alessandro Petacchi , Mark Cavendish and Tom Boonen . Occasionally, sprint trains are also successfully set up within the framework of world championships , for example when Cipollini won the World Cup for Italy in 2002, but also by the women: Here it is primarily the Nürnberger team that has consistently and successfully implemented the concept for Petra Rossner , Trixi Worrack and Regina Schleicher implemented and recently also did so within the national team, so that Regina Schleicher won the 2005 World Cup in this way .