FINDING THE ONE

How savvy Androni team manager Gianni Savio secured the hottest Colombian stage racer... “I knew Egan was a mountain biker,” Savio tells Patrick Fletcher. “He inished on the podium twice at the Mountain Bike World Championships. I irst spoke to Hector Urrego about him, and then the story of how I signed him comes from the 2015 Coppa Agostoni. I was there at the inish, and along came Paolo Alberati, who was Egan’s manager at the time. He o fered me an Italian rider, a sprinter – and a good one, because he was a national champion at the time. I said to him: ‘No, look, I already have enough sprinters – I only have space for a climber.’ He said:

‘ Well, I have a climber right here.’ I turned around and there he was. I looked at him and saw a muchachito [a kid]. I said to him: ‘But you’re a child.’ He was 18 but looked younger. He told me he knew about what I’d done in Colombia and then we spoke for a while, about Colombia and what have you. He told me his father worked in a salt cathedral. We spoke a bit and then I turned back to Paolo and I said: ‘Paolo, this is a muchachito.’ And he said: ‘Tonight I’m going to go home and send you the data from his tests.’ He’d done tests in Switzerland at the UCI World Cycling Centre in Aigle. After seeing the data, I called Paolo in the morning and said let’s meet. We signed a contract there and then. It happened very quickly but it was intuition. There were other professional teams interested in him, but apparently they were waiting, watching, saying: ‘ Yeah, okay, we’ll wait and see.’ When I have that feeling, and the talent is there to see, I move quickly.”