THE CHOSEN ONES ?
F or many British fans ( and journalists), the Tour’s Grand Départ in ‘ le Yorkshire’ this summer represents a celebration of the UK’s arrival in the sport’s top league. With the defending champion and ( probably) the 2012 winner in a British team and holding British passports, how could it be anything else?
Across the Channel though ( or should that be la Manche?) it would be understandable if there’s a degree of envy of how GB has hit the heights. It’s getting on for 30 years since there’s been a home winner of le Tour, yet the search for a bona fide successor to Laurent Fignon and Bernard Hinault has never ceased.
Giant- Shimano’s Warren Barguil has yet to be widely tipped as a potential successor to Fignon le Professeur ( The Teacher) and Hinault le Blaireau ( The Badger). But with two Vuelta stage wins in his first year as a pro and a Tour de l’Avenir victory in 2012, it can’t be so long before French journalists start dropping not- so- subtle hints that Barguil might be next in line to the vacant French Tour throne.
Riding for a Dutch squad, Barguil certainly doesn’t seem to think it’s a bad thing to be living far removed from the pressure that accompanies up- and- coming French riders in French teams.
To call those expectations a poisoned chalice is being polite. In the last decade, after Sylvain Chavanel and Sandy Casar were both touted to win the Tour, their failure to do so overshadowed some superb riding in other events. Futhermore, as the doping shadows have lifted on cycling, and riders with no “history”, as Bradley Wiggins once diplomatically put it, have finished higher and higher on the Tour GC sheet, the pressure for results on the French has become more intense. It’s perhaps logical that as
ciclisme a deux vitesses ( two- speed cycling) slowly morphs into what might more accurately be called ‘cycling at one- and- a- bit speeds’, the expectations of a nation that has taken anti- doping far more seriously than many others have got higher. Either way, Barguil recognises that as the playing field has levelled out, the breakthrough point came when Thibaut Pinot won in spectacular fashion at the 2012 Tour on a stage through the Jura mountains and then finished in the top 10 overall. Pinot was also the youngest rider in the race, making him a perfect torch carrier of the promise of a new generation, untainted by the suspicions of the past and able, it seemed, to hold his own against the rest of the pack. Barguil recognises Pinot’s win as the moment when the French lost their inferiority
As the quest for the ‘next French Tour de France winner’ goes on (and on, and on), how does it feel to have to face up to near impossible expectations?
complex that had lasted almost a decade. “I remember the stage perfectly. Pinot’s brother Julien used to be my trainer and we were on the phone all day, I was saying Thibaut Pinot had done the right thing [ getting in the break and attacking], he didn’t agree, back and forth, it was amazing. It was a breakthrough for all of us, a moment when we saw it was possible to win.”
That sensation that the French are ‘ back’ has persisted ever since, even if in 2013 the French performed relatively unspectacularly at the Tour. Barguil recounts how in early 2014, L’Équipe newspaper brought together all the young French riders for a joint interview, and “we were talking about how we’re no longer scared of attacking, we’re no longer afraid of losing. But the key thing is we’re no longer scared of winning.”
However, you can have too much of a good thing, and Pinot is once again a classic example of that. Two days after the 2012 Tour finished, L’Équipe ran an article with a headline, ‘Can Pinot win the Tour?’. Subsequently, Pinot failed to win a single race in the 2013 season – this in a year when his FDJ squad helped maintain the French ‘ winning feeling’ by taking a mere 33. Pinot quit the Tour after the Ventoux stage, with question marks over his descending skills.
But if Pinot answered his critics when he then went on to take seventh overall in the relatively low-profile Vuelta, for Barguil the message from the contrasting results was clear. “He had too much pressure at the Tour. It was a real shame. He did so well in the Vuelta yet nobody really noticed. It just goes to show that the only thing that seems to matter is winning.”
If avoiding the hype in France this July will be impossible, then maybe adapting to it is the next best thing; Barguil’s brace of victories in the 2013 Vuelta was certainly one way of doing it. The first, at the steeply rising little climb in the town of Casteldefels, came from a break of 10 non- GC threats with a well- timed move two kilometres from the line and could
At Formigal, I wanted to do something because my family had come to watch me in the Pyrenees and it was the third day they’d been there
be partly explained away by him being underestimated as a neo-pro. But three days later, in Formigal ski station in the Pyrenees, there was no excuse for any of the other breakaways to let Barguil get up the road and his ability to outsmart as formidable a customer as Rigoberto Urán was even more impressive.
“At Formigal, I wanted to do something because my family had come to watch me in the Pyrenees and it was the third day they’d been there,” he recalls. “Saturday to Andorra was really cold and I just wanted to get through it” - over a dozen riders abandoned, some with hypothermia - “and on Sunday’s stage [ to Piau Engaly] I’d been in the break but got dropped on the Bales, so I dropped back. I told myself time and again that I had to sit up and recover as best I could, even though I knew the Bales from training there before the Vuelta. It
As soon as somebody sticks out in France, immediately they start getting told, ‘You’re the best, you’re the one who will win the Tour’
was that decision to recover that enabled me to get through the day in a better shape, and then go on to the win the next day.”
The back story of those Vuelta wins makes those two Vuelta stage wins even more remarkable. On the stage before the first rest day to Sierra Nevada, Barguil had been caught up in a huge crash in the neutralised zone and had to race injured all day “with a lot of support from team-mate Johannes Fröhlinger,” he recalls. Flying out of Granada airport that night as part of the transfer to northern Spain, one Spanish TV journalist, Carlos de Andrés, remebers seeing Barguil “covered from head to foot in bandages and in such pain he could hardly walk.” No bones were broken, though, and after a hospital check- up it was confirmed he could continue, but as he admitted afterwards, it had been touch and go whether he abandoned.
As with Pinot’s seventh place not exactly setting the media alight back home, Barguil’s two Vuelta stages got him “more recognition when I go out training, more phone calls, but not too much more. The good thing is I don’t get too much pressure from the French media but the day I go to the Tour that may change. Still, there’s a whole generation of young riders now – Thibaut, Romain Bardet, myself – so at least it’s split up a bit. But the wait for the next one after Hinault has gone on for a long time, which is why people have lost patience. But I’m sure our day will come.”
If Fröhlinger is his unofficial ‘ big brother’ at Giant- Shimano, helping him with advice and to stay well positioned in the peloton, Barguil points to two French trainers as being instrumental for helping young French pros to prosper.
“If I have to really thank anybody for giving me the right advice it goes to [ French Espoirs team director and former Peugeot pro] Bernard Bourreau and my former trainer Julien Pinot” – brother of Thibaut and now working with FDJ.fr. “It was really thanks to them that I became a professional.” Bourreau, he says, “taught a whole generation of riders in the French team to change their mentality about racing, in a good way. I think it’s thanks to him that a whole generation is coming through now.”
Meantime, as he says, it’s all getting a shade over the top: “As soon as somebody sticks out in France, immediately they start getting told, ‘ You’re the best, you’re the one who will win the Tour.’ And then when they make a few mistakes there’s an over-reaction in the opposite direction. If we could clear all of that hype away, it might be easier for that new generation to come through at their own speed.”
Bardet’s results, including 15th overall in last year’s Tour, which made him France’s top finisher, automatically put him in that media frame of being a potential ‘ Hinault successor’. On top of that, his background certainly has enough historic links to help those French fans wishing, as it were, to add two and two and make 25. He comes from Inzinzac, the village where one Eddy Merckx had his first ever win in France, and like Hinault, he, too, is from Brittany, France’s cycling heartland.
Rather than Hinault, though, it was his father, a cat 1 amateur at a local club, who was his most prominent inspiration. Bardet admits that he always enjoyed riding a bike, even though his first steel Mercier was heavy and not best suited for racing. He quickly moved onto a BH, then a Look, of which more later. When he went to the World Championships at Plouay in 2000, just a few kilometres away from his village, to see Romains Vainsteins win the men’s Road Race, “I only went to see the women’s race, to tell you the truth.” The realisation that Barguil could make it in bike racing came comparatively late, after he won the French Junior Nationals in 2009. “I had just finished second in the Classique des Alpes” – a top French amateur race – “behind [future LottoBelisol pro] Tim Wellens so I knew I was in good shape. Then at the Amateur Nationals, everybody thought it was going to be flat when in fact there were three short, sharp climbs and each one did a lot of damage. There was a long break and although all the favourites had tried to get away alone, I managed it, and stayed away. It’s one of my best memories ever.
“I had a Look at the time and I rode it all the next year painted red, white and blue. If there’s one bike ever going into a frame on my living room wall, it’s that one because for me, that race was where it all started for me. Thanks to that win, I got into the French national team and after a previous year where I’d got lots of placings but few wins, that was my big step up.”
A 10th place in the Tour de L’Ain, the best of any amateur present, was another step in the right direction and following a year with CC Etupes in 2012, and the Tour de L’Avenir win, FDJ were keen to sign him. But instead, he took the slightly surprising option of going for Holland and Giant- Shimano.
“I like the fact that at Giant there are lots of different nationalities, lots of different points of view,” he notes. “If I was in a French team, one of those with just French riders, it would be too
insular.” Those ever- present expectations that he might some day win the Tour would be even harder to avoid, too.
However, it is in France where his racing will probably have most impact, and certainly where the chances of yet another potential ‘successor’ to the big stars of yesteryear will sell the most newspapers. Barguil knows that – he grins in appreciation when we tell him that back in the 1990s, Lance Armstrong also made an impression by denying he was Greg LeMond’s successor, telling reporters “I’m the first Lance.”
“I think exactly the same thing,” Barguil says. “I don’t want to be an imitation of Bernard Hinault. During the 2012 Tour de L’Avenir, Marc Madiot [ FDJ director] would tell me, ‘Ahh, you’re exactly like the Blaireau… you attack like he did, so journalists. “Yes, I got a lot of flak for that when I was junior,” says Barguil, “although in some ways it helped me get where I am now, and in any case I’ve matured a lot. I’m a lot more cautious as a racer than I used to be, because I lost a lot of times because I used up so much energy.”
He cites the example of when he fought – and won – against Rigoberto Urán at Formigal as an example of how he has grown up. In similar circumstances the previous year, he points out, he had lost a race against former junior world champion Olivier Le Gac but this time round, by calculating his effort a little more conservatively, he could just outpace Urán.
However, his individualism and willingness to speak his mind are also reminiscent of a certain Breton Tour winner, when he says, for example, that in the last 20 kilometres of a race, he has “no need of a sports director telling me what to do. It’s me on the bike and me that makes the decisions.”
For examples to follow as racers, though, he looks further afield, to Spain. “I’m a big fan of Alberto Contador,” he reveals. “I remember watching the Mur de Bretagne stage in the 2011 Tour when he came so close but something happened with his handlebars and Evans won it instead. But if it wasn’t for Alberto in the 2013 Tour, nobody would have attacked. That’s the kind of panache I really admire. If we all sat around and waited for the time trial, it would be really boring.”
It doesn’t take too much to imagine a certain Bernard Hinault nodding his head in admiration at that particular observation – and perhaps this summer, as the maitre d’ for the Tour stage winner ceremonies, Hinault will have the chance to congratulate Barguil in person, too.
If it wasn’t for Alberto in the 2013 Tour de France, nobody would have attacked. That’s the kind of panache I really admire
on and so forth, you remind me of him.’ And I’d always tell him, ‘ Nope, I just want to seem like myself, that’s all that really matters.’”
He does admit that in his youth, he had a reputation for launching repeated, uncalculated attacks, something of which Hinault would surely approve of, given that his tendency of booming “Il faut attaquer! ( you have to attack!)” whenever he’s asked for comments about a race has become something of a joke among French Read what FDJ talents Arnaud Démare and Johan Le Bon have to say about the current state and future of French cycling in our joint interview on page 94