Training Camp 2009

The noise of the rotor blade rotation and the feeling of the rushing adrenaline pumping through my veins for a split second I forget the simple instructions on my way out of the helicopter. The moment Nicki Sørensen’s voice weakly penetrates the noise on my way behind the machine with my head bowed eyeing the ground, I become aware that the close shave meeting the rotating blades would cause would only be productive in terms of the blood-red headlines on the front page of newspapers around the world. I find the right way by running in front of the helicopter along with Michael Mørkøv and Nicki Sørensen, before it lifts off to pick up the rest of the Team Saxo Bank personnel on top of an unknown mountain on the island, Fuerteventura off Africa’s northwestern coast.

The training camp is for all employees on the team. Mechanics, soigneurs, riders, management, sports directors. The camp serves as a common frame of reference for the employees who are working closely together during the season.

“The most important thing on the camp is not to win the individual competitions. The key is having the chance to look one another in the eyes and thereby get to know each other. If the employees from the staff had not been here with the riders we could be missing out on these moments where the staff’s and riders’ skills and strengths must be combined to achieve the ultimate goal and find solutions to various hardships. Both strengths and weaknesses are exposed and each of us is forced to take off our mask. Even a world-class rider suddenly becomes human when he hesitates about having to go out into the cold water”, says Michael Mørkøv who just arrived Fuerteventura with a fresh victory from the six-day race in Ghent.

That opinion is being backed up by the Tour de France stage winner Nicki Sørensen: “I am pleased that all employees on the team participate. In this way, team building truly becomes to be about team building and cooperation with people with other competencies than the riders”.

The helicopter flight is the last stage of an eventful series of diverse skills-intensive activities over three days, which take its real beginning on the resort, Playitas where we are all staying during Team Saxo Bank’s annual training camp and team building. Playitas is an oasis in the impoverished flora of Fuerteventura which is characterized by a barren but at the same time fascinating lunar landscape with highly weathered and eroded rock.

The activity-day is launched on the beach where five groups og eleven guys are each using a two-man kayak to sail around a buoy a few hundred meters out in the ocean. Everyone in the group must go through the trip twice before the baton is over and the winner of the eleven sandwiches is found. Number two in the competition gets a smaller amount of sandwiches, even fewer for number three and so forth. Teamwork is highly rewarded:

“The main objective having this training camp is to give all employees a chance of getting to know each other by working closely together. When you have been through hardships you learn how teamwork works in practice and that it pays off to use each other’s different skills. Furthermore, it is essential that riders are aware of the great value of the office staff and their influence on the results”, says team owner Bjarne Riis who follows his employees closely during the whole trip.

Similarly, food is distributed to the participants after the orientation course, the golf competition, the diving contest and the absolute toughest competition where each team is put in the ocean 1.5 kilometers out to sea where they are left with two surfboards which they must bring to shore. The weaker swimmers are naturally positioned on the board while the rest of the group pushes them to shore. The concept of motivation, confidence and teamwork permeates all the exercises.

On the bus on the way to the starting point for the survival camp the following day, we are all excited and the dusty landscape gives Gustav Larsson the opportunity to, in most entertaining of ways to tell hunter anecdotes from the dark Swedish forests where hunters have become the hunted and moose and wild boar have become hunters, continuing with stories from South Asia where deadly centipede rage villages making life dangerous for unsuspecting tourists. Ironic justice in the extreme.

Thus arrived, the leaders of the survival camp are searching through our bags and clothes. No chocolate, cokes, cell phones and other lifelines can be carried along except the small amount of food that was won during yesterday’s activity-day. Now, a 16-kilometer long trek with backpacks through the barren desert landscape awaits, finishing with a few kilometers of hiking on the beach. The trip takes us past a small fortress which reportedly was used as the last stop of the Nazis just after WWII on their escape to South America.

The rest of the day is being spent finding necessities such as water, firewood and blankets using maps, mountain bikes and four-wheeled motorcycles in the rugged terrain. Cooperation and visible leadership is rewarded with the basic elements of survival.

Upon a chilly night in the open, we swim out in the ocean with our clothes in a bag to get on the jet skis where the ride with Frank Høj proves that this rider not only has the need for speed sitting on a bike. A ten kilometer breathtaking ride across the waves with the prospect of flying fish ends by a motorboat which the whole group boards and is being transported down the coast line.

Another swim from the boat to the shore leads us to the mountain bikes on which we are to transport ourselves to the top of the mountain where our group will be awaiting the rest of the crew’s arrival. On arrival, we all climb in an almost symbolic gesture up to the mountain peak where we collect stones and rocks and form the words: TEAM SAXO BANK.

A few seconds later, the helicopter propeller admonishes. The helicopter which should bring us all down to safety in the bottom of the valley from where we went mountain biking. And here, the ring reconnects. A closure that could have had a bloody ending, were it not for the due diligence and hail from Nicki Sørensen. Life is in our own hands but without cooperation, social interaction and the awareness of the qualities of your partner, colleagues and friends, the great achievements slip through our fingers. The training camp has been a success.

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Photos: © Lars Møller

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