"Whenever you have good races, people just seem to expect more" - Biniam Girmay on learning to handle the pressures of expectation

Few riders in the entire peloton are under as much pressure to perform as Intermarché - Wanty's Biniam Girmay. Wherever the Eritrean icon goes, a loyal legion of his fans follow and whilst their support is greatly appreciated, it can also bring much weight of expectation for the 24-year-old.

After bursting onto the wider cycling scene in 2022 with historic victories at Gent Wevelgem and the Giro d'Italia, Girmay cooled off slightly, finding wins much harder to come by in 2023. “Bad things can happen to anyone, but 2023 was only really my second real year in the World Tour," Girmay recalls in conversation with Rouleur. "I was still learning. I was learning how to train. I was learning how to deal with the pressure from the press or the expectations of the fans. In bike racing, you have good races and bad races, but whenever you have good races, people just seem to expect more. And then there was the stress that I put on myself, because me, I always want to improve. I was still giving 100%, giving everything, but things were not going how I wanted.”

“He made a lot of rookie mistakes in the first Tour de France (2023 ed.), but we had real conversations,” admits Aike Visbeek, the performance manager at Intermarché - Wanty. “He learned from those mistakes, and we learned... One thing we have learned about Biniam is that he has great recovery. He recovers better than anyone on the team, really, and at training camps he only got better and better. So we learned that we were not maximising that strength and we weren’t training him hard enough. With his trainers I focused on giving Biniam a harder, more structured training program. We really looked at the maximum number of training blocks we could fit in and just made every day count.”

Whatever changes Visbeek made to Girmay's training paid off massively in 2024 as the Eritrean stormed to a hat-trick of stage wins on his Tour de France return and secured a first Green Jersey victory. “I learned a lot in 2023,” Girmay explains. “You can give 100%, but you also have to be smart with your training, with your nutrition, with your recuperation. But everything I learned from the past years paid off. As a result, my confidence increased and boom, I had very good results.”

“Three wins, the jersey was just amazing,” Girmay adds. “The emotions were so strong, not just for me, but for my team and for everybody in cycling, for my fans, for my country. It is hard to explain. It was just amazing.”

Girmay even surprised Visbeek with his Tour de France brilliance last summer. “It’s interesting because, sometimes he won where we didn’t even expect it. Take his first victory in stage three for example. We knew that it was going to be a super-fast sprint, but Biniam was ready," he recalls. "He quickly understood that the first two stages were too hard for him and he just sat up and recovered. Then, on the morning of stage three he said to me, ‘OK, I feel really good’. He really had the legs to make a long sprint that day, and after he won there, I knew we were going to have a great Tour.”

And as for 2025, does more history beckon? “He is dreaming and aiming at Milano-Sanremo and Flanders will be his last Classic,” Visbeek concludes. “The early-season goal is to win a Monument. And that is a goal for the team as well.”