Hot prospects Warren Barguil and Simon Yates have been tipped to win the Tour de France one day, yet neither is riding for a team from their home country as they learn the ropes abroad.
France’s Barguil, 23, is with Dutch team Giant-Alpecin while Briton Yates, 22, rides for Australian outfit Orica-GreenEDGE.
Barguil will make his Tour debut on Saturday aiming for a stage win while compatriots Thibaut Pinot and Romain Bardet will be in the limelight fighting for the general classification.
Yates will start his second Tour after getting a foretaste last year.
Barguil and Yates, however, have already shown they can fight with the best.
The year before he went pro, Yates won two stages of the Tour de l’Avenir, a famous under-23 race, and ended up third overall in the Tour of Britain.
In the Tour of the Basque country in April, Yates finished ahead of France’s Thibaut Pinot, who was third overall in last year’s Tour.
Barguil won the Tour de l’Avenir in 2012.
Their teams, however, have been keeping the two riders on a tight leash, looking to protect them in their early years to give them time to mature.
“I wanted to be on the Tour last year but at the end of the day missing it was a good thing,” Barguil told Reuters.
“Instead I raced the Vuelta to learn how to race a grand tour gunning for the general classification.”
A highly regarded character in the team, Barguil enjoyed having first class domestiques in Spain like Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo champion John Degenkolb.
“It’s nice to see John Degenkolb going to fetch you a bottle,” he said with a smile on his face.
After some altitude training paid off, Barguil finished eighth overall, giving another indication of his huge potential, which might see him get scooped up by a top French team when his contract expires at the end of next season.
Yates, an impressive fifth overall in the Criterium du Dauphine this year, experienced the same kind of frustration when he was pulled from the Tour during the race by his team last year.
“I was going to do 12 days anyway and then I persuaded Whitey (sports director Matt White) to let me stay a few more days. I was tired, I was not really going to be in the race anymore,” he told Reuters.
“It was the right call. I was disappointed for personal reasons but in the long term it was the right call.”
Barguil, who like Bernard Hinault, the last Frenchman to win the Tour in 1985, hails from Brittany, has relocated to enjoy better training conditions in Nice. Just like Yates, who moved to Spain with his brother Adam, also a hot prospect.
Both are now likely to fight toe-to-toe for a high placing in the race for the best young rider’s jersey on the Tour. (Reporting by Julien Pretot; Editing by Ken Ferris)
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