The 60th edition of the Tour de l’Avenir was one for the climbers with major mountain passes like the Col de l’Iséran and Colle delle Finestre on the menu. A mini-Tour de France, scaled down to seven days, a prologue and six stages, it’s always a place to look for the possible future of pro racing. Here are four riders who stood out for sterling results and struggles alike.
Michael Leonard (19 – Canada / Ineos Grenadiers)
The prologue in Sarrebourg offered the same weather circumstances for all 148 riders from 23 countries, the regional team of Auvergne-Rhône Alpes and the UCI World Cycling Centre. Notable absentees were Norway and Ireland. Canadian Michael Leonard, already a WorldTour pro with Ineos Grenadiers won the 7.1-kilometer prologue.
Avenir is different to many other U23 races; it’s contested by national teams, and Leonard – riding for Canada – was quick to credit his teammates-for-the-week with their help defending his lead. “On the first day we were leading the overall classification, but none of the other countries wanted to help at the front,” he told Escape Collective via e-mail after the race.
“Quentin [Cowan], Felix [Bouchard] and Jonas [Walton] really pulled for me. This is nice because it’s not a pro team where you say, ‘This is what you have to do.’ Everyone paid to be here and do their own race so to see they were willing to support me says a lot about their character.”
Because he signed with Ineos last year, Leonard has been racing WorldTour races like the UAE Tour and Guangxi alongside more experienced riders from whom he learned a lot that helped him this week in France and Italy. Avenir was the only U23 race he did last year or this season. “I had a poor performance” last year, he said, “but I had a pretty good idea of what the race would be like. To be honest, it is WorldTour climbing level.”
He had no specific competitive goals for his race, which veered from that prologue win to some tough days in the final mountain stages and an eventual 27th-place finish. “The main objective was to learn as much as possible from the processes I targeted,” he said. “I wanted to be sure I did my best. After I won the prologue, the process was then to learn from racing in the yellow jersey. I didn’t keep it but I did everything I could have done. I learned from the experience and that was a main objective of the week.”
Jarno Widar (18 – Belgium / Lotto Dstny development)
The first major mountain stage came on day four, stage three. Two 18-year-olds, born three days apart, set the tone. Pablo Torres (Spain) attacked on the lower slopes of La Rosière but fellow 18-year-old and the season’s U23 sensation Jarno Widar (Belgium) followed. Joe Blackmore (Great Britain) gradually paced himself back too.
Perhaps no one came to Avenir with more eyes on him than Widar, already a rising star with Lotto Dstny’s development team. Widar dominated the U23 scene this year, with wins in the Alpes Isère Tour, Giro d’Italia Next Gen, and Giro Ciclista Valle d’Aosta and came to Avenir as a top favorite.
But after a promising opening to Avenir had him in second place into the final two stages, he struggled, in particular on the Finestre finish, and finished 29th. He seemed none too pleased with that, and while he wasn’t racing for his development trade team, Widar partly blamed his schedule for his fade, saying he was over-raced this year. “I already told the team two months ago that I was doing too many races, but they didn’t listen to me and we see what it looks like,” he told Direct Velo. Widar said he’ll race World Championships and the Giro di Lombardia (as a stagiaire with the ProTeam), but is otherwise done for the year.
Pablo Torres (18 – Spain / UAE Team Emirates Gen Z)
Stage 3’s summit finish wasn’t enough for Torres. On the stage 4 climb to ski station Les Karellis he attacked again. This time it was enough to take the win and the yellow jersey. Blackmore lost one and a half minutes on the steeper slopes. “That is my level against a climber like Torres,” he added realistically.
Torres, who rides for the UAE Team Emirates Gen Z development team and is rumored to have signed a multi-year contract already with the team, is one of those climbers Leonard had in mind when he mentioned the level at the race was already WorldTour. He was second at the Giro Next Gen and won the final stage of Valle d’Aosta.
And with the lead and another summit finish to follow on the final day, he was in good position for the overall. But the consistency with these very young riders is not there yet even though there is a lot of mythical climbing power coming to the pro peloton. U23 racing – and especially the Avenir – is, as Leonard said, “complete chaos.”
And on stage 5, it was Torres on the defensive without an uphill finale. With the first 70 kilometers almost completely uphill a huge battle for the breakaway started. Torres didn’t have any teammates up there, and neither did Leonard, the Canadian who started the day in fifth. Belgium did send two riders but second-placed Widar was nowhere to be seen.
The biggest upset was that Blackmore was in the first group with his Team GB teammate Louis Sutton. On the top of the Col du Mont Cénis, at 53 kilometers from the line with a long descent and then flat section to the finish in Condoue, they had just over a minute on Torres. But at the line, where Italian Florian Kajamini (who will race for Astana Qazaqstan next year) won the eight-rider sprint, the gap to Torres was five minutes. The pacing by Blackmore and his teammate Sutton and the Dutch duo of Tijmen Graat and Darren van Bekkum made the difference.
Blackmore took the yellow jersey with a seemingly comfortable lead of almost four minutes, with one day to go.
Joe Blackmore (21 – Great Britain / Israel-Premier Tech)
Blackmore, who comes from mountain biking and cyclocross, should have felt relatively at ease on the last eight unpaved kilometers of the final day, but the Finestre’s slopes, in the double digits, were to the advantage of Torres. The Spanish climber attacked 13 kilometers from the top and managed to take 3 minutes and 43 seconds on Blackmore. Torres set a new climbing record on the Finestre, beating Chris Froome’s old time by more than three and a half minutes, but came just 12 seconds short of winning the Tour de l’Avenir overall.
“I didn’t know the climb at all which was probably a good thing,” Blackmore told Escape afterward. “I knew how much time I had but I still had to give everything and go full gas to make sure. The run-in to the Colle delle Finestre had been easy with my team. They have done an amazing job getting me to the climb. We worked together as a team the entire race, not just for me but also for Mattie [Brennan]. The work Louis [Sutton] did on the flat yesterday was what helped me win the time I needed today. We had a good time together.”
Like Leonard, Blackmore doesn’t race much at the U23 level, instead focusing on 2.Pro and smaller races after stepping up in May to Israel-Premier Tech from its development team. Blackmore’s season has gone tremendously well, with overall wins in the Tours of Rwanda and Taiwan, the Circuit des Ardennes and the win in the U23 Liège-Bastogne-Liège. The 21-year-old Briton was focused on the road and MTB more this year and didn’t do much cyclocross over the winter.
“I knew I could be better this year but not win as much so I am really happy with it,” he said of his overall Avenir win. “I am now going to the Mountain Bike World Championships next week. That is a big goal. The U23 road World Cycling Championships in Zurich and the Tour of Britain are on my list too,” Blackmore concluded.
Pro road racing’s youth movement continues; at 21, Blackmore is the oldest of these four and there are others: France’s Léo Bisiaux, 19 and fourth overall, or Ronde de l’Isard winner Van Bekkum (22), who saw his own chances evaporate with an untimely flat but helped teammate Graat (21) to third.
While there is talent – the top 10 are largely already signed to a pro team or are rumored to be – the consistency isn’t yet there. “Cycling is not PlayStation,” said Leonard of the up-and-down results all week. But Avenir is about an education as much or more than performance.
“The biggest thing I learned from being pro is the importance of knowing when to be relaxed and when to be focused,” said Leonard of what he brought from his Ineos experience to his Avenir ride. “Commit to relaxation and focus on their own moments. It helps you to be focused when you need to be because you know when to relax too.” The WorldTour is much more controlled, and for some the results will continue to come, while others may find new and different roles. For now, enjoy the unpredictability and craziness of the Tour de l’Avenir, and a future we can barely tell day to day.
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