Nobody spent as long in the saddle last July as Caleb Ewan. The Australian rode into Paris as the lanterne rouge, covering the course almost six hours slower than overall winner Jonas Vingegaard. His career is built on speed, but his Tour de France quickly became an exercise in slow suffering on a route that provided little succour for sprinters.
“I think I didn’t sprint for a win from when we left Denmark until we got to the Champs-Élysées,” Ewan tells Cyclingnews. “That’s a long time in between to be suffering through mountains and whatever to get there.”
When the Lotto-Dstny rider came in alone and last on the first real stage in the Alps, his days on the race already looked numbered. A heavy crash on the road to Saint-Étienne would complicate his Tour de France further, and he would dice with time cut jeopardy all the way through the Pyrenees.
Ewan would have been forgiven for climbing off his bike during any one of those lonesome slogs with the broom wagon rolling behind in vigil, but he persisted towards those far-off summits even knowing that sprint opportunities were rare and that his prospects of victory were slim.
Why do it?
“Probably because I know what it feels like to pull out of a race,” Ewan says. “As soon as you step off, as soon as you’re sitting in the car or in the bus after your shower, as soon you’re not suffering any more, the guilt sets in. And that feeling is way worse than the suffering that you have to do for the next few hours to get through a mountain stage.
“Even at races where it’s planned that you’ll pull out, like I’ve done at the Giro in the past, you still have a shitty feeling afterwards. But at the Tour, there’s no excuse. If you’ve stepped off, it’s because maybe mentally just couldn’t take it anymore.
“You go through hell, and there’s always that voice in your head that’s telling you to stop, because there’s always that negative thought, the one that’s always telling you to take the easy option, and you have to really tell that voice to shut up sometimes.”
Blotting out the noise is a useful skill for a man in Ewan’s position at the best of times, and even more so at a moment like this. The opening half of his 2023 season has, by his own admission, been “probably the worst” of his career to date. Although he started the year by claiming the Schwalbe Classic in Adelaide that is not an…
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