À la Alaphilippe
He wriggles. He writhes. He squirms. He squiggles.
He looks over his shoulder. He looks over his shoulder again. He’s doing everything apart from focusing on riding his bike.
He looks over his shoulder again. And again. And again.
Twenty one times. In the final kilometre of the Clásica San Sebastián last weekend, Julian Alaphilippe looked over his shoulder to see what was happening behind him at least 21 times. I say ‘at least’ because the camera cut away from him and his rival for the win, Marc Hirschi, on a couple of occasions. It was most likely somewhere closer to 25 times. Once every five seconds Alaphilippe wasn’t looking where he was going.
If he’d won the race perhaps I wouldn’t have noticed how little attention Alaphilippe was paying to Hirschi. But he didn’t win. This wouldn’t be the first time that the swashbuckler was too busy swashbuckling while others were making off with the treasure. In fact, I would argue that this is the fourth WorldTour one-day race that Alaphilippe has bollocksed up for himself. He’s had a great career. Of course he has. We don’t need to list them off. He’s had a career full of wins and rainbow jerseys and yellow jerseys. And he quite seriously very nearly won the Tour de France in 2019. But his career could have, and should have, been a lot better.
Perhaps we should cut him some slack because in 2019 Alaphilippe was victim to one of the most dramatic muggings any of us have ever seen in a bike race when Mathieu van der Poel flew like a superhero in his Dutch champion’s kit and nabbed that incredible win at Amstel Gold. Perhaps we should give Alaphilippe a break because he really really didn’t want that to happen to him again at San Sebastián. Perhaps… But if you look back at the footage of that Amstel Gold race, for the final kilometre while he was up the road with Michal Kwiatkowski and Jakob Fuglsang, Alaphilippe was doing exactly the same thing. The camera angles were such that it was a bit harder to tell, but his rate of rubber necking seemed even higher than once every five seconds. If he was trying to avoid history repeating then perhaps he should have been doing the exact opposite of what he did that day instead of repeating it. The circumstances were slightly different. With the greatest of respects, Lennert van Eetvelt is not Mathieu van der Poel - not yet anyway. The outcome was the same. A win for someone else. Is this just what Alaphilippe does when he thinks he can’t win? Or does he do it all the time?
The following year, in the weird spectatorless October edition of the Tour of Flanders, victory disappeared up the road while Alaphilippe lay sprawled across it. This one was more forgivable, maybe. The race winning move had already happened. It was Alaphilippe and the Vans. One of them would win the Ronde for the very first time. The trio were working well together, the co-operation was splendid, the up and overs were constant and the tactical mutiny had not yet begun. At 35km to go, Alaphilippe starting wriggling, took his hand left hand off the bars and he smashed into a motorbike. His season was over.
The most heinous, most unbelievable moment of Alaphilippe’s career had come two weeks before that Tour of Flanders at Liège-Bastogne-Liège (Covid year don’t forget, the calendar was upside down). It was his first ever race as World Champion having taken the Rainbow Jersey at Imola the previous week. He was aiming to become the first rider to win Liège in the rainbow jersey since Moreno Argentin won in that unforgivable pastel rainbow jersey in 1987. That was when Stephen Roche and Claude Criquielion were laying down the blueprint for Alaphilippe to follow in how to make a bollocks of winning a monument classic.
Five riders were coming to the finish together in Liège, Alaphilippe read the situation brilliantly, launched his sprint at the right time and he had the race won. Then he inexplicably started celebrating when there was still a couple of seconds to go before he hit the line. He was so busy pouring dollop after dollop of sauce over his celebration that by the time he saw Primož Roglič’s wheel appear under his right arm, it was too late. Roglič had taken the edge off of his own massive disappointment at the recent Tour de France, by winning his first (and still only) monument classic.
In perfect Alaphilippe style, he was also then relegated to last place in the group anyway for veering wildly in front of Marc Hirschi and Tadej Pogačar. He managed to convert one of the greatest moments of his career, into a dismal fifth place.
This criticism all seems a bit harsh and unnecessary given his achievements on some of the other days throughout his career. This isn’t meant to be critical. In the words of Patrick Lefevere, I love him. I love Julian Alaphilippe. All of the reasons he has turned victory into defeat are the exact same reasons he has also managed to do the opposite. He is one of the greats because of this, not in spite of it. He’s an uncontrollable ball of power with watts shooting out of his body in all directions. Occasionally, he manages to wrangle enough watts from all of his other sinews and limbs into his legs. He is wriggly jiggly uppy downy look aroundy. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it turns to shite. I’ll miss him when he’s gone.
