S8 Ep95: Life in the Peloton – Jonathan Vaughters
The Cycling Podcast
The Cycling Podcast
4.7 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2020
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Vaughters founded the team and has steered it through two mergers and kept it afloat when the organisation's future looked to be in jeopardy a couple of seasons ago.
But what does the role entail? Vaughters talks about team building, the constant battle to find the finance to keep the wheels turning and how he believes every World Tour rider is underpaid.
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Theme music
The theme music for Life in the Peloton was composed by Pete Shelley, who was lead singer of the punk band Buzzcocks. It was commissioned by the production company behind Channel 4’s coverage of the Tour de France in the 1980s and was used as the theme music for the nightly highlights show. Pete died in December 2018. We were given permission by Pete’s widow and his manager to continue using the music for the theme tune to Life in the Peloton. To hear more about the music, listen to the Andre Greipel episode of Life in the Peloton.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | . |
| 0:26.9 | Welcome everyone to Life in the Peloton. |
| 0:29.1 | I'm doing well mate. I've got a special episode this week. I've spoken to my team boss, Jonathan Vorders. |
| 0:41.1 | But more importantly, what I've tried to talk to him about is being a team manager, a GM, a team owner as well. |
| 0:48.1 | I've tried to uncover what that job really is because I started to think about it. I don't really know what these guys do behind the scenes. |
| 0:56.1 | Intriguing because this is effectively you interviewing your boss. |
| 1:00.1 | It was a funny dynamic, but actually in the end once I got over that fact we just had a good chat. He's very easy to talk to and he's very great at explaining what he does. |
| 1:08.1 | So guys, sit back and enjoy this one. Cheers. |
| 1:12.1 | . |
| 1:19.1 | Well welcome Jonathan Vorders, JV as I pretty much call you all the time. You are my boss. You are the manager of my team. |
| 1:34.1 | But before you're a manager, you're a writer. So welcome to Life in the Peloton. Nice to have you on board. |
| 1:39.1 | Thanks for having me. |
| 1:41.1 | What I want to do first off before we start today's podcast is about team managers. |
| 1:46.1 | And it's a really, really big role of the part of cycling. But a lot of people don't actually understand what you guys do as in team managers. |
| 1:54.1 | How things run. But before we get to that point, what I think is really important for everyone to know is a little bit about who you are because you're a pro for about 10 years as well before. |
| 2:06.1 | And you're writing in all kinds of teams. You wrote in a Spanish team in the very beginning and then you went through you know US Postal at the height of their at their period and then also in a French teams and then finish up with an American team. |
| 2:20.1 | So I think it was a great sort of dynamic of different teams before then retiring and then moving into an idea of starting your own team. |
| 2:29.1 | What I want to ask you after all that is give us in a nutshell if you can run down what it was like as a pro writer and then what that what led you to that decision of starting your own team or starting 18. |
| 2:41.1 | Well, I mean, it was a lot of happenstance. I mean, you know, when I stopped racing, I wanted nothing to do with bike racing. |
| 2:53.1 | I mean, I wanted to separate myself from the sport as much as as it possibly could. |
| 2:58.1 | So I went into totally different things. I had a you know, real estate business and I was doing consulting for financial services firm and I mean, it was a million miles separate from cycling. |
| 3:09.1 | And then I, you know, sort of like two years into that. I started missing the sport, but not at like the professional level. |
... |
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