‘I think everybody wants to win the Tour de France’: Adam Yates profile

Cyclist

Words Mark Bailey Photography Russ Ellis

As a member of Ineos Grenadiers, Adam Yates is blessed with detailed sports science support, gourmet chefs and cutting-edge kit.

But today, as he prepares to join his teammates at the 2022 Tour de France, the Bury-born racer is reminiscing about his less-than-glamorous amateur days, when in 2011 he packed a case, fled the chilly climes of Lancashire and threw himself into little-known races with French teams UVCA Troyes and CC Etupes.

Unlike his twin brother Simon, who followed the now standard British Cycling Olympic talent pathway, refining his skills on the track before switching to the road, Adam did things the old-school way, following in the tyre tracks of the pioneering British road racers of the past.

‘We were just talking about this on a training ride,’ says the 29-year-old. ‘It’s good fun when you come up through the amateur ranks and you drive six, seven hours, step out the car and race.

‘You don’t know anything about your carbs or protein or power, you just go after it, and I wouldn’t change anything about that journey.

‘I enjoyed every minute of living that lifestyle and trying to make it. It’s a bit different to the other guys, but if you put the work in and commit you will go somewhere in life.’

The experience offers insights into the mindset of a man who competes not for jerseys or money but for the joyous, instinctive thrill of racing. ‘I don’t really have a preference, when I get a number on my back I just want to get after it,’ says Yates.

‘It doesn’t matter who’s in the race or how well people are going. If you have the legs and you’ve done the training then I don’t see why you can’t win.

‘A lot of the time, for me it’s about the Grand Tours, but it doesn’t matter if it’s the Tour of Turkey or the Tour de France. I just love racing.’

<b>No looking back</b>

Unlike fanatics of the sport such as Mark Cavendish and Sir Bradley Wiggins, who grew up devouring cycling books and festooning their bedroom walls with cycling posters, Yates has little time for cycling’s dusty annals and geeky stats.

‘Am I interested? To be honest, not really,’ he laughs. ‘I enjoy bike racing, getting stuck in and doing my best, but I’m not into the history.’

When Cyclist tells him that his third place at the Giro di Lombardia last October made him the first Brit to stand on the podium since Tom Simpson won the race in 1965, Yates is surprised.

‘That’s a good one – nobody had told me that. I haven’t come from a cycling background so we never grew up watching all the racing and the legends of the sport. We just turned up at training and enjoyed it.’

Adam Yates takes on the cobbles on Stage 5 of the 2022 Tour de France. Photo: Pete Goding

Yet this doesn’t mean Yates fails to appreciate the heritage of his sport. He was humbled to finish fourth and win the young rider classification at the 2016 Tour de France, then to wear yellow for four days in 2020.

‘Wearing the yellow jersey was an amazing experience,’ he admits. ‘For some guys, wearing that jersey for a day makes their career. And that is one jersey I have collected. I have my number on the back and it’s hung up in my house. It was a super experience.’

Perhaps it’s something to do with age, but as Yates approaches his 30th birthday, it seems this sentimentality might be creeping.

‘I now try to keep a bike from each year so I can get a collection going. Some years are harder than others and I didn’t start collecting until a few years back, so I’m a bit late really. But I’ll get all the bikes eventually.

‘I think a collection like that will be quite cool for when I retire. Hopefully by the end of my career I’ll have a nice row of bikes from every year so I can reflect on my journey.’

<b>Grand designs</b>

Yates’s career journey has now reached a pivotal moment. He has enjoyed excellent results so far, winning the Tour of Turkey in 2014 and the Clásica San Sebastián in 2015, taking fourth at the Tour in 2016, finishing second in the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2018, fourth at Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 2019 and ninth at the Tour in 2020.

But last year – his first with Ineos – was undoubtedly his most consistent yet.

Yates finished second at the UAE Tour in February, won the Volta a Catalunya in March (a result that Wiggins said confirmed Yates as ‘the next British star’), was fourth at the Tour of the Basque Country in April, fourth at the Vuelta a España in September, second at Milano-Torino in October and third in the Giro di Lombardia the same month.

Going into the Tour de France this year, Yates has added another second place at the UAE Tour and a fourth at Paris-Nice. It’s an enviable list, but for all Yates’s talk of preferring racing to dwelling on past feats, he’s acutely aware of all those oh-so-nearlys.

Like it or not, his legacy will be defined by one simple question: how many races can he actually win?

‘I think I had a good season last year but obviously I’d have liked to win more and I think everyone does. But at the end of the day I won in Catalunya and I had a couple of near misses, where if I’d played things differently I could have had a win. But that’s bike racing and that’s life.

‘In previous years I’ve struggled with consistency so that’s something I’ve worked on, and I didn’t have many bad days last year. I wasn’t at my best in the Vuelta but for most of the season I was up there fighting for wins.

‘Joining a new team – with new equipment and new teammates – is never going to be super-smooth, so I think I did a good job.’

With his strong all-round repertoire of talents, Yates believes that Grand Tours will remain his priority, despite the competition for places on the Ineos Tour team.

‘I think everybody wants to win the Tour de France. It’s the biggest bike race in the world and to win that changes your life, doesn’t it? So for sure it’s going to be the Tour.

‘But a bike race is a bike race and whatever race I go to, I enjoy it. It’s just a matter of the process and having the right team and the right form at the right time.’

Little surprise to hear, then, that certain Classics continue to appeal to Yates’s raw racing instincts.

‘I’ve come close to making the podium in Liège and last year podiumed in Lombardia. These are races that suit me. Lombardia is the one that suits me the best, but they’re both super-hard and super-long races with a lot of metres of climbing.

‘I’d love to win one of those. Maybe down the line I might just target one-day races and really go after them, but at the moment I race in blocks. Who knows where one-day races might take me, one day?’

<b>Bury boy</b>

Yates has come a long way since his childhood riding in the Lancashire hills. He’s now based in Andorra and doesn’t travel home much but despite this he says he still very much feels like a Bury boy.

‘When I’m back I always do the classic local climbs: Blackstone Edge [a 472m gritstone escarpment in the Pennines] and The Rake [0.9km, peaking at 22%].

‘As you get older it is harder to stay in contact with people but I’ve still got my core group of friends from home. A lot of us went to primary school, secondary school and college together.’

And then, of course, there is Yates’s brother. The twins got into cycling aged nine following a family trip to the Manchester Velodrome, and their parents soon found themselves carting Adam and Simon off to track meets racing for Eastlands Velo and road races riding for Bury Clarion.

The brothers would race and nag and fight each other up every climb in Lancashire, and that relationship continued for seven years as pros at Orica-GreenEdge (now BikeExchange-Jayco). But last year Adam made the switch to Ineos, leaving Simon behind. Has this been hard?

‘I still speak to Simon pretty much every day,’ says Adam, who is the younger by minutes. ‘We’re super-close, as you can imagine. He’s in Andorra as well, so we train together. He was in Gran Canaria with me not long ago too.

‘To be honest, now that we’re in different teams we spend more time together as we have similar schedules. Before, we had different schedules due to our different roles in the team, so we actually see more of each other now.’

That’s as may be, but doesn’t it feel odd to be battling against your twin in a WorldTour race?

‘I mean, it’s a little bit weird in a way, but at the end of the day we’re both professionals. Teams are paying us money to race. Simon is like me: he enjoys bike racing and getting stuck in, so it doesn’t matter who’s on the start line.

‘Even if Simon is there we’re both going to race 100%. Even if we came to the finish and it was just me and him, we would race like we would race anybody else.’

<b>The big move</b>

Yates admits that, despite his highly instinctive approach to racing, the hyper-detailed support and training structure at Ineos suits him. ‘I like planning and I like to know where I’m going, and this team makes it very easy to do that,’ he says.

‘I think we’re a good fit. I’m quite into training to get fit and really flying. If you know you’ve got to do certain things to be in a certain shape, I find it easy just to lock in, focus and train the house down.’

What exactly did Sir Dave Brailsford say to him to convince him to join? ‘You’re testing my memory,’ laughs Yates. ‘But we talked quite a lot about marginal gains and the little things you can change. They do make a big difference.

‘These days the level of competition is so high, if you’re not doing the little things you’ll get left behind. I tried to implement some last season – some worked and some didn’t – but this is a new season and we’ll try some other things. You have to do everything perfectly to win big.’

Yates is an obsessive trainer. Last November, in the middle of the winter break – normally a time of total recuperation for pro cyclists – he ran the Barcelona Marathon, clocking a solid time of 2:58:44.

‘I don’t run at all during the season but me and my girlfriend wanted to give it a try,’ he says. ‘After Lombardia I went home, then went to the Maldives for ten days, so I didn’t have much time to train.

‘The island we were on was 1.8km long so you couldn’t do much running. But we’re endurance athletes, so as long as you can handle the impact on different muscles it wasn’t too bad.

‘I mean, I couldn’t walk for a week after, but it was good fun.’

It may seem like a strange way to relax, but Yates knows he can’t afford to ease off. ‘There’s always stuff to work on, even if you win, or someone will come up behind you and take your spot,’ he says.

With his 30th birthday next month, it could be said he’s hitting his cycling prime, given the ages of many Tour winners over the past decade or so, such as Cadel Evans (34), Bradley Wiggins (32), Vincenzo Nibali (29) and Geraint Thomas (32).

But more recent winners, such as Egan Bernal (22) and Tadej Pogačar (21), have bucked that trend. Yates can hear the clock ticking.

‘You’ve got young guys now winning straight out of the juniors, so at times it almost feels like you’re getting old. But it was only a few years ago when the older guys started winning all the races. I do feel that every year I’m getting better, so we’ll see.

‘It’s a matter of doing everything you can, looking after yourself 100% and committing – and I’m sure the results will come.’

Twin peaks<b> </b>

The career highlights of Adam Yates

1992: Adam Richard Yates is born in Bury on 7th August, minutes after twin brother Simon

2013: Races in France thanks to support from the Dave Rayner Fund, and finishes second at the Tour de l’Avenir

2014: Signs for WorldTour team Orica GreenEdge, winning a stage and the overall at the Tour of Turkey

2015: Follows a solid showing at his first Tour de France with victory at the Clasicá San Sebastián

2016: Shows his Grand Tour GC potential with fourth overall at the Tour de France, winning the youth classificiation

2017: Another solid season includes ninth overall at the Giro d’Italia and fifth at the Tour of Poland

2018: Finishes in the top five overall at Tirreno-Adriatico and the Tour of California, but can only manage 29th at the Tour

2019: Is consistently strong in the early season, but again disappoints at the Tour, without a single top ten stage finish to his name

2020: In his final year with Mitchelton-Scott, wins the UAE Tour and holds the yellow jersey at the Tour for four days, finishing ninth overall

2021: Now riding for Ineos Grenadiers, wins the Volta a Catalunya on his way to a strong fourth at the Vuelta a España

Photo: Gonzalo Arroyo Moreno via Getty Images

<b>Yates on…</b>

…his best win last season

‘For sure, it was Catalunya. It’s always more memorable when you win, but I shared the podium with my teammates, Richie Porte and G [Geraint Thomas], and that just showed the dominance of the team. We set off straight from the gun and even in the TT we had four guys in the top ten, so it showed our intent.’

…his first bike

‘I still remember my first bike, which was a little red mountain bike. It was quite small but – I don’t know why – it had a massive gear on it. There is a really straight road near our house and I remember tearing down the road in this huge gear.’

…motivation

‘For me it’s all about having a goal. If you have something to aim for, like a race you want to win, everything feels easier. But once you get there and have that condition it lingers on, so you can use it in other races for a period of time. Once you know what you want, go after it.’

… Ineos Grenadiers

‘It’s not often we all get together these days. So it’s good to see everyone, have a laugh and get the training done. There’s a lot more people in this team, people that have different jobs looking at all the details so everything’s perfect. But at the end of the day it’s a cycling team that wants to win races. And that suits me.’