'This is my story and I am the main actor' - Primož Roglič at peace with Tour de France heartache

Primož Roglič is used to being chilled, projecting a nonchalant persona. Cool, calm and collected is a phrase he epitomises. But this, the deep and prolonged reflection, free of his usual cliches, was something else. This was Primož Roglič without pressure and stress, this was the Slovenian liberated. No more asking him if he’ll ever win the Tour de France, he’s totally at peace with his career arc.

“Everyone is writing their own story and their own things. This is my story and I am the main actor,” the 35-year-old told the assembled press ahead of his seventh Tour, the race in which he so heartbreakingly lost yellow in 2020, and has suffered more subsequent pain in the ensuing years, failing to finish the last three editions.

“Everybody has their own story. You all know mine: I came from winter sports, ski jumping and switched to the road bike. It still, for me, feels incredible – crazy, actually – to be here, to be present in the biggest event in cycling, to have some impact and to try to do my best.”

For the best part of the last decade, after he so famously swapped sports in his mid-20s, his best has been winning one-week stage races, four Vueltas a España and one Giro d’Italia. But the Tour has always remained elusive, the only race that refuses to be Roglified. He’s felt the pressure and the expectation to win yellow, but now he no longer talks himself up.

“With the way Tadej [Pogačar], Jonas [Vingegaard] and Remco [Evenepoel] are riding, about myself I don’t really care too much,” he said. “We all know in the end what races I won and the races I didn’t yet win. Yes, I have unfinished business with the Tour de France, but on the other hand, winning it or not, I’m almost 36-years-old, and I am happy and proud that I am able to come to the Tour de France and be part of the biggest cycling event in the world.”

Does he still dream of winning the race? “No, I look at the race realistically. Like I said, winning it or not, it is what is. Myself, my family, everyone around me, it will be the same afterwards, but for sure it’s still a challenge to keep me going.”

It’s a conscious decision to let go, a new game plan perhaps to try to carve out some luck in the race that has so often been his nemesis. “With obviously growing up, not getting younger but definitely getting older, you learn some things and what actually helps you,” he went on. “From this point, it’s helping [me to be more relaxed], to look at the facts that you are competing with Tadej, who is on another level, and others also.”

Roglič only tends to finish a race one or two ways: either as the winner, or at home, having crashed out. His last one, the Giro d’Italia, ended the latter way. “I was finished after the Giro,” he said. “I was on antibiotics with a bacterial infection and all I could do [since] was put in the work day after day. Yes, I was suffering, on my knees, but now we’re here and we will see.

“With every situation I try to learn something. It’s always easier to learn when something goes wrong or not the way you want. When you’re winning and doing good, it’s hard to learn from it, it’s hard to be realistic or look realistically in the mirror. With shit things, they show you; without bad things, you don’t know what the good things are. You always have to try to learn something out of every situation.”

Despite having won 91 bike races – ninety-one – Roglič is as synonymous with defeat as he is triumph. He’s had plenty of practice learning from bad moments. “It’s not only about the victories, and from my personal career, I don’t remember a lot of victories if I am honest, but the hard moments are what I remember more.”

This, a reminder, is Primož Roglič speaking, a man usually of very few words. Still here is, open, letting us all into the pain he’s felt through the years. But now he’s free. There is, of course, a serious point: Roglič, it appears, is bidding au revoir to his Tour chances. The time will come to maybe critique this approach, but for now let’s just embrace a different, authentic Roglič. “I really have nothing to prove to no one. I just want to come to Paris, take a champagne, smile, and we will see,” he smiled.

Testament to his laissez-faire attitude, he’s not even checked the route in detail. “We probably have a meeting tomorrow so I’ll see it then,” he said, nonchalantly.

But this is all not to say that Roglič is giving in from kilometre one. He’s too much of a competitor for that. “We’re all starting from zero, we’re all just saying something hypothetically. We of course fight for every second. I don’t expect Jonas or Tadej to push me up mountains, but the guys are strong. I only have to do my best.

“I’ve always definitely tried to do everything, to be able to come here as good as possible. How good it will be [this year] we will figure out sooner or later. But of course, being who I am, it’s always my dream to fight, to work and to do my best. Every athlete has the mindset to be the best. And in the end the place you get is what you deserve.”