INTERVIEW: MICHAEL MATTHEWS
Michael Matthews’ Tour was flipped on its head when his team-mate Tom Dumoulin pulled out two weeks before the grand départ and he became Sunweb’s sole leader. The Australian tells Procycling about making the best of a difficult situation
Exclusive: the former green jersey winner
After stage 10 of the Tour, it was 12.30am before Michael Matthews could sleep. He kept playing over the final 200 metres of the day’s sprint into Albi in his head. For the eighth time he had finished in the top 10. Today he was fourth.
If he had just started his sprint earlier, he kept thinking, no one else would have got around him and he’d have won. With 400m to go, Matthews was sat comfortably in third wheel. At 350m Cees Bol, his team-mate and Tour debutant, wound up his lead-out. The line was directly in front of them. At 200m Bol was still setting the pace but running out of steam and the bunch was starting to swell around them. By the time his team-mate had dropped off, Matthews was boxed in and had lost his momentum. He had tried to accelerate again, but Wout Van Aert and Elia Viviani were already ahead. It was too late.
The next morning, on the Tour’s first rest day, Matthews is still replaying the moment over and over. “It’s frustrating when you know that it should have been the win, but you waited too long. If you didn’t have the legs, or you
crashed, then you take it as it is, but knowing that you had the legs to finish it is probably the hardest to take in,” he tells Procycling, with an almost despondent sigh.
On stage 1 he was beaten by Mike Teunissen in the bunch sprint. On stage 3 on the steep uphill finish in Épernay he was runner-up to Julian Alaphilippe. On stage 4 he finished ninth behind Viviani. By stage 5 into Colmar and after another top 10, it all seemed too much. The rolling stage had featured three categorised climbs which was perfect for a punchy sprinter like Matthews. His team recced the route and took the lead-out on the road, but it still wasn’t enough and Matthews was beaten by his nemesis, Peter Sagan.
While riders usually dart straight to their bus after a stage, that day Matthews looked like he wanted to go anywhere but there. He rolled through the parking convoy at such a slow pace his legs were barely spinning. His head was down, eyes fixed on the floor. A multitude of thoughts must have been going around in his head. What more could he do?
Matthews has always worn his heart on his sleeve, win or lose. He would take questions before and after every stage, and answered comprehensively even when he was clearly frustrated or at a loss. On the rest day he smiles as he greets us and sits down, but he speaks slowly and takes very long pauses with an intake of breath
“The nights are quite difficult to go to bed, you still have 1,000 things going on in your head about where you made a mistake” Michael Matthews, Sunweb
while he thinks. A bubble as intense and pressurised as that of the Tour can make it a lonely place to be. There are few places to lick wounds and recuperate. Riders, the most successful at least, are able to dust themselves off and try again the next day, even if they don’t want to.
“In the Tour de France, where you have so much media around, where you are constantly talking about it, if you do make a mistake everyone sees it, the world sees it, then you keep getting asked questions about the same things,” Matthews explains to us.
“I have a really good group around me that believe in me. I think that’s definitely what helps me get up the next day and continue with this. The nights are quite difficult to go to bed. You still have 1,000 things going on in your head about where you made a mistake or what happened or the rest,” he says.
Two years ago at the Tour, everything went Matthews’ way. He won two stages and a debut green jersey while his team-mate Warren Barguil also won a pair of stages and the polka-dot jersey. Six weeks before, Tom Dumoulin won the German squad their first grand tour title at the Giro d’Italia. They were riding a wave.
But nothing is certain in cycling. This year, everything that could go wrong, did. By July, Sunweb’s win tally was just six, among the lowest in the WorldTour. Their talisman Dumoulin had crashed out of the Giro. He was scheduled to ride the Tour but just two weeks before the grand départ the Dutchman pulled out with a knee injury. In France, rumours were rife that the Dutchman was on the verge of leaving the team.
Matthews had spent his spring preparing to ride the Tour in support of Dumoulin, which meant largely putting his own ambitions aside. Then he suddenly found himself in no man’s land. The durable sprinter was now the de facto team leader, but hadn’t been preparing as such.
“I didn’t expect to be going for these stages every single day; I didn’t mentally prepare myself to do it. In 2017, I mentally prepared myself that every day I was going to be fighting for the finish, for the intermediates. So much planning went into that, so I was mentally and physically ready. Now I think I am really physically ready but mentally probably not where I needed to be to be fighting with the best sprinters on every stage.”
His chief lead-out man, Bol, a neo-pro, had been fast-tracked into the line-up in Dumoulin’s absence. The pair had only raced together once before at the Tour of Flanders. Understandably, it was taking time for them to gel and every stage was both a learning curve and a big target. As Matthews’ desperation to win became more fevered with each passing day, so the chance for errors increased. The more he wanted it, the more he and the team were prone to overthinking. “That’s what’s probably blacking a little bit out of my brain when
I’m coming into the sprints, I’m thinking, ‘Oh I should be here, I should be there, I should be doing that, instead of just following or using my instincts of racing, which is what I’m best at.”
Physically, Matthews was also different. He’d spent weeks at altitude before the race, working on his climbing to better support Dumoulin. Hours of time trialling efforts were put in, considering the significance of the stage 2 TTT for a GC rider. His endurance was good and Matthews felt fitter than before, but the change had an impact on his explosiveness. The sting had been taken out of him: “Not being as snappy, as fiery, as explosive as I have on other years is probably what’s hurting me a little bit.”
Sunweb’s general manager Iwan Spekenbrink dreamed of seeing his team up on the podium after the Brussels TTT. The day was meant to be a signal of strength in Dumoulin’s bid to win yellow, as well as being a fitting symbol of the team’s unity.
Even without Dumoulin, Matthews was still determined to give the day his all. With no team bus at the finish he collapsed inside the team car, lying across the front seats. When he finally sat up, a soigneur mopped his damp face as he held his head in his hands. When he stood up, he needed steadying before taking tentative steps towards the rollers.
“I just gave it everything and above of what I had inside of me, and when I crossed the finish line I honestly can say I couldn’t have pedalled one more time,” he says. “Showing the team and Ivan that it also meant so much to me was nice for them to see.”
In 2017 Matthews was in the same position. He consistently finished in the top 10, but the win evaded him early in the race. He didn’t give up, and on stage 14 in Rodez he succeeded. Two days later, another win. Nothing could stop him and by Paris, he had the green jersey. Whether 2019 would deliver another turnaround was doubtful. Where once everything the team touched turned to gold, in 2019 everything turned to dust instead. But it was a mark of Matthews’s determination that he wouldn’t give up trying.