ALEXANDER KRISTOFF
The Norwegian sprinter talks about settling in at UAE and making his own grand tour
This year was a bit new. It was all a little bit difficult in the first year on a new team. You see other riders struggling, but I feel the team took good care of me. I like it a lot, the atmosphere is good, but for sure we hoped for better results, including myself. The team in general... we maybe didn’t perform as good as we hoped, for me especially. The win on the Champs-Elysées was my season’s best result.
My best results came when I had a full lead-out train with Katusha in 2014 and 2015.
I had a lot of riders around in the sprints. For sure I have the potential to win more if I have more back-up in the final, but I won this year on the Champs-Élysées without it.
I try not to focus too much on it when things aren’t going well.
I did not win as much this year as I did other seasons – I only have five victories compared to around 10 last year and in 2015 I had 20. Our team doesn’t do that many small races. I have the same amount of WorldTour wins, almost more this year than the last seasons. When you look at the prestige of my wins, it’s quite good. I feel if I did the Tour of Norway, Tour des Fjords and the Arctic Race I would have more.
When I started cycling I was young - nine years old.
It was mostly time trial races because we didn’t have enough riders to make up a pack. We were three, four riders only. My stepfather was in charge and he wanted me to do more races in a group, to get in a peloton and get used to this, so he merged all the groups aged from 10 to 16. When I was 12 years old, I raced against 14, 15-year-olds, and we had a small pack for criteriums. We got quite good at cornering and you knew exactly when to pedal and could touch the ground, because it was so technical.
Edvald Boasson Hagen was my main opponent when we were younger.
He was more alone and I had a team, so we always tried to outmanoeuvre him. Sometimes we did, sometimes not. I was always usually a little bit faster, so if it came to a sprint I could beat him, but normally in a climb he could always just crush our team to pieces. He was way too strong.
For sure there would [have been] a lot of expectation around me when I beat Thor Hushovd in the Nationals [in 2007, aged 19] if it wasn’t for Boasson Hagen.
But he had already signed a pro contract that season. I was always compared to him and he was always way, way better than me. I didn’t get so much attention because he was the new Eddy Merckx. I was under the radar for a long time.
I think I have the best chance to win San Remo again.
Flanders is very hard and I was in really good shape the year I won – everything was working fine. Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara were not there and they were the big two guns. I was a little bit lucky - for sure Van Avermaet and those guys were good, but he was not really at the top like he has been in the last couple of years. I think everything just went my way. I only had to follow one attack, Terpstra... It was the hardest race, at least one of the hardest, so I kind of rank Flanders personally slightly higher than Milan-San Remo because of the way that I won it.
I tried to do a ‘grand tour’ by riding all three races in the Middle East [before the Classics this year].
But the racing was so easy because there was no wind. It didn’t help me much when I had a 100 watts average. I think I lost a little bit of the base that I needed for the Classics.
I still live in Norway. I want my son to have as normal a life as possible. He is in school now, second grade, he has friends and a normal life... My area is quite easy to train in: we can train flat, we can train climbs and there’s not really a lot of snow in the winter.