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Juan Ayuso, just 20 years old but already announced as a current and future star of cycling having ridden to third at this year’s Vuelta a España on debut, talks with such fluidity and fluency, such ease and enjoyment that it’s a pity only a handful of journalists get to see him up close, to ask him what they want.
Nothing with Ayuso is off limits; he’ll answer everything, his openness and his relaxed demeanour inviting a leisurely environment where everyone present is at ease, comforted. It’s the sort of trait usually reserved for a television personality – or at the very least someone with a decade or more in front of the cameras and press.
Ayuso is neither of the two – yet. “Yesterday I was speaking with [teammate] Marc Soler, he is my roommate, and I said to him that we should open a Twitch account because we spend nearly all of our free time playing video games,” the Valencian-Catalan prodigy tells a smattering of journalists at the UAE Team Emirates winter training camp in Benidorm.
Twitch, a video streaming service, has exploded in popularity in Spain in the past two years, with celebrities and ordinary people alike building ever-growing fan bases. Even the recent manager of the men’s football team, the cycling aficionado Luis Enrique, became a streamer during the World Cup.
“I have a Formula One simulator at home so that’d be cool to stream it,” Ayuso, in perfect English, continues. “And then in the [hotel] room Marc and I spend all of our free time playing FIFA or Call or Duty or whatever else together, so we said we could stream together. But I said, ‘Ok, watch out, because when we play we swear a lot! So if we wanna make it public we’re gonna have some issues!’ But yesterday we were thinking about it and it’d be nice. Luis Enrique was streaming and I think people liked it a lot so maybe with the team and at some races we think we can do something.”
It’s jokingly put to him that he could stream alongside Spain’s other young superstars, such as the Barcelona footballer Gavi or the tennis sensation Carlos Alcaraz. “I was at a Marca awards event and there I met [tennis player] Carlos Alcaraz,’ Ayuso says. “This last year, it was super-normal that I was always the youngest. And then when I arrived there, Carlos was [the youngest]. He is one year younger than me. I thought I was still the youngest! He said, ‘oh no, I’m 18’ and I was 19, and I was like, ‘what, are you joking me?’…
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