From Australia..

..ng Saharan wind is tempered by the ocean breeze, the remnants of the Saxo Bank team (plus whatever boss Bjarne Riis could muster in the transfer season) gather in the Spanish Canary Island of Fuerteventura.

And for the first time since Riis took ownership of the team a decade ago, there will be no training camp led by B.S. Christiansen, the former soldier from the Danish Ranger Corps who spent 28 years as a top-notch commando.

“It’s all about teaching people that they can achieve their goals by cooperating. They have to perform their very best under the worst possible circumstances, where every action has a consequence,” Christiansen said at their winter 2004 camp, where Australian Scott Sunderland began his career as a sport director.

Denmark’s version of Bear Grylls, B.S. Christiansen’s oddball training camps soon became stuff of legend, where Riis’ men donned army fatigues and went into the wild – sometimes desert, other times jungle, always inhospitable – often without food or water and sometimes for two or three days, all in the name of team building. When they finished the camps looking like malnourished cats, they must’ve wondered exactly whose interests Riis had at heart. The only individual who seemed to revel in these fight-or-flight conditions was Jens Voigt, the irrepressible hard-man who probably throws a few nails in with his Weet-Bix at breakfast time.

“We didn't have any clue of time nor place,” said Sunderland after his first boot camp in 2004.

“We didn’t know where they took us and we had to hand over our mobile and watch. They split us up in groups of 13 people and we were on the go for 48 hours. We got the whole military kit, huge backpack and all. Over the last two days, we didn't get to sleep much more than a couple of hours. [We were] under the open sky and on an island, and that wind cuts through you; it was horrible, really. Our feet are all blistered and we were absolutely knackered after the two day ordeal.”

But when the cammo’s came off and the lycra came on, come race time, the team was formidable. Terrifying, even.

When they gathered their troops up front in an early season race like Paris-Nice, it sent shivers of fear down the peloton’s spine, because their rivals knew there would soon be carnage and by the day’s end, just a handful would be left standing. “If they are this strong, this organised, and this deadly now, what would happen in the Classics or Tour de France?” many riders must’ve been thinking.

Many times, they won well before they crossed the line.

“When a rider is under a lot of pressure,” said Christiansen, “he reacts very selfishly, and that’s where I have to work with them.” Former Riis rider turned sport director (who is now at Team Sky), Bobby Julich, said that, “those days in the bush bonded us much closer and gave us the strategies to work as a team in any racing situation”.

Fuerteventura, which has the epithet “island of the eternal spring” for its near-perfect year-round climate, sounds a far cry from Man vs. Wild.

“Will you miss the survival camp?” I asked Richie Porte, who endured his first and last in the European winter of 2009 before Christiansen took a job at FC Midtjylland, one of the top soccer teams in Denmark’s Super League.

“No, not at all. It wasn’t nice... No, it was bloody horrible, spending a night out in the desert,” he told me. “I guess Bjarne’s always going to do something to put us out of our comfort zone, but me personally, I’m not going to miss that. But it really did bring the team together; it was an incredible idea.”

But then Richie owns up to the real reason why it was so bad: “It was harder on most of the young guys because they had to have a couple of days’ off Facebook, to be honest. You can quote me saying that!”

As funny as it was – and I did laugh out loud – I can’t help thinking whether these Facebook-addicted teens and 20-somethings might be missing out on vital social skills that Christiansen was so determined to instill, which, if one thinks about it, are the essence for survival in the real world.

A recent article in the New York Times, ‘Generation wired to distraction’, said the lure of new technologies is particularly potent on younger people and “the constant stream of stimuli they offer pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning”. The risk, researchers say, is that the brains of our wired youth become so used to switching tasks, over time, they may render themselves unable to see a task to its completion.

“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but jumping to the next thing,” Michael Rich told the NYT, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and the executive director of the Centre on Media and Child Health in Boston. “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

In this year’s Giro d’Italia, Porte showed he not only has the physical ability to ride consistently over three weeks, but the mental capability to handle the stress of such an event (though he did admit to me to being extremely highly strung throughout). However in 2011 as possibly the sole Grand Tour leader on the squad, he’ll also need to demonstrate he has the social skills to gather and motivate the troops at Saxo Bank, if he’s to lead them to victory.

And as B.S. Christiansen would have said, that’s something you can’t do on Facebook.