INTERVIEW: VINCENZO NIBALI
Vincenzo Nibali has won all three grand tours, along with two monuments - San Remo and Lombardia. But in 2019 he’ll take on the ambitious target of the Giro-Tour double. Can his aggressive riding and experience bring him his greatest achievement yet?
“For us Italians, it’s never enough.” Vincenzo Nibali talks critics, crashes and contracts
The double take. Vincenzo Nibali gets it a lot, on his travels abroad, and especially among his own people in Italy. The morning after Il Lombardia last October was no different. At the Bahrain-Merida hotel, an elderly woman approached with widening eyes. “It’s Nibali,” she said.
The previous afternoon, Nibali had stalked Thibaut Pinot all the way to Como but fell short of a third win in the season-ending monument. Given the circumstances, both the result and the performance were remarkable. Barely two months earlier, Nibali had undergone a percutaneous vertebroplasty procedure after fracturing a vertebra when a spectator caused him to crash on Alpe d’Huez at the Tour de France. He only opted for surgery as part of a desperate bid to recover in time for the Worlds, and he slogged his way through the Vuelta among the back-markers, beating himself into shape.
Although Nibali lined up with the squadra azzurra in Innsbruck, the Worlds came a couple of weeks too soon and he was dropped before the finale. But rather than end his season there, Nibali rode on into October, determined to finish on a high note. On the shores of Lake Como, low sun in his eyes and dead leaves crackling beneath his wheels, Nibali battled gamely, animating the race where he could, but ultimately giving best to Pinot on the slopes of the Civiglio. Almost as an act of defiance, he fought off the chasing group to take second, a dignified ending to a blighted campaign. Nibali, however, plays to a demanding audience. They may have been entertained, but that didn’t mean they were satisfied, broken vertebra or nay. After the lady at the hotel had established that it was indeed Vincenzo Nibali, she offered a gentle but firm reprimand: “You only came second.”
Heavy lies the crown, and a little levity is essential for he who wears it. Nibali chuckles at the memory when he takes a seat at Bahrain-Merida’s training camp in Hvar, Croatia. “For us Italians,” he explains, “it’s never enough.”
Thus it has ever been. Following Marco Pantani’s death and after a number of false dawns, the Italian cycling public have had their lonely eyes turned firmly towards Nibali for a decade or more. He has responded by amassing a varied palmarès, and with considerable flair, but at times the mesh of affection and attention wrapped around him has threatened to overwhelm.
The 2016 Giro d’Italia was a case in point. After struggling for two weeks, Nibali seemed to reach the end of his tether on stage 16 in Andalo. He’d been the favourite but now found himself 4:43 behind maglia rosa Steven Kruijswijk and opted for radio silence at the finish line. When a reporter eventually cornered him in the Piccolo Hotel’s lobby that night, Nibali’s lament was doleful: “Why do you want to wound my pride even more? I’m already in pieces.”
On that race, a mobile phone provider held a daily poll in which fans voted for their favourite rider. Even as he dropped down the standings, Nibali found himself on the podium before each stage, joylessly accepting a smartphone as a prize. The
ritual seemed something of a humiliation, but the tifosi’s affection can inspire as well as suffocate. “I realised the fans didn’t care about what the press said. They were watching me with different eyes, and my result didn’t matter to them,” Nibali says.
Some way, somehow, Nibali bent that Giro to his will in its dying days, with a stirring win at Risoul after Kruijswijk crashed trying to follow him on the Agnello descent, then by snatching the maglia rosa from Esteban Chaves with a day to go. Even by the Giro’s operatic standards, this was a most startling volte-face. “By that point, you’re just competing for your pride. You’re competing just to show what you can give, and in a certain way, the result almost falls into the background,” Nibali says. “I wasn’t even thinking about trying to win. It was just important to do something to make the Giro spectacular.”
That victory cemented Nibali’s reputation as an instinctive grand tour champion who expresses himself in the grandest gestures, but two-and-a-half years on from that keynote triumph, he gently dismisses the idea that he is wedded to the ideal of winning in a certain style. “When I’m racing, it’s not like I stop and think about how to win,” Nibali says. “Okay, I know that there may be decisive points in a race, but usually my race develops in the last 10, five or three kilometres, depending on the route. At San Remo, I know that the last 10km are the most important, or on a mountain stage, I’ll know that a certain climb is the most important part of the stage. You focus on those situations, and then in the course of those kilometres you see whether you can attack or not.”
That said, few, if any, of Nibali’s 51 pro wins could be categorised as routine. His back catalogue is not dominated by any one template, but instead seems to have been compiled by an artisan, each victory uniquely crafted. Last March, for instance, he became the first rider in almost quarter of a century to win Milan-San Remo by soloing clear on the Poggio.
Even his dominant victories at the 2013 Giro and 2014 Tour were garlanded with ornate flourishes – a snowbound victory atop the Tre Cime di Lavaredo in the former, an exhibition at Hautacam in the latter. One has the impression that Nibali can scarcely ride to the shops without élan.
Nibali’s aggressive mode of racing has been welcomed by many as an antidote to the more risk-averse strategy employed by Team Sky over the past decade. If the British squad employ a form of cycling catenaccio, then Nibali’s approach is something more akin to gegenpressing.
“I’ve always tried to change the destiny of races, but it’s not easy. Often, I’ve come up against a battleship like Team Sky, and they’ve always shown themselves to be very strong in the Tour,” Nibali says. “Theirs is a very tactical style of racing. It’s certainly less spectacular but it’s very profitable.”
“When I’m racing, it’s not like I stop and think about how to win. Okay, I know that there might be decisive points, but usually my race develops in the last 10 kilometres”
Staying with a football analogy, Francesco Totti recently said his decision to reject the overtures of Real Madrid and stay at Roma for his entire career was a “Sliding Doors moment,” wondering how much more he might have won had he accepted the riches on offer at the Bernabeu. Nibali had a similar chance early in his career, when Dave Brailsford was building the first Team Sky roster in mid-2009. The Italian was courted but opted to remain at Liquigas.
A decade on, Nibali is reluctant to indulge in the parlour game. “There was contact with Sky, but we didn’t reach an agreement. Lots of riders went to Sky and didn’t express themselves well, and then others did,” he says, and, at Astana at least, he never found himself coveting Sky’s resources.
“We weren’t inferior. Astana was one of the strongest teams of all, with me, Landa, Fuglsang, Westra – all riders of the top level,” Nibali says, and grins: “If we weren’t Real Madrid, then we were Barcelona.”
Nibali, in fact, is the only rider to have interrupted Sky’s sequence of Tour wins. His 2014 triumph, where he applied relentless pressure from the opening weekend, seemed to provide a template for how to discommode Sky, though he shrugs off the idea. “There’s no secret,” he says. “It just all depends on how the race plays out and how you manage yourself.”
With three monuments and four grand tours to his name, it is hard to say if Nibali would have won more had he signed with Sky in 2010, but it is reasonable to suggest that he would have won differently. A bronze medallist in the Worlds time trial at junior and U23 level, Nibali might have been pointed towards relying more on his qualities as a rouleur on the British team.
“Maybe, but it’s difficult to compare teams,” Nibali says. “I’ve only seen Sky from the outside, but Fassa Bortolo, Liquigas, Astana and Bahrain-Merida are all big teams that have left their mark on me.
Nibali never gave up during the 2016 Giro and he was rewarded with the pink jersey
Some teams might focus on certain things, but there was never anything hugely different. Maybe there’s a perfect team, but I don’t believe perfection exists anywhere.”
Last year, of course, Sky’s first Giro triumph was sealed by a Hail Mary effort that could have been ripped straight from Nibali’s playbook. Chris Froome produced a passable imitation of the Sicilian’s 2016 vintage when he conjured up an improbable 80km solo raid over the Colle delle Finestre to Bardonecchia with two days to go, after a largely subdued race to that point.
“Froome produced a really great attack,” Nibali says. “Maybe he was already capable of doing that more often, without realising it. He’s usually more conservative but he also knows how to make attacks like that.”
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but Nibali’s relationship with Froome remains a distant one since they clashed publicly at the 2015 Tour. Though there has been no notable contretemps since, there is no discernible warmth between them either, and Nibali was among those to criticise Froome’s decision to race while his salbutamol case remained unresolved last season.
Nibali has jousted with other rivals, such as Tom Dumoulin on the 2017 Giro, when the latter disparaged Nibali’s tactics and the Sicilian decried Dumoulin’s arrogance, but that enmity quickly dissipated. “When you get to know Dumoulin, he’s a really nice guy,” Nibali says. His rapport with Froome, by contrast, has always remained strictly professional, if not adversarial. “With Froome, it’s different. Maybe it’s the fact that we’ve always seen each other as rivals,” Nibali says. “But there is respect.”
One day before his audience with Procycling, Nibali announced his intention to ride both the Giro and Tour in 2019 at the BahrainMerida team presentation. It is hardly coincidental that his first concerted tilt at winning the Giro-Tour double comes after Froome and Dumoulin came closer to claiming both races in the same year than anybody since Pantani in 1998, though his coach Paolo Slongo insists that the project was always on the cards at some point. “We watch the others, of course, but it’s not like we’ve been inspired by them,” says Slongo.
Nibali has raced the Giro and Tour in the same season on two previous occasions, but both efforts are too far removed in time and context to provide any real pointers for 2019. The first time was over a decade ago, in 2008, when he was still finding himself as a rider and he placed 11th at the Giro and 20th at the Tour. In 2016, he rode in France only to prepare for the Rio Olympics.
Slongo emphasises that this attempt has come about because, at 34, Nibali has “reached a high level of physical maturity”. But the rider himself admits that the rationale behind his 2019 schedule is also one of compromise between his own preferences and the demands of his paymasters. “It came about because of my desire to get back to the Giro,” he explains. “We’ve added the Tour, partly because it was something the team requested.”
One senses that, left to his own devices, Nibali would favour the Giro, a race that rewards attackers, over the Tour, an event that often seems to penalise them. When it is put to him that he is racing the Giro for pleasure and the Tour for work, he exhales.
“The Giro is almost the hardest race to win because the weather is still quite cold in the mountains, so your body has to adapt to changes in temperature,” Nibali says. “The Tour is difficult because you always have to stay focused. Always. You have to be so careful because there are so many crashes.”
In early November, a visit to a police station across the Franco-Italian border in Modane reminded him of some other unfinished business on the roads of France. Nibali went to give evidence as part of the case he and his team have opened against ASO after that crash on Alpe d’Huez, which left him with a fractured T10 vertebra.
“It’s going to be a long case, but it’s important, and not because I’m angry at the Tour or with the fan who brought me down,” Nibali says. “We riders simply need more security. On a climb like that, it’s unthinkable that people should be able to give riders a push or a punch as they go past. It’s also a question of protecting the investment that a big team puts in.”
Sitting with the gendarmes, Nibali’s lawyers scrutinised each frame as though it were the Zapruder film. Nibali was also struck by the way the images showed how
“I’ve always tried to change the destiny of races, but it’s not easy. Often, I’ve come up against a battleship like Team Sky, and they’ve always shown themselves to be very strong in the Tour de France”
strong he was on the Alpe. He had floundered against Sky’s current at La Rosière the day before, but amid the waves of humanity on the Alpe, he was beginning to find his sea legs only to be sunk by a dangling camera strap.
“Kruijswijk was out in front but we were coming up to him. Froome attacked, and I was on his wheel, with the motorbike beside me.!Geraint Thomas was behind me when I fell, and the only reason he didn’t come down too was because he had been slightly dropped,” he claims. “He hit me with his foot as he came past but managed to stay up. Roglic and Dumoulin were behind, and Froome and I were going away... The video showed that.” When Nibali left the Tour that night, he was fourth, 2:37 behind maillot jaune Thomas. Despite the dominance of the Welshman and Sky, Nibali wonders what he might have achieved. “I’d targeted the Tour, and I didn’t think the race was finished,” he says. Whatever about the final result, the spectacle in the final week was certainly diminished by his absence, even if Nibali himself could only stomach snatches of one stage, the novel 65km leg to the Col de Portet. “I couldn’t really watch it,” he says, pressing an invisible remote control. “Pffft. I changed the channel.”
Nibali’s double attempt could determine the worth of what will likely be the last major payday of his career. His Bahrain-Merida contract expires at the end of the year and he has yet to commit his future to the squad. According to general manager Brent Copeland, negotiations paused following McLaren’s arrival as a team partner, but have since resumed. Nibali, who is keen on a two-year deal, was reportedly courted by Trek-Segafedo in the interim.
“The intention is to continue here, but we still have to talk about it,” Nibali says. “And obviously when a rider is in the final year of his contract, he can receive other offers.”
Failure to land the double would do nothing to diminish Nibali’s legacy. His place in history, as one of seven riders to win all three grand tours, is assured, though earlier this winter, he dismissed the idea of scaling back stage-racing in favour of the the Classics. “I still feel I’m a stage race rider,” Nibali said.
Nibali’s antennae seem to pick up criticism far more clearly than praise. Perception is a curious thing. A glance at the Italian press suggests he is blanketed in near universal reverence, but his attention tends to snag on the occasional jagged word of reproach. One particular bugbear is that his decision to use the 2016 Tour to build towards the Olympics was unduly criticised.
“Everybody was attacking me,” Nibali says. “Even at the Olympics, I was asked why my Tour had gone badly… Come on.”
That Olympic dream ended when Nibali crashed while within touching distance of the gold medal. A global title is the obvious gap on his resumé, and he came within a kilometre of winning Liège in 2012. Nibali won’t confine his ambitions to a single race.!
“The Worlds, Olympics, Liège or Flanders are all races I’d still like to win. Maybe I’d like one of each,” he laughs. “There are a lot of beautiful races out there. Winning a third Giro would be a beautiful result too – and so would winning a second Tour.”
Winning is the operative word. Nibali is hailed as a crowd-pleaser, but 14 years amid the realities of pro cycling have taught him an inalienable truth. It’s nice to entertain, but in this business, the best chance of keeping everyone happy is to win.
“The Tour is dif icult because you always have to stay focused. Always. You have to be so careful because there are so many crashes”