David, we know you are a great professional and we know this because your philosophy is to work with passion. Tell us a little more about your passion…
D: My two great passions have always been sport and journalism and I have afghanistan consumer mobile number list been fortunate to combine both for most of my professional career. Although I was a football fanatic as a child, at the age of 14 the cycling bug got into me and, first as a cyclist and then as a journalist, I have been involved in that world for two decades . But I am a lover of all sports and I have tried not to limit myself to cycling and to try to diversify my activity further into other modalities. I am passionate about learning new things and in the future I would also like to focus more on other disciplines.
What is it like to work with elite athletes?
D: I think that having competed for so many years, even at an amateur level, helps you in a certain way in your relationship with them. You know certain feelings, fears and circumstances that would otherwise be difficult to understand. Obviously, and as I suppose happens in any sector, then you find everything: people who are more accessible and close to you and others who are more difficult to manage. But, in general, the relationship with everyone is good because you have something in common with them: the passion for the job and the sacrifice made over many years to get there. In my case, having also been 'on the other side', in the media, helps me to understand what they are looking for and to try to find a balance between both interests , which is one of the most important tasks of my work.
How do you interact with cyclists? Do you accompany them to events? Where do you carry out your “office work”?
D: It's a very particular job. Although this year we have opened a team office in Madrid where we work, mainly, the three people who make up the communications area, our work is quite itinerant. We don't accompany the team to all the races, because sometimes we compete in two or three countries at the same time, but I do travel with them to the most important events, especially the three grand tours: Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España . After more than ten years of experience, you already know the peculiarities of the competitions and you try to adapt to them, although you don't always succeed. You have to take into account that when you are in a race, every day your work scenario is a different city , a different start and finish line and that the working conditions depend on many circumstances: the weather, the location, the needs of the team that day... You have to adapt to working from anywhere, be it the finish line itself, the team bus, under the podium... Very rarely do you do it comfortably from the press room... Thanks to new technologies, the location is almost the least important thing now and the important thing is the immediacy with which we disseminate our information, which is one of our main objectives when we work on the ground.
What are the main challenges faced by a communications director for an elite sports team?
D: In my case, and being a team that has won the world ranking in the last four years and is the oldest in the international peloton, what we are looking for now is to take a step further in the organisational aspect. Our resources are not unlimited and we have to try to optimise them to the maximum. The relationship with the media and their satisfaction, both in fulfilling their requests and in our proactivity in terms of generating content is a priority for us. And as representatives of Telefónica, social networks and the entire digital sphere have also become a main axis of our communication policy . We have more than 1,200,000 followers and we are already the second cycling team in the world with the largest number of fans on the networks.
