For most professional riders, winning the National Championships road race at the age of 39 for a fifth time in your career and fourth time in a row would be ample reason to consider the season a success. But for Mavi García, claiming the red and yellow of Spanish National Champion last summer was the only highpoint in a year where precious little else went right.
It was a year that Garcia realised that elite athletes are humans too.
“In 2023 I was never really been at my top level. It’s partly due to a series of circumstances and misfortunes, but also to the fact that we’re people, not machines,” the Liv AIuIa Jayco rider told Cyclingnews last December at the Queens of the Alhambra criterium in Granada, Spain.
“After three years of going really well, you can’t always be right up there at the top.
“Last year I may have made some small mistakes, but I had a lot of bad luck, too, and whenever I was racing I had a strange feeling. This year, I want to get rid of that feeling.”
Garcia will begin her 2024 season at this week’s UAE Tour Women stage race.
Yet if bouncing back at 40 – her birthday is on January 2nd – in professional cycling sounds like a daunting task, García is one of the few racers who could probably do it.
She’s always had a knack of making the most of paths less travelled. Her success rate after turning pro eight years ago, aged 31 being the standout case in point. From that most unlikely of beginnings, García moved all the way up the ladder to become Spain’s top women’s racer.
Such has been her dominance of the Nationals, in particular, with a staggering nine elite titles to her name, that anything but a repeat win in either category is now considered a a surprise .
As García tells Cyclingnews, she herself has been a little guilty of taking her relentless superiority in the Nationals for granted.
“This year, the time trial didn’t work out well for various reasons and it seems like it was a disaster when it shouldn’t be seen like that, that’s not reasonable.”
“But even I am getting overly accustomed to doing it [winning the Nationals] and that’s not good. You have to take things year by year, because each race is a world in itself where you can always win or lose, and winning the Nationals so many times in a row is actually very hard.”
Bouncing back
If García is looking for the best way to bounce back from an uneven year, then the merger between her former squad Liv…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…