The Orica-Scott rider tells Procycling about his ambitions in the sport and how he hopes to build on his stunning fourth in the 2016 Tour
In 2016, Adam Yates became the rst Briton to win the Tour’s white jersey. He also nished fourth overall. The 24-year-old has headed to the 100th Giro d’Italia in search of more experience. But could there be more to it than that? As Adam explains to Procy
Back at the end of 2013, at Orica’s pre-season training camp in Australia, there was plenty of interest in the team’s new 21-year-old pommie twinset, Simon and Adam Yates. “So,” asked one rider, “which is the good one?”
Three and a half seasons on, the question is still unanswerable. Parity between the 24-year-old Lancashire twins remains intact. Their talent provides deep foundations but the pro environment, any mental frailties and luck have yet to knock the edges off either. One brother wins, then the other. Take this year for example. On 5 March, Adam won the GP Industria e Artigianato di Larciano in a reduced group sprint. Five days later, Simon won a stage of Paris-Nice and went on to finish ninth overall. Adam looked certain to finish on the podium of Tirreno-Adriatico until a stomach bug and fever forced him to withdraw on stage 5. But before the month was out, he’d finished fourth at the Volta a Catalunya. A month later he became the first of the brothers to finish in the top 10 in a Monument by taking eighth at Liège-Bastogne-Liège. At the time of writing, Simon had his nose ahead with victory in the GP Miguel Indurain and, most recently, the queen stage and second overall in the Tour de Romandie. Adam, all being well, will be taking his chances in the Giro. And if it’s a characteristically chaotic race that provides opportunities to attack, who’d bet against him levelling the score?
In the athletic sense, then, how do you separate the brothers? You could do what British Cycling did and split them based on Simon’s superior track work as a teenager. That left Adam to pursue his amateur ambitions in France on the road. As Simon’s one-time coach Keith Lambert said just after the pair signed for Orica, “One went clockwise, one anticlockwise and here they are, back in the same place.”
Or you could do what Matt White, Orica’s head sports director, did in April. Faced with changing one of their programmes so that a Yates (either one, he wasn’t fussed which) went to the Tour as a back-up for Esteban Chaves, he passed the initiative to them. He spoke to them both, then gave them a week to come back with an answer. So Simon switches to go to the Tour, leaving Adam to forge on with the Giro-Vuelta programme White originally suggested to him on the eve of last year’s Grande Boucle.
Alternatively, you could do a deep dive in to their results. Simon’s got six pro wins to Adam’s five. Three of Simon’s wins are WorldTour, including a Vuelta stage. Adam’s only got one WT win, but it’s a biggie: Clásica San Sebastián, 2015. Adam’s also won a stage race, the Tour of Turkey in 2014; Simon hasn’t but has finished in the top 10 of a WT stage race on six occasions. Adam is one behind, but one of those is the Tour de France and it came with that white jersey. That’s probably the result that separates them right now.
Adam became the first Briton to wear the maillot blanc in Paris, which made him one of only three active British riders to have visited the podium in an individual Grand Tour classification. Chris Froome and Mark Cavendish are the other two. Last year’s Tour therefore had historical significance.
When that’s put to him in the Hotel Caesar in Lido di Camaiore on the Tuscan coast, Yates bridles. We should have known – he dislikes looking back. “I don’t get too emotional with this stuff and I don’t really think about making history, he says. “All these questions… I get them a lot. I don’t really know what to say. It was a great experience and a fantastic result but I was
just doing what I could. I don’t want to think about that.”
Yates headed to Sardinia as a Giro debutant. For a rider who’s ridden the Tour twice and achieved much there, he could have felt miffed that his plan was being tinkered with. White certainly didn’t know what answer he was going to get when he pitched the Giro-Vuelta programme. Adam, though, wasn’t worried. “It wasn’t a big decision to go to the Giro and, hopefully, Vuelta,” he insists. “It’s not often neo-pros get to ride the Tour anyway. Normally you start with the Giro or Vuelta, get some experience and then do the Tour, but it’s good to… not take a step back, but do something new, change the objective.” He will attack the Giro with his usual ‘what will be will be’ attitude. “It’s just about getting the experience, getting stronger… You do one Grand Tour on its own and it’s pretty tough, but doing two in one year, that’s another challenge. All this stuff is new, stuff we’ve never done before, so we should give it a try and see what happens. If it doesn’t work we can always go back to plan that does.”
Tahough he’s engaged and thoughtful during the interview, he clips his words right back. You get the feeling that anything that doesn’t contribute to his racing and results is a compromise or, worse, a distraction. “We’re not in this sport to mess about,” he says. Themes of hard work, riding to a plan, not looking back and accepting whatever happens echo through the interview. It’s one thing about Yates that doesn’t change from one year to the next.
Take last year’s Tour for example. On the first rest day everybody wanted a piece of him. At the team hotel in Andorra he was hemmed in by microphones. Second on GC with the white jersey and the story of the flamme rouge debacle that led to stitches in his chin meant there was plenty to talk about. Questions flew in from all sides. The microphones edged closer to catch the brief answers that got briefer as the session went on. Yates retreated into the chair and riffed on the theme of ‘what will be will be’ for 20 minutes or so. When the media had run out of new ways to ask him to predict the future, they relented and Yates bounded out of the chair and was gone. Job done.
He appears to have pared down his pro life – and therefore his life in general – to the bare minimum. Few impediments are admitted and that applies to his off-the-bike commitments too. Talking about both brothers, White said: “The dream for those guys would be not to talk to anyone. They really enjoy riding their bikes and racing. Everything else that comes with being
“I don’t get too emotional with this stuff and I don’t really think about making history. I was just doing what I could”
a pro, they understand is part of the job and they’ll do it, but they’re not materialistic and they’re not chasing attention.”
While many other pros have realised that being a rider first and social media manager second is a path to enhanced commercial value, Yates is a rare user of the various platforms – just the odd landscape photo from a training ride on Instagram or tweet to plug a sponsor. “Do I need to?” he replies when asked why he doesn’t post more for his 23,000 Twitter fans. “No, in my opinion, social media… When I first started, it was a laugh but then it just got serious. People started taking things out of context because of how you’d written them and that just creates negativity. I don’t need that. What am I gaining from it? That’s the question you need to ask. It’s just more stress, more hassle, more stuff to do. Why bother?”
And that view seems to encapsulate much of Yates’s philosophy for being a good pro: the removal of mental pressure and stuff that gets in the way. “There’s no pressure here,” Adam says about Orica. “It’s the riders who put pressure on themselves and that’s not just me, it’s everyone. But if there’s pressure from elsewhere – the directors, the staff or whoever – it’s just another layer of stress. And when there’s stress you make little mistakes, mistakes that cost you wins. In my opinion, Orica deals with the pressure well. It’s not like: ‘you have to win this, this and this’ here. We go in with a plan, try to execute that plan and if we get
result, we get a result.”
Wahen there’s nothing to play for Adam doesn’t play. But when there’s something on the line, he’s all in,” says Mat Hayman. One of Orica’s most experienced riders, Hayman has spent as much time with Yates as anyone in the team besides Simon. Hayman says Adam is the more “difficult to read” of the two brothers and doesn’t divulge a lot to the rest of the world. “Adam takes a while to warm up, he says. “On the bike he communicates through body language and his performance rather than doing a lot of talking,” Hayman adds. “He’s very race savvy so he won’t miss a group if it does start to happen. All of a sudden he’s there, right where he needs to be.”
Hayman recalls a couple of the blustery stages in last year’s Tour, where the slightframed Yates was at risk in the crosswinds. “I was pretty impressed with the way he rode those windy stages in the Tour last year. He needed our help but he was right there and he didn’t leave the wheel.”
Yates admits he had a torrid time during the race, particularly on the stage to Montpellier, where Froome and Peter Sagan attacked in crosswinds. “If anyone said they enjoyed those stages, there’s something wrong with them. It was stressful, but I knew the whole team was around me. When you have a team like that, which sticks around you, it doesn’t matter how much wind there is because somebody’s blocking it for you.”
Just as there’s nothing yet to separate Simon from Adam in terms of results, it’s also hard to say whether Adam will show more proficiency for one-day or stage racing. “I was going to say I’ve had a bit more success in one-day races but I guess that’s not true any more,” he replies. “The thing is, a race is a race to me. If it suits me then I’m going to try and win.”
And he’s still in the developmental stage where he can try things out in stage races. Yates approached his two earlier Tours differently. In 2015, he was there to get in
“Social media... When I irst started, it was a laugh, but then people got serious. People started taking things out of context”
“When you have a team like that, that sticks around you, it doesn’t matter how much wind there is because somebody’s blocking it”
breaks and was doing a “hundred max sprints and holding on” in the first few hours. The team also lost three riders to crashes in the early part of the race. A lot of the training he did for 2016, focused on steadier efforts and threshold training before winding up for the finishing climb.
The apparent ease with which Yates settled into the World Tour suggests racing comes easy to him, but that’s far from the case. Anyone familiar with Yates’s story will remember Adam’s rejections from the British Cycling Academy because he didn’t fit the profile of rider they were looking for - which was to say, accomplished track men. So while Simon lived in British Cycling digs and rode the boards most days, Adam spent two and a half years as an amateur in France. One and a half years were spent with the UVCA Troyes squad and then he had a final breakout year with CC Étupes, France’s finest hothouse for climbers right now. For Adam that year with Étupes was where things started clicking into place, even though he only left France with three wins. A curious set of circumstances, one may think, for a rider of his calibre, but Yates remembers being stretched to his physical limits every time he threw a leg over the bike. “I was doing all these smaller French races and they were harder than any I could do in England or elsewhere. From the outside you wouldn’t know these races are so hard because they were in the lower category, but they were. Really, really hard. You’ve just got to race whoever turns up and it’s still the same today. It’s always been like that.”
When the interview ends and the photo shoot starts the lad beneath the pro exterior emerges. He’s eager to see the shots and mocks himself for his “massive head” and the scars on his chin. “Not my right side!” he laughs when the photographer asks him to look to his left.
The Teflon, ‘what will be will be’ coating, which lets disappointment slide off and won’t let achievements build up either, is probably his most notable characteristic. Where did it come from? “I’ve just grown up that way. My dad didn’t put any pressure on us,” he tells us. “He used to take us all over the country doing youth and junior races. You always see the parents putting pressure on their kids – the ‘You’ve got to f*cking win this’ people, but my dad was just there cruising about. If we had a good performance it was all on us. That’s how it’s always been. So all this feels normal, I don’t do anything different.”
Before the Giro, Matt White said a place in the top 10 and the white jersey were realistic objectives for Yates. Those too would be results of historical significance, but the 24-year-old won’t be looking that far ahead. No pressure, remember.