INTERVIEW: ALEXANDER KRISTOFF
Procycling meets the Norwegian classics specialist and former Milan-San Remo and Tour of Flanders champion
Alexander Kristoff has trodden the line between sprinter and classics racer throughout his career, picking up both Tour de France stage wins and monuments at Flanders and San Remo. As he gets older, he reflects to Procycling on why consistency and endurance are his biggest strengths, and where he fits into the peloton
To survive in cycling, a rider needs to find out what they are best at, and occupy that niche. In most other sports, the skills are prescriptive. The fastest runners, longest throwers and furthest jumpers do well in athletics; swimming is a little more complicated – you still have to be the fastest, but there are four different strokes so swimmers of different talents and strengths can still find their own niche. Team sports are more complicated again – a football player may be fast and have a good eye for goal, and therefore gravitate to being a forward, or they may be well built and tall and hard to get around, like a defender. But where road cycling differs is that every race is held on very different terrain. Athletics, swimming and football, and indeed most other sports, take place on largely identical fields of play – a 400m track, a 50m pool, a pitch roughly 100m long by 60m wide. Road racing has as many fields of play as it has days of racing – flat, rolling, hilly, mountainous and every possible combination.
Cycling is a sport of misfits, in which everybody fits in. Good at sprinting? Your niche is flat races. Good at climbing? Head for the mountainous races. Kind of good at both? The hilly classics are for you. Fast, and able to be among the first 40 or 50 over a climb – there’ll be something at the Tours of Catalonia and Basque Country, without doubt. Able to ride at a very high speed, without fluctuations, for long hours? You’ll be a domestique, but a valuable one, even if you don’t win many races.
So we’re sitting here in Spain, me and Alexander Kristoff, and I’ve been trying to work out what his niche is. Kristoff is pretty successful – he’s won classics, he’s one of a quite rare club who has won more than 20 races in a season, he’s ended the year ranked in the top 10 riders on CQranking.com in five of the last six years. He’s a sprinter, but as he points out, compared to the really dominant sprinters, he’s won few grand tour stages compared to them.
“I won two Tour stages in 2014 and one in 2018,” he says. “But
I was never the fastest in the pack. Never. I think I haven’t won so many bunch sprints. Even in 2014 and 2015 I was fast but never in the flat sprints. Before there was Kittel, Cavendish and Greipel, who were all faster than me – I wasn’t at their level in a bunch sprint. Now it’s Gaviria, Viviani, Groenewegen and Ewan who are the fastest, and I’m not at their level. I’m just under, like I always was.”
Kristoff’s best results come in long, hard races. He’s won MilanSan Remo, Gent-Wevelgem and the Tour of Flanders and come second in the Worlds. He’s won Hamburg Cyclassics, the GP Plouay and Eschborn-Frankfurt, the latter of these four consecutive times between 2014 and 2018. He’s too big to be a sprinter-climber in the mould of Peter Sagan and Michael Matthews, but on a flattish parcours over 200km, or late in a grand tour when other bunch sprinters might have gone home, he’s possibly the best in the world.
“When everybody is tired in long or hard races, usually I have a good sprint. If it comes together in a classic like Gent-Wevelgem or Flanders or Milan-San Remo, I am one of the guys who can sprint the best,” he says. He sums up the occupation of his particular niche in cycling: “I’m best at sprinting when everybody else is f*cked.”
Even wrapped up in winter kit at the UAE Emirates team camp in Benidorm, Kristoff is very
“I won two Tour stages in 2014 and one in 2018. But I was never the fastest in the pack. Never. I think I haven’t won so many bunch sprints”
recognisable – his barrel-shaped torso and Desperate Dan jaw are unmistakeable. If you weren’t familiar with him, you might make the mistake of thinking he looks a bit over, even for the time of year. He drily comments that he feels things will get worse before they get better: “It is Christmas; my fitness will not improve.”
But he looks like this the whole year round. He’s always there or thereabouts, and wins races and places highly from January or February right through to September and October. For six years in a row he has won at least one stage of the Tour of Oman, a run which will come to an end this year as he is altering his early-season programme to take in the Volta ao Algarve instead.
“Usually my shape is quite steady,” he says. “I’ve found a way that works for me and it involves a lot of training. Some guys are training less and sometimes get better results, but maybe they are not getting those results all year. For me, I still manage to win so I think what I do is about right. I’ve found a way that works, and I think it’s not the smartest thing to change too much. If I lose a year, it’s a big part of what is the rest of my career.”
Kristoff is perhaps a typical Norwegian. He’s the latest in a line of broad-shouldered blonds to have thrived in cycling from his home country – Dag-Otto Lauritzen, Thor Hushovd and Edvald Boasson Hagen are his forebears; like they were, he is resilient, strong, consistent and hardy. Unlike many, he’s resisted the temptation to make his home in the all-year summer of the Mediterranean – he still lives in Stavanger, on the Norwegian coast, and his kids are at school there, so the hassle of moving them outweighs the convenience of staying warm on training rides.
However, Kristoff is not so Norwegian that he’s unable to thrive on a team which has Italian DNA and an international roster.
“They say that every Norwegian is born with skis on, but I’m not such a good skier,” he says. “Maybe Norwegians are a bit quieter than the Italians. We’ll go back to our room and not sit up until 1am talking about nothing. After dinner I stay for an hour, but I already think that’s a long time. Sometimes my team-mates ask if something is wrong, but there’s nothing wrong – it’s just that I want to relax.”
He explains: “In Norway, on a bus if you have a seat with two places and somebody is on one of them, you don’t sit next to them if you are on your own. You take another seat with two places that is free. In Norway, you’ll see one person for each double seat all the way to the back on each side, rather than sitting next to each other.
“But I’m in the middle. I’m not a typical introvert, but I’m not very extrovert either. I’m just average.”
That idea of balance runs right through Kristoff’s life and career. His season is less a series of peaks and troughs than a constant high level of form. He’s settled on a way of training and racing that suits
“If it comes together in a classic like Gent- Wevelgem or Flanders or Milan- San Remo, I am one of the guys who can sprint the best”
him and he hasn’t changed it. “I’m happy with the way my career has been, and when I quit my career I will look back and not regret the way I did things because it has worked out quite well,” he says.
While his UAE team-mates will train at altitude in January, he’s skipping it to go and spend a bit of time training with riders from the Continental team he helps to run instead. “My career works without altitude training,” he says. “So why should I sit on top of a mountain and be bored?”
Kristoff will be remembered as a rider who won Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders and GentWevelgem, along with his Tour stages (plus whatever he can get in the next three or four years). We’ll get to those high points later, but the most striking thing about his career, and what really marks him out from a lot of his rivals, is that consistency. To add to those six consecutive wins at the Tour of Oman, which demonstrates metronomic good form at the start of the year, since 2013, he’s finished in the top 10 of Milan- San Remo every year except last, when he was 14th. Six participations in Eschborn-Frankfurt have resulted in four wins, a third and a sixth. In Hamburg, 10 participations have netted eight top fives, an 11th and a 14th. At the Worlds he’s been in the top 10 every year since 2014 with the exception of the mountainous edition of 2018. Outside of the two very prolific seasons of 2014 and 2015, when he won a total of 34 races, the story has been of occasional world class wins, and clockwork consistency. If he doesn’t make the front group, then he wins the sprint behind – for seventh at the Yorkshire Worlds, fourth at the 2019 Euros, third at the 2019 Flanders, fifth at the 2017 Flanders, fourth at the 2017 MilanSan Remo, fourth at the 2016 Tour of Flanders, and so on.
It’s always the same races, always the same results – top 10s in the longest, hardest one-day races on the calendar. Curiously, he can knock out top 10s in the Tour of Flanders year in, year out, yet in E3 Harelbeke, the traditional form guide for the bigger race, he’s only ever been once in the top 20.
“They always say that if you can win Flanders you should be able to
“I’m happy with the way my career has been, and when I quit my career I will look back and not regret the way I did things”
win Harelbeke [E3], but I was never really close there,” he explains. “In Flanders, it’s such a hard race that the speed on the climbs is less than in other classics. They go faster on the climbs in Harelbeke because it’s a shorter race and they are not so tired. Flanders is much better for me because everybody is so fatigued.”
His favourite race is Milan-San Remo, however, even if his results suggest he is a little better at Flanders. “Flanders is a lot of stress because of Belgium,” he says. “It’s not always nice to race – it’s constant pressure and stress and fighting. When you are in the race you hate it, but you enjoy it when it’s finished.
“At San Remo, when you go down the coast the cities just fly past. You do 50, 60kph and you kind of enjoy it even if it is long and tiring. I won it once and have a second place and many top 10s. I hope one day to win it again.”
Kristoff’s peak years were in 2014 and 2015. He talks about being the strongest sprinter in long hard races, but at his best, in the 2015 Tour of Flanders, he won from a two-up escape with Niki Terpstra. Even in 2014, his last-ditch effort to cross to the leading quartet of Fabian Cancellara, Sep Vanmarcke, Greg Van Avermaet and Stijn Vandenbergh after the Paterberg climb was almost successful. Only a combined effort by the four ahead, who knew what the result would be if they sprinted against Kristoff, kept him at bay, despite the fact that he came within seconds of closing them down.
“They were the best years of my career,” he says. “In 2014 I won Milan-San Remo and two Tour stages and in 2015 I had 20 wins and the Tour of Flanders.
“I always strived to come back to this level, but it’s never easy to
come back to a top year. There’s a reason it’s a top year.
“I was at the perfect age – 27, 28 years old. I could see in training and the peak power I had was higher back then. Your muscles are at their strongest and at 33, it’s just physiology – you’re not as strong as when you were 26 or 27. It’s normal that you’re weaker in a max effort. I can still push more than 1,600 watts, but back then it was more than 1,700. But for longer intervals I’m no worse than before, so I am the same level in the classics.”
This means that we’re unlikely to see Kristoff winning multiple sprint stages at the Tour again, as he did in his heyday. He can pop up, as he did on the Champs-Élysées in the 2018 event, and beat out the other survivors of the mountains, but as time goes on and his top end speed is converted to even more consistency over longer efforts, his priority will be the classics. Even for 2020, the team has acknowledged this – the Norwegian will go to the Giro d’Italia for the first time since 2012, while his team-mate Fernando Gaviria goes for the sprints at the Tour.
“It will be difficult to peak in the Giro, because there are not many days of rest after the classics. But I am always in good shape, so if I don’t go too deep I won’t be too bad. But also maybe not too good. Average. In the past average has been enough, so we will see.”
However, that doesn’t mean Kristoff is losing his race-winning ability. The 2019 Gent-Wevelgem was perhaps the race that best sums up Kristoff’s strengths – one of the hardest one-day races of the entire season, which was blown to pieces in the wind and in which Kristoff made the sprint look easy, albeit aided by clever tactics.
“In the final sprint, Fernando [Gaviria] told me he was dead so couldn’t do the sprint. I saw later, he got on my wheel and just let it go so it f*cked it up for the other sprinters. They were on his wheel, but it was not a good wheel to follow,” he says.
The Giro will be a chance for wins on some of the longer stages, or towards the back end of the race - he’s never won a stage there. And with the Olympics and Worlds presenting hilly courses this year, Kristoff will likely put in his normal good performances at the end of summer in the Bretagne Classic, Cyclassics Hamburg and maybe the GP Québec, where he was once third. It’ll probably be more of the same in 2021, 2022 and maybe even beyond that.
“I feel a little bit old,” Kristoff, who turns 33 in July, says. “Two years ago, I felt young, but suddenly I’m one of the oldest guys – there are guys more than 10 years younger than me on the team. Suddenly I went from being young to old, and I never felt like I was in the middle.”
But the middle is where Kristoff, who has defined his life and career by being consistent, steady and balanced, is happiest. Even if the performances he puts in in some of the hardest races in the world exist right at the extremes.