"He’s never done any performance planning" - Bahrain - Victorious ready to take Lenny Martínez from diamond in the raw to potential Tour de France contender

Rod Ellingworth, formerly part of INEOS Grenadiers and their performance team, is now with Bahrain - Victorious and was hired to help the development of a Tour de France winner in the team. That could be Lenny Martínez, with whom he's working with, and he details how the Frenchman's development is actually in great part due to the lack of work that had been done with him at Groupama - FDJ.

“It’s all about understanding who he is, and how he thinks about things. I’m really enjoying that, to be honest. I’m working with some good young guys — physios and nutritionists — people with ambition," Ellingworth shared with Velo. "It’s mentoring of the performance group around Lenny, that’s the role.”

Ellingworth has an important management role within the team and has been overlooking the Martínez project. So far this season the 21-year old, with already a few years of World Tour experience, has won at Paris-Nice and the Tour de Romandie. In the latter, he finished second in the overall classification, showing significant improvement in the time-trial. He was also 7th at Paris-Nice, 5th at the Volta a Catalunya and 4th at Flèche Wallonne.

Besides the obvious climbing talent, the Frenchman is improving quite a lot on being a consistent rider and one who can properly focus on stage-racing. Weather-wise he has shown to be able to handle it well despite being very lightweight, time-trialing wise the improvement is very visible, and he has been quite consistent in multi-day races thus far this season.

“It’s everything across the board. He’s got a real good ability. I don’t think Groupama-FDJ did anything in terms of having a plan. He doesn’t come to races with a plan, like 'what’s it gonna take to win?'” Ellingworth points out that Martínez came in and perhaps his improvement comes down to the mere planning of his training and racing schedule, something that perhaps is not as detailed in some World Tour teams still at this point in time.

“He’s never done any performance planning, to the extent that we would expect," the Briton adds with quite a lot of surprise. "Like really going into the details of what it would take to win or perform. But I think he finds it quite interesting. He’s ‘I hadn’t thought about that,’ and I’m ‘oh my God!'”

Hence, it is an interesting project for Ellingworth to work on and at this year's Tour de France, Martínez should go in as a co-leader and be an interesting outsider for the top GC battle. “He’s got some constitution. You can throw a shit load of work at him and he bounces back. He’s got what all top sports people have. He’s not weak.”

Although of course, this will require him to be on top of his game when there are days with tough weather conditions and crosswinds, something which he has struggled with in the past. “I’ve stood in front of the group and said ‘guys, this is an outdoors job. If you don’t like an outdoor job, go and get an indoor job.’ If you’re a gardener, you don’t complain about the weather. They choose to do it, nobody is making them do it.”