From national titles to Grand Tour stages to the Hour record, Alex Dowsett’s career has been dedicated to the pursuit of one thing: more speed
Words James Spender Photography Mike Massaro
Alex Dowsett Profile
I was talking to Matej Mohorič one day and he assumed that, – just by looking at him – I’d be able to tell his CdA. I just went with it, like, “Yeah, point two three on the TT bike, a bit more on the road bike.”’
CdA is the coefficient of aerodynamic drag, a single number derived from complex calculations that expresses a rider’s aerodynamic efficiency. The fact that Mohorič – a winner of Milan-San Remo and a technical whizz himself – would ask this question says it all. Alex Dowsett’s early career may have seen him hallmarked as the haemophiliac time-trial prodigy, but by the end the boy from Maldon was known for something else: an uncanny understanding of how to go faster.
Local education
Dowsett hung up his aerosocks at the end of last season and in April swapped Andorra at altitude for life back at sea level in Essex. That marked the end of a 13-year career in which he amassed six national time-trial titles, two Giro d’Italia stages and one Hour record (52.937km, set in 2015). And yet, he laughs, there was one race more important than them all.
‘The Maldon 10 time-trial. There was a running joke that me getting a sub-19 was more important than winning WorldTour races, and an element of that was true. Each pro has their testing ground. If you live in Girona it’s the Rocacorba and mine was the Maldon 10. It was my wind-tunnel, my place to test pacing strategies or how to ride in different conditions. No one takes photos so I would take different sets of kit. I learned an awful lot about how to go fast there.’
Quite why Dowsett saw cycling through such a methodical, data-driven lens even he couldn’t tell you. Perhaps it was two years of marginal gains at Team Sky, or maybe the fact his father was a racing car driver. But nurture or nature, Dowsett quickly became the type of rider who ended up testing 53 skinsuits, gold-plating his sprocket to reduce friction and working out the optimum temperature for the velodrome (30°C) before embarking on that successful Hour record attempt, or indeed setting the Maldon 10 course record at 18min 51sec. Precisely the kind of rider you’d want on your team.
How fast works
‘Just after the Hour I rode a time-trial at Bayern-Rundfahrt with a young Marc Soler,’ says Dowsett, then at Mo
