It's not so easy to explain what Carina Kirssi does for a living. "Bus driver" is the superficial answer - but she doesn't drive a school bus and jobs in the World Tour of cycling are not as clearly defined as in other everyday working life. Driving the team bus is just one of the 47-year-old's tasks, to which many others are added. It is much easier to understand how Kirssi came to her profession: Born in Finland, she has a cycling past herself with national championship titles in cyclocross, road cycling and mountain biking. After ending her career, she first completed a one-year training programme in sports massage in 2012 and then joined Team IAM Cycling. In 2015, she obtained her German bus driver's licence for the team and has been working for Bora-Hansgrohe since 2017.
Carina Kirssi's daily routine at Bora-Hansgrohe
Her career path already suggests that she can fulfil many more tasks for the team than just driving the bus from A to B. A typical day on a race day looks like this: Kirssi chauffeurs the racers to the start in the bus and makes sure "the coffee machine is ready to go" beforehand. Afterwards, she helps to prepare the radios and other equipment, for example. After the start of the race, she tidies up the bus and drives to the finish line. There she prepares everything for the arrival of the drivers: Drinks, a first meal such as noodles or rice and towels and laundry so that the drivers can shower right on the bus. After the journey to the hotel, she washes the drivers' dirty racing clothes and cleans the bus.
It is also their job to clean the riders' helmets, shoes and goggles and prepare the equipment for the next race day. Depending on the race, the working days can be very long - "sometimes up to 16 hours in the worst case". When it rains, there is a lot of work with the laundry and bus cleaning. She mainly has time for massages during shorter races. The social role that Kirssi fulfils is not included in any job description for bus drivers. For young drivers, starting in the World Tour is like jumping in at the deep end - they are happy to have someone to look after them a little: "I act a bit like a mum and support them."
Stressful bus journeys
Bora-Hansgrohe has three buses, and Kirssi also travels to small cycling races "in Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia or Slovenia". She doesn't know exactly how many kilometres she rides per year. "But at IAM it used to be 60,000 kilometres." Her favourite race is the Vuelta a España because she likes the climate and the country. She also particularly enjoys riding in the Arctic Race of Norway: "Norway reminds me of my Finnish homeland."
Kirssi really enjoys driving the bus, even if it can be quite stressful at times - it's often on very small roads, sometimes there's a subway that's too low or a bridge that the bus is too heavy for. It takes full concentration to manoeuvre through narrow alleyways to the team hotel or to manoeuvre in a small car park. She once discovered a tyre defect early in the morning and had to act quickly to get the drivers to the start on time. In Belgium, she once got stuck in an alleyway with the bus because a concrete slab of the road wedged under the weight of the vehicle and ripped open the toilet tank - which earned her the more or less funny saying "Shit happens".
Under observation at Bora-Hansgrohe
Many people watched how I behaved and looked closely to see if I was making mistakes. That's no longer the case today. - Carina Kirssi
It is rare for a woman to drive the team bus in professional cycling - so she was scrutinised very closely at the beginning: "Many people watched how I behaved and looked closely to see if I was making mistakes. That's no longer the case today," says Carina Kirssi. "But as a woman, you need self-confidence to assert yourself." The Finn has travelled a lot around the world - from Norway to the United Arab Emirates to China, she has been to cycling races, she knows all the one-day classics and all the big tours.
Kirssi spends around 180 days a year travelling for Bora-Hansgrohe. The job means that she has had less and less time to cycle herself in recent years. She is therefore happy that she will be able to work a few more days in the equipment warehouse in Raubling in 2024, and she remains a big cycling fan: "You're always happy when the guys win or ride a good race, especially the young riders." She is looking forward to the current season with new signing and captain Primož Roglič with great anticipation: "The team has set its sights pretty high, which also means that we have to do our best to achieve these goals. That's really exciting!"
Kristian Bauer
Editor
