KWIATKOWSKI'S PATH TO THE TOP
For all Micha ¯ Kwiatkowski’s gilded promise, his journey to the professional ranks hasn’t been straightforward
We track the 2014 world champion’s route from amateur to top-ranked rider
We knew right away that he was special,” said Marcin Mientki, who coached the Sky star in 2005, when they both joined Pacific Torun. “I knew his name even before that. People had been telling me, ‘There’s this young talent who is already winning races. Watch for him.’
“He made a big step that year: he instantly started to win everything in Poland. You could see when he started competing in the European and worldwide competitions he would be someone very good,” Mientki said.
Kwiatkowski had asked his parents if he could follow his older brother, Radis¯aw, into Torun’s state-run sports school. Boarding would streamline his day and save his parents, Wojciech and Agnieszka, making 70km round trips from the small town of Dzia¯yn to drop him off for training. “[Radis¯aw] was sort of my dad at that time,” Kwiatkowski said. “I was living with my parents; it is just 35km from here but there was nothing to do there and I had the support here. That day I wanted to go to the school, I took a big decision.
“I remember complaining about the food most of the time,” he recalled. “School started at 7.45 and straight after class we would go out training until it was dark. Everybody was here for sport – they were rowers or cyclists – and it was very competitive. It was a full day but it was a great time.”
During that time, Kwiatkowski emerged as one of the pre-eminent juniors in the world. He took a stage win and the overall at the Junior Peace Race in 2007. The first seven behind him were a year older. He was first and second in the European Championships road race and TT respectively. He also won the Cup of Grudziadz, an international stage race held just north of Torun. Peter Sagan was second. Kwiatkowski ended 2007 as the number one in the UCI’s junior ranking.
“There was nothing for us to work on – he was complete already,” said Mientki, of his prodigy. “The biggest problem was making him follow a training plan. “We could have raced him harder – the school would have got more funding if he had won more, but we have to assume always that they will be racing for years. We didn’t want to burn him out.”
In 2008 he successfully defended his European TT win, and, on a blustery course in Cape Town, South Africa, added the world junior title. Professional teams
were interested. A few days before Christmas 2008, his agent, Giuseppe Acquadro, brokered a deal with Giuseppe Martinelli and the Amica Chips-Knauf outfit. The plan was that he’d spend the first six months of 2009 with a predominantly Polish team, MG K-VIS Norda, which was based in Tuscany and managed by an Italian, Angelo Baldini. Kwiatkowski would ride as a trainee with Amica in the second half of 2009 and then join the ProConti team in 2009. He never rode for the San Marino-based team – it folded in May 2009 for unpaid rider wages. He remained with MG and won a stage of the Tour of Slovakia.
In the aftermath of his Milan-San Remo victory, La
Gazzetta dello Sport ran a story intimating that Italy had been the making of Kwiatkowski, thanks to Baldini’s regime. In the article, Baldini said Kwiatkowski tended to eat too much when he lived in the team house in Marinella di Sarzana on the Tyrrhennian coast. The article irritated Kwiatkowski. He has a different view of his time in Italy. “I would say the regime and the expectation was too high. When I was there, they used to expect me to win U23 races as a first year [espoir], so it was kind of hard. When the environment is expecting you to be a world champion again but then they don’t support you, don’t give you power meters or any sort of path, then you can get in trouble. You can do something or you can finish with cycling.”
That was never going to happen. The Pole figured his best option was to escape the pressure of the Italian U23 ranks by turning pro, hoping that being a small fish in a big pond would provide the cover he needed to race without pressure. That was his original plan anyway. “I signed a contract with Caisse d’Epargne and they suggested that actually I go to Caja Rural for 2010. Halfway through the year I found out they didn’t want me any more and I was searching for another team.”
According to his friend, Micha¯ Go¯as, Kwiatkowski lost his way a little bit at Caja Rural because he was, again, isolated and lacking support. Still, he did learn Spanish. In the 2010/11 off-season Go¯as invited the rider he’d known for a decade to winter with him in Spain before he joined RadioShack, his first taste of the WorldTour.
There, Kwiatkowski was a minnow among sharks. Lance Armstrong, Andreas Klöden and Robbie McEwen led a cast of grizzled alpha personalities, many with pasts that didn’t bear too much scrutiny. Yet stories filtered through to Go¯as about how Kwiatkowski rode the veterans ragged on the pre-season training camps. “It was the first time he showed what he could do as a pro,” said Go¯as.
Kwiatkowski performed strongly that spring. He finished third overall when RadioShack swept the podium at the Three Days of West Flanders. He was third at the Three Days of De Panne, and, in the late summer, third at the Tour du PoitouCharentes. But at the same time he was
At RadioShack, Kwiatkowski was a minnow among sharks - Armstrong led a cast of grizzled alpha males
still largely being left to his own devices. “He had no people around to teach him,” said Go¯as. “He was still young [20/21]. It was a big step.”
Three masterminds of grand tour strategy – Martinelli, Unzué and now Bruyneel – had lost Kwiatkowski before they had scarcely greeted him, but their loss was Quick-Step’s immediate gain. Kwiatkowski flourished at once under Lefevere’s direction in 2012. He had access to a coach and a nutritionist and he was more focused on his own results, said Go¯as. “To me, he just came back to the shape he had a junior.”
Brian Holm, the DS, also joined Quick Step in 2012. “He reminded me of the Polish version of Dan Martin: he was very humble and there’s no ego to him.” And on 2 March, he won his first race: the Three days of West Flanders prologue. “We could see straight away he could do a little bit of everything. He was good in the bunch, on the cobbles and in the wind,” added Holm. That July, he wore his first WorldTour leader’s jersey, at the Tour of Poland. In 2013, Kwiatkowski reached a new plane entirely. He was second in Algarve, fourth at Tirreno, fourth at Amstel and fifth at Flèche. At the Tour, in a fresh Polish road champion’s jersey, he finished 11th after riding solidly in the mountains and extremely well in the time trials. He finished in the top 10 on seven stages. By the end of the year, Acquadro, his agent, was talking of Kwiatkowski as his “biggest diamond” and predicting he’d be world number one before long.
The following year was Kwiatkowski’s best so far. He won nine races, finished second at the Tour of the Algarve and País Vasco and finished on the podium of Amstel and Flèche. He ended the year by becoming the first Pole to wear the rainbow jersey. Acquadro wasn’t far off the money.