INTERVIEW: MATTEO TRENTIN
The European champion saw his 2018 classics campaign ruined by crashes. He explains how he’s hoping for better this spring
After his 2018 classics campaign was hampered by crashes, European champion Matteo Trentin is almost starting afresh with Mitchelton- Scott this spring. The Italian tells Procycling how he hopes to grab his chance and have luck on his side this time around
Matteo Trentin laughs as he points to the scar on his forehead before tracing the dead straight, vertical line which runs centrally from just under his hairline to between his eyebrows. The scar is the result of one of his first times ever on a bike as a small child, when he crashed riding on a small downhill near his family home. “I was always crashing,” Trentin tells Procycling. “That was my introduction to cycling.”
Turn the clock back 12 months from our interview, and crashing summed up Trentin’s introduction to life at Mitchelton-Scott, too. The Italian joined the Australian team during the winter of 2017, having spent his whole career to that point with Belgian classics heavyweights Quick Step. Then 28, Trentin was hitting his physical peak and at a crossroads. He was in the best classics team at Quick Step, but often found himself working for his team-mates during spring rather than racing for himself. Mitchelton might not have had the same level of Flandrian pedigree, but the team offered Trentin more responsibility, more opportunities, to see what he was capable of achieving when let loose. He took the chance and made the move.
Yet days into the start of the new year last January, Trentin crashed into a stone wall while out training and broke a rib. It was a setback, not necessarily a full-blown disaster, for what was meant to be his new start. He was back on the bike quickly, even though the injury left him playing catch-up going into the cobbled races. Trentin still managed to record decent results – 11th at E3 Harelbeke and seventh at Gent-Wevelgem. Then at Paris-Roubaix, it got worse. This time when Trentin crashed, he lay on the pavé and knew it was serious. He had fractured his thoracic spine. What was meant to be his first classics campaign to shine had been a write-off.
“Oh f*ck,” he laughs, when asked what his first thoughts were after the
second crash at Roubaix. “I didn’t think anything about cycling, it was more concerning about my normal life because I broke my spine. Okay, when I broke my arm or when
I broke my rib it’s nothing more than a break, it’s going to heal. But you think, maybe if it broke in some different direction or some different way then maybe I would not be able to walk again. You take a completely different approach.
“I knew I had broken my spine somewhere because I heard the cracking myself. It wasn’t fun, until I got some painkillers, then it was okay. Then I could handle it.”
He continues: “There was nothing I could do. For example, my second son arrived two weeks later and he was three-and-a-half, almost four kilos when he was born, but I couldn’t hold him standing. I needed to sit all the time,” he says. “Your body doesn’t let you do what you cannot do.” Trentin could have been annoyed, stuck on his sofa not able to ride, just wallowing in self-pity, frustrated at the bad luck that befell his spring. Instead he chose to focus on what he could do, rather than what he couldn’t. Two days after Roubaix, while still sat in his hospital bed, he started scrolling through the race calendar for the rest of the year to find a good comeback target. He picked the European Championships road race, in August. With the support of Italian national team coach Davide Cassani, he quickly started drawing up a training and race plan, to get him to Glasgow in peak condition.
“I’ve never been the guy who sits back and says, ‘Ah f*ck,’ and cries to himself, or something. I think you need to always have a goal to come back stronger and to come back faster from the injuries.”
After a month he was back training, and by June he was at altitude in Livigno. “It was horrible, really sh*t. I was really sh*t,” he says. But Trentin persevered, racing the Adriatica Ionica Race with the national team and then the Tour of Poland the week before, fitting around what he calculates as 40 days of proper training.
“The condition was good enough to win the race,” he says of the Euros. “But the preparation was perfect.”
Despite the grimmest of conditions as the rain poured down constantly, making the Glasgow city centre circuit slick and slippery, Trentin got every move spot on. While others crashed or abandoned around him, he was part of a 10-rider break that got away with 55km to go. Inside the final 10km, he then cannily avoided a pile-up before being led out for the sprint by his team-mate Davide Cimolai.
“We rode the perfect race. As a team, we got a plan, we stuck to that and we basically got the perfect day on the road. It was really nice to see all the pieces come together, all the sacrifices that I made.”
SMALL MARGINS
Now, at the start of 2019, Trentin has hit the reset button. When Procycling meets him in mid-February he’s with his Mitchelton team on a training camp near Almería, Spain, and the signs are already there that this time around, spring could be different. Just 10 days before we speak, Trentin had already got a win under his belt, on stage 2 of the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana, his first race of the season. Three days after we leave he would win again, this time on stage 2 of the Ruta del Sol, then again on stage 5. Before February even finished he’d already surpassed his 2018 victory total.
The main target, however, is the spring classics campaign.
Having turned professional with Quick Step in 2012, Trentin spent his career learning the trade of the Belgian one-day races from the best in the business. At the team full of classics winners, however, usually Trentin found himself deployed in a domestique role, working for his team-mates whether Tom Boonen, Philippe Gilbert or Niki Terpstra. Sometimes he found himself in the right moves, but typically he had spent much of his energy earlier in the race, meaning by the time the racedefining moments came, he was done.
“I think I have always ridden pretty good during my career. Of course, I missed the results and I am here in this team to try and grab it,” he says.
“If you are the main guy protected for the final you know where to move to, to really go for the results. Otherwise you are more concerned about, ‘If this and that happens you can do something,’ but it is not your goal. So, it’s much more difficult.
“Before maybe I had to anticipate and see everything that was going on and now I can wait for the right moment to make my move, or follow the big guys.”
Trentin’s biggest challenge is that the margins between the elite group of classics riders seem to get smaller each year. A decade ago the likes of Boonen and Fabian Cancellara largely shared the spoils at the big races, but today there are 10 or 12 riders who are regularly in contention. The competition is fierce. “Quick Step had the perfect season [in 2018] and they had most of the strongest guys but Terpstra has changed teams. Now they only have tybar, Gilbert, Lampaert...” Trentin says.
“They will probably control the classics again because they are the team that normally sets the standard in the classics, but we have Van Avermaet, me, Gilbert, Sagan, Naesen, Stuyven, Degenkolb… there are quite a lot of guys who can be there. It’s getting more and more high; the level is high every year.
“I knew I had broken my spine somewhere because I heard the cracking myself. It wasn’t fun, until I got some painkillers.”
Nobody is dropped on the climbs any more, and it’s all about the situation. The margin between riders is one per cent. One per cent is enough.”
What then can Trentin do, to turn his performances into results? Where can he make the improvements to get onto a podium, or win a big classic?
Rather than any physical improvements, any different tactics he or his team can do, any extra knowledge he can gain, Trentin puts winning a classic down to “80 per cent body and 20 per cent luck”.
“It really is the approach to the races,” Trentin says. “If I don’t have to work during the race, that should already be enough. You need to be strong, you need a little bit of luck, and that’s all. Just those two things, it’s pretty simple.”
ALL ROUND ABILITY
Trentin’s role with Mitchelton will extend beyond the spring, particularly now sprinter Caleb Ewan has moved to Lotto Soudal. With the Australian team focusing on grand tours and stage racing, and now without a pure bunch sprinter, a versatile rider like Trentin is even more valuable. Such is Trentin’s all-round ability, he is one of only 16 active riders who have won stages in all three grand tours. While he may not have the same level of speed as the top-tier sprint specialists, or be able to climb with the best GC climbers, Trentin can do both well, putting him in the same bracket as hybrid sprinter/climbers like Peter Sagan, Michael Matthews and John Degenkolb. The team see him, along with the likes of Daryl Impey and Luka Mezgec, as a key rider who can win races on hilly races or from reduced bunch sprints.
“I don’t sit back on the climbs, waiting, but just smash them, and try to drop the sprinters, as we did in the small races in Spain,” Trentin says. “It’s something I really like. I can probably climb in the top 30 in a big race. If you climb with the top 30 guys, no sprinters will be there.” He continues: “I can actually be a bit of a multitasker, I can climb quite
good, I can sprint. In fact, the only thing I cannot do that well is time trialling on my own. For the rest
I can do almost everything, of course I cannot stay with the big, big guys on the climbs, but for the rest I can fit into any role. I don’t have any preference. When I am feeling good I can fit into any race.”
Trentin’s win in Glasgow at the Europeans last August not only marked a turning point for his season, but also for the Italian national team. It’s been a decade since the likes of world champions Mario Cipollini and Paolo Bettini retired, during which time the country has been lacking a major leader on the national stage. Even Vincenzo Nibali has struggled while wearing the Italian tricolore. The squad has lacked the strength in depth expected from a country where cycling is so much part of the culture.
But Trentin’s win showed a level of cohesion not seen for a while. “We started building up a really good group of riders from 2015, mainly from my age. Viviani got stronger, I got stronger, Colbrelli got stronger, Nizzolo got stronger, it’s lined up the roles in the national team,” Trentin explains.
“It’s like a proper team. It’s not easy when you go and race once a year and you need to find that cohesion. But I think starting from Norway and last year we really got into that.”
It’s no wonder then that Trentin already has one tentative eye glancing further ahead in 2019, to the World Championships in Yorkshire this September. He narrowly missed out on a medal in Bergen in 2017, finishing fourth on a lumpy course predicted to be not too dissimilar in its challenges to that of the Yorkshire circuit.
“That’s the second goal of the year. I need to see the parcours, first,” he says. “I need to see the climbs, how they really are. That’s in my planning to maybe go there for a weekend to see how the roads really are. Also, to get a proper training schedule to see if it’s something for me or not.”
Either way, however the spring pans out for Trentin, he appears happy just to have the chance to give the campaign his all this time around.
“In general, I feel better than any other year at this point, at this time of the year. I think I am not at 100 per cent still. The next races are just putting kilometres in and hopefully some winning again. Let’s say from the opening weekend in Belgium, the season will be on, 100 per cent.”
“I don’t sit back on the climbs but just smash them, and try to drop the sprinters”