BROAD HORIZONS
What’s Julian Alaphilippe good at, and what’s he going to achieve? Procycling looks at the choices facing the world’s best all-rounder
There’s a temptation to be reductive with bike racing, because it’s a way of making sense of a complex sport. We compartmentalise the riders: sprinter, climber, rouleur, puncheur. But nearly all riders fall in the overlaps. Peter Sagan is a sprinterpuncheur; Tom Boonen was a sprinterrouleur. But only Julian Alaphilippe is a sprinter-climber-rouleur-puncheur.
Alaphilippe’s good at everything. He’s won uphill finishes, TTs, stage races, flat finishes, gravel races, classics and Tour mountain stages. He’s never raced the cobbles, but he says he’d like to, and would you really bet against him winning one?
This breadth of ability is rare. But it’s not going to make planning a career easy. Even Alaphilippe can’t be expected to win MilanSan Remo, the cobbled classics, the Ardennes and the Tour de France. At least not in one season. That means that over the course of his career, he may shift his focus.
In the 2018 Tour, as the reigning Flèche champion, Alaphilippe was the favourite for stages 5 and 6, lumpy stages with uphill finishes in Brittany. He was thereabouts, but fifth and fourth were comparatively disappointing. However, he’d actually had his eye on targets further into the Tour - the two mountain stages without summit finishes, in Le Grand-Bornand and Bagnères-de-Luchon. By the time he won these, along with the polka-dot jersey, we’d forgotten that he’d been supposed to win the stages for puncheurs, not climbers. But he did serve notice that he would not be typecast in an interview with L’Équipe during that Tour: “I’m not going to base my whole career on winning Flèche and Liège.”
He could have been forgiven if he had focused on those races, along with the other hillier classics of the season. He first really came to the attention of the cycling world when he came second in the two Ardennes races in 2015, even if it took him another three years to finally win Flèche, and he’s still not won Liège. He’s won Strade Bianche and San Sebastián, neither of which presents physical challenges too dissimilar to Flèche and Liège - all have punchy hills, and so are well suited to the best puncheur in the world. The Worlds,
depending on the course, also tends to favour puncheurs. If Alaphilippe was so inclined, he could make a career of these hilly races, because his natural physical gifts as a puncheur are so rare.
The French physiologist Fred Grappe defined a puncheur as a rider who can combine a high lactic tolerance with a good VO2 Max. “Their efforts are a minute or less,” he said. “Comparable to a 400-metre runner. It’s the distance most feared by runners because it’s the most violent effort - it provokes deep pain and you have to be able to tolerate that.” Grappe also added that the mental ability to withstand the pain is as crucial a part of the puncheur’s armoury as the physical. “You don’t become a puncheur,” he continued, “In a peloton of 100 pros, there are only around five riders who have this ability.”
But Alaphilippe has already broadened his repertoire to both flatter and hillier one-day races. He won Milan-San Remo last year and was second to Vincenzo Nibali in Il Lombardia 2017. San Remo is always a bit of a lottery, so a repeat win is possible rather than probable, but he probably wouldn’t have to change much in order to win Liège, Lombardia and the Worlds.
Alaphilippe can potentially map out a career which could involve winning San Remo, Liège, Lombardia and the Worlds - four out of the biggest six one-day races in cycling. It would be impressive, though not vanishingly rare - 18 riders have won a combination of four or more of these races.
But when Alaphilippe told L’Équipe that his horizons extended beyond the summit of the Mur de Huy, he also said that the cobbled classics, “the Tour of Flanders, more than Paris-Roubaix”, were on his radar. His coach, Franck Alaphilippe, said Flanders was possible. “Physically the Ardennes suit him best, but the Flemish races attract him more. The way they are raced suits his character,” he said.
He also pointed out that his DeceuninckQuick Step team are the best in the world at these races. Against Alaphilippe: if it’s the Tour of Flanders that he is setting his sights on, it will still be a very complicated challenge. Both Nibali and Valverde, grand tour and hilly classics winners, tried and failed in the Flemish race - you need experience to win. The winners tend to be bigger riders, who have excellent seated power - Alaphilippe’s dancing climbing style might work on asphalt, but the cobbled bergs of Flanders will bounce him all over the place. Paris-Roubaix? Surely impossible, for now.
So Alaphilippe has realistic hopes of winning five of the sport’s six biggest one-day races. He has also already won week-long stage races, and he could envisage winning every single one on the WorldTour.
However, his ride in the Tour last year has complicated things. His two weeks in the yellow jersey and his ability to match the best all the way to the Alps were revelatory. But those who predicted that
“Physically the Ardennes suit him the best, but the Flemish races attract him more. The way they are raced suits his character” Franck Alaphilippe
the longer, higher climbs of the Alps would find him out were right. Even with two major climbs excised from the race after landslides, he shipped 5:24 to eventual winner Egan Bernal in two days, essentially on just two climbs. There was also the small matter of how he gained his time - through incessant attacking through the first half of the race, then a supreme performance on a punchy time trial route in Pau (he’s a good time triallist, and Pau should not have been a surprise - he won a similar TT in ParisNice). But this is not an easy way to win a backloaded grand tour - there’s a saying in cycling that a rider wins a grand tour with the energy he saves, rather than the energy he expends. The paradox of Alaphilippe as a grand tour contender right now is that he can’t be in a position to win one unless he expends a lot of energy chipping away seconds, and if he expends a lot of energy chipping away seconds, he can’t be in a position to win one.
He’s currently vulnerable on long climbs. This is trainable, but Franck Alaphilippe said that to do so would risk the assets that make him stand out elsewhere.
In short, Alaphilippe would have to change to win the Tour, and as he has said in the preceding interview, he hasn’t changed since he can remember. But there is one more possibility. ASO were not blind to the excitement that followed Alaphilippe around France at their race last year. The 2019 route was good for Alaphilippe until the Alps. Maybe future routes will be good for Alaphilippe all the way to Paris.