Primož Roglič has said even if he had won La Vuelta this year, rather than his Jumbo Visma deluxe domestique Sepp Kuss claiming the overall victory, he still would have left the team.
Now aged 34 years, he has cut short his contract with the Dutch World Tour outfit, shaving a year off its term, to join German rivals, Bora-hansgrohe.
With Kuss moving up a notch in his career after winning La Vuelta, and Jonas Vingegaard having won the last two editions of the Tour de France, Roglič says he had no option but to leave the team.
He still wants to win the Tour de France - to add to his Giro title from this year and his three overall wins at La Vuelta. And he believes he had to switch teams if he wanted a proper shot at winning the Tour, which remains his all-out goal for 2024.
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He has also told Dutch newspaper AD that he wanted to continue racing to win this year's Vuelta, even though his team mate Kuss was leading the race deep into the final week. Eventually, after Roglič and Vingegaard dropped Kuss on the Angliru summit finish of stage 17, the team agreed to ride for American Kuss.
"That felt uncomfortable, because it is my responsibility to win races," Roglič said. "On the other hand, it wasn't just about me, it was also about the team. And no one deserves it more than Sepp.
"A few years earlier I taught Jonas and Sepp everything, they still looked up to me and now they were numbers 1 and 2 for me. We made history and I was part of it. But even if I had won the Vuelta, I would have left.
"I simply have greater opportunities elsewhere to achieve what I am still fighting for. That wasn't a tough decision, rather a natural one. I have achieved the maximum I could with Jumbo. It got to the point where I had to leave.
"It doesn't detract from how happy I was on the podium in Madrid. Hopefully I will be even happier and in a different jersey in future photos.”
Roglič famously switched from ski jumping to cycling and only rode his first UCI-ranked bike race in 2013, competing for the Adria Mobil Continental team and riding with that team for three seasons. Aged 14 years, he had gone to boarding school where he combined his studies with his training for ski jumping.
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He says when he looks back at his first win - taking a stage in the 2014 Tour of Azerbaijan - he finds it hard to believe the photograph of him crossing the line was taken just two years after he stopped ski jumping.
"Everything happened so quickly," he says looking back now, having won four Grand Tours overall and taken 18 Grand Tour stage wins, among 80 career victories to date.
"I had a KTM 125cc dirt bike and I sold it to buy a bicycle. I had decided that I would become a cyclist, but also that I wanted to become a professional. I had a plan. I Googled who the best coaches in Slovenia were.
"I told them that I had cycled 3,000 kilometers in my life and wanted to become a professional. With my experience in ski jumping, I already knew how it worked in top sport. I bought a book about cycling by Miran Kavas, the best coach in the country, and told him I wanted to ride the Giro. To which he said: 'Put that out of your mind.'"
Though he took a brilliant win in the Giro this year, he said he now has a two-year contract with Bora-hansgrohe and his biggest goal, the one that keeps him cycling, was to win the Tour de France.
"But if the moment doesn't come, I have no regrets. People sometimes ask: what would you like to change about your life? Look how many wonderful things I have experienced. I wouldn't change a thing.”
Roglič came very close to winning the 2020 Tour, only losing the yellow jersey to compatriot Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) on the mountain TT to La Planche des Belles Filles on the penultimate day of the race. Now more than three years on, he believes his failure to win that year probably made him a better rider.
"Of course, I was fucking angry and disappointed. I didn't want to be there, but that moment was also a challenge," he said facing defeat on La Planche des Belles Filles. "Congratulating Pogačar was also a victory for me. I had lost, knew what that meant, but I could still control what I would do from that moment on.
“You have to lose in the same way you win. It didn't break me. I was still second, right? I didn't sleep a minute less because of it. You always learn more from losing than from winning.
"Suppose this hadn't happened. Then I would have won the Tour, but maybe not everything I won afterwards. If you're trying to achieve something, losing is part of it.
"I hate it, but that is also part of my life. If you're never going to lose, you might as well quit and do something else. Losing is part of winning.”
