When it comes to being a young, aspiring GC contender and you're in the same team as Tadej Pogačar, it can't be straightforward. But according to Juan Ayuso, Pogačar's teammate at UAE, who makes no secret of his own Grand Tour ambitions, that's exactly why he likes it.
As Ayuso sees it, Pogačar is the best racer in the world, and that makes the Slovenian what the 22-year-old calls 'the one who sets the bar, and we try to reach it' - even if such a mission is actually borderline impossible and Pogačar is operating in a league of his own.
"My friends from outside cycling see Tadej doing his stuff and they ask me - is that normal?" Ayuso explains during his team training camp in Alicante this winter. "And I always say, No, it's not normal. He just makes it seem like it's the easiest thing in the world.
"He's like Leo Messi in football. You see Messi dribbling the ball past his rivals like there's nothing to it. But you know, of course, that that's not the case."
Yet even if he has not got Tadej Pogačar's palmares, Ayuso has his own share of prodigious, precocious talent. He was third overall in the 2022 Vuelta a España, his first ever Grand Tour, aged 19, thereby becoming the second youngest rider ever to make the podium of a three-week race after Henri Cornet won the Tour de France in 1904, 118 years before, just ahead of his 20th birthday.
Then despite his late start to 2023 because of a leg injury, Ayuso followed that up with a fourth place overall in the Vuelta and winner of the Best Young Rider classification. This was a step down in terms of the overall hierarchy, but as the best-placed rider not racing for Jumbo-Visma in a Grand Tour GC where the Dutch squad obliterated the opposition, it was far from a step back.
Since then Ayuso has gone on showing flashes of notable brilliance - but curiously enough, not in the Grand Tours. In 2024, Ayuso was the fiercest opponent of Visma and Jonas Vingegaard in Tirreno-Adriatico, where he claimed the opening time trial and finished second overall.
He won the overall of an edition of Itzulia Basque Country that was overshadowed by the terrible mid-race crashes of Vingegaard Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) and Ayuso's own teammate Jay Vine, amongst many others - but which nonetheless culminated in a stunning last day battle between Ayuso, Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos Grenadiers) and defeated race leader Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek).
So far so very good, but then Ayuso's much-anticipated Tour de France debut, working for Pogačar, went severely askew. Firstly, he was affected by a heavy crash and obligatory abandon mid-way through his warm-up race, the Critérium du Dauphiné, and then during the Tour itself, Ayuso nearly got dropped on the opening stage. That severe wobble was followed by a brief but intense moment of controversy high on the Galibier three days later when UAE teammate João Almeida visibly waved an arm in what appeared to be frustration at Ayuso for seemingly not pulling his weight on the ascent. "Some gestures are not necessary and that was one of them, but that is what it is," Ayuso told reporters the next day at the start.
Things got no better as Ayuso was obliged to abandon with COVID-19 a week later and his illness actually explained why he had not been firing on all cylinders early on. But by then the fuse had already been lit on the speculation about the Galibier which in turn morphed into later, equally unsubstantiated, rumours that he might break his contract, switch teams and move onto Movistar in 2025
Ayuso later claimed what happened on the Galibier was not at all significant and the hatchet had been buried. But in a sense, that barely mattered. The bigger issue was that in a squad as stacked with talent as UAE, speculation about internal power struggles rarely, if ever, materializes into anything concrete, at least to the world at large. That makes such moments as the Almeida arm-wave far more important than they actually are - and makes Ayuso's explanation to a question about how Pogačar's UAE teammates work with such a powerful leader even more interesting.
The answer, Ayuso says, is not to fight the extra pressure that brings or heightened expectations, but to exploit them to your - and the team's - advantage.
"For sure I think we're one of the best teams in the world, and that does mean many teammates at a very high level," Ayuso argues.
"That also brings the whole level of the team up because if you want a chance, you know you really have to perform. You know there are going to be riders that are just better than you, and whom you'll need to help. But that's also motivation because it means you can't relax," he explains.
It all but goes without saying that for a vast majority of riders, including Ayuso, Tadej Pogačar represents the ultimate ideal in terms of performance. But Ayuso is at pains to emphasise that he does not see him as a rival, and pleads with assembled reporters that when he says that he wants to be better than Pogačar, it should not get misinterpreted.
"What I mean is of course you want to be better than him because he's the best rider in the world. In my case, I dream of being, one day, like him. But if you want to be like him you have to beat him," Ayuso says.
"But I don't want this to be a misunderstanding, [for somebody] to say that he's a rival [for me]. It's more than he sets the bar and we have to try and reach it."
However, as anyone who hasn't been sleeping under a rock this year will know from his runaway success in 2024, Pogačar is not just setting the bar but almost constantly raising it. So as Ayuso points out, the fact the Slovenian operates in a league of his own means he can be hugely admired. But in terms of his approach to racing, Pogačar being such an exceptional racer means there are also some severe limitations on what Ayuso believes he can actually learn from him.
"It's hard to get any advice as he's the best in the world and everything he does he makes it seem easier than it actually is," Ayuso reasons, before adding with a smile, "But it's definitely better, anyway, to have him on your side than as an opponent."
The Galibier Question
The question of whether Ayuso would rein in his own goals became a subject of very public discussion following Almeida's gesture towards his teammate on the Galibier stage when they were all working for Pogačar. But the Spaniard insists the whole story was blown out of proportion, and that he and Pogačar cleared the air completely just a few weeks later.
"We talked when we were in the Canadian races that summer. I thought it was necessary because a lot had been said in the media, and more than anything I wanted to clear things up. And he appreciated that, while he said a couple of things which I was grateful for, too."
Rather than there being a question of Ayuso not pulling his weight to resolve, he says, what was at stake in their Canada conversations was his own frustration about under-performing because of catching COVID during the Tour.
"After what happened, with me not being able to be there to help, and only on the race for one and a half mountain stages, I couldn't show what I was able to do. So I had some conversations with him in private and he understood that, and I appreciate that a lot about him because he always takes the time with those sorts of questions," explains the Spaniard.
"Even when he's winning and it's so easy for him, he realises that for others it might not be, and that makes it easier for everybody else to work with him."
If there was ever any discord within the team, Ayuso is markedly playing it down, then, and he gently brushes aside a question about the rumours that he could have broken his current contract - which lasts until 2028 - and headed to Movistar by saying he's very happy in UAE and "I don't need to think about anything else."
What he does reflect on, though, and in detail, is how he can improve his current performances both by ironing out some points where his season went askew in earlier years and simultaneously upping his game in the mountains.
"One of the aspects I'm focussing on is to increase the hours of training load as I'm now getting older," he says.
On top of that, "I've done the Tour de Romandie three times. And while 2023 doesn't count because I had an injury, in 2022 and again in 2024 I was going well but then halfway through the race, I blew up.
"So it's clear something had to change because at that point of the year next season, rather than easing back as I have done, this time I'm going onto the Giro," he points out.
"So right now I'm training a lot more easily than in other years and I'm changing a lot of things in terms of preparation, too."
Unsurprisingly, he's not overly willing to say what the specifics of those switches are. But as he puts it, one goal for 2025 is to improve his climbing, and hopefully, those changes will produce that.
"I've been considered pretty much a mountain racer, but now my wins have been mostly on the TT bike, so that's a bit weird," he says.
"On the other hand, these days time trialling is really important for GC guys because it's so hard to take back one or two minutes on the climbs, while in a time trial, you can easily lose that amount of time.
"So I already have my time trialling in my favour. But now, I do want to focus more on climbing and try and close the gap on the top riders, guys like Remco [Evenepoel] and [Primož] Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe)."
There are other important changes for 2025 for Ayuso. With the Giro d'Italia as his big goal for 2025, Ayuso says he'll start racing much later than in 2024 when he was winning hilly one-day races in France as early as February. Although his debut event is yet to be decided, he'll have another crack at Tirreno-Adriatico before heading to the Volta a Catalunya, a spell of altitude training and then on to the Grande Partenza and his Giro debut in early May.
With no Pogačar in either the Italian or the Catalan week-long stage races, it's reasonable to assume that Ayuso will have a leading role, and that's something that - if it wasn't clear enough from his career to date - he relishes. "For me, it's important to be a team leader because the pressure you put on yourself is not the same," he recognises, before adding, "I asked a lot of myself in the Tour de France because it was my first ever Tour and I wanted to do it as well as possible.
"But when things depend more on you, it's something special that also changes a bit, and that extra motivation is very important. It's something I've always had in me since I was young."
Whether Ayuso co-leads at the Giro on his own or works for Pogačar is, of course, the big question mark still hanging over his pathway through the 2025 season. But be it getting his own chance to shine or racing for the Slovenian, as Ayuso says, in one key sense - it doesn't really matter.
"If Tadej is there it changes everything a bit, but in terms of preparation it changes nothing", Ayuso insists. "You prepare the best way you can, and if Tadej goes then we race one way, if he doesn't then we race another.
"Either way, up to the Giro start, the focus and way to approach it is on doing the best performance we can." Either way, too, be it in Grand Tours, week-long races or one-day Classics, Ayuso's ambition to succeed looks to be burning more fiercely than ever. And that's something he and his team leader Pogačar certainly have in common.
