INTERVIEW: ESTEBAN CHAVES
The Colombian talks to Procycling ahead of his attempt at taking the Giro d’Italia title
It might seem on the surface that Esteban Chaves doesn’t have much to laugh about, as he makes his second comeback from serious injury. But the Colombian will still go to the Giro as one of the favourites. He explains why he’s feeling so positive
Ex- Premier League football manager Iain Dowie wasn’t thinking of Esteban Chaves when he coined the phrase ‘bouncebackability’. How could he have been? When Dowie was trying to save Crystal Palace from relegation in 2004 – explaining that his team needed to discover said skill whenever they got thrashed – Chaves, then aged 14, had got as far in cycling as racing his father around the lanes surrounding Bogotá.
But the word could have been invented for Chaves: bouncing back from serious blows is something that the Colombian has proved he is rather good at. The latest setback came at the end of last September, at the Giro dell’Emilia in Italy. He slid out on a patch of damp road on a high-speed descent while following the lead TV moto and in this instance he literally bounced – a sickening, violent bounce as he landed square on the tarmac – and spun off into the verge. The resulting concussion confined him to a dark room for six weeks, where he struggled to walk without feeling dizzy, while his broken shoulder slowly healed. “It didn’t need major surgery,” Chaves explains. “Just pain, and work.”
Chaves’ retelling of the rehab might sound surprisingly blasé were it not for that fact that he’s been there before, only much worse. At the Trofeo Laigueglia in February 2013 he was left with broken bones to his head, neck and shoulders and a career-threatening rupture of the axillary nerve leading to his right arm. Doctors spent nine hours reattaching it, using healthy nerves harvested from his foot. He was told he would probably never ride again.
It took two years, but Chaves did bounce back. And he did so to the level that was expected of a former Tour de l’Avenir winner, winning two stages in the opening week of the 2015 Vuelta a España and enjoying stints in the red jersey before finishing fifth overall. The following season he finished second in the Giro d’Italia, third in the Vuelta and won the Tour of Lombardy, fully repaying the faith shown in him by the MitcheltonScott team, then sponsored by Orica, when they hired him in the depth of his rehab and confirming the predictions that he was one of the most promising grand tour and climbing talents around.
This year he has bounced back again, although this time things have been a little quicker. Already champion at the Herald Sun Tour in February, a result which came somewhat as a surprise, the Colombian lines up as one of the favourites for the maglia rosa in this year’s Giro, perhaps the man who can take on Chris Froome and defending champion Tom Dumoulin and push them all the way. Even a DNF at the Tour of Catalonia hasn’t dented that status as a favourite. With two
At the Trofeo Laigueglia in 2013 he was left with broken bones to his head, neck and shoulders and a career- threatening rupture of the axillary nerve
grand tour podiums already to Chaves’s name, the perception is that he has the experience and the talent to win one.
Chaves only has one pink jersey from the 2016 Giro. He won it at Risoul on stage 19 when the race leader Steven Kruijswijk crashed on the snowbanks of the Colle dell’ Agnello’s descent and Chaves stayed close enough to the stage winner, Vincenzo Nibali, to assume the race lead. With a flat final stage to Turin, all he had to do was keep Nibali in check in the final mountain test. He’d done it a week earlier when, on the queen stage 14 to Corvara, Chaves and Kruijswijk had left ‘lo Squalo’ floundering and the Colombian outsprinted the Dutchman to take his debut Giro stage win. But on the final climb of the Giro the rebounding Italian wrested the jersey from Chaves’s shoulders with a racewinning ascent to Sant’Anna di Vinadio. That sole pink jersey is framed - dirt, sweat, numbers, pins and all – and mounted on the wall in his house in Bogotá, where the 28 year-old Chaves overwinters every year with his brother Brayan, seven years his junior and a rider for Mitchelton’s development team. When Chaves returned home to prepare for the Giro following the Tour of Catalonia, it was there, staring him down and reminding him of that day in May.
“It’s like on TV they cook on a cooking show and you try to imagine the taste, but you can’t,” he says, looking back. “I can’t explain what feeling you have in the third week of the Giro when you are really tired but you are really happy that they are yelling your name and you have the pink jersey. There are no words for that.”
Chaves has a complex relationship with Italy. It was Bergamo that he called home when he first moved to Europe in 2012. “Everywhere was cold,” he remembers, “but I learned Italian, I made friends, and it was where I learned to be a bike rider.” It is in Italy that he has taken many of his biggest results, attacking through a crowd of Italian fans leading up to the old città of Bergamo in Il Lombardia, flying down the road circling the old city walls with Urán and Rosa and outsprinting them.
The lifestyle suits his Latin upbringing and the racing suits his aggressive style; Chaves isn’t blessed with natural talent against the clock so he has to make it count with canny racing and attacks uphill. Italy has been a capricious mistress - it’s where he suffered his two devastating crashes – but above all it’s the communion with the Italian tifosi that resonates with him, perhaps not surprisingly for a man whose first
team was called ‘Colombia es Pasion’: Colombia is Passion.
“When you race there you feel the passion of the people, they really like cycling and I understand them,” Chaves says. “At the Tour de France, everyone is on holiday so there is a big public, and most of the people have no idea what cycling is about. It’s not like the Giro: there they go because they love cycling. In Italy, it’s a different type of public.”
Chaves rode the Tour in 2017, but after suffering a knee injury early in the season and being dealt an emotional blow by the death of his physiotherapist and friend Diana Casas in a cycling accident in Colombia just before the race, it was a low-key grand tour and he finished 62nd. As we’ve come to learn, this was no surprise for Chaves in his debut Grande Boucle, but now Italy is calling once again.
Mitchelton’s Giro directeur sportif, Matt White, admits that he was a little surprised to see Froome and Dumoulin on the start list for the race and now puts Chaves in a second tier of overall contenders, alongside the likes of Rohan Dennis, Thibaut Pinot, George Bennett, Miguel Ángel López and Fabio Aru. The Aussies will be taking a roster to support Chaves and Simon Yates, who pinned his colours to the mast with second overall and a stage win in Paris-Nice this March.
“Mate, it’s the Giro,” White says. “The Giro can be won or lost anywhere, and that’s the beauty of it, there are surprises around every corner. For us, the time trial is key. The one in Jerusalem is neither here nor there, but the 35km TT at the end of the second week will be crucial for us, that we don’t lose so much time.”
It’s fair to say that the Giro suits Chaves’s inherent characteristics better than the Tour, with the Italian race’s unpredictability and daunting physical challenge. The Giro’s stages are generally longer, higher and raced in more extreme conditions than those of the Tour, and they play into the hands of attacking, opportunistic racers. Although Chaves finished a decent 10th place in the 18.4km time trial stage of Paris-Nice, clocking exactly the same time as his teammate Yates, Mitchelton’s game plan will be to race aggressively enough to offset the predictable losses in the long time trial on stage 16.
“It’s easily said, but a lot trickier to get it done,” White adds. “Wherever there are opportunities in those three weeks, we have to take time. I’ll expect an aggressive style of racing from us because otherwise we have no chance of winning.”
It’s a refreshing outlook, a positive augur for the unfolding of the race from the fans’ perspective, and certainly a bold aim given the ‘control the controllables’ modus operandi of Sky and, to a certain extent, Sunweb. Chaves will relish playing the cat that throws itself among the pigeons. He likes being an uncontrollable; it’s how he’s going to beat Froome.
“The Tour de France is like one long time trial,” he says, implicitly pointing the finger at Sky. “They can pick all the stages and know the required watts per kilo for every one, and then ride six watts per kilo so that no one can attack them,” says Chaves.
“The Giro is the Giro; the Giro is cycling; the Giro is passion; the Giro is different. Anything could happen… in Sicily, in Israel, there are really hard stages from the beginning, and long ones. The Giro is beautiful because all the time we are racing. You can’t control that race like you can control others.”
“The Giro is the Giro, the Giro is cycling, the Giro is passion, the Giro is different. Anything could happen…”
Sitting across a coffee table from Chaves it’s difficult to reconcile his off-bike persona with the aggressive, savage racer. Obviously there’s the trademark smile, and he is engaging, smart, and seemingly happier talking about his cycling academy back home in Colombia than poring over what happened in this race or that race. His teammates talk of a calming, positive influence in the squad and as someone who leads by example rather than fear.
But it’s not without reason that he has earned the nickname ‘The Smiling Assassin’. Chaves is not one of these riders who indulges in an experiment to see how fast they can go or how far they can push. Chaves is in it to race.
“Once he puts a number on, he’s just as hungry as the guy next to him who is cold, and shows no emotion,” White says. “They’ve both got the same focus. It proves you don’t have to be a stereotypical snob or stuck-up guy to be successful. He’s had a solid upbringing and has been close to his family, so he’s pretty even keeled as to where he sits on this planet. He’s certainly not pretentious. He’s a big star without acting like one.” At 28, minus a couple of seasons lost to injury, Chaves is coming into what should be his physical prime. He must be hungry for a big win – and starving for that debut grand tour victory his talent promises - but he refuses to admit that he has any pressure on his shoulders.
“In Colombia we have a saying that translates as ‘not all the fruits ripen at the same time,’” Chaves says. “The more important thing is to go and enjoy every day. You can’t say, ‘I’m 28, I’m gonna smash this year.’ Maybe tomorrow I’ll get the flu… you can put too much pressure on yourself.
No doubt his injuries have played their part in this holistic contentedness. Given that he was so close to losing his chosen career – and having to give up on his dreams - he explains that he counts it a success every time he simply lines up on the start. Evidently such trauma adds a healthy dose of perspective to your hopes and expectations. “Sometimes riders forget that a lot of people in the world watch the races and dream of being there. And if you’re one of the people that can go, that’s already one of the best things that can happen. If you win a stage it’s even better; if not, you try your best and you’re still there,” he says.
“I don’t want to be 70 years old and sulking to my grandkids because I finished second in the Giro d’Italia in 2016 and that was the worst day of my life. I want to say, ‘In 2018 I went to Israel and maybe we changed the world for some Israeli people, I was part of that and it was awesome.’ That’s a result.”
Mitchelton’s Giro team leadership will be decided between Chaves and Yates on the road. It’s a handy double act, a pairing of young talents who are entering their prime, having been scouted by their team five years ago. It’s also a laudable example of long-term planning, accepting the downs along the way and knowing that overcoming them will make the ups even sweeter. Chaves has faced his own long road of pain and work, but now he is bouncing back and on the up. At the Giro d’Italia, we’ll see how high he can go.