Filippo Ganna (Image credit: Getty)
Last July, Filippo Ganna ’s second life on the track briefly felt like a burden. His Tour de France debut had been more trying than anticipated. Fatigue, mental as much as physical, had mounted across the three weeks. The thought of tackling the Hour Record in August, as initially planned, only seemed to make things worse. A week from Paris, Ganna shelved the project.
“The plan was to finish the Tour and then immediately do the Hour Record,” Ganna says. “But when I didn’t have a perfect Tour like I wanted, I said it was better just to focus on finishing it. It was better to stay calm without thinking about the Hour Record or other goals. We decided to delay the attempt.”
At that point, Ganna would surely have been content to push any attempt into 2023, but the idea was never going to be allowed simply to wither on the vine. Ineos performance engineer Dan Bigham himself broke the record in August, which only heightened Pinarello’s desire to complete the harvest by having Ganna establish a new – and definitive – mark on their machine before new UCI regulations forced a redesign.
“Before the end of the season, Fausto Pinarello had studied the bike and prepared it, and he said, ‘Can we do something or not?’” Ganna says, breaking into a sheepish grin: “I said, ‘Ok, Fausto, I’ll try to do it.’”
Ganna’s displays on the road in the latter part of the season – third […]
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