Home expectations for quick progress from 21-year-old French climber Lenny Martinez (Bahrain Victorious) obtained a significant increase at Paris-Nice on Thursday due to his first-ever World Tour win on the brutally steep end of La Côte-Saint-Andre.
While it is too quickly to say if French followers’ hopes that the nation’s prolonged quest for a successor to former greats like Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignon will lastly be fulfilled, Martinez’s sequence of flamboyant mountain triumphs is actually giving them renewed causes to dream.
Martinez had already taken 5 wins in his first two years as an expert with Groupama-FDJ. But after shifting to Bahrain Victorious over the winter, the query of the place his first victory for his new crew would come remained – till Thursday.
Fifth total at 55 seconds, and with the hardest mountain phases to return this weekend, Martinez stays a possible contender for total victory subsequent Sunday, and he’s now speaking up his possibilities of going for the rostrum.
But for now, in any case, his demonstration of climbing prowess on the lungburstingly powerful slopes of stage 5’s summit end in opposition to a few of the best-known riders on the planet already signifies that, career-wise, a significant step ahead has been taken by Martinez.
“It’s crucial as a result of he is a younger French rider,” double Tour de France winner Bernard Thévenet informed L’Équipe. “He’s actually one of many large French hopes, and on Thursday, he confirmed each nice maturity and ambition.”
“We cannot ask an excessive amount of of him, however on the similar time, we have to ask for outcomes – sure, he has to win races,” he added. “Just a few years in the past we made the error of leaving our expectations to at least one facet, to allow them to progress gently as an alternative of placing them below duress. Lenny, although, like Romain Grégoire (Groupama-FDJ), like Paul Seixas (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale), like others are already there, they’re displaying they’re as much as it.”
Martinez’s success, nonetheless, has positioned him below a relentless highlight, which is probably not so ideally suited, Loïc Segaert, Martinez’s coach since final November, informed Nieuwsblad, on condition that at 21, he wants time to progress.
“It’s unbelievable how a lot stress there may be on him,” Segaert mentioned, including that the choice to area Martinez in Paris-Nice and plenty of different main races on dwelling soil was “partly to win again French hearts,” after he stop native WorldTour squad Groupama-FDJ for Bahrain Victorious final winter.
“Whenever we trip a race in France, there are all the time thirty or forty individuals standing on the bus chanting. ‘Lenny! Lenny! Lenny!’
“You shouldn’t underestimate the stress the French media places on him. The variety of interview requests is sort of unimaginable to rely, and there may be all the time a digital camera crew following him.”
Segaert mentioned the crew had already seen that stage 5 suited Martinez, given his capacity to punch laborious on the prime of a tough, steep ascent, and that the primary goals for him remained week-long stage races, stage wins and maybe a crack at Flèche Wallonne, with its very related end to Paris-Nice’s remaining steep ascent on stage 5, in April.
As for the Grand Tour GCs, nothing is dominated out but – and Martinez has already turn into the youngest ever chief of the Vuelta a España two years in the past in a mid-week mountain stage to Javalambre. But whereas these doable long run targets are nonetheless unsure, Martinez’ choices on additional success in Paris-Nice stay very a lot intact.
