INTERVIEW: CALEB EWAN
Caleb Ewan became the most successful sprinter at the Tour de France this summer, winning three stages on his long- awaited debut in the race. The Australian tells Procycling about the pressure of living up to high expectations
We speak to the Australian rider who stood head and shoulders above his sprinting rivals this year, with three Tour stage victories
Caleb Ewan didn’t go to a string of booze-fuelled A-List parties or rub shoulders in Premier League football corporate boxes following his commanding Tour de France debut this summer.
“Unfortunately, not,” he laughs. Save for a McDonald’s run and trip to a nightclub with team-mates the night the Tour finished in Paris, Ewan faced something more grounding in the aftermath of his three-stage haul with new team Lotto Soudal: fatherhood.
The 25-year-old left for the Tour before his first child, born six weeks prematurely, was discharged from hospital. When we speak over the phone in late October, he is multi-tasking as parents do. Ewan is talking about his third stage win, on the Champs-Elysées, the turf of sprinting immortals, when his daughter, Lily, begins to cry in the background. “Sorry, I just had to wake her up from a nap,” he says.
The Australian was new to fatherhood and new to the Tour but not new to cycling or fame when he arrived at the grand départ in Brussels. In the leadup, his delayed debut was much discussed - at least as much as his subsequent victories on stages 11, 16 and 21, where he finally lived up to the hype that has long surrounded his name.
Ewan had been due to compete at the 2018 Tour with MitcheltonScott. However, the team he turned professional with in 2015 reneged on the selection at the last minute having previously said Ewan would be given a race start. The management cited performance for the omission, amid rumours that Ewan had already signed with Lotto Soudal for the 2019 season. The transfer was confirmed soon after.
The anticipation surrounding Ewan’s Tour debut didn’t just begin in 2018, however. Ewan talks about the pressure having started to mount much further back than that, as he reflects on his debut season while still a teenager.
“My Tour de France debut has been spoken about since I first ever won Bay Crits [in 2013]. Even from then - not that I deserved to have people talking about me going to the Tour de France at that point - people always just jumped to the biggest conclusion,” he says.
Ewan was 18 when he won the Bay Crits, a summer criterium series in Victoria, beating established professionals to earn headline plaudits and comparisons thenceforth.
“I saw heaps of people getting asked, do they think that I’ll be able to go to the Tour de France and win. And this is when I was still a teenager,” he continues. “Growing up in Australia, the Tour de France seems like a pretty distant, almost unachievable thing. It is so far away to start with, and cycling is not really a huge sport in Australia. The closest you get to it is on the TV. It’s not like the European riders, who probably have all experienced going to the Tour de France as a kid or being up close.
“But then after I won Bay Crits and that kind of thing, people being asked the question whether they think I could go and do well there, that’s when I started believing that I could definitely get there.”
He adds: “I didn’t know how well I’d do.”
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Ewan is a prodigious talent who joined the WorldTour straight out of the Australian sports academy. Often such an institutionalised rearing can come at the expense of maturity and general awareness, but he is remarkably reasoned, open and astute.
In a race Ewan is a real, redrag-to-a-bull sprinter. He quickly transitioned from idolising champions he’d watched on television, to seeing them merely as rivals to quash.
“I’m a pretty calm person for a sprinter. I’ve got a good switch that I can be calm when I need to be and feisty when I need to be also,” he says.
10 WINS IN 2019 FOR CALEB EWAN
However, he is unlike Mark Cavendish, André Greipel or Marcel Kittel before him. Dissimilar to Greipel, who Ewan superseded at Lotto Soudal, his confidence isn’t fragile. He’s not as modest or diplomatic as Kittel was, nor intense and feverish like Cavendish.
Ewan is 5ft 4in tall, and his diminutive aerodynamic position, refined through wind tunnel testing, has long drawn comparison to Cavendish’s, even though Ewan doesn’t believe he is that ’aero’ any more.
“As far as that extreme position goes, maybe only if I’m really starting to fade, I’ll start to go aero, but this year I timed my sprints pretty well. I’m happy with my path to the line and that’s ideally what you want,” Ewan says.
Ewan won a stage at the Vuelta a España as a neo-pro in 2015 and a stage at the 2017 Giro d’Italia, and he finished second behind
Vincenzo Nibali at Milan-San Remo in 2018. He won a further two stages at the Giro this spring. Yet he had to wait four years and leave Mitchelton-Scott, which placed emphasis on slow development to avoid spoiled promise, to arrive at the Tour.
“[Mitchelton-Scott] wanted to be a GC team and I’m a sprinter. It was working for the first few years but then when I really wanted to excel and go to big races that’s when I felt there was pushback from the team,” he says.
“Now when I look back, I think they weren’t holding me back for my best interest, they were using that as an excuse because they had different plans.
“Look at Remco [Evenepoel], he’s 19 and he can win big races. I’m not comparing to him, he’s at a different level to most riders, but that’s just the thing: young riders don’t need 10 years of development. We can win straight away, we can come into the sport from a young age and go straight into the big races, and sometimes you just need to be thrown into the deep end anyway.”
Ewan’s view speaks to his inherent ability. However, the WorldTour peloton is a kid’s kingdom now. If you were born before the mid-1990s, you’re old.
“I had to take the risk to move on because I wasn’t - as far as performance goes - getting what I needed from the team,” he says.
“I’m a little bit surprised that I won three [Tour] stages in my first year, but I definitely believed I’d at least win something.
“Look at Remco Evenepoel... that’s just the thing. Young riders don’t need 10 years of development. We can win straight away”
I went there very ready. It’s almost like if you’re starting school three years later than you should have, you’re probably going to be more ready than you were three years before.”
TAKING THE LEAD
Greipel, in an almost unheard of move for champions, offered to work for Ewan at Lotto Soudal as part of his lead-out. But when he wasn’t asked by the team he took his own chances at Arkéa-Samsic. Ewan makes a point of being considerate when probed about the elder statesman’s proposal.
“When I was signing with the team it was something that the team spoke about and I was happy for him to stay; he is someone that I could have learned a lot from,” Ewan says.
“But in that sense as well, I don’t think he was ready to be a lead-out man and he’s not a lead-out man, he’s a sprinter. He’s one of the best sprinters in the world. Sprinters don’t change like that. Sprinters don’t go from being one of the best sprinters in the world, to next year, ‘Oh, I want to lead out this young guy who is coming to the team,’ when he’s been the main guy of the team for so long.
“I think the team almost needed, with the changeover from André to me, a clear-cut change. It was like a whole new team was beginning again. I think their plan with me is probably to do the same as with André, go a long time with the team and develop,” he concludes.
Yet Greipel’s departure consequently meant Ewan was able to maximise his race schedule and position in the squad, which went through a generational turnover, with fewer constraints.
“I had so much flexibility. Whatever race I wanted to do I could do,” he says. “I’m definitely not a natural leader but I like to do things my way. For example, Lotto with Greipel, he was a different sprinter to me, so they know it would be wrong of them to use tactics they’d use with him. They trust I know what I’m doing. Even at the start of the year, when it was not going so good, they constantly backed me.
“In [meetings] I say exactly what I want and most of the time the riders will agree with me.
Everyone has their own ideas so sometimes there are disagreements, but that’s good. I wouldn’t want them to sit there and say, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ If they did that it’s almost like they don’t care any more. It’s good you have feedback from them, things that they think can be better because that means that they care.”
SLOW OFF THE BLOCKS
Ewan returned to the Giro in May, following an inadvertent break from grand tours in 2018, and won stage 8 and 11. However, those triumphs barely rate mention as he recalls his season, placing more emphasis on the Tour of Turkey in April. The standards Ewan holds himself up to are clearly ruthless.
“The two wins I had in Turkey were the ones that really got the ball rolling,” he says.
“The start of the season actually wasn’t great. I came to this team as the big rider to get some wins and almost half the year had gone, and I hadn’t delivered anything for them.
I’d delivered one win for them, which wasn’t really enough, so the pressure was on.”
Ewan marked an unofficial victory in his first race with Lotto Soudal, the prelude criterium to the Tour Down Under. On stage
5 of Down Under he was waiting to grace the podium’s top step when he learned he’d been relegated for headbutting Jasper Philipsen of UAE Emirates in the finale. Ewan’s first win came on stage 4 of the UAE Tour with a steep, uphill sprint at Hatta Dam, which topped out at 17 per cent within the last 200m.
“I went to Turkey not in great form because I was trying to peak for the Giro. To get the two wins there got my confidence back, they were pretty hard wins as well,” he continues.
“In the Giro it was exactly the same as the Tour. It started off slow but in the end my persistence paid off.”
It’s not until Ewan explicitly spells out what he navigated in the lead-up to and during his Tour debut that it’s possible to really understand the weight of the pressure he was suffering, quite apart from the race.
“I went there with my new team; I went there as a clear leader for the team to get them their results. They’d just had André there for the last eight years who’d won them, I think, 12 Tour de France stages [11 – ed]
“My lead-up to the Tour, it wasn’t anywhere near ideal...I had a really rough run up. There was so much stress, it wasn’t healthy”
so I’m following on from that,” Ewan says.
“I’ve got the media looking at me thinking, is he going to do as well as he thought he was going to the year before, or is he going to get there, do nothing, and were Mitchelton right to leave him at home? As well with my lead-up to the Tour, it wasn’t anywhere near ideal, I had a lot of sh*t going on that I couldn’t plan for with my daughter. I had a really rough run up until the Tour. There was so much stress leading into the Tour, it wasn’t healthy.”
As Ewan says, his Tour got off to a slow start where he finished so near but so far from a win repeatedly during the first week; he finished third, third, second and third before he cracked his first win in Toulouse on stage 11, the first day back after the first rest day. The win came ahead of Dylan Groenewegen and Elia Viviani, the two most successful sprinters of the last two years.
“I’m proud of the way I dealt with that and performed through it, especially when the first half I hadn’t won and obviously I needed to win,” he continues.
Ewan brought chief lead-out pilot Roger Kluge with him to Lotto Soudal from Mitchelton and counts on an inner circle comprising his parents, wife and manager, but no mentors, who could have helped navigate the pitfalls and pressure. “I actually deal with a lot of stuff just by myself. It’s the way I’ve always been. I don’t know if it’s a good thing, maybe it’s better if I speak to someone, I don’t know, but when I finished the Tour it was the biggest relief of my life.”
ENDING ON A HIGH
Ewan completed his season in September with a win at the Brussels Cycling Classic, a ‘home’ triumph for his team and his single one-day victory of the year.
“I was actually quite lucky I won there because I don’t think I was the strongest, but tactically I got it right. That’s the thing with cycling, sometimes you’re the strongest and you can’t win and sometimes you’re definitely not the strongest and you can win,” he says.
Ewan recognises that he was the best sprinter of the 2019 Tour but is reluctant to cast that superiority further over the peloton, which, dissimilar to previous generations, now has a surplus of young, evenlymatched fast men. At the moment, there’s no sprint king - it’s more of a sprint oligarchy.
“I didn’t win the most races this year out of the sprinters; Dylan won 14 or 15, Sam Bennett won 13, [Pascal] Ackermann won 12 or 13. But if I look at all the other sprinters, I would take my wins of this year over theirs,” he says.
Ewan won 10 races, five at grand tours, but it’s the three he won at the Tour which suggest that he is entering a new phase in his career. He’s no longer the up-andcoming star who is unproven in the biggest race in the world. He’s arguably the sprinter of 2019. Now he’s up and running at the Tour, Caleb Ewan is burning brightly, not burning out.