“I wanted to anticipate" - Valentin Madouas' dream come true at Olympic Games following perfect tactics

Valentin Madouas is a rider who thrives in the long, hard and tactical races. In the past he's finished on the podium of the Tour of Flanders, won the Bretagne Classic and the French national championships as career highlights. Today he adds a huge result to his palmarès which is a second place behind Remco Evenepoel at the Olympic Games, a race that suited him to the core.

The French team had a very strong lineup and a plan, and Madouas himself executed perfectly the plan he had in mind: “I wanted to anticipate and gain a bit of a lead on the favourites. I knew that things would get going behind me and that I would need a bit of a lead to stay ahead of them," Madouas told Eurosport in a post-race interview. "I could also recover a bit before they returned. That was also the plan that emerged from the preliminary discussion. And that’s what I did.”

He didn't know who, but he put his chips on the race blowing up in the first climb of Montmartre and that he could then catch the wheel of the big favourites. “I knew that a champion would ride towards me and that I had to stay on the wheel of that champion. That’s how I tried to win a medal."

That one rider turned out to be Remco Evenepoel who attacked on flat roads and, without barely having a single turn from another rider, dropped the entire leading groups. Madouas was the last survivor of the Belgian's pace but with 15 kilometers to go he could no longer keep it up. He lost time, but held it together enough to keep second place on the finish line. "I gave it everything I had. I went beyond my limit and it was still far. But I came second. Here, in Paris, at the Eiffel Tower. That's fantastic. It's a dream."

He celebrated across the finish line, and the French team had more to celebrate seconds after as compatriot Christophe Laporte took home the bronze medal. "During the Tour I already knew: this is the form of my life. I couldn't show that, but I recovered well and focused on this race afterwards. I was very confident, just like Christophe and the whole team. We wanted to win a medal and we got two," he concluded.