INTERVIEW: JÜRGEN ROELANDTS
Jürgen Roelandts is only the second Belgian ever to race for Movistar in their 40- year history, and a rare flat classics specialist in a team of climbers and stage racers. Why did he make the move?
The Belgian classics specialist on breaking convention and joining Spanish squad Movistar
Jürgen Roelandts is a master of disguise. When asked how his Belgian colleagues in the peloton reacted to his joining Movistar in 2019, he says it is simple: the whole concept is so alien to his compatriots, sometimes they no longer realise he is actually still Jürgen Roelandts. They simply see another rider wearing Movistar’s distinctive jersey.
“Even now in Valencia, when I see a lot of Belgians I haven’t spoken to in a long time, they don’t recognise me,” Roelandts tells Procycling during the Spanish early-season race, the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana.
“They are so surprised to see me in blue. Today I went alongside Oliver Naesen and got really close to him and he was like, ‘What is this Movistar guy doing to me?’ They are just not at all used to seeing a Belgian rider in a Spanish team. But me, I like it.”
The Belgian riders’ failure to identify Roelandts in his new team gear is not as strange as it sounds. Roelandts rode for Lotto for 10 years (13 if you include the three years he spent with their Conti-level feeder team, Bodysol), then spent a single season with BMC last year. But it’s not just the new colours which are confusing – it’s a culture clash as well. As a team structure, albeit with different sponsors, Movistar is the oldest squad in the peloton. But Roelandts is only the second Belgian rider to race with the team in its 40-year history, and the first for 36 years [see panel].
This dearth of Movistar riders from Belgium is not just a historical curiosity. It represents what three-time Milan-San Remo winner and rare Spanish flat classics specialist Óscar Freire calls a ‘race culture divide’ between Spain and Flanders. It’s more than the Pyrenees and half a continent which separates the two cycling cultures – Freire and Juan Antonio Flecha are rare Spanish winners of races like GentWevelgem and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, but in the main the Spanish stick to their climbing and the Flemish stick to their cobbles.
Movistar, for their part, haven’t prioritised the cobbled classics. Last year, they decided to pull Alejandro Valverde out of the Tour of Flanders and race him in the GP Miguel Indurain instead. However, the signing of Roelandts signals a shift: this year, the team participated in Omloop and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne for the first time ever, and Roelandts has been a perennial top10 finisher in many spring classics. That hasn’t prevented questions. “It feels weird,” says Wim Vos, head of cycling at HetNieuwsblad. “This is one of the biggest teams in the world but they’ve never been a big part of the Flanders classics.” Movistar have achieved a single top-10 finish in the Tour of Flanders: Imanol Erviti’s seventh in 2016. One explanation is that Valverde needs some sort of local support and knowledge in his Flanders debut this year. Also, as Freire says, the penny is beginning to drop collectively in Spain that the cobbled classics no longer need to be off limits. There’s a more pragmatic reason too: as Roelandts says, “Movistar scored no points in the Flanders classics last year, and I’m consistent.”
For Roelandts, it will be less of a culture shock than it might appear. “My wife’s father is Spanish. She also speaks Spanish to our son so he can grow up learning two languages,” he says. “Maybe now when I come home, I’ll ask her to speak more Spanish to me as well.”
More importantly, fending for himself on the pavé of Flanders with limited team backing is unlikely to affect Roelandts. “In all his years in Lotto, Jürgen always had a free role in the classics,” says Vos. “He was originally considered the ‘next big thing’, particularly after winning the Belgian Nationals in his first year. Maybe not to win Flanders but certainly Omloop or E3. He got on fine with the management at Lotto, too. The only problem was, he never won a big one-day race.”
Roelandts has had some fine near misses, though. Third in Flanders in 2013 was the high point, but he’s also finished on the podium in Milan-San Remo and E3 Harelbeke, come fourth in Scheldeprijs and taken top 10s in a list ranging from GP Ouest France, Gent-Wevelgem and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad to the GP de Montréal.
His 50km solo breakaway in the notoriously rain-lashed, windswept and crash-marred 2015 edition of Gent-Wevelgem, where he still placed seventh, was arguably his most impressive classics effort of all. Yet his wins have mostly come in stage races, like the Tour de Pologne, Tour de l’Eurométropole or, last year, on stage 5 at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana.
“Now he’s 33, he’s in the final stage of his career, so he likes to try
"I've always told the Belgian press my goal is to win one classic, I was always second or third so I'm still missing it, I want to keep trying"
something new,” Vos reflects. “Last year wasn’t so bad for him, he was always on the front or in the top 15 of the classics. But it’s all about winning, so he might have more of an opportunity at Movistar. And if it gets worse for him when he’s 33 or 34, then so what?”
“I’ve always told the Belgian press my goal is to win one classic. I was always second or third so I’m still missing it,” Roelandts says. “I want to keep trying and with Movistar I will have a clean record sheet to go to the classics. That is good for my head and good for my motivation.
“San Remo is also good for me, I was third in 2016 and fifth last year. A lot of one-day races suit me. I’m 33, I know what I can do as a racer. I’m no grand tour rider, Paris-Nice or Tirreno is too hard for me, but in a five-day event in Belgium I can go for it. On a good day, a single-day race, I can climb with the best. It’s only the win that is missing.”
Movistar, he thinks, will provide the right scenario for that longawaited classics victory to happen. “I’ll have to work hard in the grand tours but I’m getting carte blanche in the classics; that’s always a good thing,” he says.
For a rider who seemed destined to finish his racing days working for Greg Van Avermaet when he moved to BMC at the start of 2018 after all those years with Lotto, that newfound motivation must feel like a door opening. Certainly the Movistar deal came about quickly. Roelandts’s time at BMC was not, reportedly, a happy one. So when during a Giro d’Italia stage Movistar sent an emissary - “a rider” is all Roelandts will say - to tell him that the team were interested in him, he quickly responded.
The subtext to Roelandts’s signing for Movistar is that he will be spanning that Flemish-Spanish race culture ‘divide’. “I don’t see myself as a pioneer,” Roelandts says. “Movistar was the best option I had.” But he recognises he can have a role as an educator.
“I think I can teach the Movistar riders some things about the classics. Tricks about positioning in the peloton during those races, tyre pressure, stuff like that.”
The fact he can already speak some Spanish should help speed up the integration process, and that was a factor behind Movistar’s interest in him too.
“I had already spoken to some guys on the team: Jorge Arcas, Imanol Erviti, just to practice my Spanish a bit, I’d go up to them in the peloton and try to chat, small talk, basic stuff. I knew Rafa Valls from when he raced in Lotto.”
The first big difference Roelandts noticed between BMC and Movistar when he switched was that Movistar don’t do winter training camps. His first four full days with Movistar, barring a couple of days in October and the team presentation, came in Mallorca in January prior to the Challenge races where he started his 2019 season. As for the Mallorca Challenge itself, Roelandts had another surprise on his first race day with the team. As he told HetNieuwsblad, one day when the peloton was already wending its way through the neutralised zone, six Movistar riders were still on the bus. “They weren’t concerned about that. I was shocked. I thought, Movistar, top team, there will be stress. None of that. That was different at BMC. They were sometimes too organised.
“Movistar is only my third team, but I already know that it’s the one that fits me best. I like to let things come to me. It should not be too planned,” he says.
In Movistar, Roelandts will also be operating with a much lower level of media scrutiny than he would get in a Belgian team, where the public discussions of every local
rider’s performances start in January and don’t stop until May. “I’m a rider with 12 years’ experience, and I always put pressure on myself to be good, but I don’t sense that external pressure yet from the team. I know I want to be good; they know I’ll try my best.”
But the real judge of whether Roelandts’s unusual switch of tracks has succeeded will come in Belgium in March and April. And if taking on a classics team like DeceuninckQuick Step is hard enough for another Belgian squad, for one with so little experience of being in at the kill of the cobbled classics like Movistar, it could be even tougher. Roelandts recognises that, but says he prefers to have his own options to race nonetheless.
“Quick Step are a very specialist squad, of course, with five or six guys on the team that can win each classic, so it’s always hard to beat them. I could have gone there a few years ago, but I always like a challenge, to ride against them, to see what I can do.”
Furthermore, at Movistar, when he lines up at the Tour of Flanders, Roelandts will start alongside the world champion, Alejandro Valverde, for his debut in the event.
“I’ll be feeling proud,” Roelandts says. “It’ll be the first time he does the Tour of Flanders, and it’s in the rainbow jersey so it’s going to be very special. It doesn’t matter which race it is, Alejandro always fights to the end, so I’ll be curious to see how he does.”
From a team which has barely bothered the top 10 of the Tour of Flanders during its 40-year history, suddenly Movistar have found they have not one, but two potential contenders in their midst.
"I'm a rider with 12 years' experience, and I always put pressure on myself to be good, but I don't sense that external pressure yet from the team"