INTERVIEW: WARREN BARGUIL
What next for the French rider now that Nairo Quintana has joined him on the Arkéa-Samsic team?
When Nairo Quintana flung his arms skywards at the summit of La Colmiane in Paris-Nice in the final WorldTour race before lockdown, it was the culmination of a series of sudden surprise developments in the Colombian’s career. Signing for a ProTeam like Arkéa was a curveball, given his status as a genuine Tour de France GC hope. Then Quintana’s dramatically successful start to the season - no fewer than five wins - abruptly and somewhat surprisingly reversed his decline.
To judge by those results, the Colombian’s adaptation to team surroundings as unfamiliar as Arkéa after eight years at Movistar was clearly a very smooth one. But that renewed lease of sporting life for Quintana also raised a question: what about Warren Barguil? How was Barguil, by no means as successful a climber as Quintana but definitely one of the most talented in the world, going to fit in the Arkéa-Samsic organigram now?
At least initially, Barguil hadn’t expected any problems. “He’s a big champion, and sometimes you need to admit that there is a better rider than you out there,” Barguil told Procycling back in the off-season. “He’s won two grand tours and I have a lot of respect for that.”
“But when people say, ‘Ah, Quintana will not help you,’ I reply, ‘Come on…it’s not going to be like that. I think he will help me, and if he’s going better than me then I’ll help him.’ That’s how I see cycling, no matter the level.”
Warming to his point, Barguil explained how in his five-year stint at Sunweb he had worked well with Michael Matthews, Tom Dumoulin and John Degenkolb, and not just on the climbs. In the 2016 Tour into Berne, he pointed out, he had even helped Degenkolb mix it up in a bunch sprint, albeit an uphill one.
“When I know somebody is better than me then I give them 100 per cent. But if I’m better than them, then it’s harder for me to do that. If you know the team leader is at 60 per cent and will lose three minutes and you know that you can have the leader’s jersey in a race, I think the team needs to be open-minded. They will need to let you make a move.
“Also, if you are a leader and have a bad day in the mountains, you don’t need to have the full team waiting. So we will see how it works out for Nairo. And for me.”
As for the potential problems caused by the initial language barrier between the two, Barguil was adamant that this would not be an issue, telling Procycling, “I don’t speak Spanish and he doesn’t speak English, but we’ve tried to talk a little bit on the bike already.
“When I was at Sunweb at first I didn’t speak English either, but I learned quickly. It will be the same for him and learning French here.”
TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
The pandemic laid low one of Arkéa’s key plans to ensure the two would rub along - by getting them racing together throughout the first half of the year, something Barguil said would help the bonding process enormously and enable the two to ‘read’ each other’s racing condition better. “It’ll be how we learn to make the right decisions,” is how Barguil put it.
Instead, to date, they have only done one stage race together, the four-day Tour de la Provence - won by Quintana, with Barguil 24th. But at their first WorldTour race, Paris-Nice, Barguil was disqualified after crashing badly and drafting on stage 1.
After which, the curtain came down on sport, and the question marks on that key issue - as on so many else - remain unanswered for now.
On the plus side, though, Barguil feels that the Tour de France in 2020 is exactly what he and the Colombian could have wished for. “For Nairo and me, it’s perfect. It’s three hard weeks with a lot of elevation gain overall, but never lots of elevation gain on a single day. That means you have to be very fresh at the start, recover very well each day and by the third week, it will be really hard - and that’s when I’m at my strongest.”
But it’s not just about the route, it’s the racing itself that excites Barguil about this year’s Tour. After a 2017 Tour with two stage wins and the King of the Mountains and a very mediocre 2018 for reasons not fully explained, Barguil bounced back in 2019. Maybe he didn’t reach the dizzy heights of 2017, on the back of which he’d been signed by Arkéa as their talisman rider, but he came 10th overall, a result which got somewhat lost in the noise around Julian Alaphilippe wearing yellow for two weeks and coming fifth. He was also just two minutes behind eighth-placed Quintana, and it was Arkéa’s first ever top 10 at the Tour, in 15 years of existence.
“It was a totally different Tour to previous years, from the moment when Alaphilippe won that stage in the first week. Ineos had to let him go. There were still 40 of us in the front group when he broke away. We all saw that Ineos weren’t as strong as the year before,” he said. “As for me, I proved to myself and the team that I was still at a good level after a lot of crashes and setbacks.”
Tenth in the Tour came on the back of his victory in the French Nationals, his first since he signed for Fortuneo in 2018. Coming after two bad crashes, one in ParisNice and a second in Catalunya, fracturing his pelvis, winning a small group sprint to take his first national title provided ample confirmation he was on the right road. “If there’s a bit of an uphill like there was that day, I have the right kind of kick for it,” is how Barguil remembers that victory. If the 2020 National Championships get pushed back to October, as is possible, he may well get to wear the tricolour maillot for a second year running in the Tour.
“This is a very peculiar year,” Barguil told French website cyclismactu.net in June.
“Racing the Tour twice as national champion would make me very happy, even if I’d prefer to have a very normal year. But whoever is wearing it, even if there are no Championships at all this year, this jersey should be at the Tour, it’s a symbol that’s part of cycling’s heritage.”
While 2019 represents a step in the right direction, the bigger question for July is whether Barguil can repeat his 2017 success. But as he told Procycling, “I look back and I say, ‘Why can’t I do it again?’ I think the overall level now is higher than in 2017, because I’m pushing the same watts as before and I didn’t win as much.” But that was maybe due to circumstances as well. He’d felt strong in the Alps, but the mid-stage cancellation on the Tignes stage put paid to any ambitions of another stage win to add to the two he took in 2017.
“I was at the front on the Iseran when they cancelled the stage, so if they hadn’t I could have moved up maybe to seventh or
“I was at the front on the Iseran when they cancelled the stage, so if they hadn’t I could have moved up maybe to seventh or eighth”
eighth,” he said. “And who knows what could have happened on the last stage if it hadn’t been shortened? It could have changed everything.”
The five-month interval between Quintana winning at Paris-Nice and the planned return to racing post-lockdown means that rather than gambling everything on the Colombian, for now Arkéa-Samsic are keeping their options open. That means that as far as they’re concerned, while Quintana is a pre-race favourite, for now Barguil is viewed as a potential Tour de France winner himself.
“Of course, of course,” sports director Yvon Ledanois says, when asked if he thinks Barguil could end up even winning the Tour. “This will be one of the most open Tours in years, and any one of 10 or 12 riders could win it. Among them Warren.
“After everything he did this spring, Nairo is going to be right at the centre of the Ineos radar. But imagine that means Warren slips into a break early on and takes three or four minutes. In any case, we don’t care if it’s Warren or Nairo who is at the head of affairs for Arkéa-Samsic. The important thing is that both of them are in as good a position overall as possible in Paris.”
Since March, Arkéa’s dilemma about Barguil and Quintana has been simplified considerably in one way: the absence of team-mate and sprinter Nacer Bouhanni, who opted out of the Tour. “It’s because he’s not stupid and he can see that there are very few stages for him,” Ledanois argues. “But we’ve never had this experience before so right now we’re operating in the dark.
“Nairo has been far more successful. But Warren is young, ambitious, has his own ideas and he’s racing his national Tour. This year, it’s all about GC, which is a first for us, too. We need everybody to be at 200 per cent for that. Not just Nairo and Warren.
“Or,” he adds in anticipation of an open race, “Warren and Nairo.”
Bback in the old days, the Tour de France used to build to its crucial stages, either in the Alps or the Pyrenees. Once the battles had been fought, the peloton would wend its way back to Paris over the course of a few days - a couple of long flattish stages, maybe a time trial, then Paris.
As recently as 2005, the final summit finish came on stage 15, with a whole week to go. This was followed by one more mountain stage with a long downhill finish, a rest day, and three flat or rolling stages and a time trial. 2001 was worse - the last mountain was on stage 14. Suspense was there none.
In part, the final quiet few days of the Tour were a function of France’s geography. The Alps and Pyrenees are at the opposite end of the country to Paris, so if the Tour has to go by bike, it takes a few days to get there. In the 20th century, long stages of 250km-plus were more acceptable, but it still meant that racing suspense was all but dead quite a few days out from the end of the race. (Of course, there were honourable exceptions, like 1989, when the final mountain stage was two days before the end and the Tour had the once-in-a-lifetime privilege of a close race and a final day TT.)
But the modern Tour cannot afford to have its grand finale two thirds of the way through the race, and then peter to a conclusion in Paris. Attention spans and modern media habits dictate that the race needs to be exciting, and stay exciting as close as possible to the end. To this end, the Tour has increasingly featured set-piece grand finales, often on the secondlast day of the race. These entail logistical headaches for the riders, teams, organisation and media - the evening of the final Saturday and the Sunday morning are not spent digesting the action of the previous three weeks over a long dinner and celebratory drink; instead there’s a long transfer to Paris.
In 2020, the set piece is La Planche des Belles Filles, a climb that only appeared for the first time in 2012, but which now makes its fifth appearance in the race. La Planche des Belles Filles has everything the Tour needs. On a racing level, it’s hard - the Vosges climb is one of the steeper summit finishes, with an average of 8.5 per cent, long stretches above 10 per cent and a 20 per cent final kick (also the even steeper top gravel section, which was used to great effect in the 2019 Tour). But it’s not a long Alpine grind. It’s six kilometres long, which opens it up to more riders than the mountain diesels - it’s a punchy, exciting experience to watch. This all translates well on television. What’s more, it has relevance especially to the home fans - it’s Thibaut Pinot’s local climb (though Romain Bardet holds the Strava KoM). La Planche des Belles Filles comes on the penultimate day of the 2020 Tour, and what’s more, it’s the end of a 36km time trial.
This trend towards set-piece finales began in 2009, when Mont Ventoux appeared on the secondlast day. Christian Prudhomme had taken over as Tour director from Jean-Marie Leblanc in 2007, so by 2009 he was making his mark on the shape of the race. Leblanc favoured a predictable template - flat first week with a time trial, mountains, transition stages, mountains, Paris. Prudhomme shook things up. The next three Tours all had big finales - the final summit finishes were the Col du Tourmalet, Alpe d’Huez and Peyragudes, but their impact was compromised by being followed by at least a long time trial and one or two flat stages. But since then, it’s almost every year - Semnoz in 2013, Alpe d’Huez in 2015, Morzine (with the Col de Joux Plane) in 2016 and Val Thorens last year.
Of course, if the race for the yellow jersey is effectively over well before the final weekend, as often happens in the Tour, the set-piece finale is robbed of a little sporting intrigue. But at least the days of the interminable journey back to Paris are truly over.