INTERVIEW: ELIA VIVIANI
Elia Viviani capped the most prolific two seasons of his career with a long- awaited Tour de France stage win this summer. But all is set to change in 2020 for the European champion, who tells Procycling what he’s targeting next
How the Italian finally broke through to the top level by winning his debut Tour stage this year
Elia Viviani is a perfectionist. For years he has been dreaming of winning a Tour de France stage, of returning to the race where he hadn’t started since 2014 and finally clinching a victory, one that would confirm he is among cycling’s top sprinters and the fastest in the world. Not that we didn’t know already: as of last year, Viviani already had multiple victories in the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España, but the Tour is a different beast, the competition is the strongest of the year, at the highest level, and winning there was the obvious target for him; the natural next step. So after Viviani finally clinched the elusive win on stage 4 of the race in Nancy this year, you’d expect he’d be elated and eager to talk about it. But instead, when Procycling sits down with the Italian and asks about that July day, he makes one short reference to the win before seamlessly switching in the next breath to talk, at length, about stage 10 in Albi. That day he didn’t win, which makes his eagerness to talk about it all the more surprising, as he ended up on the wrong side of a photo finish behind Wout Van Aert. The loss is clearly taking up more of Viviani’s headspace than the win. Like we said: perfectionist.
“I’m really, really happy with my Tour de France,” Viviani says. “I probably missed that win in Albi because I think it could have been a really nice win. It was a really hard stage, 3,000 metres up and down, then the crosswinds, a really hectic final, and losing on the line to a big champion like Van Aert is okay but still, if I reflect, that win was one that got away.”
Viviani’s instinct to speak first about the things that went wrong, rather than those that went right, is perhaps a sign of how high his standards of performance are these days. After years of being a nearly-man and a sprinter who was prolific but hadn’t yet broken into the A list, Viviani has been on an upward trajectory ever since he won gold at the Rio Olympics in 2016. That victory in the omnium on the track partly explains the delay in him breaking through to the top level on the road, but once he’d transferred to DeceuninckQuick Step in 2017, his success snowballed. He won 18 races in 2018, including seven grand tour stages and the Italian tricolore, before winning a debut Tour stage and becoming European champion this summer. With so much success in the past two years - he has 19 WorldTour race wins since the start of 2018, compared with just eight during the whole of the rest of his career - that prolific record explains why he’s not content to just win one stage.
“The first one I won, it was a clear sprint, with the perfect lead-out. The guys probably won this stage, 90 per cent, for the job they did,” he continues. “Stage 10 was kind of a different sprint, it was a really chaotic one, really hectic in the crosswind with the team and it was a totally different stage. It was a good one to win but we lost on the line.”
LEARNING LESSONS
Viviani had a less than perfect build up to the Tour this year, after a disappointing Giro which saw him finish four times in the top four without winning, before he left the race early on stage 12 - all while wearing the jersey of the Italian national champion. He’d
crossed the line first on stage 3 but was subsequently disqualified, leaving a reluctant Fernando Gaviria to take the plaudits. The race was quite a contrast to the previous year, when Viviani won four stages and the points jersey. Back in May, the dejected 30-yearold said he “lacked self belief”.
Sprinters, more than any other riders in the peloton, are expected to win and win often. It’s a resultsbased existence that means often, when things are not going well, it’s easy for riders to spiral further into a hole that self perpetuates into even worse performances, as Viviani found this spring.
“We can’t say in the Giro I was not fast because in the end I lost the first one against Ackermann on the line, I won the second one in front of Gaviria and all the bigger sprinters [before being disqualified] but then after that, I lost a little bit of confidence,” he says. “From that I did second, second, [fourth].”
Three years ago Viviani found himself in a similar position. He missed the time cut and got eliminated on stage 8 of the Giro just a few months before the Olympics and was left questioning his form. But the lessons he learned then and the resilience he found to bounce back and win gold in Rio proved important. This year, after a few days off with his family at home in Monaco he switched his mindset to look ahead for new goals, something to work towards that would refocus his attitude, just as he did in 2016.
“When something goes wrong I am really good at analysing why, but at the same time resetting, forgetting it and working much harder for the next goal. That happened in the Giro this year. I understood the Giro didn’t go the right way for me, I was just thinking what could be the next target, and the next one was the Tour de France. I went home and reset everything. I didn’t read all the comments about how I didn’t do well at the Giro in the tricolore jersey. I always think that is something that is not respected. When a rider needs to stop he needs to stop,” Viviani says. “Only I know, probably the people closest to me know, what the feeling is in that moment. I just did four, five days in Monaco at home without the bike, with nothing, just the family.”
He says this break was as much for the psychological benefits as the physical, both important attributes for a sprinter.
He continues: “You need to find some new motivation. In that moment you just think, ‘Last time I was doing really badly, what happened afterwards? I won the Olympics.’ So try to do the same, and the results will come. When something goes wrong, you can easily give up.”
Viviani is an engaging interviewee. His time in teams as international as Sky and Deceuninck-Quick Step have given him an almost perfect grasp of English, and he talks at a quick pace with answers given at length. He is willing to offer in-depth opinion on almost anything asked of him. His ability to analyse and communicate the intricacies of a sprint finish, too, is by far one of the most comprehensive and like Mark Cavendish, he can talk you through the seconds of a sprint as if time was slowed down. He doesn’t shy away from topics, either. When Procycling meets him, halfway through the summer, he’s in the midst of a curious period. Despite enjoying the two most successful and prolific years of his career at Quick Step, it’s been confirmed he’s leaving the team at the end of the year. The rumours, which would be proved true a few weeks later, are that he is joining Cofidis. At the time, Viviani admitted he didn’t necessarily want to leave
the Belgian squad. “I feel great in the team and I want to stay, but we have to come to an agreement and that didn’t work out,” he told Sporza during the Tour.
Taking this into account, it’s hard to not notice that throughout the time we’re talking, Viviani continually makes reference to his lead-out riders, notably Michael Mørkøv, Fabio Sabatini and Max Richeze. Richeze spent 18 days with Viviani at altitude in Livigno after the Giro, training hard for the Tour. Road captain Mørkøv organised Viviani’s Tour win in Nancy, directing the team in the final kilometres, including ordering Julian Alaphilippe to the front when he was in the yellow jersey, to help set up the sprint. Mørkøv particularly has been Viviani’s right-hand man, and both joined Quick Step at the same time. Together they have clocked up 127 race days, and all of Viviani’s big victories have come with the Dane alongside him.
Only Sabatini is following Viviani to Cofidis, however, and it’s hard not to presume that the loss of these team-mates could make replicating the success he’s had recently a tricky prospect next year. Viviani is one of the best sprinters in the world, but Cofidis is not Deceuninck.
“It’s a big loss, 100 per cent,” Viviani acknowledges. “It’s a mix of experience, they are super fast. For sure Michael and Max and Saba can sprint on their own and do a top 10 every sprint, but they do this job and they make the
difference to this job. It’s going to be a big loss for sure, I think it is Michael, mainly Michael I am going to miss.”
The trust and relationship between sprinter and lead-out is an important one, too, and Viviani insists his friendship with all three riders is part of the reason they’ve all worked so well. “The value of riders like Max, like Michael, is really high. It’s really what a sprinter wants to have in the lead-out for all of his career. That is really difficult to find or rebuild with another guy.”
It raises the question then: why is Viviani leaving? Deceuninck boss Patrick Lefevere insisted that the issue came down to money; he has a track record of never keeping a rider he can’t afford regardless of how successful they might be. Marcel Kittel and Fernando Gaviria are two previous riders who also moved on. There’s another thing that high-profile, departing riders from Lefevere’s team also have in common: less success elsewhere. Kittel never found his sprinting legs and confidence again after leaving, and Gaviria’s best results remain those he achieved on the Belgian team. Viviani, meanwhile, might not have wanted to leave but he insists he now needs to focus on the future.
“I am going to try and rebuild a super strong group, and I am quite sure we can redo it,” Viviani says. “When I have guys like that it’s as if my chances to win in the sprint are doubled. I feel sorry but at the same time I really want to think positively and I am sure we can build a group close to this one to win a lot of races.”
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
When Procycling last met Viviani, in the midst of his Belgian classics campaign in spring 2018, he outlined a list of goals he was targeting; a stage win in all three grand tours, Gent Wevelgem and Milan-San Remo. With the Tour win this summer completing his grand tour hat-trick, the two classics remain elusive and will be central to Viviani’s 2020 plans, before he aims to return to his track roots and compete at the Tokyo Olympics.
Although Viviani was an agonisingly close runner-up in Gent-Wevelgem in 2018, his best finish in San Remo was ninth in 2017; otherwise he recorded 108th, 108th, 84th, 19th and 65th in the preceding editions. He admits that cracking La Primavera will not be easy. In 2018, Viviani found himself in the bunch, fighting for second place behind Vincenzo Nibali, but when the sprint began, after 300km, he had nothing left and couldn’t even get out of the saddle. San Remo is a battle of endurance; Viviani knows he needs to work on his resistance so as not to lose power when he sprints at the end of such a long race, although that may come at the temporary sacrifice of his punchy acceleration.
“The point is always a good balance, because if you work a lot on resistance, you are
“I am going to try and rebuild a super strong group, and I am quite sure we can redo it”
probably going to lose something in the sprint, and that means if I lose a stage in Tour Down Under, a stage in Abu Dhabi, a stage in Tirreno, things like that, I probably wouldn’t have the confidence to go to San Remo and win,” he explains.
“But at the same time if you work on resistance you have one reason to lose the big, big, power you have for the sprint. It is about balance, and after these two seasons I can take this risk. That is a point we can work on all through winter.”
In his favour, at Cofidis, he should enjoy full team support in San Remo. At Deceuninck, he was the strongest option if the race came down to a bigger sprint, but riders like Alaphilippe and Gilbert also had protection towards the finish. Whatever happens in 2020 and beyond, and whether Viviani enjoys as much success at his new Cofidis team as he has had at Deceuninck, are complete unknowns. But nothing will take away from the fact that Viviani is now a Tour de France stage winner. Many successful sprinters have won repeatedly elsewhere, but never won in France. And Viviani isn’t taking that for granted.
“It’s the only one I was missing. I won in the Giro, I won in the Vuelta, the Tour I did just in 2014 and to be back here as a leader, with the super lead-out, it was pretty emotional to win. To have the support of this team, in front of my parents, I think it was a really big step for my career,” he says. “To win in the Tour de France you understand… you can be a great champion when you win at the Tour de France.”