In the UAE there are undisputed runners, like Tadej Pogacar or Marc Soler, who at the age of 28 understood that he would never be the champion he dreamed of being and that he would live better, without headaches, as a member of the champions. A few have forgotten their dreams. Juan Ayuso is not one of them. Ayuso has an idea and is willing to die for it. He wants to be, he dreams of being, the best cyclist in the world, but is he up to the idea, the ambition that guides all his decisions?
Ayuso, who at the age of 19, in 2022, stood on the podium of his first major event, the Vuelta, began 2024 by winning the Tour of the Basque Country following the disastrous accident of Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Roglic. He then dominated the Tour de Romandie until the penultimate day, and crashed in the mountain stage. He fell in the Dauphiné Libéré and in the Tour it lasted 10 days, a fight, a shine in the Galibier and a covid. That’s where his year ended. “A little bit of the good side and also a little bit of the other side,” he says. “But I think overall I’ve continued to make progress.”
When he talks about his sporting life, summarized in the last season, Ayuso, who has just turned 22, resorts to ying and yang, the complementary and at the same time opposing forces, black and white, which, according to Chinese philosophy, They make up a dynamic system, perhaps life, and although the most attractive Spanish cyclist summarizes it in the good and the bad that happened to him in 2024, it can also serve to illuminate the contradiction that characterizes his past professional career and that of the future as well. White desire and black reality. The best cyclist in the world is called Tadej Pogacar, he is only four years older and rides on the same team. “I want to be better than him because he is the best. I dream of one day being like him. And to be like him I have to beat him. But of course I don’t want this to be a misunderstanding because it’s not that he is my rival, but that he is the center of attention. He sets the bar and I try to reach it.”
As if he were a magnet from which he cannot escape, Ayuso’s life seems to revolve around Pogacar, who makes him give the best of his enormous talent, and make miscalculations and screw up rudely, like when it seemed that in the Galibier made every effort to ensure that his partner Joao Almeida was burned first and that he appeared in the final photo. Pogacar, an old-fashioned dictator – not a drop of sweat can go into any effort other than his triumph – did not find the gesture nice and did not even regret that Ayuso fell ill and withdrew from the Tour. “I have a perfectly normal relationship with Tadej, in a way, cordial. There’s even a bit of friendship. The withdrawal was quite hard for me, mentally, because I felt like I couldn’t show what I was capable of doing,” says the Spaniard, who even considered breaking his contract with the UAE and accepting an offer from Movistar, but preferred to apologize to the Slovenian. . “In Canada, in September, I had conversations with Tadej privately and I think he understands it and that he also understands the whole situation. It was necessary because there had been a lot of talk in the press and Tadej knew that much of what was coming out was not true, but he wanted him to also hear it from the parties involved, which in this case was me, to hear from me, to know a little Well, more than anything, thank him a little for everything and he appreciated it, he also told me a couple of things that I was very grateful for and that was it.”
The theory is easy and smooth. The proposition is clear. “Tadej makes everything look easier than it really is. It’s like when you see Messi with the ball and how he dribbles around everyone, he also makes it look easier,” Ayuso explained a few days ago, at his team’s training camp in Benidorm. “Pogacar is the Messi of cycling. It’s good to have him around, better on your side than on the other side.”
Ayuso also sees the path clearly. “I made preparation mistakes. For 2025 I am changing quite a few things,” explains Ayuso, who is trained by Íñigo San Millán, the Alava native who was, precisely, Pogacar’s first coach. “I want to focus more on improving my climbing to close the gap with the best, like Vingegaard, Remco and Roglic. Another change is starting later. It’s no secret, but if we analyze it, I have raced Romandía three times, and on the 22nd and 24th, both times I went well and then I ended up crashing. Something had to change because right on those dates instead of stopping, which is what I have usually done, I will start the Giro. Now I am training much calmer than other years. In December, I was already doing series, high-intensity work, now I’m not going to start until after January.”
The conclusion is more complicated. Life is something else. “At the moment, Ayuso has earned the eternal distrust of Tadej Pogacar,” warns the director of a rival team. “Together they will not run anymore.”
Maybe Ayuso thinks the same. That’s why he thinks about the Giro, the race in which he will debut. “The idea is to try to win it, of course,” he says. “For me it is important to be the leader of the team because the pressure you put on yourself is not the same. The demand that I set for myself for the Tour was maximum because it was my debut in the Tour and I wanted to do my best, but when it depends more on you there is something special that also changes a little more and having that extra motivation for me is very important because it is a bit of what I have been doing since I was little and it is undoubtedly a plus.”
His yin and his yang, without Pogacar and a life that revolves around Pogacar, the center of the universe.
