'Without tunnel vision, you get left in the dust' - Jai Hindley and the loneliness of the Grand Tour contender

Six weeks or so had passed since the 2023 Tour de France when Jai Hindley sank into a chair in a hotel lobby in Québec. The dark circles beneath his eyes were only partially explained by the leap in time zones on the long flight from Europe the previous day. By early September, a rider whose entire year had been built around the Tour was already likely to be wandering around with a thousand-yard stare. It comes with the territory.

“I was pretty banged up and bruised, and pretty done physically and mentally, let’s say, after the Tour,” Hindley admitted. “I was pretty cooked.”

It was hardly surprising; Hindley crammed more into his July than most. His Tour debut began in sparkling fashion, when a daring attack on stage 5 to Laruns put him into the yellow jersey. After losing the lead a day later, he still looked the best of the rest behind Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar through the second week, only for a heavy crash on stage 14 to change the tenor of his race completely.

“I was able to save it a bit on that stage, but after that, my back was worse and worse every day,” he said. “I was seeing the physio a couple of hours every day, sometimes before the stage even, and then in the evening full gas. The physios were doing everything they could to ease the muscles around the tailbone because when I crashed, I fell full on the tail bone, it was pretty grim.”

The Australian’s Tour began as an exploratory mission to see just how high he could soar against that exalted competition. It ended as an exercise in plumbing the very depths of his reservoirs of endurance and resolve. In any other race on the calendar, Hindley’s injuries would surely have seen him climb off. The Tour being the Tour, of course, the thought never really entered his head. He battled on to place seventh in Paris, exhausted by the ordeal but not scarred by the experience.

“The Tour is the biggest race, so you don’t quit unless you’ve got two broken legs,” Hindley explained. “It was just really grim, especially the last week. I was just suffering every day and losing a lot of time every day, and then still trying to stay in the GC battle. But it was really shit to just watch the GC slide further and further away. It was pretty tough.”

Hindley had already shown his mettle as a Grand Tour rider at the Giro d’Italia. He placed second overall with a breakthrough display at the pandemic edition of 2020 before returning to win the race outright two years later, when he held his nerve in a tense duel with Richard Carapaz before outdrawing him on the Marmolada.

And yet, despite those achievements in Italy, Hindley knew he had to prove himself all over again in his maiden Tour. The Giro and the Tour share the same basic premise, yet they seem to present very different challenges. Cycling history is dotted with riders who flowered in May only to wither repeatedly in July. Hindley couldn’t be certain of his ability to keep time with the rhythms of the Tour until he stepped onto the dance floor for himself. His performances prior to the fateful crash suggested he was a quick learner.

“I just expected it to be super hard and tough, with crazy pressure and everything – and yeah, it pretty much delivered on all those fronts,” he said. “It’s always hard to say the Tour is harder than the Giro, or the Giro is harder, or the Vuelta. There are so many factors and variables, it’s hard to say if one is straight out harder than the other, but I think the amount of pressure and the hype around the race at the Tour is pretty crazy. Just in terms of the hype, I think that’s pretty unrivalled.”

Spotlight

Hindley had a crash course in Tour hype when he rode his way into the race over the Col de Marie Blanque on stage 5 and then lost it the following day on the Tourmalet, but in truth, a man doesn’t need a yellow jersey on his back to draw attention in July. For GC contenders, every stage is a referendum on their prospects, and every day finishes with a debrief outside the team bus with waiting reporters.

Although Hindley is among the peloton's most amiable riders, he confessed that media obligations are really something he would rather do without. It’s testimony to his innate good manners, then, that he has never shown so much as a flicker of irritation towards the fourth estate during his Grand Tour career. Witness, for instance, the grace he showed in the mixed zone after losing the maglia rosa on the final day of the 2020 Giro.

“Interviews and media presence are not something I’ve ever really looked forward to,” he said. “But it’s just all part of it and I just try to embrace it as best I can.”

Somehow, Hindley’s equanimity remained intact even as he was struggling his way through the final week of the Tour, shipping time to his podium rivals most days and then spending at least two hours on the treatment table every evening. 

“You try to gee up yourself as best you can but it’s also pretty tough,” he said. “The last week especially I was just in pieces. The media is asking me, ‘Oh, how is it today?’ and well, it’s just the same shit, different day, you know? ‘My back is still like it was yesterday, if not worse’. So it’s pretty frustrating.

“You also have the team supporting you and asking you how’s it going today, is it any better? Everyone wants the best for you but it’s just frustrating. You just go into every day just suffering and just trying to survive another day. There’s a big difference between that and actually being in the race. It’s a lot more fun when you’re being competitive as opposed to just surviving.”

Sacrifice

For months, Hindley had carefully laid sacrifice upon sacrifice as he built towards the main event. Blueprints for diet and training were diligently followed, and the work was buttressed by a lengthy spell at altitude in May. Second place at June’s Critérium du Dauphiné suggested his foundations were robust and Hindley looked to reinforce them with another stint at altitude in June.

And yet no matter how diligent the preparation, nothing can insure a rider against that recurring occupational hazard at the Tour – rotten luck. Hindley’s entire race turned on an anonymous stretch of road outside Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne on Bastille Day, when he was among the many fallers in a crash in the opening kilometres of stage 14. He would have been forgiven for asking himself if the increasing demands of preparing for a Grand Tour in the 21st century were really worth it.

“I enjoy it in a way, the training and the isolation. But in another way, it can be very boring and very lonely at times,” he said. “It’s tough physically, obviously, because you’re driving yourself into the ground every day for four weeks, and mentally, it can be really tough as well.

“If you’re having a good camp, it’s great, and if you have good guys around you and you’re feeling good on the bike, it’s great. But it’s not always like that. Sometimes you’re not feeling so good on the bike or maybe the guys you’re with aren’t the best or whatever, and it can be difficult.

“For me, the camps were really good for me, but in the end, I did four and a half weeks of altitude and that was a long time. The altitude I did up until the Dauphiné was sweet, but I was a bit tapped out when I went back to altitude afterwards, so that was a really hard week. I wasn’t recovering great.”

Based on that experience, Hindley is likely to forgo a June altitude camp in 2024, but the baseline requirements of preparing for Grand Tours aren’t going to become any more forgiving next year. Professional cycling isn’t simply a job, it’s a lifestyle. The default level of involvement has edged inexorably upwards he entered the WorldTour with Sunweb in 2018.

“I think it’s safe to say the level is getting higher and higher every year, and it will always be getting higher and higher every year,” Hindley said. “Guys are having to do more extra stuff with their training, pushing things with nutrition, sacrifices, dedication, time. It’s probably less social now, let’s say.

“If you don’t have tunnel vision, then you’re going to get left in the dust. It’s pretty crazy, actually. And that’s just my perspective from turning pro in 2018 until now. It’s not even that long ago, but the difference between 2018 and 2023 is already just…”

Those demands have led some high-profile riders to step away from the sport at a relatively young age. Hindley, for his part, has tried to guard against burning out by building periods of complete rest into his schedule. After the Tour, for instance, he stepped away from the world of cycling altogether for 10 days.

“I love what cycling gives you, the people you meet, the places you go, the racing, but it’s not always so glamorous, so it’s important to find balance,” he said. “When I have time off, I really have time off. I don’t look at my bike, I don’t watch any cycling and I don’t reply to a lot of messages from cycling-related people. You let your mind reset and then naturally you are attracted to it again. If you don’t have that balance, you burn yourself out pretty quick.”

That mindset stood Hindley in good stead in 2021, the most trying season of his career to date. Ambitions were high after his sparkling Giro the previous Autumn, but his final campaign with Team DSM was punctuated by ill fortune. A saddle sore forced him out of the Giro, while he was left out of DSM’s Vuelta squad altogether. Even though his performance numbers from the 2020 Giro spoke for themselves, he was aware, too, that in some quarters, he was being dismissed as a flash in the pan. The move to Bora-Hansgrohe that winter offered a chance to break that cycle and begin again.

“In 2021 I had a super shit year. There was a lot of injury, a lot of illness, and also a lot of things happening off the bike, like not being able to get back to Australia for a long time,” he said. “I had this really high expectation for what 2021 was going to be like, I was super hungry and motivated, and then it all just fell to shit, basically. Mentally that was really tough.

“But in the back of my mind, I knew the level in 2020 was really high, regardless of what people on Twitter or Facebook or whatever were saying. I knew it was a really hard race and I had the best legs of my career in that race. If you’ve done it before, then why can’t you do it again?”

Hindley proved the point at the 2022 Giro and, though the crash compromised his final result, he underlined it with his displays at the Tour. Even if Vingegaard and Pogačar are, by Hindley’s own admission, operating on a different plane.

“I think it’s safe to say I’m still a fair way off those guys,” he said – the Perth native’s appetite for the race was whetted by his first experience. “For sure I’d love to go back and give it another crack and see where I am.”

The Roglič factor

The outlook at Bora-Hansgrohe would change rather dramatically in the weeks after this interview, of course. At the time of speaking, Hindley was the team’s most established GC leader, with Aleksandr Vlasov next in line. The arrival of Primož Roglič from Jumbo-Visma alters the hierarchy considerably. The Slovenian will target the Tour next July and, with 59km of time trialling on the route, he will set out as Bora-Hansgrohe’s clear leader.

Hindley, meanwhile, seems likely to be pressed into a service as a rather deluxe domestique at the Tour – or perhaps an auxiliary leader – with manager Ralph Denk recently telling GCN that the Giro route was ill-suited to his characteristics. It remains to be seen if the likely departure of Cian Uijtdebroeks causes a rethink of Bora’s 2024 planning, but Hindley insisted that Roglič's arrival was a bonus for the team when asked about it at the Giro presentation in October.

“Primož is one of the best riders in the world and he’s also the reigning Giro champion, so he’s a huge addition to the team,” Hindley said then. “I’m really excited and I think the team will hopefully step up a level.”

Of course, what else could he be expected to say?

More revealing, perhaps, is what Hindley explained about his relationship with the burden of outright leadership back in early September in Canada, when Roglič was still a Jumbo-Visma rider, locked in an internecine struggle thousands of kilometres away at the Vuelta with Vingegaard and Sepp Kuss.

“I think I’ve always liked to be a leader, but telling people what to do and having to be an arsehole every now and then is not always the easiest thing for me, so I actually like going to a Grand Tour with another guy going for GC,” Hindley said then. 

“In the end, it’s a pretty modern way of going to a Grand Tour these days. The whole pressure and responsibility, I think, is easier when there’s less expectation.”

Roglič’s arrival, in other words, could yet open as many avenues as it closes. Sometimes, it doesn't hurt to have a bit of company on the road. 

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