Aged just 22, in only his third year as part of the WorldTour, Laurence Pithie wants to win a Monument next season.
“Shoot for the stars,” he says with a grin.
It’s undoubtedly ambitious, but this mentality has got the Groupama-FDJ rider where he is. Pithie has had to be driven, gutsy and bold to make it from his evening club time trials in Christchurch, New Zealand to the highest rungs of professional cycling, and he’s nowhere near done yet.
“I always wanted to be a professional athlete. I was always sporty but for cycling, I fully committed at the end of 2016 and the start of 2017 is when I stopped running and got a coach for cycling,” Pithie says. “Everything from there was with the goal of becoming a professional and in the WorldTour.”
The pathway to the top hasn’t been simple for Pithie – it isn’t for many riders who are required to move to Europe from the Southern Hemisphere to pursue their careers. It was on the wooden boards of the velodrome where the Kiwi rider’s talent originally came to the fore, he won two world titles as a junior on the track, something which grabbed the attention of Groupama-FDJ’s Continental team. Even when his contract with them was secured, however, the challenges continued.
“The team took a chance on me from my results on the track, but making the move to Europe was super difficult actually,” Pithie says. “I found it really hard to go from racing with 50 guys maximum in New Zealand on big, wide roads, and then coming to Europe. My first first road race was Le Samyn which is like a 1.1 and it had Van der Poel there, which was pretty intimidating. I don’t think I left the back of the bunch until I pulled out of the race. I definitely was questioning myself after that if I was in the right place. But for me, it got better and it got a lot worse. I crashed a lot, which made it difficult but the team was super supportive which made it easier.”
Pithie’s plucky determination to find his place in the professional peloton wasn’t just driven from his own desire to win. He explains that he felt a duty to repay those who had helped him to have the opportunity to be in these bike races at all.
“In my mind, I didn’t really have a choice. Giving up wasn’t an option. There’d been so many sacrifices made with my family just to get me to Europe. If I’d have given up, it would have been a wasted opportunity,” he states.
There is an exact race that Pithie can pinpoint as the…