MIKEL LANDA // The Pragmatist
bike at the end of the season. “I need
it,” he says, “for the head, to relax,
but also for the body. I needed time
off, to do whatever you can’t do during
the season: going to the mountains,
eating, drinking. It’s important to have
a month of recovery and then you feel
stronger for working again.”
I wonder if this is Sky-approved. He’s
over a month away from officially
joining his new team but Landa is
already in regular contact with Tim
Kerrison, who coached Bradley
Wiggins, coaches Chris Froome, and
now coaches Landa. Landa says they
have been speaking regularly on the
phone, though he may not be following
Kerrison’s instructions to the letter. The
problem, he confides, is that he is
having great difficulty understanding his
new coach’s Australian accent.
It was during the Giro that Landa
caught the eye, not only for his exploits
on the bike but for his demeanour off it.
He speaks good English, was always
cheerful and smiling, and endeared
himself to fans – quite an achievement
for someone riding for a team as mired
in controversy as Astana.
Landa is not a typical professional
cyclist in the sense that he has a
hinterland beyond the sport. Before
turning pro with Euskaltel he went to
university, studying technical
architecture. He didn’t finish the course:
he says he did three-and-a-half of the four
years (but doesn’t explain why he quit so
close to the end, other than to say, “I
wasn’t the best student”). He is still
friends with some of his fellow students.
With them, “I can forget the cycling
world and live with normal people.”
He turned professional with Euskaltel in
2011, having spent two years with the
Orbea Continental team, where, aged 20,
he was fifth at the 2010 Tour de l’Avenir.
The Tour of the Future lived up to its name
that year: on the queen stage, to Risoul,
Landa finished with Andrew Talansky, 39
seconds behind the eventual winner,
Nairo Quintana. In his first season with
Euskaltel he took a solo victory on a stage
of the Vuelta a Burgos, and also claimed
the King of the Mountains title, in a race
won overall by Joaquim Rodríguez.
Over the next few seasons there were
flashes of ability – a stage win at the Giro
del Trentino in 2014, for example –
especially in the mountains but little to
suggest that Landa would one day be a
Grand Tour contender. But he had health
problems, often feeling tired. Last winter
he was diagnosed with mononucleosis.
“I was ill for three months,” he says. “It
was strange. You start feeling better, then
bad again. You have to be really patient
and do things really easily. It was the last
days of November that I started feeling it.
I stopped riding my bike in December,
then in January and February, some days I
was good, some days I was bad.”It was a worrying time. “It was an
important year for me because my
contract [with Astana] finished. The
team wanted more from me and there
was pressure to perform well.”
It was the pressure that made him ill
in the first place, he thinks. “I trained
too much. I always got good condition
very fast but then I’d train a bit more
than I needed to.”
It wasn’t until February 2015 that he
began to feel healthy again. The Giro
was a little more than two months
away. “I began training later and again
got my condition really fast but this
time I had the advantage of being fresh
because I hadn’t trained so much.”
There is a lesson here, he concludes: “I
think I need to be more fresh.”
Restored, Landa was rampant at the
Tour of the Basque Country, where he
won stage five, and the Giro del
Trentino, where he was second to an
even more on-fire Richie Porte.
When it came to the Giro, Landa
wasn’t just fresh, he was also hungry.
And he says he realised in the first few
days that, “in the climbs, I was the
best one.” He sat third overall beforeAstana’s best rider
in the 2015 Giro. And
on the right, norminal
leader Fablo AruLanda took the
second of two
consecutive stage
wins at Aprica
in the 2015 Grio,
putting 2:42 into Aru82 // March 2016