CZECH AND BALANCE
“The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one,” wrote the Czech novelist Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s something that Roman Kreuziger might have contemplated as he entered the 2020 season, his 15th as a professional cyclist.
No rider can go on forever; all the talk in cycling is of the huge talent of the young generation, the riders in their early 20s who came through in 2019. But Kreuziger is still coming back for more. The flowing locks of his early years have long since been replaced by a crop of choppy bed hair, and 15 seasons of wind burn and dieting have chiselled deep lines into his face. The end, however, is not yet in sight: “I have plenty of years ahead of me,” he says.
Back in 2007, 2008, Kreuziger was the precocious youth coming through. His unusually earlyflowering talent was partially obscured by his near-contemporary Andy Schleck, second in the 2007 Giro at the age of 21, and even within his own Liquigas team, by Vincenzo Nibali, a year and a half older. However, back then, before Nibali had started winning grand tours, some within Liquigas felt that the Czech was the more likely to go on to dominate the sport. Paolo Slongo, who coached both, described Kreuziger as a “fuoriclasse”, a champion, and pointed out that he had more mastery of his physical capacities than the Italian rider: “Roman is more determined, more meticulous and he knows his body better than Vincenzo. Vincenzo often attacks at the wrong time. Roman is mature and cold-blooded by comparison.”
Indeed, it took Nibali until
