Danny Pate's arrival at Rally Cycling after spending the past seven years on the WorldTour with Team Sky, HTC-Highroad and Garmin is a reunion of sorts. The 36-year-old will reconnect with former teammates Jonas Carney, who is now the Rally Cycling performance director, Pat McCarty, one of the team's directors, and Brad Huff, who is in his third year with the team.
Pate's two-year deal with Rally will take him through the 2017 season and his 17th year as a pro, and having a few familiar faces in the program will likely help him adjust from riding for one of the world's most successful, well-funded teams to being back in the world of domestic Continental racing.
“I'm getting to an age where former teammates are probably going to be less and less, at least from that far back,” Pate told Cyclingnews last week at the team's training camp along the Southern California coast in Oxnard.
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“Through the years a lot of guys I've raced with have come to this team, and then a lot of them have since stopped racing,” he said. “Past years with this team are actually probably a little more familiar to me when I wasn't even on it. Guys like [Mike] Friedman and [Mike] Creed and [Dan] Bowman and all these guys were on the team. Now it's just Huff. I was on [Team Slipstream] with him, and then Jonas [Prime Alliance] and Pat [Garmin-Chipotle].”
Pate, started his pro career with Saeco as a spry 20-year-old, returning to the US the following year with Prime Alliance and then going on to win the the U23 World Championship time trial in 2001. He spent the next six years on US Continental teams, eventually moving to Jonathan Vaughters' TIAA-CREF team in 2006. He stuck with the Slipstream-run teams as they moved up the cycling ladder and hit the WorldTour as Garmin in 2009. He raced with the team in 2010 and then in 2011 moved to HTC-Highroad, where he raced for a year before moving to Sky in 2012.
It's been a long journey for the rider from Colorado Springs, and now he's circled back home to the States. Young cyclists often talk about the difficulties of learning to live and race in Europe, now Pate is faced with the opposite transition: getting back in tune with the Continental circuit.
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