He made the above statement at the end of a Tour in which he won the greatest victory of his career, taking stage 1 in a 50km breakaway with DSM-Firmenich PostNL (now Picnic PostNL) teammate Frank van den Broek and winning the first Tour de France yellow jersey of his career. Bardet said after that victory that he came into the Tour with a different state of mind than he’d had at the previous 10 Tours he had ridden, “totally relaxed, ready to give 100% every day and not to turn over heaven and Earth if it didn’t work out.
”He also, characteristically, shared the credit for the victory with the 10-year-younger van den Broek, who was riding in his first Tour. “Today, we are sharing this jersey, which he wanted to win as much as me,” Bardet said. “It’s the first day of his very first Tour de France, at 23 years old.… I couldn’t have done it without him. It’s pure joy.
”The question is why he could never start the previous Tours “totally relaxed,” as he did his last. The answer, I think, is that he had finally shrugged the weight of his country’s expectations off his shoulders. If you are a French top road racer, an excellent climber and you “never stop trying,” you will inevitably be expected to win the Tour de France for the home country, which has not walked away from its greatest domestic sports event with a GC victory since 1985.
That now makes 40 years of frustration, disappointment and failure, and every French rider with good climbing legs and early success will be burdened with that history. It was Bardet’s ‘misfortune’ to finish second in the 2016 Tour, behind Chris Froome, and so immediately become a new Great French Hope (GFH) to end the long drought.
He himself said that his racing mindset changed when he changed teams in late 2020 from the French team AG2R Mondiale to the Dutch DSM (now Picnic PostNL). In a 2022 interview with Rouleur, he said his new team had a different attitude to the one he experienced in France. “Now I feel more relaxed. [Team general manager] Iwan Spekenbrink came to me and said, ‘We want you in the team. We’ll try to do everything right but at the end of the day, if you don’t win, that’s ok… We don’t need you to win, we just need you to be the best you can be.’ [In France] the boss thinks all the riders are trying to [fool] them, taking the salary and doing as little as possible. The team managers are like, ‘We need to really push the rider because he’s taking it a bit too easy.’”
Thibaud Pinot, another GFH, retired last year to great fanfare because his failures in the Tour were dramatic and sometimes accompanied by tears. Bardet is a different breed of rider, sober, soft-spoken, dogged rather than dramatic. He has now won four Tour de France stages, as well as a Tour King of the Mountain jersey in 2019; a Vuelta stage in 2021 and a Vuelta team time trial in 2023; the Tour de l’Ain in 2013 and the Tour of the Alps in 2022.
But the Tour wins, of course, provided the greatest satisfaction, and he is leaving the sport with his head held high. “I feel I’ve achieved everything I could in the Tour, especially after wearing the yellow jersey last year,” Bardet told Cyclingnews in an exclusive interview before the start of the recent Giro d’Italia. “I have some really nice memories from the Tour; they’re the highlights of my career. So, it’s a special race for me.
“That’s also why I just don’t want to be there riding around as a farewell race this year. I never wanted to do the Tour just to be on the start line, and not really being an actor of the race is not my style. The Tour is too hard for that. I’m happy the 2024 Tour was my last. Now I’ve let it go. It’s time to make room for other riders on the team and let some new energy in.”
But Bardet is not retiring from competitive cycling. He will race gravel in the second half of 2025 and 2026, with the goal of remaining competitive while having more flexibility in his schedule and spending more time with his family. This was one important reason for his retirement from road racing, to be able to devote more of his time to his wife Amandine and their young son, Angus. And he will continue to mentor and guide young riders in his team, such as the two promising 22-year-old Britons, Oscar Onley and Max Poole.
As Bardet himself said, he was always an honest rider, not a superstar but a rider who never gave up and could light up a race with a sudden burst of speed at the top of a climb and a courageous solo ride to the finish line. He will be missed.
