Last July, Filippo Ganna’s second life on the track briefly felt like a burden. His Tour de France debut had been more trying than anticipated. Fatigue, mental as much as physical, had mounted across the three weeks. The thought of tackling the Hour Record in August, as initially planned, only seemed to make things worse. A week from Paris, Ganna shelved the project.
“The plan was to finish the Tour and then immediately do the Hour Record,” Ganna says. “But when I didn’t have a perfect Tour like I wanted, I said it was better just to focus on finishing it. It was better to stay calm without thinking about the Hour Record or other goals. We decided to delay the attempt.”
At that point, Ganna would surely have been content to push any attempt into 2023, but the idea was never going to be allowed simply to wither on the vine. Ineos performance engineer Dan Bigham himself broke the record in August, which only heightened Pinarello’s desire to complete the harvest by having Ganna establish a new – and definitive – mark on their machine before new UCI regulations forced a redesign.
“Before the end of the season, Fausto Pinarello had studied the bike and prepared it, and he said, ‘Can we do something or not?’” Ganna says, breaking into a sheepish grin: “I said, ‘Ok, Fausto, I’ll try to do it.’”
Ganna’s displays on the road in the latter part of the season – third in the time trial at the European Championships, seventh at the Worlds – seemed to vindicate his decision not to tackle the Hour immediately after the Tour. By the time he returned to work on the boards, however, the velodrome had started to feel more like a refuge than an obligation.
Not for the first time, repeated laps of the track in Montichiari seemed to restart Ganna. Even before he travelled across the border to Grenchen for the Hour Record attempt, the mainspring was fully wound. “I think I got a good result,” he says with considerable understatement. His eventual 56.792km surpassed both Bigham’s record and Chris Boardman’s 1996 effort, set on the since-outlawed Superman position, and for good measure, he set an individual pursuit record of 3:59.636 a few days later at the Worlds in Paris.
Immediately afterwards, Ganna suggested he would never tackle the Hour again. In truth, his mark might have put the idea off anyone’s mind for years to come, even a man of seemingly boundless ambition like Remco Evenepoel. “If he wants to try, Grenchen is…
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