IN DEPTH: ARKÉA- SAMSIC
The Breton team signed a raft of ambitious riders for 2020, but have they taken too great a risk? Procycling investigates
During the summer of 2019, with André Greipel notably failing to work out at Arkéa-Samsic as their star sprinter - he won just once all year in a stage of the Tropicale Amissa Bongo - you could assume that the team’s management found themselves faced with a dilemma.
One option would be for Arkéa-Samsic to return to the traditional model for solid French ProConti teams in the bigger stage races - fulfilling the role of plucky underdogs with a long shot at the overall and a stage win or two as their dream result. And, of course, getting themselves into plenty of breaks. This was, after all, a pragmatic, tried-and-tested strategy for middle-sized French squads all the way back to the mid-1990s - from Aubervilliers 93 to Saint-Quentin-Oktos, Agritubel and, of course, Arkéa-Samsic themselves. Or they could go for broke again, buy in a raft of new top talent and see where that got them instead.
Arkéa have opted resoundingly for the second option, and with an intriguing double sub-plot to boot. Because rather than signing a single solidly-established leader for 2020, Arkéa have instead gone for Nacer Bouhanni, a sprinter whose stormy relationship with previous team Cofidis has been far more of a draw than his actual, very uneven results in the last few years. If signing Greipel last year was a gamble, Bouhanni is the equivalent of putting the house on red. However, the minor furore around Bouhanni’s new team was eclipsed by Arkéa’s flagship signing for 2020, Nairo Quintana.
Come what may, Quintana’s track record as a victor in the 2014 Giro d’Italia and 2016 Vuelta a España, plus three podium finishes in the Tour de France, make him a prestigious racer. But he arrives with a rather important question mark hanging over him - whether, as Eusebio Unzué, the manager of his former Movistar squad believes, Quintana
can no longer win a grand tour.
If signing two big but possibly fading names and going for the ‘double’ rather than the ‘quits’ button on their 2020 ambitions wasn’t interesting enough, there are two more unusual angles to the Arkéa signings for 2020. First and foremost is signing a star grand tour racer who is not a Breton, in keeping with the team’s heritage, but not French either. If it feels fairly unusual for a French team like Cofidis to sign an Italian sprinter like Elia Viviani as their top name, as they have in 2020, or Total Direct Energie to have Dutch bruiser Niki Terpstra leading their charge in the classics, the last non
French racer to lead a grand tour assault in a French squad was Joseba Beloki in Festina in 2000. In 2004, during his ill-fated half-season with Brioches-la-Boulangère, Beloki didn’t even get to the Tour before he headed back across the border to Spain’s Saunier Duval.
Furthermore, Arkéa already have a GC star - Warren Barguil, a Breton - in their line-up. You could argue that Barguil is more Breton than French, just like his team. But that doesn’t resolve the question of how the reigning national champion, 10th in last year’s Tour and whose spectacular 2017 season has yet to fade in the rear-view mirror, and a Colombian with two grand tours in his palmarès, will divide up the leadership roles in races like the Tour.
Yet for all the major changes, when Procycling visited Arkéa-Samsic in the Spanish coastal town of Calpe this December at their pre-season training camp, it all looked to be business as usual at the team hotel. Knots of riders in tracksuits whiled away the downtime in the lobby between sponsor and team meetings with coffees, mobiles and conversations: with seven different teams staying in the same hotel, there
were certainly plenty of opportunities to gossip as well as work. However, each morning, the large number of riders in non-Arkéa kit milling around the mechanics’ truck outside the hotel prior to training was testament to how big a change in the line-up there will be in 2020. Among their 12 new riders there was also Quintana’s brother Dayer in yellow-and-black Neri Sottoli gear, Daniel McLay in the bright pink of EF Education First, Thomas Boudat sporting Total Direct Energie colours and Diego Rosa in his last month of wearing Ineos kit, as well as Winner Anacona, who came with Nairo Quintana to the team and was therefore wearing Movistar blue.
TURNING POINT
Encouragingly given it’s such a big change, Arkéa’s old guard, it would seem, have welcomed the new arrivals with open arms. “All these signings are hugely motivating,” Florian Vachon tells Procycling. Vachon is the only rider still racing with Arkéa who has been with the team since it was a Conti squad in 2010. (Vachon may be a salt-of-the-earth member of the squad, whose surname is as rural as the backwaters of Brittany, but he actually comes from Montluçon in central France.)
“We’ve all got different physical limits and there’s only so much you can do about that. But we’ve all got egos, too, so it’s good that we are no longer a small team, the other teams will have to respect us more,” he explains
As Vachon sees it, “All these great champions, they didn’t get where they got to just by being nice and polite. So if we’ve got to stick our wheels into a line, we’ll do it. We have to play smart now. It’s part of the rules of the game.”
Other old hands say that they could see Arkéa-Samsic’s latest major throw of the dice in 2020 was a development waiting to happen. “When I was here before, you could see the team’s big boss, the Arkéa owner, was always seriously interested in the sport, so if an opportunity came up to expand, they were bound to take it,” McLay, who rode with the team three years ago before a spell at EF Education First, says.
“It’s early days yet, but behind the scenes the team is progressing. They have kept the same core, but that’s better, because it’s not just been: ‘Get rid of a load of people and bring in a new lot.’ It’s a natural evolution.”
Both McLay and Vachon highlight the team’s switches of equipment as evidence of progress, with the biggest one surely being a change from BH to Canyon bikes. “I’m not saying that BH were bad, just that at this point in time, what they had wasn’t enough for us,” observes Vachon. “We’ve got new, better designed kit to wear too, which is not just more comfortable but also has better aerodynamic properties. You can see the team’s improving.”
While Arkéa-Samsic are mainly bankrolling a major boost on all fronts, the mastermind overseeing it all remains team manager Emmanuel Hubert. He was briefly a pro in the 1990s and he began managing the team back in 2010 when it was known as Bretagne-Schuller and was still a Conti squad. Hubert’s
“WE’VE ALL GOT DIFFERENT PHYSICAL LIMITS AND THERE’S ONLY SO MUCH YOU CAN DO ABOUT THAT. BUT WE’VE ALL GOT EGOS, TOO, SO IT’S GOOD THAT WE ARE NO LONGER A SMALL TEAM” Florian Vachon
ambitions have now risen so high that Arkéa even tried to get into the WorldTour in 2020. They failed, but their 2020 line-up will, no matter the question marks, be on a level with some WorldTour teams.
“2020 marks a turning point for the team. We started a process of internationalisation when we signed Warren [Barguil] in 2018 and now with Nairo it’s another step in that direction,” Hubert told Cyclingnews.com in October.“We have to take the positive aspects of our absence from the WorldTour, use it as motivation. Riders won’t be taking anything for granted or be able to think that just because we have a Barguil or a Quintana or a Bouhanni in the team, everything’s going to be straightforward.”
McLay explains that there is a solid plan in place. “Initially we’re going to be doing a lot of one-day races because we’re on a points-chasing mission to get in the WorldTour,” he says. “Right now the onedays offer more points relative to their difficulty than stage racing. But between now and March, normally most teams’ strategies change so we’ll see what happens after that. Things could suddenly move in a different direction.”
If the dramatic rise in ambition feels like a major sea change for Arkéa-Samsic, looking at it from the opposite angle, Quintana’s move to the team caught many people by surprise, too. Quintana recently told Spanish website Ciclo21 that his objective for 2020 is the Tour. But apart from Unzué saying recently Movistar and Quintana went their separate ways because they believed Quintana could no longer win a threeweek stage race, in recent years, no nonWorldTour team has managed to win one, either. Put it all together, and Arkéa-Samsic are looking to break some seriously resilient glass ceilings.
BIGGER GOALS
First and foremost, though, is whether the Breton team can provide Quintana with the back-up he’ll need even to be in a position to do that. When asked how he views Arkéa’s capacities for looking after both their GC star and Bouhanni, not to mention Barguil, Hubert insists the team now has the strength in depth for such missions. Part of the reason, he says, was that they learned some valuable lessons from the Greipel debacle.
“The most important lesson was that when you have a well-defined leader, you have to work only for him. With André, it was complicated. He was very used to a really well organised lead-out train and we had difficulty establishing that,” he explains. “Nacer and Nairo have joined this team with a different kind of outlook: Nacer is not the same type of sprinter as André - he’s more independent. And Nairo knows he can count on the support of Rosa, Anacona, Warren Barguil, his own brother Dayer and Elie Gesbert.”
As the team’s road captain, Vachon - nicknamed ‘the Bus Conductor’ by his team-mates - insists that should he ride his sixth Tour in a row for the team next summer, “Wa-wa [Barguil] already knows that he can’t ask me be one of the last 20 riders on a col. But he knows he can count on me to be sure when we get to the foot of the climb, he can be one of the top 10.
“RIDERS WON’T BE ABLE TO THINK THAT JUST BECAUSE WE HAVE A BARGUIL OR A QUINTANA OR A BOUHANNI IN THE TEAM EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE STRAIGHTFORWARD” Emmanuel Hubert
I hope Nairo will give me the chance to do that.
“With the sprinters, there’s a lot more work getting them to where they want to be. But there’s only a big overlap between the two goals of GC and sprints in the Tour de France - that’s both the beauty and the problem about that race: everything matters there. If we’re in the Dauphiné, say there won’t be so many chances for Nacer, we’ll build our team around the climbers. On the other hand if we’re in a race like Oman, we’ll be there mainly for the sprints. So I think we’ll be able to satisfy everybody.”
Behind the scenes, the team has expanded, but Hubert confirms McLay’s comments that the changes are incremental and not radical.
“Nacer didn’t ask for anybody to come with him at all. Nairo asked if he could bring a particular physio, but it wasn’t an obligation, and the same went for guys like Dayer and Winner. I think given the language question, bringing them on board ties in with our team’s expansion, so I had no objection to that.”
That last point raises the biggest challenge of all beyond riding fast up mountains: communication. Quintana still only speaks limited French - the management and the Colombian will need to work out a way of keeping everything clear if they are to work well together.
Probably the biggest logistical alteration is the team’s two new trainers: Flavien Soenen, formerly a coach for the FDJ-Nouvelle Aquitaine-Futuroscope women’s squad, will focus on the GC
“FROM HERE ON, OUR PRIME OBJECTIVE IS WORKING FOR THESE TOP LEADERS. WE CAN’T JUST BE GETTING IN THE BREAKS IF WE’RE GOING FOR GC” Emmanuel Hubert
riders’ time trialling - an area which Hubert feels the team has been lacking in previous years, which was one reason why he decided to switch to a more specialist bike sponsor like Canyon. Meanwhile Kévin Rinaldi, previously a trainer with Delko Marseille, has been brought in to look after the sprinters.
However, the main change is unquestionably the team’s overall goals. As Vachon puts it, “We have strong Breton roots and that’s a big source of pride in our team. But from here on, it’s no longer reasonable to expect a guy like Warren to be at the top of his form in the Tour de Finistère and then be up there fighting for the win in Liège-BastogneLiège a week later.”
“We can’t have the same objectives or the same demands when we were operating on a Continental-size team budget as now when we have a budget which almost at the same level as a WorldTour team,” adds Hubert. “From now on, our prime objective is working for these top leaders. We can’t just be thinking about getting in the breaks if we’re going for GC or a sprint.”
“We’re not forgetting about the smaller races. But now they’ll be the responsibility of our younger guys - Bram Welten, Thibaut Guernalac, Alan Riou - with senior racers like [Laurent] Pichon, Vachon and [Romain] Hardy as road captains. Gesbert is a part of the next wave too, and he should be doing well in races like Oman this year, for example.”
WINNING POTENTIAL
At the same time, Hubert is convinced that with Bouhanni, the potential to win is already there. “Bouhanni has to win very high level races, but in 2020 that means he has to start winning right from the gun, just to regain his hunger for triumph and his morale. The fight for the bigger wins will go from there,” he says.
Asked what, if anything, he would like Arkéa to acquire from the French WorldTour teams in terms of their performance, rather than their results,
Hubert points to “The sprint trains with Arnaud Démare at GroupamaFDJ and the way Ag2r look after Bardet, to the point where he very nearly took the victory in the Tour de France a few years ago.”
If Hubert manages to do that with Quintana, and get the Colombian in a position to try to win the Tour, that would make all the effort ArkéaSamsic are putting into raising their game this year worthwhile. But for the older riders like Vachon, who can recollect when the team’s biggest wins were in respectable but low-profile regional races like the Mi-Août en Bretagne, the Tour de
Finistère or the Kreiz Breizh, the switch up will bring all kinds of benefits for the team, regardless of the results.
“Things had already changed with signing Warren [in 2018],” Vachon says. “But it wasn’t so long ago that if our team riders had been up there at the head of the peloton at crucial moments, domestiques from other big-name squads would start yelling at us: ‘Hey, what are you lot doing here? Get out of it.’ “Now I’ll be able to answer them: ‘I’ve got Nairo, Warren and Nacer sitting here on my wheel - and we’re going to try to beat you.’”