IN- DEPTH: JULIAN ALA PHILLIPPE
The biggest personality of the 2019 Tour
Julian Alaphilippe was the unexpected star of the GC battle at this year’s Tour, spending 14 days in the yellow jersey and winning two stages along the way. His big personality and ability to race with panache brought out a new side of the race, as Procycling found out
Early in the 2019 Tour, the Groupama-FDJ performance director told us what we already knew about Julian Alaphilippe. “He’s a rider who combines lactate tolerance with a very high VO2Max,” Fred Grappe told L’Équipe on the evening of Alaphilippe’s first stage win of this year’s Tour, in Épernay.
“The puncheur is at his best in an effort lasting less than a minute. He is comparable with a 400-metre runner – these kinds of efforts are what athletes fear the most because they are the most violent, they provoke acute pain and you have to be capable of resisting that. It’s one more characteristic of the puncheur – his capacity to mentally tolerate this kind of effort.”
Of course, a rider doesn’t win Flèche Wallonne, Strade Bianche, Milan-San Remo and Clásica San Sebastián without people working out what their strengths are. Alaphilippe is probably the foremost puncheur in the world. What’s more, he’s probably the best road cyclist in the world at the moment, at least on the men’s side. No other rider is winning such a variety of very big races as Alaphilippe right now, and though such systems sometimes smooth out the brilliance, he leads in every single one of the main ranking classifications – Procyclingstats, CQ Ranking and the UCI’s own WorldRanking. Not that it isn’t obvious, anyway.
However, though we knew he was good at the hilly classics, what we did not yet know was that Alaphilippe, despite his protestations, is a potential Tour winner. Not of this year’s race –
“The puncheur is at his best in an effort lasting less than a minute. These kinds of efforts are what athletes fear the most because they are the most violent, they provoke acute pain” Fred Grappe, Groupama- FDJ performance director
even given Alaphilippe’s electric performance over two and a half weeks, he was always going to be found out in the Alps. But imagine a lower, less mountainous Tour, in which the race avoids the highaltitude giants of 2019 and shifts its battleground to the middle mountains and grippy rolling hills. You can be sure that ASO’s route designer Thierry Gouvenou is also imagining much the same thing.
Alaphilippe’s Tour could have been declared a success after that high-energy escape to Épernay on stage 3. A stage win and a few days in yellow, and he could have sat back, lost time, waited for the Massif Central and Pyrenees, won another King of the Mountains jersey and taken maybe another stage win. Instead, he defended the yellow jersey on the front foot – attacking on La Planche des Belles Filles when he was expected to concede a minute or more; attacking again with Thibaut Pinot on the Saint-Étienne stage. He was exactly in the right place when crosswinds split the peloton on the road to Albi. And while the pundits wondered by how many desperate seconds he would defend his yellow jersey in the Pau time trial, if at all, Alaphilippe did the unthinkable and won it.
Race followers reverseengineered their prognostications to take into account the fact that this was no rouleur’s course – the flat, wide roads of the traditional Tour time trial were replaced by bends and punchy hills, so no wonder Alaphilippe won. But by this point in the race, well past halfway, the Frenchman had engineered a lead of 1:26 over Geraint Thomas. Only three more riders were within three minutes.
The mountains would tell, they said, on the eve of the first big Pyrenean stage. Only nobody told Alaphilippe. He was second on the Col du Tourmalet behind Pinot, which put him two minutes clear of second-placed Thomas in the GC, and now only Thomas and Steven Kruijswijk were within three minutes. It was only on the next day, to Prat d’Albis, when the GC challenge that Alaphilippe maintained was a by-product of his primary aim to race each day as best he could, started to crumble.
And even then, he survived the triple-mountain stage to Valloire, thanks to a superb descent off the Col du Galibier. ‘Still alive’ ran the headline in L’Équipe the following day. Alaphilippe was finally found out on the Col de l’Iseran and climb to Val Thorens, falling one place on stage 19 and then a further three to fifth overall as the race left the Alps. As his manager Patrick Lefevere said, “Even Duracell batteries run out eventually.”
A Tour winner? Only in the most specific of circumstances, and to an extent it doesn’t really matter when he’s clearly having so much fun being disruptive. But Julian Alaphilippe rewrote the tactical rulebook of the world’s biggest race in 2019. Even if he doesn’t win himself, he may have opened up the possibilities for others to try something different.
THE GREATEST SHOW MAN
There are videos of Alaphilippe on the internet showing him dancing and singing in a team car after one race or another. The camera loves him, and he loves it in return. He bolsters his racing talents with immense charisma, and he was undoubtedly the dominant personality of this year’s Tour.
Alaphilippe is a positive, dynamic media-friendly yin to his compatriot Thibaut Pinot’s detached, lugubrious yang.
There’s an interesting comparison to make not just with Pinot, but also with Peter Sagan. Sagan has been an equally dynamic presence on the Tour in recent years – he has won a lot of stages and seven green jerseys, and with the same brio and panache as Alaphilippe. Yet Sagan looked jaded in the media mixed zone at the Tour, visibly chafing at having to answer questions and mumbling his responses, while Alaphilippe was talkative and open in his daily press conferences, holding court and making jokes with the journalists and with the translator.
He was asked one question in French and answered in English, before bursting into laughter at the absurdity of mixing up his languages as a Frenchman in France’s biggest sporting and cultural event. “See you tomorrow,” he said pointedly, after one journalist had asked if he could hold the jersey the next day.
Of course, this was Sagan’s eighth Tour, and the seventh in which he has endured daily rounds of interviews as the holder of the green jersey. This is Alaphilippe’s third, and only the second in which he’s been the real centre of attention. The novelty has not worn off yet.
However, he was gracious and positive in all of his interactions with the media. The French press might have been happy to make the most of any rivalry with Pinot, but when Alaphilippe was asked about the Groupama rider towards the end of the race, he suggested that if he could not win the Tour himself, the rider he would most want to win would be Pinot.
There was not the slightest hint during Alaphilippe’s entire Tour that he was feeling the pressure.
Not a single thing went wrong for him between Brussels and Prat d’Albis, but even when he finally started conceding time, he still attacked the race with verve. Even when he lost the jersey in the chaos of the race neutralisation on the Iseran, he still played to the audience, leaning out of the window of his team car and conducting fans who were chanting his name.
For 14 days out of 14 in the race lead, he had been self-deprecating about his capacity for winning. “It’s been an unforgettable Tour, with 14 days in yellow and my two stage wins,” he said when he’d finally been divested of the leader’s jersey. “But this doesn’t change my future. I am clear about one thing – the parcours of the first week fitted me perfectly; the Pau time trial was made for me. I might have to wait a few years before circumstances fit me so well again.”
Lefevere has suggested not looking at the GC as an official project for another couple of years, which means fans may have to wait a long time before a repeat of 2019. “That suits me fine,” said Alaphilippe. “It would be to the detriment of the precise things that allow me to win races. If I went all in for GC, it would be at the cost of that, and I don’t want that right now. To win a grand tour you have to stay concentrated for three weeks, and even several months beforehand. For me, that’s difficult – I need to relax a little before refocusing on another goal.”
Alaphilippe’s biggest impact on the 2019 Tour may yet be his influence as a catalyst. Though he was not targeting the GC, there were echoes of Simon Yates’s method at the 2018 Giro d’Italia. Like Alaphilippe, Yates spent the first two weeks chipping small amounts of time from his rivals often, and while he finally faltered on stage 19, he’d used a different technique than the single-hit shock and awe promulgated by Team Sky in recent years.
If the right Tour route is laid out, and Alaphilippe has similar or even better form than in 2019, it’ll be hard for his rivals to do anything about him. All of his time gains this year were taken à la pédale, through strength rather than tactics or luck. Given the same opportunity again, but without the big climbs, Alaphilippe might have given us a preview of his future.
“The parcours of the first week fitted me perfectly; the Pau time trial was made for me. I might have to wait a few years before circumstances fit me so well again”