INTERVIEW: EGAN BERNAL
Egan Bernal emerged as Team Sky’s number one mountain domestique in his debut Tour de France. Procycling finds out how special the 21-year-old may become
Procycling meets Sky’s next big thing, Egan Bernal, tipped as a future grand tour winner after his MVP ride at the Tour de France
By the end of the 2018 Tour de France, most fans would have been able to identify the lanky, angular features of Egan Bernal as easily as those of his more familiar Team Sky leaders, Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome. Day after day, Bernal was the second last, or often the last of Sky’s climbing domestiques tasked with keeping the team’s co-leaders in play on the main mountain stages. Blasting away for Froome and Thomas for 8km on Alpe d’Huez was arguably the Colombian’s finest hour, but in reality, in both mountain chains, Bernal was instrumental to the Sky machine. Bernal’s main trainer at the British team, Xabier Artetxe, who has been with Bernal at every race this year, is convinced: “Without Egan, we wouldn’t have had two riders on the Tour podium. Either Froome or Thomas would have had to sacrifice their own chances for the other.” Bernal becoming the backbone of Sky’s Tour de France climbing squad aged 21, and in his grand tour debut, is impressive. What makes it more striking is that just three years ago, in the autumn of 2015, after Bernal had made the podium for the second year in a row at the Junior Mountain Bike Worlds, he abruptly switched to road racing. It was a sport in which he had virtually no experience. In January 2016, Bernal made the uncommon step of skipping the entire amateur road category by signing his first pro contract with Gianni Savio’s Androni GiocattoliSidermec team. Two years later, Bernal joined the biggest team in the world, Sky.
As if that upward trajectory was not steep and successful enough, Bernal then ran sixth in the 2018 Tour Down Under, won the National TT Championships and took Colombia’s new race, the Oro y Paz. Back in Europe, he was on the point of finishing second in the Volta a Catalunya when he crashed in the closing kilometres of the final stage and abandoned. Undeterred, he finished second overall in Romandie and then won the Tour of California. Any one of these results would have been remarkable enough for a rider debuting in the WorldTour. Instead, when combined, they meant Bernal was selected for his first Tour.
“Many people talked about how Bernal was only 21, how the Tour could wreck his progression,” Artetxe tells Procycling. “But it didn’t. We saw he came through it very strongly. In terms of his learning curve, it was all very positive.”
And it wasn’t just Sky who were impressed. As Bernal shredded the field on Alpe d’Huez, no less a figure than Alberto Contador reflected on Eurosport, “That’s what you need to win a grand tour.” Sky probably wouldn’t say it out loud, but with such rapid progress the usual banalities of ‘taking things step by step’ must feel like they’re increasingly unrealistic.
While Bernal’s rise through the ranks has been so fast it’s “unprecedented” in Artetxe’s experience as a trainer, it has been tempered by some sobering moments. His heavy fall in Catalunya left him with shoulder fractures. When he was brought down in a mass crash towards the end of Clásica San Sebastián, he was left
with a small bleed on the brain, a number of broken teeth and facial injuries.
! Bernal’s dazzling ascent came within a whisker of never happening. As Bernal recollected earlier this year, both his first day of training as a pro with Androni in 2016, and then his first race day went so badly he had serious doubts about the wisdom of being in professional road cycling at all. “It was like I’d been transported to another world,” Bernal recalls to Procycling.
“I remember when I first travelled to Europe, to northern Italy in January, on my very first day, I told myself I had to train because I had to get off to a good start.
“But it was bitterly cold, well below freezing, it was raining and I got completely lost. Instead of doing a couple of hours on the bike I ended up doing five. It was terrible.
“Then the first race I did [La Méditerranéenne in February 2016] was really cold and raining again. I’m an explosive kind of rider and I didn’t understand road racing, because as a former mountain biker I thought I had to be up there at the start, like in MTB. And after 5km of racing, I’d already been dropped. It was horrible.” There were, he reflects, too many changes, all at once. “In no time at all, I’d gone from junior to elite to professional; from Colombia and South America to Europe.” He might have added he went from mountain to road; from two hours of training a day to six. “I had been on my way to a good career in MTB, I’d gone from being a big fish in a small pond to the other way around, and when things like this happened, I’d ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’”
But it is testament to Bernal’s tenacity that he persisted, and proof of his innate talent that the results started coming almost immediately. “In the same race [La Méditerranéenne] I finished in the top 20, and then on the last day I got 10th or something and I was feeling a lot better. But at one point I thought I would not even finish.”
! His immense talent aside, Bernal’s capacity to learn fast has helped him speed up his progress, as has, paradoxically, his lack of experience.
“Egan’s not got the prejudices and attitudes an older rider possesses as a matter of course,” says Artetxe. “He assimilates what you teach him extremely well.” Within limits, Artetxe likens Bernal’s development to that of LottoNLJumbo’s fast-rising star, Primož Rogli , the former ski jumper. “Like a Slovenian mechanic we’ve got in Sky told me, both Egan and Rogli are able to take on board a lot because there’s nothing there that blocks out what they’re being told to do. Older riders might tell you they’re not doing this or that. But you only have to tell Egan something once.
“But Egan’s no robot,” adds the coach. “He doesn’t simply accept orders. He’s always asking questions, trying to improve things, analysing everything you tell him. It’s not like he doesn’t care, he’s really intelligent. But he listens too, and he follows instructions 100 per cent; to tell the truth, he’s a joy to work with.”
Bernal says he learned a lot from Franco Pellizotti at Androni in 2016. “Pellizotti was a very calm, collected
I’d gone from being a big ish in a small pond to the other way around and I’d ask myself, ‘ What am I doing here?’”
sort of guy, always in the right place in the bunch,” says Bernal. “I tried to do exactly what he did: eat like he ate, behave like he behaved. I learned like that from everybody. I didn’t make a single move before they did. If they ate, I ate; if they didn’t eat, I wouldn’t eat and if they threw the bag over to the right-hand side of the road, I threw it to the right-hand side too.
“I’m in my third year, but it’s a question of learning, learning, learning. I’m 21, but I think even the most veteran riders go on learning. It’s a never-ending process.”
Bernal says Sky is not putting him under any pressure despite the big races he’s had on his schedule. “I have been in situations [pre-Sky] when they tried to get me to produce results and the more they did that, the more stressed I got, and the less well I went. Here, if I do well, that’s great. But if do badly I think about what went wrong and what I have to rectify.”
Whatever fate or cycling throws at Bernal, he seems able to handle it. Brought to Europe under the wing of the Italian coach and agent Paolo Alberati in autumn 2016, Bernal was only able to take part in one race, the junior Sognando Il Giro delle Fiandre in Tuscany before the season ended. He won it. Despite his inexperience, Bernal took fourth in the Tour of Slovenia and fourth in the Tour de l’Avenir in his first year. He returned to the Tour de l’Avenir last year and won it. At Sky, having been given a time trial bike for the first time ever – they had no such luxuries in Androni – Bernal proceeded to win his National TT Championships on an unfavourable, almost flat, course.
“Firstly, in Androni, I had to get used to a road bike instead of an MTB bike, which wasn’t straightforward because of the difference in positions. I had a lot of back problems,” Bernal recollects. “Then when I compared myself in photos on the road bike I used in Tirreno last year with Androni and the latest TT bike I had with Sky, I can see my position is totally different, it’s more aerodynamic, I’m hunkering down.”
Bernal says Androni had little interest in time trials, only in breakaways. But he is in no way critical of the Italian squad, pointing out that it operated at a completely different level, economically and racing-wise, to a team like Sky. And at Androni, Bernal didn’t just have experienced team-mates like Pellizotti to learn from, either, because he was also placed under the wing of Michele Bartoli, the former pro, who he describes as an excellent coach and friend.
Now, he’s under the tutelage of Artetxe, who lives near to Bernal in the Basque Country. Explaining the decision to ride the Tour, Artetxe says it was a natural process. “He was very clear: he wanted to do a grand tour in his first year and initially we decided the best choice would be the Vuelta. But with Egan, the points we had marked for his progression were reached much quicker than you’d expect.
“Before the Tour we saw he could have that chance, so it was like, ‘Why not do it?’ It’s the best race, it’s a great opportunity to race with role models like Chris and Geraint,” says Artetxe.
I’m 21, but I think even the most veteran riders go on learning. It’s a never- ending process
“Psychologically, Bernal needs to learn faster than other riders. When we knew he was up for the Tour, it wasn’t a big decision. Physically it wasn’t a problem, and in terms of learning it was very positive. I sat down with him after the Tour and asked him if he was pleased with having gone, and he said ‘100 per cent.’”
Sky were prepared to go an extra step with Bernal too. Procycling learned from other sources that prior to crashing out in San Sebastián the Colombian had been set to head to the Vuelta and tackle two grand tours in one season.
Yet even a racer like Bernal has limits. “As a climber weighing 58-59kg, he’s likely never going to be up there with the big engine time triallists,” comments Artetxe. “In grand tours recently, the most successful racers have been time triallists who can climb well, rather than the other way around. That may well influence our choice of grand tour for him. But seeing as he’s a pure climber, we can use that. We’ll minimise losses in time trials and then break his rivals in the mountains.” Indeed, Sky have nailed the TT-rider wins-Tour formula.
Bernal seems to present a twist on the theme and what this season has established is what Sky will want Bernal to do in the future. “Given what he’s done this year, seeing he can win a week-long WorldTour race, and that he practically made it into the top 10 of the Tour if he hadn’t had those crashes on the Roubaix stage, you can see he’s got the potential to win a grand tour,” says Artetxe.
But to rewind to Bernal’s beginnings one more time it’s worth recollecting that at least one person had already foreseen a great road racing career for Bernal.
Androni’s team manager Gianni Savio, ever the fan of hyperbole, once described Bernal as “the future of world cycling”. It might have sounded ridiculous at the time and Bernal himself plays down such ideas strongly. Yet who – after this year’s Tour de France – can avoid the sneaking feeling that Savio might well be right?