No longer a Tour de France rookie, Sepp Kuss knows the challenge that lies ahead. Once again, he’s ready to do his job when the three-week Grand Tour reaches the final mountain stages in the mighty Pyrenees.
Kuss, the 26-year-old American cycling star from Durango, will embark on the 108th edition of the Tour de France on Saturday with a start in Brest with a hilltop finish in Landerneau. Twenty more stages will follow before the finish July 18 in Paris on the famed Champs-Élysées.
“I am feeling good. I am happy, motivated and pretty excited to start the Tour,” Kuss said Wednesday in a phone interview with The Durango Herald before Thursday’s team presentations. “I did the Critérium du Dauphiné, and then as a team, we went straight to Tignes in the French Alps where we also trained last year before the Tour. We got the final touches on our preparation and all feel really good.”
A year ago, Kuss boomed in popularity around the globe after some massive efforts on a climbing-heavy Tour de France route. Already a stage winner at the 2019 Vuelta a España, Kuss turned heads with his stunning climbing on the most grueling stages of last year’s Tour de France, the most iconic event in the sport.
With Kuss as a top support rider, Team Jumbo-Visma’s Primož Roglič of Slovenia wore the coveted leader’s yellow jersey the majority of the 2020 race until the Stage 20 individual time trial, when 21-year-old Slovenian Tadej Pogačar came from behind to swipe the yellow jersey away before the final victory ride into Paris.
Pogačar is back one year more mature for the UAE-Team Emirates squad, which will look to deliver him once more to Paris for back-to-back titles.
At 31, Roglič returns as the second betting favorite behind his countryman and will once again be able to count on Kuss for team tactics on the climbing stages.
“We’re really motivated,” Kuss said. “After last year, we learned a lot. We’re still as strong and motivated with pretty much the same team back from last year, and we want to ride the race how we want and to the best of our ability. But I think last year also showed us that, in the end, we have to do our best and be happy with every step we take rather than only focusing on one goal. Our opponents are all very strong, and we can’t underestimate anybody. If we go there and do our best, I think we can be happy.”
Roglič, the 2019 and 2020 winner of the Spanish Vuelta, has taken a bit of time off from racing but has been hard at work in training alongside Kuss in the Tignes and earlier in May in Spain.
“I am confident I’m in shape,” Roglič said in a Team Jumbo-Visma news release. “Normally, I react very well to altitude training. In previous years, I also had a period without racing. Like the period between the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España in 2019 or the corona period in 2020.”
As has become customary, all eyes will be on the Ineos Grenadiers team, whether there is infighting within the squad or if they are able to produce a winning rider.
Along with the third-betting favorite in Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz, the 2019 Giro d’Italia champion and 2021 Tour de Suisse winner, Ineos will also bring this year’s Critérium du Dauphiné champion Richie Porte of Australia as well as Geraint Thomas, the 2018 Tour de France champion and 2019 runner-up. Ineos also has British star Tao Geoghegan Hart, the 2020 Giro d’Italia champion.
Ineos will be motivated after not being able to deliver Egan Bernal, the 2019 Tour de France champion, last year to the Champs-Élysées. Bernal won this year’s Giro d’Italia but is not on the Tour roster.
“They have three or four guys who are all really big threats, and they each have their own skill-set,” Kuss said of Ineos. “I think, from their position, they will try to make the race hard by attacking with those guys. That’s up to us or other teams to be able to follow the different cards they have. It will make the race definitely more exciting this year.”
This year’s route will have two individual time trials for the first time since 2017. Kuss previously lost ground in time trials but has improved in that department already this season. Because of that, he is 14th among betting favorites to win the entire Tour at 80-1 odds. Those are the same odds as his strong Belgian national champion teammate Wout van Aert, who has three stage wins in his previous two showings at the Tour de France.
This year, there are eight flat, five hilly and six mountain stages to go with the two individual time trials. Only three finishes – Stages 9, 17 and 18 – have summit finishes. The Stage 18 climb on July 15 on Luz Ardiden in the Pyrenees could be the last chance for a general classification contender to establish a strong lead before a flat Stage 19, a Stage 20 individual time trial and the flat victory ride on Stage 21 into Paris.
“People will say maybe this year the route does not have enough summit finishes or is not as mountainous, but in the end, racers decide how hard it is going to be,” Kuss said. “There are less mountains than last year, but that is going to make it tough because it will be even more aggressive on those mountain stages that there are.”
Kuss will feel at home during Stage 15 on July 11 before the last of the two rest days. It is a mountainous day in Andorra with a climb of Col de Beixalis before a ripping downhill finish. The start that day in Céret is one of 10 new stage cities on this year’s route. There are four categorized climbs that day.
“I think that will be one of the toughest stages, and it will be cool because I will go right by my house in Andorra,” Kuss said. “The last stages in the Pyrenees are also going to be pretty hard. Every mountain stage is decisive. Because there are more time trials, the more climber-type riders have to make up time in the mountains.”
Kuss is eager to enjoy a Tour de France a year after quarantine. Last year’s Tour was pushed back from its usual summer start until the final week of August with the event rolling through September.
“It’s such a different year scheduling wise,” Kuss said. “Last year, there were question marks all around the race. We didn’t even know if we would make it through the first stage with the COVID situation being so unknown. Now, it’s more or less a normal season. We’ve been able to have a lot of races instead of just training. I have felt pretty good. I still had some work to do in training after Dauphiné to get to my best level, but luckily I’ve had that time to improve.”
And while there were still plenty of fans lining the roads last year despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Kuss knows it will be even crazier this year with lockdowns lifted.
“Last year, there were still a bit more people than you would expect for most of the world being in lockdown. This year with restrictions eased quite a bit, it’s going to be full-on spectators,” Kuss said. “It’s great for the atmosphere, and hopefully everything stays safe.
“In the Tour, a lot of people are there just to get drunk and don’t know so much what it’s like to ride through a horde of people, and sometimes there’s not that much respect for the riders. But it’s all part of it. You really never know what you’re going to encounter.”
Kuss turned down a spot on the USA Cycling team for the 2021 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. The race would have come a week after the Tour de France, and he will aim to spend that time to recover before gaining his first team leadership role at the Spanish Vuelta in August. It will be his fourth career Vuelta start.
For Kuss, it was an easy decision to pass up the chance to be an Olympian to focus on the Grand Tour events that matter most to the team. Kuss signed a new three-year contract extension with Team Jumbo-Visma this spring.
“I already had my schedule more or less decided in December,” Kuss said. “I already knew I probably wasn’t going to make the Olympics work with what I wanted to get out of the season. A lot of people say, ‘Aww but there is only one Olympics and a lot of Vueltas,’ and stuff like that. But when you have that opportunity in one year to go for the Vuelta like I do this year, then you have to make a decision. In pro cycling, every year counts. In my mind, the Olympics is just another race. It is the biggest global sporting event, but in cycling, there is a lot more than just the Olympics. It would be cool to say I am an Olympian, but for me, it’s not what I do it for. There are bigger goals.”
Kuss said he doesn’t believe the 2024 Olympic road race course in Paris will suit his climbing style, so he also doesn’t see himself going to that Olympics. But he didn’t completely close the door on a future Olympics, potentially in 2028 in Los Angeles.
For now, he is focused on his job at the Tour and working to once again try to put Roglič into the coveted yellow jersey. He won’t be hard to miss on the NBC Sports or Peacock streaming broadcasts. On their new Cervélo bicycles, the Team Jumbo-Visma riders will be riding with a unique blue front tire as part of a sponsorship arrangement.
They hope to keep that blue tire at the front of the race for three weeks.
“Primož is our main, big leader, and I want to help him as much as I can,” Kuss said. “I think for me, it’s also about getting through the first week in good shape and not losing too much time just to see what I can do. I want to be there, but in the end, I want to help Primož in the mountains on the really decisive days. We’ll see; it will be less of a controlling type race like it was a year ago. We have different cards to play on our team, too. We’ll see what the tactics are as we go.”
jlivingston@durangoherald.com
