PHILIPPE GILBERT - ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH

PHILIPPE GILBERT HAS WON ALMOST EVERY RACE HE HAS SET HIS MIND TO, INCLUDING FOUR MONUMENTS AND THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS. AHEAD OF HIS FINAL YEAR IN THE PRO PELOTON, HE TELLS PROCYCLING WHAT IT WAS LIK E TO BE THE BEST R IDER IN THE WORLD, AND WHAT HE WANT

29 Dec 2021 - Procycling

Writer: Adam Becket 

Portrait: Jesse Wild

Few riders can claim to be the truly dominant rider of a year. Of course, there is always someone with the most wins, and it’s common to end the year with a best sprinter, a best stage racer and a best classics rider, but it is rare for one rider to be the definitive best of a season. In 2021 Tadej Pogačar was clearly that, with his wins at the Tour de France, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia; in 1972 Eddy Merckx won more than most top riders win in their entire career, but 11 years ago it was another Belgian rider in Philippe Gilbert. In one season, he won 17 races, including the Ardennes double of Liège and Flèche Wallonne plus the Amstel Gold Race; also San Sebastián, and a spell in yellow at the Tour.

Gilbert’s second monument title came 

in the rain of the 2010 Lombardia

A decade on, when Gilbert is asked what being the undisputed best rider in the world is like, he explains: “It’s hard to say. You start the season, you win a race, then a few days later a second one, then another. You go from race to race, and I was resetting every time. I wasn’t thinking I had won 10. I was just resting and focusing on the next race.”

He is sanguine about his standout, record year: “I am really happy I enjoyed those moments, and I was always aware of what I was doing. I was working hard, I sacrificed a lot. For that year, I was almost never home, I was always training and doing recons. There was a lot of work behind it. I realised I didn’t do it for nothing, because that year was one of the best years ever in cycling.”

In the moment it is hard to see these exceptional years through the morass of results that is pro cycling, and yet with time they really shine. This is what has happened to 2011, and is what will in time happen to Pogačar’s 2021.

The man to thank for his consistency throughout the season, according to Gilbert, is Cadel Evans.

“My season was really full, because I did all the classics, the Tour, and then I had to keep fighting to win the WorldTour. I remember that Cadel Evans won the Tour de France and took a lot of points. Maybe because of Cadel I was doing an even better job, because I knew I was far back after his win and I knew I had to take as many points as possible.

“This gave me motivation, because I had finished third and second in the WorldTour in the years before and I really wanted to win it. The best way to take points is to win, so I have to thank Cadel.”

STAYING MOTIVATED

The pandemic has not been kind to the former world champion. 2020 was the first year he did not win a pro race since 2003, and then the same happened again in 2021. Gilbert does not mince his words: “It has been two difficult years, two years to forget. I hope to have a better last one. I don’t like to be in this situation, and be behind, but you have to deal with it and

I take this as experience also.

“I was working a lot, but I was far behind where I wanted to be at the start. Last winter, I was really struggling, and my age doesn’t help. It was really hard to come back into the game, and then the season was so quick again.”

Knee pain, combined with covid and his age have taken their toll. Despite the fact that he went into Paris-Roubaix in October as the defending champion, his victory seemed like a long time ago. The man who with that win became just the sixth rider to win four of the five monuments was barely talked about ahead of Roubaix, or before the race that he needs to complete his set, Milan-San Remo. In the event, he finished 72nd at the Italian race, and 29th over the cobbles of northern France.

This winter, however, he is feeling better with no issues, and is feeling positive: “I'm sure this will pay off in the next few months.”

Motivation has never been a problem for the man who has started 53 monuments across his career. His return to Lotto Soudal meant that he would race into 2022: “It was a long contract, my one with Lotto, and I hesitated a bit before signing. It will be 20 years a pro next year, I will be 40 years old, it is all nice round numbers. I thought it was nicer to finish like this. Now I want to finish on a better level.” 

It was not a move that came from financial necessity, nostalgia or hubris. Gilbert really believed and believes that he still has it in him to perform for his new team. It reminds one of the response of Denis Bergkamp when asked where his motivation comes from in his book, Stillness and Speed: “Ambition, for money or whatever, is more calculating. It can be satisfied. But passion… You want to grab it. You do the hard thing, always go for the difficult thing, and then you have to go for the next thing.”

Gilbert celebrates his 2011 Liège win, 

rounding off a rare spring hat trick

The Belgian explains: “I have a lot of motivation to still get nice results, and I hope to win again. When you are in this mood, when you always win, it becomes almost normal, and when you miss that, you realise that it is actually really hard to win a bike race. I don’t know how it will be when I come for a win next time, if I will be more nervous than normal, because it has been such a long time now. This is something I have never experienced. I am curious about my reaction.”

PLAYING THE TEAM GAME

Winning has always been part of Gilbert’s career. He has done it 77 times, which leaves him mostly only behind sprinters on the leaderboard of wins by active riders. While he has not been winning, or even threatening in the last two seasons - his best result being second on a stage of the Tour de Wallonie in 2020 - he has been working selflessly for his team. This has thrown up new sensations for the 39-year-old.

“I like to do my best, and I have been working a lot for my teammates and the team, sometimes too much,” Gilbert says. “This is something I like: doing something, being part of something. This year, I was next to Caleb [Ewan] when he won a few stages, a few races. When you do something, even if I’m not the last leadout man, I am working for him. You take some pleasure from this win, even if you don’t see him winning because you do your job and get dropped.

“I have won a lot of races, big races, and I always had control of my emotions. You build your own win, and you know when you are going to win, so I never really had a surprise at winning a big race. My emotions were always controlled. When you work for someone, and you have done your job, it’s not in your hands any more. Then when you hear that the guy you were working for has won, it is a bigger explosion in your head, because all the emotions come. I think I had more emotions with my teammates’ wins than for myself.”

It has not been helpful to be at a Lotto team that has struggled for wins, just 12 this season, with half of those coming from Caleb Ewan. Lotto is distinctly in the third tier of WorldTour teams. However, the team is also notable for its youth, with more than half the riders 25 and under. In riders like Harm Vanhoucke, Andreas Kron and Florian Vermeersch, the team has a future, and can surely learn a lot from Gilbert, a man who has seen and raced it all.

BREADTH OF TALENT

It is the breadth of wins in Philippe Gilbert’s career that stands out the most, from Omloop Het Nieuwsblad to Il Lombardia, both of which he has won twice. This is what makes Gilbert proud as well: “You always want more, but I think I have been quite successful. The thing I like the most in my palmarès is that I won so many different types of races. I mean, I won bunch sprints, I won time trial prologues, I won stage races, I won hard stages, I won flat stages, I won on the cobblestones and I won in the Ardennes. A bit everywhere. This is what I like. In the future, when a young guy asks me for some tips, I’ll be able to tell him because I can talk about it all.”

The Belgian has won almost every race he’s well suited for, something that escapes even the best riders. Some of the best monument riders of the last decade, such as Peter Sagan and Greg Van Avermaet, cannot be said to have won every race their ability could have led them to. Aside from Milan-San Remo, Gilbert has pretty much managed it.

Gilbert fights his way up the Paterberg en route to Ronde victory

THE ORIGINAL ALL- ROUNDER

In the last edition of Procycling, Edward Pickering considered the range of Wout Van Aert, who won a mountain stage, a time trial and a bunch sprint at this year’s Tour de France. Perhaps Gilbert was the prototype for the modern rider who can really do it all, after a couple of decades of increasing specialisation. Before Van Aert, there was another Belgian who triumphed in his country’s tricolor jersey.

When this is put to Gilbert, he says: “I gave some motivation to other riders. I opened the road up maybe. Or reopened, because it was like that in the time of Merckx. Then it became more specialised, also due to the capacity of the athletes. Not everyone is able to do what I did. You need a good body, a good head and a lot of ability.

“I remember Fabian Cancellara was speaking a lot about trying in the Ardennes, and in the end he didn’t even start. It’s really hard to do what I did, because you also have to want to do it. It’s a big difference, the way of training, and yourself. You have to be lighter and heavier. You cannot win Flanders or Roubaix at 65 kilos.”

This mention of Cancellara is fascinating, as the pair are of a similar age, two monumental riders of their generation, and yet Gilbert is still going, while the Swiss rider retired in 2016. One is moved to wonder what it is that keeps him riding and whether there is unfinished business.

Of the new generation of multitalented riders, one stands above the rest to the Belgian: “Pogačar is the exception. I saw Eddy Merckx speaking about him. Eddy has heard a lot of times that the ‘new Eddy Merckx’ is here; he has heard that every five years. I think only now we can maybe speak about it. He’s able to win grand tours, big classics, and win from February to October. Win with big gaps - not by seconds, but by minutes. In Pogacčar I think we will find a rider that you only find every 50 years. And all the others, okay, they’re really good riders, but they still have a lot to do before they become really big champions.”

To be a big champion, Gilbert argues that you have to deal with the expectation of winning, then repeat, something he certainly did at the Worlds in 2012. This is something that notably his compatriot Van Aert is still dealing with, especially at big one-day races.

He says: “Being the favourite is a lot of pressure and makes it more difficult. This is why we also see a lot of riders winning, and then it is hard for them to confirm it and do another big year, then another one. It’s only the big champions that can do this, and you realise that there aren’t that many.”

There is the sense that there is a hinterland to Philippe Gilbert, although as a great champion who has been interviewed so many times, he knows how to keep himself guarded. He runs a bike shop in his adopted home of Monaco and he loves to travel.

Gilbert tackles the first of 17 attempts 

so far to win MilanSan Remo, in 2004

On this, he explains, “I think the longest I’ve ever been in the same bed is two or three weeks, and I don’t see myself staying somewhere for more than a month. I need to travel, and still need to find this feeling. If you just stay home, this is not good.”

This year he was also elected to the Athletes’ Commission of the UCI for a four-year term, beating Toms Skujiņnš. One gets the sense that he is really proud of this. When asked why he stood, Gilbert replies: “I speak to a lot of riders, a lot of riders from different teams and countries, so I have a good idea of what the riders need. I’m really open, so riders know that they can come to me. Politics is more and more important.

When you are young, you just think politics is bullshit, but with the years you realise that everything is working with politics. If you want things to change, you have to do politics. I want to give my experience to change things.”

A life after cycling, which is really speeding along the tracks towards Gilbert, beckons, and there are options, but nothing is decided yet, apart from continuing to travel, that is. He says: “When you do 20 hours and more of riding, plus the gym and stretching, it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot to add something. I don’t want to rush, I will just let it come.”

First, he has to get through his final season as a pro cyclist, and this is something that he will not take lying down. Some would use the year as a kind of farewell tour, a testimonial of sorts, but not Gilbert. He still wants to impress, to remind the public, his team and the media one more time of the great rider he is, especially after the disappointment of the last couple of seasons.

“I want to get a good result in a big race,” he explains. “Of course I want to win a race, but I want to be there in the final of a big race. For me, this is the most important thing. I have never been a rider who has been chasing easy wins, like a lot of riders that I have seen in my career, and I have been looking for the nicest challenge instead. I’ve spent maybe 90 per cent of my career at the World Tour level, against the best riders, and this will not change. I don’t want to do small races just to get a win. If I’m in the top five at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad against the best I will be happy, I want to fight with them.”

CHANGING TIMES

Gilbert has seen a lot of change over the course of his career. “The young guys have no idea what I experienced in the past. For me, the biggest change was the new mode of having a bus. When I started, we had campervans and we came by car to the race; we had smaller parking places and it was more open. It meant that we were more concentrated, and it was really friendly because you came out of the cars next to other teams. Now you go to the hotel, you go to the bus, you go to the race, you do a small interview, you sign on and then you race. It’s a big difference. I think also cameras on phones changed a lot of things. In the past, there were still people coming for autographs and asking for pictures, but from the moment that selfies came, all the riders stopped going to the village at the start of a race, because you would have to do 100 selfies. This stopped the proximity a bit between the fans at the riders. To protect yourself, you stay more on the bus. Sometimes you are scared just to step off the bus.”