INTERVIEW: MATEJ MOHORIC
Mate j Mohoric was 19 when he joined the WorldTour as a junior and U23 world champion. After" ive years adapting tot hep e lot on, and with a series of big wins to his name, the Slovenian tells Pro cycling how he" in ally found his place among the pros
Slovenia’s former U23 world champ on turning pro at 19 and the hard adjustment to the WT
When Matej Mohoric was just 18 years old, in the autumn of 2013, he became the first rider to win the U23 world road race title the year after having taken the junior version. A few months later he earned another accolade, becoming the youngest rider in the WorldTour for the 2014 season, at just 19, having signed a contract with Cannondale the summer before. His name appeared on almost every ‘riders to watch’ list there was. As an amateur he had performed on all kinds of terrain. He could climb, descend and time trial. At the U23 Worlds road race in Florence, Italy, he attacked and dropped a now familiar young French climber, Julian Alaphilippe, on the race’s final ascent, before using his descending prowess to open a gap to the finish. Alaphilippe, Adam and Simon Yates, Louis Meintjes and Caleb Ewan were all in the chasing pack that finished behind him. In his post-race interview, the smiling, redfaced teenager looks aghast, wide-eyed in disbelief. If the phrase ‘teenage prodigy’ was developed with a cyclist in mind, Matej Mohoric would likely be it.
Yet cycling’s history is littered with riders who excelled as amateurs but struggled to match that as pros. Turning pro at a young age doesn’t guarantee future success. Statistics suggest more are likely to struggle to adapt than to survive and thrive. Mohoric clearly had a natural talent, but being handed his dream at such a young age wasn’t easy.
“I think I was maybe too young when I turned professional because I was only 18 years old [when the contract was signed],” Mohoric, now 24, tells Procycling. “I was physically not even close to being ready. I was really suffering, especially in my first year… I didn’t have the legs to go the distance and I had some, say, issues with the coach on that team. I was probably a bit overtrained, and overweight also.”
The step-up in racing is a big enough challenge for young riders,
but living up to the pressure of expectation can just adds to the burden of a promising young rider. Mohoric insists he didn’t feel the outside pressure around him, but making the jump straight to the WorldTour after just one season as an U23 put him behind many of his peers.
“I don’t suffer stress so much, I was more focused on my own progress and my own work, but still I think maybe I was a bit over-excited. I might have worked too much in training and I think that’s why I might have come to some races too tired and couldn’t perform, and [would] then train even harder and then come again, it was all a circle,” he says.
“I never expected of myself to be competitive in my first years; I knew that it was going to be hard and I was prepared for that, but it was really…
I was surprised when I first raced WorldTour, I was surprised how fast these guys go and how long they can keep it up.
“Some guys in U23, they are already racing with professionals and can race with them. That’s different if you are, say, 22 or 23, because U23 takes four years. But I only did one year. If you race for some time and have some kilometres in your legs, then you can come to the WorldTour and be a captain straight away... But I wasn’t. I helped others in races and that makes it even harder.”
Mohoric’s development was also disrupted by the fact that the team environment around him kept changing. In his first five years as a professional, he has already raced for four teams. He spent his neo-pro season at Cannondale before the team merged with the Slipstream organisation to form Cannondale-Garmin a year later. He was one of just five Cannondale riders who stayed on in the new US-Italian venture. In 2016, he joined Lampre, but just 12 months on and the team also underwent a transformation when it took on a new lease of life as UAE Emirates, with new management, new sponsors and many new riders. It was only when Mohoric joined BahrainMerida at the start of 2018 that he seemed to find the right environment to unleash his considerable potential. The combination of a few years of racing, a stable team, and faith from the management helped make last season a breakthrough: he won seven races, including a debut Giro d’Italia stage, and the overall titles at the BinckBank and Deutschland Tours.
“I think the biggest difference was they [the team] believed in me straight from the start,” he says. “They said, ‘You are going to be one of the guys we focus on and we are going to give you a good programme.’ They gave me the
“I THINK I WAS TOO YOUNG WHEN I TURNED PROFESSIONAL BECAUSE I WAS ONLY 18 YEARS OLD. I WAS PHYSICALLY NOT EVEN CLOSE TO BEING READY”
easy to forget Mohoric is still only 24. He’s thoughtful when answering questions, pausing to think of his answers rather than rushing to speak. He’s fluent in Slovenian, English and Italian, and can speak German and French. It gives him a unique position in the team and wider peloton - an ability to communicate with most riders. Early in his career he even combined racing with studying for an economics and business management degree at the University of Southern Denmark. When the CPA recently visited the Bahrain team at their training camp at the start of the season, CPA president Gianni Bugno called team manager Brent Copeland the next day full of praise for Mohoric. “He said, ‘he’s amazing, he’s the one who spoke more than anyone on the team and gave us such fantastic ideas,’” Copeland recalls.
Copeland first worked with Mohoric when he was just 20 at Lampre. He remembers back then how the young rider would always be the first to raise his hand for any role the team needed that day. Whether it meant going in the breakaway or pulling on the front of the peloton, he was eager to soak up all the information he could.
“He was like, ‘I want to learn every role that’s being given to me, because one day, if I do have the ability to be leader, I know what each person has been through.’ And I just thought to myself - back then he was 20 - damn, this guy knows where he wants to go to,” Copeland says.
That experience is not lost on Mohoric either, who feels his tough introduction at cycling’s school of hard knocks in those early years taught him valuable lessons that now set him ahead of his peers. “I was also a rider who was among the first guys who gets dropped; I was not the guy that comes to the WorldTour and is GC captain straight away. I think I have a lot of respect for my team-mates, I know they also suffer and maybe even more than the guys that are in front in the races. I think I have maybe a different perspective because of my first years.”
Mohoric’s biggest challenge in the next few seasons is finding his speciality. Being an all-rounder can be a blessing and a curse. Mohoric feels his strength lies in hard one-day races and stage races without long climbs. He had success as a junior in time trials and won the world title and finished third at the Europeans. He was dedicating time this winter to improving in the discipline. “I think I have to fix my position and adjust my training for it, but in the next year hopefully
I can improve,” he says.
The 2019 season will also see Mohoric make his cobbled classics debut, after getting a taste for Flanders at the BinckBank Tour. Starting at Omloop
“THEY GAVE ME THE GOALS STRAIGHT FROM THE START. IT GAVE ME EXTRA MOTIVATION AND ALSO SOME SELF CONFIDENCE”
Het Nieuwsblad, he will race through Milan-San Remo, Flanders, and ParisRoubaix largely as a testing ground. His versatility, the team feels, could see him excel in any of the big classics in the future.
There’s little wonder Mohoric is such an all-rounder, considering where he took up cycling at his home in Slovenia. “I live in an area where there are lots and lots of beautiful roads. You have an area that’s completely flat you can train on, and then you have an area that’s a little hilly, similar to Belgium, and then you have another area with mountains – not big mountains – but you have climbs that are up to 12 kilometres long, and that’s plenty,” he says.
The bright lights of Monaco, where he now bases himself, are a contrast to the small village he grew up in. “It has maybe a population of 150 people and now I live in Monaco where there are 38,000 people in three square kilometres so that’s completely different. It’s more crowded but I kind of… I was uncomfortable at first but now I don’t mind living there, it’s nice.”
Some teenage prodigies never match early success later on in life. But happily for Mohoric the evidence of last season suggests he may yet eclipse the results of his younger self. “I think the best results are still to come,” he says. “Hopefully in the future if I stay focused and work hard I think I can continue.”