Primoz Roglic interview: ‘Cycling is one of the toughest sports. That's what attracted me'

New York Times

8 hours ago

As a 21-year-old, painfully aware that he would never become one of the world's best ski jumpers, Primoz Roglic switched course. He would instead develop into one of the world's best cyclists, the winner of five Grand Tours and an Olympic gold medal.
But first, Roglic worked on different slopes, cleaning escalators in his local shopping centre.
Advertisement
In many ways, the job evokes his eventual career. Escalators rise. They fall. They disappear and return. In the interim? The mechanism — the grease, the cogs, the engine — are unseen. The hard work is taken for granted. It keeps on going. This is not to romanticise escalators, but at his best, Roglic possesses a mechanical relentlessness as he climbs. To stride up an escalator's supersized steps even mimics his trademark low cadence. And back then, the job was perfect for the young Slovenian.
'It was good money,' says Roglic. 'I enjoyed it. I would go in the middle of the night, and clean all the escalators before it opened. And that meant I had the whole of the day to ride my bike.'
Speaking to The Athletic from his pre-Tour de France training camp in Tignes, Roglic softly laughs at the suggestion that he appeared to enjoy it as much as his cycling.
'You don't necessarily have to be what you're supposed to be, to be this, or that, but you can choose what you want to master,' he asserts later. 'The ultimate thing at the end is to be free and happy, no matter what I do and how I do it.'
But interspersed with this sentiment is the inherent difficulties of his chosen life. Despite his honours — the four Vuelta titles, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, three stages of the Tour, as a potted summary — Roglic's disappointments are public and visceral. There have been crashes, the ignominy of being dropped. The life of a professional cyclist, to the majority at least, is to be left bloody, pale and downcast.
'Cycling is something that brings me a lot of challenges in my life,' he says, somewhat understatedly. But Roglic is not using this as a negative description. He uses it to try to explain why he prefers cycling to cleaning escalators.
His most recent challenge came in May. Roglic was favourite for the Giro d'Italia, and wore the pink jersey for two days in the first week of the race. Then, struggling with illness, he began to crash — four times in total, before Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe withdrew him on stage 16.
Advertisement
'I was struggling with my health a bit,' he explains. 'We discovered I had bacteria which needed antibiotics, and I was not at my best. And then the crashes really did not allow me to improve. But I'll take the way it was. For sure, there was a lot of suffering. It was a hard one.'
The Giro, after all, was not this season's main goal. Roglic will return to the Tour de France this week, a race with which he maintains a tempestuous relationship. In 2017, as a 27-year-debutant, he soloed to a stage win over the Col du Galibier, holding off two-time race winner Alberto Contador.
His memories of that day? 'I put everything behind me very fast, whether they're good or bad. I don't know if that's lucky or unlucky.'
Roglic was at the Tour to stay. He won another stage one year later, finishing fourth in the general classification and proving himself as a rider with Grand Tour-winning potential. His first of four Vuelta a Espana titles followed in 2019.
The 2020 Tour de France appeared set to be his moment. Delayed until late August because of Covid-19, Roglic held the yellow jersey for 11 dominant days. Heading into the penultimate stage, a time trial up La Planche des Belles Filles, Roglic had a 57-second advantage over his young compatriot Tadej Pogacar.
The next hour would morph into Pogacar's coronation. Roglic, having lost almost two minutes, and the race, rolled across the line looking broken, his helmet askew, but immediately sought out his conqueror. For many in Slovenia, thrilled by the nation's first Tour success, but equally enraptured by Roglic's late-developer story, it brought complicated emotions. Even Pogacar's mother was once quoted saying that she would have preferred Roglic to have won that edition.
In the five years since, Roglic has never threatened the Tour's podium. His record? Three starts. Three DNFs.
Roglic's record makes him a modern great. He could carry on targeting overall victory in the Giro and the Vuelta. As he remarks himself at one stage: 'My palmares are OK, let's say… they will not completely turn around with one Grand Tour.' With each withdrawal, the psychological and physical toll of the Tour becomes ever more evident.
Advertisement
The question I have been waiting to ask Roglic is why he keeps coming back.
'Yeah,' he begins, before pausing. 'I mean it's a bit of unfinished business, in this case, that attracts me. Of course, you can call it unlucky, this, that, but on the other hand, you cannot take away that it's the biggest race in cycling.
'I have to be there. I want to be there. I want to come to Paris, cross the line after all these years, and say, 'Oh, well, long time no see, hey?''
Is it more than winning, then, that represents closure? Roglic is not considered amongst the top tier of favourites this year, with a duel expected between Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard, with a chance of Remco Evenepoel becoming involved. Some even think he may be outperformed by young German teammate Florian Lipowitz, though Roglic's team manager, Rolf Aldag, told Cyclingnews this week that Red Bull were encouraged by their leader's numbers.
'I wouldn't say I need the Tour to be myself,' Roglic replies, nodding. 'I will be the same athlete whether I win it, whether I don't win it. I'm in the phase of my career where I can do things for myself and nothing more. We all know how fast the guys go each day: Jonas, Remco, Tadej. You really don't necessarily have that much influence.
'It's easy to look over a list of results and to say, 'I was first here, second there, didn't finish then'. But on the other other hand, if you look at it, think about it, and if you really put everything in, that is really the only victory you can get, a victory for yourself. That's the goal for the Tour de France.'
Speaking to Patrick Lefevere in the weeks before the Tour, the legendary former principal of Evenepoel's Soudal-Quickstep team, the Belgian brings up Roglic unprompted. 'Roglic, he is one of the diehards,' Lefevere says. 'He never gives up. You hit him, he goes down, he gets back up. He's like a really good boxer.'
Advertisement
Roglic smiles as Lefevere's quotes are read back to him, before his brow crinkles as he considers how to answer the question of where that attitude came from. The conversation turns to his upbringing, in the Slovenian mining village of Kisovec. His father used to work in the pits. In the evenings, he would take his son to the famous Planica ski jumping hill nearby.
'Of course, you come from your father and mother,' he replies. 'But you're always a little bit different from them. And then I'm also an only child. It meant I had to stand up pretty fast on my own legs, to really learn things for myself. I went away from home early so that I could ski jump in high school, to practice in a different city. I had the right coaches in that period who really taught me a lot. All these small, small, small points make me the way I am now.'
The Tour was peripheral back then. His fixation with the race does not come because he grew up watching it like the cycling-obsessed Pogacar, from a town just 50km away. His childhood memories of the Tour are half-formed; he remembers Lance Armstrong, but it was mainly blurs of colour on the television during long, hot summer days.
'(My relationship) with the race is completely different now,' he says. 'I was dreaming for my whole life to have the longest flight on skis, you know?'
His eyes flit to the corner of the room. 'I mean, I'm still dreaming of that a bit.'
In 2007, Roglic crashed, horribly, in the pursuit of that ski-jumping dream. He was knocked unconscious, and airlifted to hospital. Though his injuries were far less serious than they could have been, it was still a long return, and when he was back, further improvement came far more slowly than he had hoped.
'I had problems with injuries,' he explains. 'And I had to be honest with myself. I had a bunch of victories, I was good, but I thought maybe I wasn't the most talented, I was just a really hard worker. Maybe I was not born to be a ski jumper, I did not have Olympic medals, world records, or anything like that. This was the reality.'
From his training, Roglic knew he had endurance ability. Studying at university while working on the escalators, he had his VO2 max tested, benchmarking his aerobic ability. The results were comparable with some of the best riders in the peloton. Remembering his glimpses of racing on television, Roglic sold his motorbike, a KTM 125, and bought a bicycle.
Advertisement
'When I took it to the guy, he told me, 'There aren't that many people that trade a motorbike for a bicycle. It's usually the opposite way around.' But now I'm stuck with bikes.'
Despite his success, Roglic never replaced his KTM. But to his initial training partners in the Slovenian amateur cycling team, it might have appeared he was still riding one, burning up the Balkan nation's sharp climbs. But though he could climb uphill, Roglic still had a long way to go.
'I still have all these old emails on my Gmail from 2012,' he says. 'I came from winter sports, I didn't know anyone. So I emailed Slovenian teams — Perutnina, Radenska and Adria Mobil — asking them for advice. I was 23 years old. If you want to turn professional you cannot just take a bike and ride it.
'I mean, it sounds really easy. But getting used to real cycling? The sort you see on television? It's a completely different story to going on a ride with the local guys behind your house. I'd never been on a TT bike, I had no clue about 99 per cent of racing's aspects.
'I was successful, but I never really had the feeling that I skipped any steps. It did not come too fast. I really had to fight. There were periods where I asked myself, 'Do I really need to do this? Do I really want to suffer so hard, to fight for survival day after day?' I was still at university. I could have just done something normal.
'But on the other hand, I knew that wouldn't really fit me. I couldn't do something easy. Look at the calorie consumption you need in cycling, or the impact on your health of a Grand Tour. It's huge. It's one of the toughest sports. That's what attracted me, that's what got my attention.'
And so ultimately, this is why Primoz Roglic keeps coming back. He goes to the Tour because he has the ability to do so, and fight; to pay off the debt to the young man who did not know what to do, who fixed escalators and sold his motorbike. Roglic rides with a desperation in his eyes; he is one of the only riders who gazes up when the gradient steepens, rather than down.
Primoz Roglic dislocated his shoulder and had to use a spectator's chair to find the right position to put it back in!#TDF2022 #ITVCycling pic.twitter.com/Cp2tpQPLmW
— ITV Cycling (@itvcycling) July 6, 2022
At the 2022 Tour de France, he popped his own dislocated shoulder back in after crashing into a hay bale, rather than quit the race. He would need surgery three months later. A strange expression crosses Roglic's face when he is reminded of the moment. There is pride, but also a tinge of embarrassment at its innate absurdity.
Advertisement
'You know, it's these sort of things that help me,' he says. 'It's because of the way I am. I'm ready to die out there.
'It's probably why I won so many races, but on the other hand, it has cost me so many times. I've made things a lot harder than they should be.
'You can look back at things, but when you're out there, of course you can say it's just a race, but for us riders, it's more than that. You prepare yourself, you put so much in. It's a fight, you know.'
Does that resilience, his ability to recover from disappointment apply to all aspects of his life? Or is it just cycling?
'But everybody has that fight in their lives,' Roglic replies instantly. 'It doesn't really matter what kind of job you do. I just try to inspire people, to teach them something good. That's my goal. That's what I want to do.'