INTERVIEW: EGAN BERNAL
With victories in the Tour de France, Tour de Suisse and Paris-Nice this year, Egan Bernal is arguably the rider of the year and he is currently spearheading the generation of new young riders in professional cycling. How did the 22-year-old get to the pi
How the Colombian became the youngest Tour winner in 110 years this summer
You were the youngest rider in the 2018 Tour de France and the second youngest in the 2019 edition. Does winning so much at your age make you more relaxed, because you’ve got a lot of time ahead in your career and you’ve achieved so much already, or does it make you hungrier to win more in the years to come?
Egan Bernal: Neither. I will continue racing with the same attitude that I’ve always had. I’ve always wanted to win races, I’ve always wanted to train, too, and regardless of whether I’m winning or not, those feelings haven’t changed.
PC: There are a lot of young riders making a massive impact on professional cycling right now and lots of theories as to why that’s happening. One is that with so much more physiological information and data available these days, it’s no longer necessary to be an experienced racer, like it used to be in the past, in order to be able to win. Do you agree?
EB: No, at least not in my case. Data and technology, all that stuff about watts and power output - I don’t think a young rider is going to win because he’s constantly looking at how many watts he’s producing. Rather, I think young riders are winning more these days because teams are giving them bigger opportunities at an earlier age, sometimes right from when they are neo-pros. They believe in them at a much younger age than before. I don’t know much about what cycling was like back in the day because I am young myself and new on the scene. But in my case at least, you can explain my success thanks to my team having so much faith in me, and because the experience I’m lacking in racing is transmitted to me through my team-mates. They’re constantly keeping me at the head of the peloton, telling me whether I need to move to the left or right in the bunch or when to eat. All the stuff I need to learn to be a better racer, they teach me.
So I have that 100 per cent support from the team and my team-mates make sure I’m doing what I need to do. Rather than technology and data, which might work for them, that’s how it works for me.
PC: In previous interviews you’ve mentioned in your first two years racing in Europe, 2016 and 2017, that guys like Franco Pellizotti and other riders and management in Androni Giocattoli were key to getting you off to a good start...
EB: That’s very much the case. That team was my first of any kind as a road racer, and I learned a massive amount. The team trusted me 100 per cent, to the point where they took me to almost all the races which suited me the best.
I could always count on the support of Giovanni Ellena, the Androni director. And even more than that, he became a great friend who backed me up on and off the bike, for example, by making sure I was living in a great place with really good people during my time with the team. In those first two years, the team helped me hugely and made sure I wasn’t too stressed out about anything. As for Pelli [Pellizotti], even though I only had one season with him, I learned a lot from him.
PC: Talking of Androni, you’re in Italy right now, and I imagine people are asking you a lot about the Giro d’Italia. Rather than focussing 100 per cent on the Tour, could the Giro form part of your plans in the future?
EB: Of course, some day I’ll have to race it. But we’re talking about the Giro d’Italia, one of the three big stage races of the year. It requires a lot of preparation, and you can’t make the decision to race it lightly. The Tour is the Tour, as everybody says, but there’s the Giro and the Vuelta a España, too. Deciding what I do and when, though, will have to
“Being the defending champion of the Tour, I should be there in July. But if the Giro route suits me better and the team want me to go there, then I’ll do the Giro”
go hand in hand with what the team want me to do and which race suits me best, but bearing in mind, too, there could be some years when the route of the Giro suits me better than the Tour. Sometimes it’ll be the opposite and the Tour will suit me more. We have to play around with both of those factors, but either way, the Giro will surely, at some point, come into my plans.
PC: So what will your decision for which grand tours you do in 2020 depend on?
EB: First we’ll have to look at the routes and it’s hard to say what I’ll do yet, without knowing what they
are like. I’ve yet to talk to the team and with Dave [Brailsford] to plan next year. Once we’ve looked at the routes, then we’ll plan what suits each of us, depending on each rider’s characteristics and the team’s needs. For now it’s hard to say anything. I’ve already said that being the defending champion of the Tour I should be there in July. But if the Tour route isn’t so great for me and the Giro route suits me better and the team wants me to go there, then I’ll do the Giro. In any case, I’ll work it all out with the team.
PC: This year’s Tour was a real rollercoaster for everybody with lots of sudden changes, lots of
drama and no clear outcome emerging until very late in the day. But on a personal note, is it fair to say the stage in the Alps to Tignes, where you went from riding clear, descending the Iseran, then getting stopped, getting off the bike and into a car, driven to the finish and getting the lead, was the most memorable of them all?
EB: Yes. That stage was the one where the team had finally given me freedom of manoeuvre, whereas all the previous ones I had to keep calm and wait for my moment further down the line. So I wanted to attack and that morning I got the green light from the team to do that and go all out for the win. But then everything that happened, happened. Imagine what it feels like to be finally on the attack like I wanted to be, and my legs were feeling great, then somebody drives up and tells you have to stop and
that the race has been neutralised. And then on top of that, I ended up being in the yellow jersey. I’m never going to forget that day and how I got the lead.
PC: Was there any point before July, like in the Tour de Suisse, maybe, where you maybe felt that this could be a really special Tour de France for you?
EB: No. The Tour was very much a question of taking things little by little. Or you could say taking things very little by very little. When I got to the Tour de Suisse, I didn’t feel that brilliant at all. I’d been doing an awful lot of endurance work at home in Colombia, getting a lot of kilometres in but training with very little intensity. The idea was to acquire that intensity in Suisse, and obviously, finally it worked out and I won. But in the first day, in the prologue… oof! I felt terrible because I hadn’t made that kind of intense effort since the Volta a Catalunya. Even in the Tour in the first half I didn’t feel fantastic. Instead the idea was to go on building up until the final week in the Alps, which I knew had the toughest stages of the whole race
My trainer designed a perfect build-up for that last part of the Tour for me. Because that was the crucial part with stages where riders weren’t going to lose 10 or five seconds - the gaps were going to measured in minutes.
PC: On a bigger scale, for the people of Colombia, what does your winning the Tour de France mean?
EB: It’s been incredibly important finally to get the country’s first ever Tour de France victory. Up to now our hopes were mainly based around Nairo [Quintana], who’d been the closest to getting the win and had been so many times on the podium, and there was also Rigo [Urán] as a contender as well. So when I suddenly appeared on the scene, that was a real surprise because not many people had heard of me, and a lot of them were saying, ‘Who is this young guy who’s won the Tour? We thought it was going to be Nairo.’ But it was very special that somebody could finally do it, and for Colombia it was something that was widely appreciated.
PC: Your trainer, Xabi Artetxe, once told me that one of the things he likes the most about you is that you only need to hear instructions once and then you understand them and stick to them. Is this something you feel has helped you?
EB: As a cyclist, when you’re young, you have to let others guide you. In a team like Ineos which gives me the opportunity to go to the Tour de France and be co-leader, and where I have a trainer like Xabi Artetxe who sits me down and explains to me exactly and in great detail how I should prepare, and he convinces me and tells me how this will work in the Tour, what else should I do but follow those instructions? The team has won seven Tours now over the years and so you could say they’ve got a lot of experience and knowledge. Obviously I provide feedback, I tell them if I think what they advise is working or not. But the most important thing is there’s mutual trust between me and the team.
PC: One of the things that people most remarked on about your victory speech in the Tour was that you could speak so many languages - French, Spanish, Italian and English. You didn’t speak much English when you joined the team, how is that progressing?
EB: Very well. I prefer to talk in Spanish, obviously, if I’m at home. But when I’m in a race or if we’re eating dinner at a race, we talk in English and even if I don’t speak it brilliantly, I can get by very well and I even do some interviews in English. Then I spent two years in Italy so
I can speak Italian, while French is a language I’d like to learn because of the Tour de France. I also like speaking different languages, anyway, and if it’s good for my job to do that, then why not?
PC: Can you tell us a little bit about what Egan Bernal does when he’s off the bike? Could you maybe recommend us a book or a film you’ve read or seen recently?
EB: I read a bit of everything but lately I’ve been a bit lazy about getting my hands on a good book. I can’t really recommend one because if
I do people will think I like this or that subject or I like a certain type of film, when basically I just keep my eyes open for what’s kicking around. If somebody lends me some kind of book, horror or whatever, the genre, I’ll read it. But it doesn’t have to be about a specific subject.
PC: Talking of writers, one of Colombia’s most famous personalities, novelist Gabriel García Márquez, studied journalism like you and once did a massive [35 hours in total, published in 14 sections in the newspaper El
Espectador - Ed] interview with cyclist Ramón Hoyos, five-times winner of the Vuelta a Colombia in the 1950s.
EB: García Marquez is one of Colombia’s most famous writers. He won the Nobel Prize, and I think he actually studied for a while in my
hometown, Zipaquirá, too. But although at school we studied some of his work, novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude, I don’t think I’ve read his work on cycling, though people have talked to me about it.
PC: With so many leaders, is communication going to be critical next year in Team Ineos, particularly when it comes to who leads the team in each race and at the Tour? That area worked well this season, so how do you see it all working out next year with Froome, when he comes back from his injuries?
EB: I don’t think there are going to be any big problems about that next year. It’s true that we will have three winners of the Tour de France in the same team, and one winner of the Giro d’Italia, with Richard Carapaz, too. Richard deserves not just a bit of respect from us, but a lot, for having managed to win the Giro.
But there are three grand tours on the calendar, it’s not all got to be about the Tour de France. The Giro is a very important, beautiful race too and even if we all had to race in the Tour - look, we’re all professionals, and it’s the team that will make decisions like who is the leader and who isn’t. It won’t be too hard for us to work out who’s first, second or third in the pecking order. If we all end up on an hour-long climb in the Tour, say, the rider who’s strongest is sure to be the rider who’s furthest ahead on the climb.
The way I see it, the team knows how to manage high-level riders in the same race, and that won’t change much next year. Also if you look at Froome’s character, he’s a champion, but he’s really laid back and he’s somebody with whom you can talk things through. The same goes for G [Geraint Thomas] and the same goes for me. If somebody is stronger than me, then what can I do? I could tell the guys to go flat out because I want to win the Tour, but I’d be the one who ends up getting dropped when there’s still a group of 20 riders on the front. So we’ll have to see how it goes, but I don’t think there will be any problems with that.