Six weeks or so had passed since the 2023 Tour de France when Jai Hindley sank into a chair in a hotel lobby in Québec. The dark circles beneath his eyes were only partially explained by the leap in time zones on the long flight from Europe the previous day. By early September, a rider whose entire year had been built around the Tour was already likely to be wandering around with a thousand-yard stare. It comes with the territory.
“I was pretty banged up and bruised, and pretty done physically and mentally, let’s say, after the Tour,” Hindley admitted. “I was pretty cooked.”
It was hardly surprising; Hindley crammed more into his July than most. His Tour debut began in sparkling fashion, when a daring attack on stage 5 to Laruns put him into the yellow jersey. After losing the lead a day later, he still looked the best of the rest behind Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar through the second week, only for a heavy crash on stage 14 to change the tenor of his race completely.
“I was able to save it a bit on that stage, but after that, my back was worse and worse every day,” he said. “I was seeing the physio a couple of hours every day, sometimes before the stage even, and then in the evening full gas. The physios were doing everything they could to ease the muscles around the tailbone because when I crashed, I fell full on the tail bone, it was pretty grim.”
The Australian’s Tour began as an exploratory mission to see just how high he could soar against that exalted competition. It ended as an exercise in plumbing the very depths of his reservoirs of endurance and resolve. In any other race on the calendar, Hindley’s injuries would surely have seen him climb off. The Tour being the Tour, of course, the thought never really entered his head. He battled on to place seventh in Paris, exhausted by the ordeal but not scarred by the experience.
“The Tour is the biggest race, so you don’t quit unless you’ve got two broken legs,” Hindley explained. “It was just really grim, especially the last week. I was just suffering every day and losing a lot of time every day, and then still trying to stay in the GC battle. But it was really shit to just watch the GC slide further and further away. It was pretty tough.”
Hindley had already shown his mettle as a Grand Tour rider at the Giro d’Italia. He placed second overall with a breakthrough display at the pandemic edition of 2020 before returning to win the race outright two years later,…
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