The Transalp is a special race: actually an amateur sport, but with stages like the pros. And yet also very different: there are no rest days, individual time trials or flat stages. Instead: Mountains, mountains, mountains. And: the performance of the individual counts for nothing, only the joint performance with the team partner counts towards the classification. The pair classification, challenging terrain and participants ranging from professionals to recreational cyclists create a race structure somewhere between a cycling marathon, pair time trial and cycling race that cannot be found anywhere else in the event calendar - neither for professionals nor recreational cyclists.
Nevertheless, in its fifth year, the Jeantex-TOUR-Transalp has become more of a bike race than ever before. The riding has become more tactical and the power density has increased. Whereas in previous years, some of the top riders would often get away from the field early on and enter the final climbs with large gaps, this time leading groups of more than 50 teams reached the last mountain. It was only there that riders attacked in Tour de France style to determine the classification. Getting one of the front places has become much more difficult. Of course, the majority of the 1,100 participants still cycle across the Alps for fun - far removed from top places and performance limits. That's how it should be. Among the top hundred, however, the air is getting thinner from year to year. Transalp veteran Max Pritzl, who won the Grandmasters classification with partner Toni Schreiber, said: "This year was the toughest tour yet."
FLATTER MEANS FASTER
One reason is certainly the profile of the stage race, which in previous years had significantly more metres in altitude. Classic Transalp stages used to look like this: short run-up, into the first mountain, down, into an epic climb, descent, maybe a little pull, finish - 100 kilometres, 3,000 metres in altitude. This year, only the fourth stage, the queen's stage with the Stelvio Pass as the executioner, matched this profile. Around 2,300 metres less elevation gain than in previous years visibly smoothed out the route, so that the majority of the field was often able to regroup on descents and flat sections. And the top riders were either unable or unwilling to break away effectively on the first climbs of "only" 600 metres in altitude.
You can find the entire Transalp report as a PDF download below.
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