IN DEPTH: BARDET AND PINOT
Romain Bardet & Thibaut Pinot shoulder the unenviable burden of being the home nation’s best hopes of winning the Tour for the first time in almost 35 years. Procycling looks at the lengths to which they’ve gone to reduce the pressure
France’s leading hopes for a home Tour win have taken a different approach to preparation in 2019
Once, Thibaut Pinot said “Non” to Emmanuel Macron. It was May 2016, and the then Minister of Economy had invited the best French riders to his office in Paris for an informal meeting about “the future of cycling”. They all came in their best wedding and funeral suits: sprinters Nacer Bouhanni and Arnaud Démare, puncheur Alexis Vuillermoz, young gun Warren Barguil and Romain Bardet, a promising climber but not a serious opponent to Chris Froome yet. Only Pinot was missing. His team manager, Marc Madiot, was angry, but Pinot’s people asked him: “What do you want, Marc? Thibaut to do some acting or Thibaut to try to win the Tour?”
Pinot failed in the Tour de France that year. He didn’t start stage 13 because of a bout of bronchitis, and it was the same in 2017, when he pulled out on stage 17 with a high temperature. Those same years, Bardet went second and third overall and raised again the hopes of a first French victory since Bernard Hinault in 1985. Bardet was the perfect Tour boy: he was flamboyant in July and he practiced what he preached – romantic cycling – with instinctive racing and unexpected attacks.
Pinot was the anti-Tour cyclist: consistent all year, but not in the summer. He declined to participate in the Tour pantomime and was far happier chasing the Giro d’Italia’s maglia rosa instead.
Both riders, born in 1990 and putative rivals throughout their junior and amateur years, came to the same point of disillusionment with the Tour in 2018. Pinot dismissed the Grande Boucle entirely as he recovered from the pneumonia which forced him to abandon the Giro d’Italia on the last weekend, while he was sitting fourth overall. Meanwhile at the Tour, Bardet finished sixth, 6:57 behind Geraint Thomas. It was a very concerning performance as he was “at his best level,” according to his coach. For once, Pinot and Bardet’s fates were the same and their misfortune was awful news to the French cycling community.
The riders could both turn their backs on the Tour. Both have shown great facility in one-day races. Last year, Bardet was second at the Worlds and third in Liège; Pinot won Il Lombardia. But they are fired up and would like a new spring in their Tour relationship. “Don’t call it revenge, but Thibaut was impassioned by watching the Tour on telly last year while recovering,” his brother Julien and Groupama-FDJ coach confides. “He said he didn’t want to watch anything, but he loves cycling so much... The absence raised his desire to race the Tour again and get a good result.”
Bardet was very emphatic on the matter: “Je vais gagner le Tour,” he told L’Equipe in February – not “I want to” but “I will” win the Tour. He later complained he had been misquoted, but the full interview still showed a long measure of self-confidence: “Geraint [Thomas] told me that four years ago, at my age, he wouldn’t have been able to do what he has done, so it gives me hope, a crazy hope!” The Auvergne climber added: “Maybe I’m a bit Utopian, but I feel that my time is coming and that, in the third week, we will make the race explode and there will be riders everywhere.”
“Bardet and Pinot are turning 29 this season and coming into their best years,” the legendary directeur sportif and now the French national coach Cyrille Guimard told Procycling. “They are still missing time trial skills to win overall, but they have a lot of experience and motivation. They know how to race.” Guimard then points out a big weight on the shoulders of many contenders, especially the French ones: “the media pressure.”
After Pinot’s performances in 2012, a stage victory and a 10th place overall, L’Equipe put on its front page, “Peut-il gagner le Tour?” – Can he win the Tour? “I know this is a game,” Pinot said to his friends, but, one year later, he was literally sick at the race and so began his love-hate relationship with the Tour. And after his 2016 position as Froome’s heir apparent, Bardet privately raised his doubts: “It’s moving too fast. I was expecting to be around fourth overall. Now I am trapped. I must be on the podium every year.”
Pinot and Bardet cut the media pressure this season and turned down most interview requests. The former opened the door to television channels only at his training camp in the Alps at the end of May. The latter welcomed media at his recon of the Bastille Day stage on his home roads of Brioude, and made clear he was not going to talk again after that. Instead, they both enjoyed time off. “To have fun might be a key to success,” Guimard concedes.
“The most important thing is how fresh you are,” Julien Pinot confirms. “In 2016, Thibaut was too strong too soon and he raced too much. We are not going to make the same mistake.”
Pinot shut himself away in his home region, le Plateau des Mille Étangs - The Plateau of a Thousand Ponds – next to La Planche des Belles Filles, where the Tour’s stage 6 will finish this July. In his downtime he feeds his animals: the goats, chicken, sheep and cows that he is very fond of; he drives his tractor to transport the hay from one field to another. “This is how I am happy,” he says. Last winter, as well as riding his bike during the offseason, he trained on cross country skis in order to “have different feelings” and, once again, “to keep the mind fresh”.
Bardet, for his part, did compete in the classics this spring. Milan-San Remo (50th), Amstel Gold Race (ninth), Flèche Wallonne (13th) and Liège-Bastogne-Liège (21st), but he also tried to spend time in Clermont-Ferrand, his home at the foot of the Puy de Dôme in the Massif Central. When he went to the Pyrenees on a training camp, he took along no team-mates and above all no journalists, but his father Philippe, a teacher. On Instagram – his only communication – Bardet posted a picture of the two at the top of the Tourmalet and wrote, “The joy of sharing.” Passion and rest are likely to be the French leaders’ new secret weapon. “Maybe this is because they have nothing to lose,” Julien Pinot says. “They have both had good results in the past. This year is like a big bonus. Thibaut’s last three Tours de France have been hectic and, despite his good end of season last year - his Vuelta [sixth overall], and his Tour of Lombardy victory, he is not a favourite. I hope he will enjoy himself, just enjoy it.”
Neither has drastically changed their preparation. In fact, Pinot and Bardet can only focus on their frame of mind. In any case, they remain the two major French hopes for the general classification. Pierre Latour lost three months of competition this year because of a broken arm. Warren Barguil is far from the level that allowed him to win the polka-dot jersey in 2017 and Julian Alaphilippe is still to prove his mettle in a three-week GC campaign.
And if Pinot and Bardet collapse, it might not be the end of the world. They may join ‘les perdants magnifiques’. From bikebreaking Eugène Christophe onwards, ‘the wonderful losers’ have become a vivid and immensely popular band of riders in the French imagination. It’s win-win.
“Bardet and Pinot are turning 29 this year and coming into their best years. They are still missing TT skills to win overall, but they have a lot of experience and motivation” Cyrille Guimard