Eight stages into La Vuelta, I was having mental battles. I was not happy. I thought to myself, there is no way I’m going to finish this race. I was in the pits, sad, just hating bike racing. I didn’t want to speak to anyone on stage 8, the Igualada stage.
It was one of my lowest points of the year.
No, it was one of the lowest points of my career.
The truth is, things have come so easy for me until now. From racing national series in Australia to racing at Continental level, winning races and turning pro, winning in the Alps then almost getting a top 10 in the Giro – as a neo-pro.
Of course, I’ve worked hard but at the same time it has felt effortless.
Now I was facing proper hardship for the first time in my career. The whole of 2019 has been hardship and things not coming easily. Before, success just came naturally. Was I lucky before? I don’t know.
I asked Ben King during La Vuelta, how often he’d thought of quitting bike racing as a pro? He said, “All the time. But you need to be stubborn and eventually, something will turn if you do all the right things”.
He was right.
The following day was the Andorra stage. I have an apartment there and know all the roads. It was great to see some familiar places. I started feeling comfortable on the big climbs. It was completely the opposite to how I’d been feeling the whole race.
I was loving racing again. Knocking off the front.
That love of racing bikes was the thing I had to get back because the day before was the day I hated bikes.
I’ve had these moments all year where I just had my arse whipped all the time. Being a pro bike rider is not like a normal workplace where the stress of deadlines and projects is a different experience to what we go through as sportspeople.
Cycling is a sport where you have to endure physical pain and there’s a point where you can only endure so much pain that you inflict upon yourself. There is a line and once you’ve crossed it, it’s very difficult to come back from it because you don’t want to hurt yourself anymore, you’re fed up with pain, fatigue and tiredness.
But my turning point was finally here.
On Alto de la Comella I was off the front with Tao Geoghegan Hart. We got a gap and were chasing the guy in front. We had a decent gap to the group behind so I was loving life.
The Ineos team car came up next to us and Oli Cookson was driving. He was the guy who looked after me as a neo-pro and cared for me the whole time when he worked for our team.
Then up came Alex Sans Vega in our team car. He is my director who has also helped me since I was a neo-pro and the guy I get along with the most in our team.
It was cool to see the two directors who had helped me become a bike racer since I’d become pro be there in the cars with us. It was great to be experiencing this with Tao too because I’d raced with him in Tour de Savoie Mont Blanc before we both turned professional. We were hitting out at each other in the mountains in Chambery just a few years ago. That was the first time I’d raced in the mountains.
It was a cool moment and the turning point for me in La Vuelta. From there, things got better. The last two weeks of La Vuelta was honest true racing and I was able to be amongst it, rather than several other races I’ve done this year where I’ve just been a sheep in a paddock with nothing special going on. The Tour of Austria was cool but it was a small race.
It was the bigger races I was trying to count on and show a lust for racing because I know I can perform in them.
Now that my season is over, I have no more racing left, I can look back at the whole year. It will be a time of reflection. Now I know in the future there will be hard times and good times, but as Ben said, just keep doing the right things.
Tags: la vuelta, la vuelta a espana, tao geoghegan hart, team dimension data Last modified: Jan 17, 2020
