INTERVIEW: ROMAIN BARDET
“Every year in the Tour, I have a story to tell. I’m always involved”
When he picks up the phone, Romain Bardet is almost home from home. Covid-19 has narrowed all of our horizons and the Ag2r La Mondiale team is no different. A dozen of the riders - the Tour pre-selection - are on a training camp in Chambonsur-Lignon, an old Huguenot enclave in the Haute-Loire, which is the next département over from Bardet’s home in Clermont-Ferrand. In the pre-covid days, teams would think nothing of flying four or five hours south to Tenerife for training camps. Now, they’re a couple of hours’ drive on the autoroute.
Maybe Chambon has been deliberately chosen to remind Bardet and the team of happier times. Their base is the same hotel as they stayed in on the second rest day of the 2017 Tour, when Bardet lay in third overall just 0:23 behind Chris Froome following a stage to Le Puy-en-Velay, in which Ag2r had come close to distancing the Brit and his Sky team with an ambush on the Col de Peyra Taillade. Froome had never looked so vulnerable; Bardet had never looked so confident and so strong.
Bardet is talking quite a good fight now, as well. The legs, “ça va”, but he describes his psychological state as “excellent”.
There’s good news and bad news as far as the career of Romain Bardet goes. The bad first. If you were to draw a graph with years along the x-axis and Tour de France general classification results up the y-axis, and plotted Bardet’s positions on it, you could draw some uncomfortable conclusions for the Frenchman. He was 15th in 2013, then sixth, ninth, second, third, sixth in 2018 and 15th last year. Apart from the ninth place in 2015, the line between the points would be an almost perfect parabola, a U-shaped graph of steady improvement followed by an equally steady and inexorable deterioration. You don’t have to be a data scientist to see the trend. He started out 15th, and he’s ended up 15th - you could say that he’s ended up not far from where he started, so a training camp just down the road from home seems like a good place to talk about it.
The good news is that there’s more to the life and career of Romain Bardet than the Paris GC. Bardet’s results at the Tour create a lot of noise in his home country, but in between he’s picked up a Worlds silver, a podium place at Liège, fourth at Il Lombardia and a dozen WorldTour stage race top 10s. Bardet points out that there’s nothing mediocre about the seven Tours he’s raced so far - he’s stood on the podium in Paris at the end of five of them. In 2014, Ag2r La Mondiale won the teams prize, then Bardet won the Super Combativity award the following year, came second in 2016, third in 2017 and sneaked on to the 2019 podium with a late smash-and-grab on the King of the Mountains classification.
“Every year in the Tour, I have a story to tell. I’ve never been a spectator,” he says. “I’m always involved. I’ve been on the podium five times in Paris, and even with a difficult Tour last year, I won the climbers’ jersey. I’m sometimes good, sometimes it’s the opposite, but I’m never neutral in the Tour.”
Bardet is a potential Tour winner, though the race has just held him at arm’s length so far. Second in 2016 remains his best, though he finished closer to yellow in terms of time when he was third in 2017. When Froome beat him in 2016, the pair were more or less matched in the mountains, but the British rider carved out four minutes from Bardet in the time trials. The next year Bardet went into the final time trial just 23 seconds behind Froome, but took a terrible beating and only saved his podium place by a single second from Mikel Landa.
“I can’t say I can win it, but it gives me pleasure to try,” he says.
There’s an important clue to Bardet’s approach to cycling and the Tour here. He seems to get more out of trying to win in a way that suits his mindset, of getting enjoyment out of his racing, than he would from being more clinical about it. He could focus more on time trialling, which has arguably cost him two Tours, but the impression is that he’d rather have fun, or rather stay true to himself and his reasons for being in cycling coming second than turning into a robot and coming first. When Procycling asks about doing more time trial training, Bardet says, “It’s a bit boring.”
LEARNING THE ROPES
Bardet’s Tour journey started in 2013. “I was 22,” he says. “I had to work very hard, but the main thing was that I finished quite strongly. I was 15th in Paris and on the climbs I was at the level of the best 10. I think my best performance was on the final mountain stage to Semnoz, which made me think it was worth keeping working on this. I recuperated well over three weeks, which boded well for the years to come. I had time to develop, and I still had work to do if I was to win a stage. At 22, that’s normal.”
Bardet hadn’t tried to finish in the top 20, or top 15, but he’d tried to minimise the time he lost. He didn’t make the split on the second Pyrenean stage to Bagnères-deBigorre, and lost a little time, but the worst came on the flat 13th stage to Saint-Amand-Montrond.
“A real beginner’s error,” says Bardet ruefully. “I took a nature break, just as the crosswinds split the bunch up, and lost 10 minutes. Those 10 minutes would have put me in the top 10 overall.”
The 2014 Tour was much better. He maintained the consistency he’d achieved in 2013, only at a higher level, and he was very visible in the front group in the mountains. Yet his achievement in finishing sixth was overshadowed by his team-mate Jean-Christophe Péraud coming second and Thibaut Pinot, just six months older, coming third and taking the white jersey.
“Froome and Contador crashed out early; Nibali was a level above everybody else. But the rest of us were close and there wasn’t much difference between us. I was among the five or six best climbers in the mountains and apart from one minor off day I was very consistent.
“However, this was the first time I had to deal with all the attention, which was all new to me. I had the white jersey for a while; my recovery wasn’t so good day to day. But 2014 still represented my breakthrough.”
From the outside, the next Tour, looked like a disappointment. He’d started with the ambition of a high finish, but in a fraught opening week he lost over four minutes to Froome, then cracked horribly on the first mountain stage to La Pierre Saint-Martin. The Tour hadn’t even reached its halfway point, and he was already 13 minutes behind. But Bardet insists that he enjoyed this Tour more than any other. The time lost on GC liberated him and he spent the rest of the race getting into breaks and going for a stage win. Ironically, the French media had given considerable space to the psychodrama between Bardet and Pinot following their rivalry as U23s and their clash over the white jersey the year before. Pinot had found himself in the same position as Bardet, and the two both missed out at Mende when they tried too hard to drop their rivals on the steep climb then found themselves unable to counter Steve Cummings when he surged past. But Bardet got his stage win at Pra-Loup (and Pinot two days later at Alpe d’Huez).
“It was a super Tour,” says Bardet. “I’m more proud of that Tour than 2014. There was a lot of pressure
and I exploded completely on the first summit finish. I was really bad there. But I bounced back and quickly refocused. I came close at Mende, and wore the polka dots up to the eve of the finish, but Quintana and Froome were stronger than me. I got the Super Combativity award, and even if the GC was less high than other years, it was a Tour I enjoyed. Even now, I prefer to win a stage than to get fifth or sixth overall.”
The next two years are the high points, so far. If the Tour had drastically reduced their time trialling distance in 2016 or 2017, as they have the last couple of races, Bardet might have won. “I wanted to focus on the GC again to make up for 2015,” he says. “I was more experienced and I knew I was capable of being right at the front of the Tour. In 2016 the race was quite defensive, with five or six riders at the same level in the mountains, but I was opportunistic and took my chances. Over the three weeks I was at the front right the way through.
“I was even closer in 2017. It’s harder to repeat something than to do it in the first place, so to win a stage and get on the podium again was great. I hadn’t been capable of knocking Froome down in 2016, but 2017 showed me I might be capable of it. I gave everything I could and it wasn’t quite enough.
“By the Izoard, I was neither happy nor disappointed. I was in my place. I gave everything, and when you give everything, you can’t complain. But I was very tired in the Marseille time trial and I was very disappointed that day. I was ill, and tired and empty. I’d given everything on the Izoard and that Tour was one day too long.”
But the downward trajectory in GC started in 2018 and continued into 2019. “I was strong in 2018. I wasn’t far from winning on Alpe d’Huez, and was sixth on GC, which is still a pretty good performance. I wasn’t far off 2017. But I had a bad day on the short stage in the Pyrenees, there were no stage wins and no podium - the circumstances weren’t quite there.
“2019 was my first real disappointment at the Tour. I made mistakes, I was a bit ill after the Dauphiné and never recovered. Still, I won the polka dot jersey and that leaves me optimistic.
“My relationship with the Tour is still very strong. I have more to give, and I can fight for the yellow jersey. I’ve come close, and with my experience, and the right attitude and preparation, I hope my story with the Tour is not finished.”
That story will continue to be written in 2020. The plan for this year was to prioritise the Giro in an effort to revitalise his racing, but the covid-19 crisis forced a rethink.
“I’m going to the Tour now, because the team asked me to,” he laughs. Bardet tried to leave the Tour behind, but it seems the race won’t let him.
“I’m adjusting to that, and hoping for a big Tour,” he says. “You can’t plan it - too much can happen. I’m not going to say I can win it, but I know how to prepare and the results will come.”
On the surface of it, Romain Bardet is not too far from where he started - 15th in the 2013 Tour, 15th last year, contemplating another assault at the race from his team’s base in central France. But at the same time, he’s come a long way.
“I hadn’t been capable of knocking Froome down in 2016, but 2017 showed me I might be capable of it. I gave everything I could and it wasn’t quite enough”