JULIAN ALAPHILIPPE - JOKER IN THE PACK

At Flèche Wallonne, Julian Alaphilippe finally toppled Alejandro Valverde to claim his maiden one-day win. As a sprinter and climber, the Frenchman has numerous cards to play and he tells Procycling how he’s learned to master his versatility

Writer: Alasdair Fotheringham

Procycling UK, #243 - June 2018

Julian Alaphilippe was sitting in the press conference of this April’s Flèche Wallonne with the usual bottles of mineral water spread along the table in front of him, when he found a new use for the lids: spooking the press by putting them over his eyes.

There was much laughter from the journalists, once they had got over the surprise of Alaphilippe’s plastic ‘eyes’. It was proof of the French rider’s love of goofing around. “In the team’s long training sessions in winter, he’ll whizz past you pedalling with one leg or pulling a funny face only he knows how to make,” his Quick-Step Floors team-mate Iljo Keisse told La Dernière Heure’s journalist, Quentin Finn.

But Alaphilippe doesn’t just boost morale by joking around. He does it by winning, too. He was in a position to give a press conference at Flèche because he had just become the first rider to beat Alejandro Valverde on the Mur de Huy since 2013. It was arguably the breakthrough result of the season so far.

In the process, Alaphilippe became France’s first winner of an Ardennes Classic since Laurent Jalabert in 1997. It was also the first Fl.che Wallonne win for Quick-Step Floors since the team’s formation in 2003. Even more surprisingly, it was also Alaphilippe’s first professional one-day race win.

Valverde had won the previous four editions of the race, the longest-running spell of success in a hilly spring Classic since Jan Raas won Amstel Gold the same number of times between 1977 and 1980. Alaphilippe had broken the Spaniard’s grip on the climb in a demonstration of how much he has matured since his early years as a pro. He didn’t just outclimb Valverde in terms of strength, his timing was also perfect. As team-mate, former winner and friend, Philippe Gilbert put it in Huy, “He’s hyperactive, he would waste a lot of his strength when he was young. But now he’s learned how to channel his energy much, much better.”

Alaphilippe agrees. “It’s true, I have a lot of energy, I need to keep moving all the time, and I used to lose a lot of energy over little things,” the Frenchman tells Procycling two days later, while sitting in warm sunlight on a bench outside the country house hotel that serves as Quick-Step’s base during the Ardennes Classics. “It’s taken me time to realise I have to stay calm, and that’s helped me get better. But I’ve also learned that staying calm for too long costs me more energy than it would do if I was just letting off steam!”

This two-steps-forward, one step-back learning process hasn’t been a quick one. Gilbert says the penny dropped for him that Alaphilippe was a star in the making when the Frenchman placed third in the RideLondon Classic in 2014. But since then, while there’s been plenty of success - stage wins or spells in the lead in País Vasco, Paris-Nice and the Vuelta a España, along with podiums in Lombardia, Sanremo, and Liège - it felt appropriate that the final pieces of the jigsaw fell into place for Alaphilippe at Flèche Wallonne.

In the 2015 race, Alaphilippe, having worked for Quick-Step’s leader Michał Kwiatkowski, discovered at the foot of the Mur that the Pole wasn’t following his wheel. When he radioed through to sports director Wilfried Peeters, the Belgian bellowed back to him, “Ride your own race!” Alaphilippe duly did so, and still finished second behind the unstoppable Alejandro Valverde. This year, when Alaphilippe finally did win, there was a sense of everything coming full circle. He initially thought Vincenzo Nibali, an earlier attacker, had stayed away and that he’d come second. His cousin Franck, a director at one of France’s top junior cycling programmes in Montluçon, where Alaphilippe grew up, and his first trainer when he started racing, told him he’d won. “Him telling me I’d won really closed a chapter,” Alaphilippe says, “in the best way possible.”

In his teens, it was Alaphilippe’s “hyperactivity”, as Gilbert calls it, that caused the Frenchman to give up school aged 16, two years earlier than the norm. “I was too stressed to stay sitting on a classroom chair,” he recalls. Instead, he channelled his excess energy into working as a mechanic for bikes and motorbikes, working from nine in the morning to seven in the evening in a bike shop in Montluçon. “You’ll never see me throw down a bike if I get cross,” he says, “because I know how much effort and time goes into setting it up.” There are other advantages to his former job, too. Alaphilippe tells the story of an U23 race in 2013 when he suffered a mechanical. Rather than waiting for help, he fixed the problem himself on a downhill, without even dismounting his bike.

Despite the 10-hour work days in the bike shop, the teenage Alaphilippe’s dedication to racing went so deep he continued to train late into the night in the countryside around Montluçon, with his path lit by the headlights of a following car driven by his father or cousin.

But it was off-road where he had his first breakthrough in 2010, winning silver in the junior cyclo-cross World Championships. “At the time,” recalls Jean-Luc Gatellier, a L'Équipe journalist who has followed Alaphilippe since his earliest days, “Julian was the big hope for French cyclo-cross for the men, and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot for the women."

Apart from bikes and work, Alaphilippe’s third way of using up his excess energy was, and still is, music. “I’ve loved playing the drums since I was young,” he says. “My dad played professionally, in a band, but I do it just for fun.” Although he says he is too restless to ever to learn to read music, the good people of Montluçon were once treated to a free outdoor concert by a young Julian and his brother Bryan - younger by three years and also a cyclist for amateur Team Pro Immo Nicolas Roux in France - when they set up their drums and keyboards on a city pavement during a music festival and began ripping through their repertoire. “We caused a bit of a traffic jam,” Alaphilippe recalls of their impromptu concert, with a grin. “People in their cars were stopping to look at us.”

More importantly for his career, he found music and bike racing have more in common than you’d expect. “It’s all about pace, rhythm and somebody moving to a particular beat. You’ve either got that beat inside you, or you haven’t.” He also sees other similarities between the lives of musicians and cyclists. “Both have a nomadic lifestyle, are constantly travelling and seeing new places. I love that.”

But as any musician will tell you, producing music successfully requires more than instinct or the willingness to live out of a suitcase. There’s a lot of discipline involved. In Alaphilippe’s case, that was first supplied by the army - just at a point when, aged 18, he had spent the best part of a year out of action because of a knee injury and was questioning whether to continue racing at all.

However, Alaphilippe received a call from the Armée de Terre team, then an amateur squad run by the French armed forces, asking if he wanted to race for them. He moved to Paris, to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and joined the army, which was a requirement for any rider wishing to join the team.

Military life was a character-forming experience, but in a good way, insists Alaphilippe. In fact, he is so appreciative of his time in the army, that he has said he believes - like the French President Emmanuel Macron - that bringing back National Service would be immensely beneficial for young people. When the national anthem played in 2012 after he won the national cyclo-cross title for a second time, Alaphilippe didn’t just stand to attention, he saluted.

“I discovered a lot in those two years, and I grew up a lot,” he says. “The army was a very special team compared to others, because we were soldiers, rather than cyclists. Living in the barracks was the first time I’d lived away from home. We did military training and we went to races together as a unit from our base, rather than meeting up there like other amateurs would. I did my first stage race, the Tour de Bretagne, with them. I learned about training camps, diet, recuperation and rest but also the army’s values – respect for team-mates, hierarchy, orders and everyday courtesy.

“For me, it was all new, the start of my life as a young man, rather than as a teenager living with my parents.”

He misses that period, even now, because there was less pressure. “I was more ambitious and I wanted to progress, I wanted to show what I could do, but at the same time I was more relaxed than I am now. I could live my life as a cyclist day by day, I didn’t have the stress. I love my career, but it’s also my job.

“I followed that up with a year in Quick-Step’s amateur squad before turning pro, but that all happened very quickly. What happened to me in the army is the key to it all, where it all began.”

What army discipline did not extract from Alaphilippe was the emotional intensity with which he races and lives. Hammering on the handlebars when beaten has become one of his trademark gestures, and he says he is too involved in his racing to play any kind of mind games with mask-like facial expressions. “If I’m happy or if I like a person, you will see it straight away. It’s never put on. I hate it when people do that,” he says.

And despite being a fan of army rules, there is no indication that Alaphilippe is prepared to follow the unwritten rules of pro cycling for the sake of it. “There was a Nationals a few years ago in Vesoul and his dad, who’s quite old, wanted to go but was too frail to drive, ” Gatellier says. “So Julian drove the family’s camping car for six hours across France to get his parents there. When you’re a professional, you don’t do that sort of thing before a race. But Julian did it anyway.”

The closest comparisons to Alaphilippe are Peter Sagan and Alejandro Valverde. Both rivals are successful one-day riders and have pedigree in week-long races. Alaphilippe’s fierce accelerations and tendency to tear up the script in races also fit the Sagan and Valverde mould. In terms of career trajectory, the 25-yearold seems more likely to follow Valverde’s path, although he’s got improvements to make in the high mountains before he’ll be challenging for the overall in grand tours as the Spaniard has done. But when it comes to Alaphilippe’s style on the bike, his sense of fun and bike handling skills, he’s more closely aligned to Sagan.

“I’ve seen him pulling all sorts of stunts in a car park, purely to pass the time one evening before Amstel,” says Gatellier. Many of those skills come from his cyclo-cross background, though he says he won’t return to the discipline. “As a kid, I loved it, particularly the technical side of it, and the intense efforts it demands. To do it you’ve got to be a bit nuts. But I’ve found I like road racing more, and there are plenty more races I want to discover. I’m not going back.”

Alaphilippe is still finding his limits on the road. Next year he would like to have a crack at the cobbled Classics and this July he should be racing the Tour, hunting for stage wins. There is the possibility his climbing may improve. But most important of all, he is emotionally driven as well as loyal to his roots and his team. “What matters is that I try to stay true to the real education my family taught me, like respect for your rivals, loyalty and politeness,” he says. 

“When you’ve been brought up to share everything with your brothers, and make sure nobody gets more than anybody else – lessons like those aren’t forgotten in a hurry. They’re too important.”

Rather than move to Monaco or Andorra, Alaphilippe still lives in Désertines, where he grew up. He has stuck with Quick-Step as it was Patrick Lefevere who gave him his first contract, while the French teams overlooked him. “He makes a point of going home to his childhood friends or seeing his family,” says Gatellier. “It’s very like the footballers of his generation, who stay loyal to their friends, even if they’re from the wrong side of the tracks or poor side of town, when they make it big. Julian is like that, he hasn’t changed.”

It also means that, as Kwiatkowski tells Procycling, other riders appreciate Alaphilippe because of how much he enjoys his sport. “He never complains, he never seems to be upset, and always brings good morale to the team. He is always trying to be happy. As a cyclist you can always complain about something - the weather, the roads...But I think Julian is one of those guys who always seems to be happy. It’s nice to see that a guy with such a positive attitude can win races.”

These days, the sheer fun of racing all too often gets buried beneath techno babble and bland press releases, but Alaphilippe’s joie de vivre and sense of humour are appealing. It’s all too rare that a pro cyclist knows when to take a relaxed approach, but at the same time, is able to win races as big as Flèche Wallonne. Alaphilippe’s rivals had better start taking him seriously.