11 Exclusive interview with Salva Garcia -
Minder to Tarres, Colomer and Bilbao
Jordi looked to be very very organised and very very proffesional. He has told me.....that he had a system .....a system for his life that he kept to ...that mostly remained unchanged ? Please tell me what this was ?
In the morning Jordi many many times go to the gym.
In the morning Jordi many many times go to the gym.
He was very strict with this ...no change ...always training in the gym. Then the rest of the day he was training on the bike and making the bike better. He no stop ...never ...always work. The timetable, depending if there were problems or not, he was always up by 7:30. If there were problems he would be working on the bike by 8 o’clock and that took priority over everything else, we even cancelled photo-shoots and interviews, so he could put the bike up together first and foremost.
Left to right . Andreu Codina , Salva Garcia , Josep Paxau, Fransesc Tarres , Jordi Tarres and mechanic Ramon.
He needed to be certain that everything was correct to win the following race. If he knew that everything was ok, he was focused and was mentally prepared and followed his routine, got up at 7:30, had breakfast at 8 O’clock then he used to go to the gym, then we went on the bike, had lunch and in some cases after lunch we would go again on the bike and gym after, depending on the specific needs. The most important thing was to have the bike up together. He was such a perfectionist that he found it very difficult to accept that everything was fine. Now a days, he is doing bikes and his thinking and way of doing things is the same, it is logic, he needs to be very, very convinced about something and really believe in what he is doing, he has to spend hours before he decides anything.
For me the change from Jordi to Marc was very different. With Jordi it took days to decide something and with Marc I said, ‘what do you think, good or not good?’ and Marc would say straight away ‘I want this’. At the end both of them have been World Champions, but are completely different styles. Jordi did many trips to Torello with Paxau. Then the technician thinks that things ought to be one way and riders think otherwise and then I was in the middle and I am the only one that really knows what really happened there.