Whose race are you riding?

So, I bet you watched all 6 hours, 17 minutes of the men’s road race at the UCI World Championships in Montréal on Sunday, didn’t you?

No? Just me then…

Well, if you missed it, the winner was an American rider called Brandon McNulty. After 240km of racing, he made a solo break with 33km left to go. He won by 13 seconds.

If you aren’t a big cycling fan, you may not have even heard of him. Which is kind of the point.

For the last six years his main job has been to help someone else win. He’s a crucial part of the trade team for the world number one, Tadej Pogačar. McNulty is one of cycling’s “domestiques” – meaning those riders who fetch the bottles, shelter their leader from the wind, and set the pace on climbs before their legs give out.

He is also very good at it - he’s helped Pogačar win the Tour de France on more than one occasion. In fact, in a smaller team, he’d easily be a leader himself. (A parallel story I may save for another day on going from big corporate lakes to small SME ponds…)

On Sunday, defending world champion Pogačar wasn’t there, and McNulty was also racing for his national USA team, not his day-to-day one.

It was a rare chance to race for himself.

I felt so happy for McNulty when he won – despite the fact I was willing on Great Britain’s big hope, Tom Pidcock, to catch him. And I also recognised something in the victory.

For a big chunk of my career, I saw myself as a support rider. Or in a less forgiving phrase – my boss’ “bagman”. Even as a VP leading large global teams, I believed my role was to make him or her shine.

I prepared the PowerPoint decks, smoothed the stakeholders, did the research. At one point, one of my own team even asked me if my main job was to write Board papers for other people…

I was good at it. That was the trap.

When you are good at supporting, people can stop imagining you do anything else. Even worse, you can stop imagining it too. And that can influence your own confidence.

After the race, McNulty said: ‘I knew there was a chance, but it would take a miracle.’

Hard, yes. But miracle? He’d won a smaller race on the same Montréal streets a year ago – and was fourth in the time trial there only a week before. The evidence was there, but in the moment, deep into the race, it can be hard to see all that.

Even afterwards he still framed his win around the looming, absent figure of his trade team leader: ‘I hope I made him proud.’

Old habits.

Being a brilliant number two isn’t a failing. Teams need people who make others shine. We can’t have a team of number ones…it would be ego chaos in minutes. But also, it doesn’t have to define your whole career. Or become the story you tell yourself and others.

Today, I am in a different mode. I am a team of one. I make all the decisions about where my business goes, who I work with, and what work I do. That’s scary at times, but the freedom and autonomy outweigh any reflected kudos I got working for someone else.

(You could argue Claude is my domestique of course – using it for administrative and thinking tasks. Having that support frees me up to do what I do best – client work, design, writing my own content.)

Let me ask you this. Whose race are you riding right now? And if it’s not yours, why not?