It’s been a challenging couple of years for Victor Lafay. The Frenchman rose to prominence at the 2023 Tour de France with a daring stage win into San Sebastian, breaking a 15-year Tour drought for his team at the time, Cofidis. Greener pastures awaited at Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale from 2024, but so did illness and injury. A recurrent knee issue forced surgery and a lengthy period away from racing, and his results since have been frustratingly mixed.
Iain Treloar
In light of all that and with his contract up at the end of this season, it’s perhaps little surprise that Lafay’s thoughts have turned to a future beyond the sport. At September’s Tour of Britain, Lafay told Daniel Benson that he was “not sure if I’ll race again next year… with these two years I’ve had a lot of time to decide on what I’d do after cycling and I think that I’m okay to stop now.” He would, he said, leave his decision until “after a good race”. That good race has yet to arrive: DNFs followed at the Tour of Britain, in Montréal, and at the Giro dell’Emilia. Now he’s at the Tour of Guangxi, his career seemingly still hovering in the balance.
When one journey ends, another begins, and the transition from life as a pro athlete can be seismic. But buried down the bottom of Benson’s interview with the Frenchman was a hint that in that regard, Lafay is a man with a plan. “I have a lot of ideas for work that I’d like to do after,” Lafay said, before going on to elaborate on one such idea: “Sell cheese in Japan, for example. Because I’m a cheese lover. I have a lot of good ideas and I know that the future will be really good.”
With that surprising and specific career prospect on the cards, you can, perhaps, understand why we needed to know more. In the extremely broad spectrum of cyclists’ lives outside of cycling, an idly dropped ambition to “sell cheese in Japan” stuck in the mind like a thorn. Why cheese? Why Japan? Why together?! Tell us literally everything, Victor.
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