Cannondale Pro Cycling The Unsung Hero Ted King’s contribution as a domestique in the Cannondale Pro Cycling team is an invaluable one.
Working in what can be described as the engine room of the team during races; Ted’s role is to ride in such a way that he is able to help riders like Peter Sagan take stage victories. This may seem a selfl ess act
but as the American rider readily points out, riding bicycles for a living and taking part in some of the world’s greatest cycle races with the world’s greatest riders is a massive honour and one that he relishes.
What do you think is the best way for professional cycling to rebuild its reputation after the damaging events of the last few years, and if it was up to you, which positive elements of the sport would you want to highlight most to the public? Truly I think cycling should stand on the rooftops and shout the good work it already does do. It’s unfortunate that a decade and more ago the sport was steeped in cheating. But over the past few years things have taken a drastic change and we are in the midst of an entirely new and exciting age in cycling. We ARE in a clean era. Cycling does a tremendous job to combat doping and achieve a safe, level playing fi eld and it’s precisely that cycling does not do a great job explaining just how stringent the regulations are and just how tightly we are tested that the sport remains somehow stuck in a nebulous mystery. Given the standard set by professional sports in general - the biggest sports on the global playing fi eld - cycling does a tremendous job to be clean. Now we need to convey that message to the masses.
Being an American on an Italian team, have you found it diffi cult to learn the language of the team and how has this affected you in your day to day role within the team over the last two seasons? Learning Italian was a trial by fi re, but as a result you learn quickly! Coming to this team my language background was Spanish and thankfully the crossover between Spanish and Italian comes naturally. It’s not like I tried to learn Italian with a base- language of Swahili. But for sure the meetings, camps, dinner table conversation are conducted in Italian and that’s part of the adventure of this sport. Living overseas, racing on the very highest level in the sport, you may as well get your feet wet and broaden
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your mind and soak up the experience, right? What does language have anything to do with my day to day role? Nada. When we each pedal the bike with a number on our backs, we have a job to do. That job transcends language so that we each excel at our particular discipline. My job is to make guys like Peter, Moreno, and Elia Viviani shine. I’d say I’m doing a pretty darn good job regardless of the language to which we go home and chat with our buddies.
You started out quite late in professional cycling which makes you quite unique in the pro peloton. Do you think this gives you a unique perspective on the sport having come into it as something of an outsider?
I wouldn’t change my entry into the sport for a second! I grew up playing “typical” American sports; as a three-sport varsity athlete in high school, I then went to college and was thinking
that intramural sports would be my thing while paying attention to academia. Through my brother winning a collegiate national championship of his own, I found cycling in my freshman year and took to it quickly. So, sure, I started cycling really late by the ProTour- cycling standards. I was about 19 years old when I started riding competitively whereas a lot of my teammates and colleagues have been riding and racing since single-digit ages. Again, I love that background it’s given me. As a result, I have a college degree - heck, I’m one of about a half dozen guys in the ProTour who can make that claim. Solely pursuing a career in professional sports - any sport, cycling included - is inherently going to be a massive risk. I’m
therefore a huge proponent
of collegiate cycling because it gives you the foundation to pursue life with the help of that college background, but you’re also balancing the rigours of training,
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