While his compatriot Matteo Jorgenson will leave Movistar for pastures new this winter, Will Barta is content and settled at the Spanish team for the foreseeable future. Barta’s two-year extension was only publicly announced a couple of weeks ago, but the new contract had already been agreed months previously.
“Historically, it’s been a really Spanish team, and that’s still the case, but I think that also makes it a really tight team,” Barta told Cyclingnews. “You don’t have lots of different groups, so everyone meshes really well, and you just feel like it’s one, big family.”
When Barta initially signed with Movistar two years ago, he was a rider still in search of himself after a career repeatedly conditioned by serious injury. The American’s first professional races with CCC in 2019 were also his first competitive outings since breaking his femur at the previous summer’s under-23 Giro d’Italia, and he suffered accordingly.
Barta finally looked to have hit his stride with a fine Vuelta a España at the end of the pandemic-interrupted 2020 season, only to sustain another broken femur weeks later in a training crash in Norway. That setback effectively ruined his 2021 campaign with EF, and he was still feeling the effects during his maiden season at Movistar.
“You never know what’s going to happen in life, but I think that was about as challenging as it can get in cycling, to be honest,” Barta said. “I was bouncing from one team to another with injuries and things like that, so I’ve been really lucky to find a nice team like Movistar to grow in.”
At the beginning of 2023, Barta set out hoping that the campaign might mark a turning point in his career given that he had just been able to enjoy a winter free of significant interruption for the first time in five years. That optimism grew further when he was assigned a racing schedule tailored to his strengths.
“When you have these injuries, your role on a team changes a bit. You become the guy who fills in, you don’t have such a clear schedule,” Barta said. “But this year, I was really lucky that the team gave me a clear run of races, with time to train and time to go to altitude. I was able to optimise things for the first time in my career, and I really benefited from it. I had my best values in training, my best numbers in racing, I was in the race more often, and I just really enjoyed it.”
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