Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) has provided fresh details of his successful Hour Record bid, saying that in the last quarter of an hour the pain had reached a point where he was thinking of deliberately crashing to “put an end to the agony.”
Ganna recently pulverized the Hour Record in Grenchen velodrome, Switzerland, pushing it to 56.792 kilometres, a huge jump on the previous total of 55.548.
“For the first half hour, you don’t think of anything, the next 15 minutes you’re thinking about how you can do something big and the last 15 minutes I wanted to fall off just to put an end to the agony,” Ganna told El País newspaper in an interview made during the Ineos Grenadiers recent training camp in Nice.
“I wanted to puncture, anything, and finish the bid there and then. I just couldn’t go on.”
But go on Ganna did, although his graphic detail of the stress levels he suffers before any track event to the Spanish media outlet left no doubt at the effort involved and the pressure he feels.
“Two hours before racing starts, your hands go cold, then they get sweaty, then they’re cold again. You’re tearful, your face turns pale," he said.
“The most stressful moments are the 50 seconds when you’re looking at the board with the countdown. So you try to hide that stress behind some glasses.”
After insisting that if he did the Hour Record again he would only do so as the “last race of my career” - as was the case for Bradley Wiggins in 2015, or Chris Boardman when he beat Eddy Merckx’s record in 2000 by 10 metres - Ganna was adamant he would not be looking to imitate Wiggins in other ways.
Asked by El País if “one day we’d see you winning the Tour like Wiggins”, Ganna answered with a cursory “No”. He was equally direct when rejecting the idea that going for the Tour overall could form part of his future ambitions.
Ganna had a difficult Tour de France debut this year, in which he failed to win either time trial and had particularly bad luck in the opening TT when a piece of glass caused a puncture. He acknowledged that had had struggled throughout the Grand Tour.
"Being in a good place mentally helps you out when you’re not in great shape. At that point, 70 percent of racing comes down to your head," Ganna said.
“In the Tour I was at that ‘70 percent’ for all 21 days. My only goal was to survival and to get to Paris. I’d help where I could, but this year in the Tour I suffered a lot.”
Ganna’s intense relationship with racing was reflected in one description he gave of how radically different riding a bike felt when he was in good shape or when things weren’t going so well.
While on the good days, he recounted, he never wanted the training or racing to end, on the bad days “either because you’ve fallen off or you’ve got some other problem, you aren’t pedalling as well as you’d like, then you hate the bike. You really hate it.”
