Kung

Stefan Küng came within one place of wearing the yellow jersey in the Tour de France’s opening time trial. Can the BMC rider follow in the wheeltracks of Fabian Cancellara and become the next great Swiss time triallist?

- Richard Abraham

Twenty-two years old and alone in his hotel room, Stefan Küng readied himself for his last chance to race against a man who had set a new paradigm of dominance over the past decade. It was the night before the Swiss national time trial championships in 2016. The young rider told himself that it was now or never.

“I knew it was the last chance to compare myself with Fabian,” he says. “I was like, ‘You have to win this, you must win this,’ not, ‘You can, or if everything goes well you might win it’.

“I put myself under a lot of pressure… and that’s maybe what made me risk too much and what made me crash.”

Küng overcooked a corner on a descent, smashed his collarbone, fractured his hip and put himself out of racing for three months, including a debut Olympic team pursuit. He’d already been fortunate not to have hurt himself six weeks earlier when he slid out of a right-hand bend at the opening stage of the Giro d’Italia in Apeldoorn. There he jumped back on his bike, found the pedal was broken, switched to his spare and finished 30 seconds down on the stage winner Tom Dumoulin. At the halfway mark, before the crash, he was just one second behind him. What might have been. He’d been too eager to perform.

The step from world class to world’s best, that final step in a gifted athlete’s career, is the toughest. Most will never make it, although every once in a while someone comes along, like Cancellara, and makes it look easy. You need talent, but with talent comes expectation and with expectation comes pressure. And under pressure, with one foot off the ground, it’s tempting to aim for something just beyond your reach. You have to belong on the top step of the podium and you have to be ready for it.