On August 24th, all cycling fans want to be Pablo Torres, to feel what the cyclist feels, a kid who has not yet turned 19 who rises as if in a trance, pure flowfloating in the Alps, the Colle delle Finestre, a bare, endless and vertical path. In front of him, the mystery, the mountain paths that open up at his accelerated pace, behind him, nothing; a little further back, the scattered peloton of the Tour de l’Avenir, who suffer while he enjoys. “I enjoyed it, yes, I enjoyed it. When I saw that I was going alone, I started to get motivated. I think that if I hadn’t been the first one, I wouldn’t have climbed it so fast, because in the end when you go there the first one gives you more strength to enjoy it, and in the last kilometers I was giving it my all, but I didn’t notice the pain in my legs. I was like on a cloud,” explains Torres a month later, sitting on a bench in the Vicalvarada park, four steps from his house, in the Madrid neighborhood of Vicálvaro. “It was a very long climb (18.5 kilometres at 9.16%, up to 2,178 metres), an hour of climbing and it went by very quickly. It seemed like 20 minutes, something like that.”
Torres had attacked 13 kilometres from the top and won the stage with almost four minutes of advantage over the second, but he was only 12 seconds away from the yellow jersey of the great race for the under-23s of the whole world, which perhaps does not matter too much. The next day, all they talked about was him, that he had beaten the record for the climb set by the Venezuelan José Rujano, a real flea, in the Giro of 2011, of the mark he had left in everyone’s imagination, who wanted to compare him with Mikel Landa or Chris Froome, that the same Finestres had flown up in the Giro of Italy, but he, who grew up cycling watching stages of the Tour and the Vuelta, after eating, with his grandfather, knows almost nothing about the Giro. “It’s in May. The month of the exams,” says Torres, who this year began studying INEF at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, but had to leave. “You can’t study from a distance. Most of the classes are in person and just to go to the university it was an hour there and another hour back. I didn’t have enough time during the day, which I normally dedicate almost 100% to cycling. I get up and I’m already thinking about cycling, what I have to have for breakfast, depending on the training I have, then going out to train, arriving to eat and also eating depending on the training I’ve done… In the afternoon I do try to do something a little different. I do like watching cycling races, so I’m also very into races, but I also like to do other different things to clear my mind a little and not spend all day thinking about the bike.”
The leader of the post-Z generation, the one that inspires the most excitement —Iván Romeo, two years older, won the World Championship time trial, Torres is expected to be the protagonist on Friday on the road and Alicante native Héctor Álvarez is one of the favourites on Thursday in the juniors—, does not want to be either Landa or Contador. “I admire Ayuso and Carlos Rodríguez a lot, and I wish I could be like them or, if possible, better, although it is very complicated, but my favourite cyclist is Pogacar. Whenever I see him attack from afar or something like that, I like not to imitate him but to try to do what he does because I think he does things that are incredible. Whenever Pogacar wins I am very happy. In fact, when he wins it is like something good has happened during the day,” says Torres, with very clear eyes and his small hands, which Bahamontes would not have liked, who said that more than a long femur a cyclist has to have big hands. Torres, in fact, runs very close to Pogacar, in the UAE development team, where he arrived from Club Sanse, the great cycling youth group in San Sebastián de los Reyes, north of Madrid, recommended by Ángel Buenache. “I started cycling six years ago. I played football, but I weighed a lot more than now, more than 60 kilos at 12 years old, and, apart from the fact that I wasn’t very good, I always had knee problems, so I decided to start cycling. At first I was lapped in all the races I ran, I didn’t finish, but little by little, especially with the quarantine, in the pandemic, which caught me at 14 years old, I got better. During confinement, as there was nothing to do, every afternoon I did an hour on the roller at home while watching a video on my mobile or watching a race.”
Giacomo Notari, the Italian coach who trains Torres at UAE, defines him as a stage racer for his ability to recover – “he is at his strongest in the final stages of races, and this was the case both in the Giro Next Gen, where he also finished second, in the Tour de l’Avenir and even in the Tour of Rwanda,” says Notari – and as a pure climber, of long climbs. “But also, although he doesn’t show it much, Torres has a point of explosiveness that can be very good for him on a circuit as tough as Zurich,” says Notari, who is amazed by the great leap forward in quality of his pupil this season. “Despite his youth, he behaves like a true professional but, this is the important thing, he has not trained excessively. As a junior he trained little, as a junior, two hours a day after school, and this has increased but does not go beyond 20-21 hours a week. But he has already concentrated on altitude, in Sestriere and Sierra Nevada. He lives a professional life but with youth training.”
“I think that the watts I move are not bad when I compare them with other teammates who are heavier. They are less but I think they are quite useful on the flat,” Torres admits. “And, speaking of explosiveness, maybe in a very short effort the start is difficult for me in the sprint, but if I am already going with a bit of speed and there has been a previous effort I think I can be more explosive. There may be more cyclists with better numbers, but after 3-5 minutes I think I can hold my own.”
No Spaniard has ever won the U23 World Championship. “It would be great to win it, either me or anyone else on the team (WorldTour riders Igor Arrieta and Iván Romeo will form the quintet alongside Torres, Iker Mintegi and Jaume Guardeño),” says Torres. “I have been among the best in all the U23 races I have competed in, but I still have to work a lot harder because this is a category that serves to learn. The results you get here don’t tell you what kind of cyclist you will become if they don’t help you learn and develop.”
