We Might As Well Win: On the Road to Success with the Mastermind Behind a Record-Setting Eight...

We Might As Well Win: On the Road to Success with the Mastermind Behind a Record-Setting Eight Tour de France ... | Johan Bruyneel, Bill Strickland | Tearing The Cranks Off

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We Might As Well W...

	We Might As Well Win: On the Road to Success with the Mastermind Behind a Record-Setting Eight Tour de France ... Johan Bruyneel, Bill Strickland Houghton Mifflin, 2008 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

On the tour and inside the mind of Johan Bruyneel, the winningest team leader in cycling history and the mastermind behind the success of the world's most celebrated champion, Lance Armstrong

Johan Bruyneel knows what it takes to win. In 1998, this calculating Belgian and former professional cyclist looked a struggling rider and cancer survivor in the eye and said, "Look, if we're going to ride the Tour, we might as well win." In that powerful phrase a dynasty was born. With Bruyneel as his team director, Lance Armstrong seized a record seven straight Tour de France victories. In the meantime, Bruyneel innovated the sport of cycling and went on to prove he could win without his superstar -- in 2007 he took the Tour de France title with a young new team and a lot of nerve, sealing his place in sports history forever.

We Might as Well Win takes readers behind the scenes of this amazing nine-year journey through the Alps and the Pyrenees, revealing a radical recipe for winning that readers can adapt from the bike to the boardroom to life. We witness Bruyneel's near-death crash and comeback as a rider. We are privy to the many ways he and Armstrong outsmarted their opponents. We listen in on the team's race radios to hear the secret strategies that inspire greatness from a disparate team. We learn how to make sure "not winning" isn't the same as "losing" as Bruyneel struggles to prove himself -- post-Armstrong -- with new riders, new strategies, and skeptics around every corner.

Whether mounting a difficult climb, or managing a team of thirty riders and forty support staff from a miniature car hurtling along narrow European roads, or looking a future legend in the eye and willing him to believe, Bruyneel is, and has always been, the consummate winner. Readers will relish this inside tour.

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more than racing bikes

Bruyneel's insight into the peleton is unsurpassed and his experiences towards 8 Tour de France victories and countless other wins highly entertaining. However the book is deeper than just bicycle racing and offers insights into living life effectively.

Tearing The Cranks Off

The only problem with the book is that it's too short! If you watch the Tour De France on TV you will love this book. The book covers everything from Johan's surprisingly successful career as a professional cyclist to the inside story about Lance's bluff on Alpe d'Huez. And it's quite well written. Even if you're a sports fan but not yet a cycling fan it's a great read.

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Gives you a new appreciation for the tactics required to win a Tour de France

This is a fascinating behind the scenes look at what it takes to coach a winning Tour de France team. You can't argue with the author's credentials: Johan Bruyneel was a professional cyclist who competed in the Tour de France himself before becoming the team director behind Lance Armstrong's seven wins and subsequently for Alberto Contadour in 2007.

In this book Bruyneel describes the strategies behind a winning team (and he makes it clear that it's very much a team effort to win the Tour de France). He talks about how a team can control the race, when they should let breakaways go and when they need to chase them down, how they can play the mind game with other teams, the different skillsets that individual riders within a winning team need to have and countless more insights into the world of cycling. I was reading this book during the 2008 Tour and it made me appreciate far more the way that team CSC were approaching the race and why they did some of the things that they did. Very, very interesting.

I didn't like the way that the book jumps about in time as required to provide support to the points that Bruyneel is making. For example, Chapter 6 talks about the 2001 tour, Chapter 7 talks about the 1999 tour and Chapter 11 talks about the tour in 2000. While Bruyneel makes it clear at the outset that he hasn't set out to write an autobiography, the book would have been more interesting (and easy to follow) if he'd kept things in chronological order.

Bruyneel talks several times about the use of performance enhancing drugs and how they have affected the sport. He is adamant that Armstrong never took them, although I found it interesting that he talks at one point about how he deliberately had Armstrong lose a stage that he could have one, in part because "if we won again, so quickly, I could foresee...accusations of doping".

He also describes the immense amount of time and money that goes into finetuning the bikes and equipment: money is no object if it converts into a few precious seconds saved on the race.

This is an easy and very interesting read for anyone who's interested in the Tour de France.

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4.5 Stars... Excellent 'memoir' for Tour de France aficionados (and more)

Johan Bruyneel, the team director of the US Postal/Discovery teams from 1999 to 2007, hails from Belgium (as do I), and I kinda grew up with him watching him on TV (he is 4 years younger with him). After a somewhat unremarkable professional cycling career (the highlight being wearing the yellow jersey in the 1999 Tour for one day), Bruyneel struck a bond with Lance Armstrong, and at the young age of 34 became the team director for the US Postal team.

"We Might As Well Win: On the Road to Success With the Mastermind Behind Eight Tour de France" (224 pages) brings Bruyneel's musing on what it was like to be Lance Armstrong's team director, and what a delight it is to read. Bruyneel is his humble self, even though confident all the way through. The title of the book comes from a conversation with Lance Armstrong, after he recovered from cancer, when they discussed their tactics for entering the 1999 tour: if they were gonna enter the race, 'might as well win it'. And win they did. The beauty of this book is that it gives insights on how determined all of them were in winning the Tour, again and again. But the hardest test for Bruyneel comes after Lance retires in 2005, and heads a team in 2006 and 2007 without Lance, posing the question "whether I was a team director who had won seven Tours thanks to one rider, or whether I was a winner in my own right" (Alberto Contador won the Tour in 2007 for Bruyneel's team).

If your interest in professional cycling is limited to the Tour de France, this book is not for you. The book oozes of great details on other things going on in the sport, including the Tour of Georgia, the one day Classics (such as Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders), etc. Bruyneel's musings are fund to read, and this book flies by in no time. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED reading for professional cycling aficionados.

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and so it goes

Thanx for the insight of the spectacle surrounding the most exciting sport in the world. I might as well keep on!
see you on the pavé roads in Belgium!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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