This feature was originally published in Rouleur 113, support our independent journalism by subscribing here.
The winner of the Giro d’Italia picks up our empty coffee cups and takes them back to the bar.
It’s barely a month since this 26-year-old Australian won the biggest race of his career, seemingly out of the blue. Has his life been transformed in that interval?
“I dunno, a little bit, but at the same time not so much. Quite a lot of things stay the same, which is nice,” he says, before adding, “I don’t really like it when guys have a big result and then it goes to their head and they change and everything. So I’ll just stay me, it’s what I do best.”
While the pageant of the Tour de France is making its way through Denmark, Jai Hindley is training at altitude in preparation for his next big objective of the season, the Vuelta a España. And in this moment when we’ve got him to ourselves, sitting in the deserted bar of the highest hotel in the Pyrenees, everything seems so calm and normal, and Jai is so easy to talk to that it’s easy to forget he’s suddenly become one of cycling’s most prominent riders.
But there’s no protective PR person with a stopwatch to control how much of his time we take. No fans hovering in the background with items to be autographed. When we move outside to take portrait shots, none of the amateur riders who’ve cranked their way up this 2,408 metre pass seems to have the slightest inkling who the trim rider in the fancy green Bora Hansgrohe kit might be. They ride on by, without even doing a double take, stopping only to take selfies by the sign that marks the summit of the Port d’Envalira.
To be fair, even one month later, it feels like Hindley himself hasn’t quite taken in his new status among the elite of Grand Tour riders.
“I went on holiday in Italy with my girlfriend straight after the race finished,” he says. “Like, just for a week, and we were in full holiday mode doing tourist things and I didn’t really have time to just sit down and process it. We’d be out at a restaurant and then I’d suddenly think about it and I couldn’t stop smiling. Her as well, she also just couldn’t believe it,” he says, as a big grin spreads all over his face.
No one expected Hindley to win the Giro. Even though he’d come painfully close in 2020, his breakout year, taking the pink jersey on the penultimate stage and then losing it in the final time-trial, he wasn’t…