Crashes, injury and COVID-19 have forced Julian Alaphilippe to add a new word to his vocabulary and a new facet to his mindset in 2022, with the usually playful two-time world champion discovering his inner resilience while forging through a season of pain and setback.
“Resilient is a perfect word to describe the emotions of my season and how I needed to make it through everything. 2022 was definitely a season of resilience,” Alaphilippe tells Cyclingnews in an exclusive end-of-season interview.
“I was never at 100% at a race in 2022, I was always fighting back, so it was hard to balance that with my usual hopes and my ambitions, especially while wearing the world champion’s rainbow jersey. I wanted to win like I so often have done but the setbacks just kept coming.
“I always trained hard, gave my best and fought to come back each time but it was a difficult season. Coming back time and time again was actually harder than the crashes. The pain was perhaps less acute but it took a lot longer.
“I need resilience for a long time. Fortunately I found that inside myself while away from the races and recovering. It’s important to have inner resilience when you’re a rider and face problems, otherwise it’s even harder to come back after each problem.”
The QuickStep-AlphaVinyl rider raced for just 45 days in 2022, only winning stages at Itzulia Basque Country in April and at the Ethias-Tour de Wallonie in late July, as he tried to recover from injury and rebuild his form over and over again.
He started the season chasing form after missing a key training camp due to a nasty cold. Then he flipped over his bike in the crosswinds at Strade Bianche, which hindered his build-up towards La Flèche Wallonne and Liege-Bastogne-Liege.
His sprint win in the Basque Country and fourth on the Mur de Huy lifted his morale and ambitions, but he was caught-up in a terrible high-speed crash at 73 km/h at Liege-Bastogne-Liege. He was diagnosed with two broken ribs, a broken scapula and a punctured lung. The injuries kept Alaphilippe off the bike for a month and a lack of real form forced him to miss the Tour de France.
When he won atop the Mur de Huy at the Tour de Wallonie in late July, his fortunes finally seemed to be on the turn, but he was sidelined by COVID-19 almost immediately afterwards. He came back to…
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