Veteran Canadian mechanic Geoff Brown is at his 23rd Tour de France

Canadian Geoff Brown is at his 23rd Tour de France. Cannondale-Drapac’s head mechanic is a veteran of the Tour and spends much of the year on the road with the team. The native of Ottawa has been around bikes his entire life and now makes his living at the top of his profession.

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“When you are working at this level, you can stand back and say that you have achieved the highest level of what you do,” said Brown. “I’ve been around for a long time and this is my life, I wouldn’t change a thing. I got into it because I enjoyed being on the road, it suited my personality.”

Brown, whose father was a professional cyclist, got his first opportunities to work as a mechanic with the Canadian national team and soon landed a gig in the professional peloton with the Motorola Cycling Team. The Tour de France is the biggest stage in the sport but Brown says that no one Tour stands out as the toughest. “They are always tough and are pretty consistently the same workload year after year,” he says. “It’s the middle of the season and the team is running at full speed and has been since the Classics or Giro d’Italia, it’s a continuation of what we’ve been doing all year.”

Responsibilities for mechanics go beyond keeping the riders bikes in tip-top shape. Apart from the work on bikes, mechanics handle many of the regular and mundane things that keep teams running smoothly such as washing and cleaning equipment, handling logistics, and spending hours driving team trucks. Their responsibilities make the lifestyle of a team mechanic extremely demanding.

“It’s very hard at this level to maintain a proper family life,” said Brown. “These days with the race program we do three or four races concurrently. Last year I spent 300 nights in hotels.”

Over years of working in the industry, Brown now says it is easier to anticipate things. The principles of bike racing haven’t changed but one thing that mechanics have to keep up with is changing technology. “Today it’s a little bit easier [to work on bikes] in one sense. In 1994 for example, we had Eddy Merckx Corsa Two bikes and when we got a new frame in you had to do all the facing and the chasing before building them up,” explained Brown. “When a steel bike is crashed though you could fix it. When you crash a carbon bike you have to replace the frame. So actually the workload to get it up running again is almost the same.”

A mechanic with Brown’s experience has worked with many different riders. “Every rider has a little dance they do before every stage,” he says. “I mean I was involved with the seven ex-victories of Lance [Armstrong]. I don’t consider to have ever worked with any bad people. Lance was always very precise about his bike and his position, he would double check everything himself every day. We would call him mister millimeter.”

Brown has also worked with some of the greats of Canadian cycling. “Steve Bauer was very easy to work with and so was Gord Fraser. Typical nice Canadian guys. Ryder [Hesjedal] was meticulous, he would stare at his saddle for 10 minutes to make sure it was straight.”

Living in Girona, which he calls “the new cycling mecca, the Boulder of Europe,” Brown works with a team of 10 mechanics on Cannondale-Drapac throughout the season. After 23 Grande Boucle’s there is no hint that the end of his career is yet in sight.

Andre Cheuk contributed to this story.