It’s the most obvious and unoriginal of comparisons to make, but in this case it’s the most appropriate: you wait ages for a bus and then all of a sudden two come at once. For three-and-a-half years, Lewis Askey has plugged away trying to score his first victory as a professional, almost pulling the feat off just a few months into his neo-pro season with Groupama-FDJ, and so nearly becoming national champion and a winner of big second-tier races, but for all the 22 top-10s he managed, winning remained elusive.
“It was getting to the point where I thought I was going to be a nearly man, someone always coming away with second and never going to win,” the 24-year-old Briton tells Rouleur. “I was hoping that winning would’ve come a lot easier, but it really wasn’t. I always felt like I had the ability to do it, but I never really managed to pull it all together. I genuinely had the stress of potentially never winning a bike race.” And then – forgive the other lazy cliché – the floodgates opened.
In early May, Askey – who has established himself as a strong Classics and breakaway rider – won the one-day Boucles de l'Aulne-Châteaulin race in France, and a week later claimed stage two of the Four Days of Dunkirk. His luck had definitely turned, too: Askey wasn’t even his team’s leader during his first win as he had been ill and off the bike since the Classics, and in Dunkirk his shoe unclipped from his pedals mid-sprint as he crossed the line.
His shoe coming loose didn't stop Askey winning again at the Four Days of Dunkirk. Photo: Luc Claessen/Getty Images
“The first one was quite a long sprint and it was an instant relief, I was super ecstatic,” Askey reflects. “I'd been waiting so long for it that there were four years of emotion built into that first win.” Seven days later, and the ball was truly rolling. “The first win really gave me confidence, but my shoe came out because I wanted to give it everything – maybe even too much.”
Askey came close again in another two stages in Dunkirk as well as finishing second in the general, points and youth classifications. Perhaps most impressive were his two third-placed finishes on two very different types of parcours at the more recent Tour de Suisse: one a sprint, another a fast downhill immediately after a tough uphill finish. Askey has never been more on form, and is primed to line up at his first Tour de France next month.
“I was initially meant to do the Giro d’Italia, but we changed the program to do those races in France and then prepare for the Tour with an altitude camp at Sierra Nevada,” he says. “I’ve given my all back and put my cards on the table, so I hope that gets rewarded in the end with a spot at the Tour because I feel like I will be an asset to the team if I do get picked.”
In analysing what’s changed for him this season, Askey points out a few factors: his freedom to go skiing regularly in the winter in his adopted home of Andorra – “I don’t like putting restraints on myself otherwise it would be no fun and you have to enjoy your training,” he says; a December training block in New Zealand with former teammate Laurence Pithie before the Tour Down Under – “it was heat training and making sure everything was right for the season”; and most crucially was that his contract situation for the following years was sorted out early in the spring: “I realised from before that when I took away that stress of where I was going to be riding, then I started to perform even better, and that’s been the case again this year.”
Askey has been riding for Groupama-FDJ since 2022. Photo: SW Pix.com/Alex Whitehead
Askey can’t say until August 1 which team’s colours he’ll be decked in next season, though it’s been reported that he’ll be joining the sizeable British cohort at Israel-Premier Tech. What he can say is that Groupama-FDJ have continued to provide him with the tools to grow into the race winner he can now finally call himself. “I’m in the fortunate spot where I'm in a really nice team which is giving me everything I need right now to perform, and they’re allowing me to show myself and my potential.”
Subsequent task? Easy answer. “I’ve won in a [UCI-ranked] 1.1 and 2.Pro, so a WorldTour win is next,” he says. “I try to set myself attainable goals and work towards them, otherwise I feel a bit empty and that I’m just here for the sake of it. Now I’ve got that memory of winning, though, and I know all the hard work has paid off not once but twice, I’m definitely more confident in myself, especially in similar sorts of finishes. It’s not that I wasn’t confident before – I don’t think the style of rider I am has ever changed – but there’s a difference between being confident in bed the night before the race and then actually pulling it off.”
Cover image: SW Pix.com/Zac Williams
