Well, man, have I got a treat for you guys today? Try and guess who this is. He's one. Liège Baston Liège, Milan San Remo. He's one of the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. He is one stage is an all-tree grand tours. The Europe, the Tour, and the Vuelta. It could only be one man. The legend. That is Simon Garens. Let's cue that intro. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our lung changes? That is the question on this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roadman, welcome roadman, it's the Roadman Podcast. Welcome back. Have I got an absolute cracker of a show for you today? As I said at the beginning, it's a man whose one stage is an all-tree grand-tores, L'Ege Baston L'Ege, Milan San Remo, he's been on the podium in the world, he is a legend of a boy grider and an all-around nice guy. It's Simon Gerns, I can't wait to get into the chat. But before I do, I'm gonna ask all you guys to do me a big favour. Press pause on this show and head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch. Got his Patreon, it's how we fund the podcast. We don't have a title sponsor. Your generosity over in Patreon is what makes this podcast possible. So please don't pass the book, don't assume that someone else is going to do it. I'm asking for a small donation towards the podcast, the price of a beer once a month. That makes the podcast possible, it makes it sustainable. And I'm able to bring you world-class guests like Simon Garen's week in, week out. So head on over to Patreon and make that small little contribution. Okay guys, I've pushed it off long enough. Here he is, the legend, the mate, the man, Simon Garrens. Simon Garrens, welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Thanks Anthony. Simon, nice to have you. It's good to be here. Simon, I was doing a little bit of research for the show and I'm not sure how current this is. You were working, are still working in Goldman Sachs, is that Well, no longer working in Goldman Sachs, but that was my first venture outside of the professional pallet on, absolutely. So I started an internship at Goldman Sachs at the beginning of 2019. So I finished racing at the end of the 2018 season, moved to London from Andorra with the goal of getting a job at Goldman Sachs. So managed to sort of get in there to an internship in the Securities Division over sort of six months, which was an amazing experience. And at the end of my internship, that offered me a permanent position into the foreign exchange area. So I took up that position, worked there for sort of further six months and sort of realised that, you know what, this is probably not the path that I want to take from here on. And at that sort of deviated away from Goldman Sachs and sort of started working with a business that I'd previously invested in, which is the service course. Awesome. I want to get out the service course in a little bit because I actually had Christian Meyer on the podcast not too long ago. It's a company I love as well. When you were in the pro peloton and you're sort of the last couple of years where you're turning, I don't want to say 140 and 140 because you still had some amazing results in the last couple of years of your career, but when you're starting to have a boy on life after cycling, where you're starting to read up on on economics, finance, was this something you were always interested in? It was something that I probably became more and more interested in throughout my career, actually. I'm not going to say I already said one eye in, one eye out, or one foot out of the professional pellet, but I was constantly thinking about what came next because as a professional athlete, you realize you have an expiry date in that profession. I was very conscious of doing as much as I could throughout my racing career to give me some opportunities for what came next. And one of those things that I used to do a lot of was charity events and public speaking engagements and quite a few corporate based activities. And that enabled me to build a really strong network in the corporate sector. And that's where I came across this possibility to do an internship with Goldman Sachs. So With that, I sort of applied for an internship position there. I must have done, I lost count, I can't remember now, but it was 20 odd interviews at Goldman's before they sort of accepted me as an intern, which is pretty much part of course there. So I went through that whole process and finally they accepted me as an intern to start the year after I finished racing. So I didn't have my heart set on working at Goldman Sachs from a long way out, but it's something that sort of come about throughout my career as I've become aware opportunity and it was an area that I'd become more interested in so that in a lot of years my career I guess.
So their approach was completely different. So yeah, I don't think anybody saw the time problem for Gacha coming, his team included. Is it the COVID year we're in and the strange race in calendar that's highlighting this, that writers are saying to be so versatile now and not that it's in any way a criticism of your career because your career was phenomenal and so you couldn't look back at it and be anything but happy. But is there a party in now tinking, it's got you so versatile, rug with you so versatile, could you have ridden the Flanders, the Ru-Bays and also targeted the Ardennes? Or it seemed to be then especially early in your career it was much more of a focus on specialization where you're picking our dens, you're picking classics or you're picking one week or three week races where we're not seeing that division or specialization now as much. Well I think looking at this year in particular the reason that the young guys are doing extremely well is they're not tied by tradition. They're not tied by the fact that every year I've done a training camp at altitude at this point in the year, I've then done that preparation race and targeted this race following that. These guys going in now don't have that to fall back on. So they're just going in with open eyes, probably a little bit ignorant to what they think they should be doing. And they're performing the number of young stages winners we saw at the Twitter France this year was simply phenomenal. And I guess if I was to give any young writer and any advice as they're entering the professional palletine now, I would say be as dynamic as possible for as long as possible, make sure you have as many sort of skill sets as you can. Learn how to ride the Parve, learn how to ride the crosswind, learn how to ride the mountains, you know, do as many different races because when you sort of become to specialise, you're very quickly pitching told to targeting a certain sort of race, but it's still great to have that skill set. And I think for myself, my first year professional, my first professional team was AG2R and they threw me into everything. I did Tour of Flanders, I did Tour de France, I did sort of a whole range of different races, which was great. But they pretty quickly worked out that what I was good at was the sort of heli type classics, the identity classics. So that's what I've been targeted every year from then on. So by targeting the identity classic was important that I did the tour of last country beforehand and that really eliminated any chance of sort of doing with any sort of serious approach and either Flemish Classic. So that's probably why I missed out on that throughout my career. Because it's hard even to put some of these kids into a box today. To try and put Remko Evanpol into a box, what is your one day rider, is your one week rider? It's just even hard to know. Yeah, it is hard to know. And I think what these young guys coming through will realise is that if they really want a win big, they will have to specialise in a certain area at this sport. As they evolve, you can't be good at everything and perform at the very highest level. You kind of realise, I think these guys will hold a big peak or manage to come up a number of times in their first few years professional, but that will burn them out. sort of look at, say for example, Evanderpull, you know, yet last year he was all over everything. And this year he's probably not at least not performing at the same level because he just tried to do too much of everything. Yeah, yeah, now it's a good point. It's a good point. We're just off the back of Tour de France and obviously you're a man for listeners don't know. You've won stages in the Tour, the Vuelta and the Jiro. There can't be many riders. How many riders have done that? Well, it's funny I know exactly how many riders done it because my co-anchiny across and he pulled this stat out during the Tour de France and there are 99 riders total that of one stages in all Grand 3 or 3 Grand 2s. Actually, wouldn't the title was that high? Yeah, well, I guess these days, I think there was 20 or 30 active current riders that have done it. It's a pretty cool club to be in. You must be pretty chuffed with that. Oh yeah, you know, but I think when you set out to target a stage in the grand tour, you're not thinking about it, thinking, you know, I want to be a member of that club, you just set yourself your objectives and you do what you can do to achieve this. You definitely need to create some sort of cool commemorative jersey now and just turn up a group, right?
Oh, I don't think you need an investment cap or a golden cap, but it's a tax cap to see that. You know, it's been talking about a lot over the last, I have many years that it's not a sustainable business model. The fact that cycling is run purely on charity and on sponsorship. It's not sustainable in any way. And you see that with how quickly teams come and go. and I think it's never been even more highlighted this year, the fact that so many writers took such a large pay cut purely based upon the fact that the charity of their sponsors, their income dried up, so they needed a bit of a break from the sponsorship. So ultimately the teams and the writers got big pay cuts. But yeah, it's not sustainable. It's not something that he's going to keep going on forever and ever, particularly as the and budgets of softening things continue to increase, but auto-nevisolution forward. But it seems like we don't help ourselves. Like I'm a massive cyclone fan, obviously, and I want to help out these sponsors. I don't know what half the matter, like CCC, NTT, I have a fucking clue what these things are. It's almost like we're just not helping ourselves with this whole thing, and we're not focused on giving a return on investment to sponsors, which are a business hat on now, service course. Like I'm sure you would write a check for our 200, 300 grand, no problem, to be a big part sponsor in a team, if they were bringing you more than 200, 300 grand, revenue return. But there's no connection between return on investment on investment. You talked about what these sponsors are. It was a bit of a running joke, and I had with Anthony, who I was commentating with it, to reference, we try and find a bit of time each stage to talk about what the different sponsors were. And we would get a huge amount of the audience saying, oh, thanks very much because I had no idea what the clinic was. For example, or what you said CCC is. And so it's really relevant platform to talk about what these sponsors are because otherwise the name is just quite simply lost in the color of the jersey. But you're right, there is no return in investment by the publicity for these companies. So unless the teams can kind of really find a way to give value for money for these sponsors. You can kind of see that as ones will come into the sport, they'll get good value for a year or two. That value will fade away and they'll drop out in response to something else. But because I can see it where Mike Lyons are, I would say a soft core, cyclon fan. They'll watch the Tour de France, starting to age up and kind of watching a L'Eis, your Rouba, your San Remo. But like they're not watching the Binc Bank Tour. Like they don't know who won the Binc Bank Tour. they don't know even though the bank bank tour exists. But in the bubble of professional cycling, race results are the most important thing. It seems like we need to change that nourishment from race results are the most important thing to, yeah, race results are important, but it's also important that we give a return on investment to sponsors. Well, cycling is a very traditional sport until fashion, the fact that so many teams just see race results as the best return on the investment for sponsors. And, you know, there are certain sponsors there that they're not interested in results, has master interested in the press, and that's why you see so many teams just doing out there and just seeing and signing writers with a hard profile that are just prepared to attack and things like that. And other teams, they're 100% focused on results, and they're not really interested in doing anything else while we. So there is a real mix back there. It's actually just to finish up on that topic. It's why I love the backstage pass that you guys were down. all of a sudden, an EF education are doing a quite well at a moment. You feel a connection with the Israeli, and all of a sudden it's Rafa as a brand, doesn't seem as pretentious because you can see, you know, Lachlan Morton going off doing a crazy gravel event. I don't know, it's bringing it out to the masses and making it a little bit more accessible. Yeah, I think when you look at what, you know, with the backstage pass of that, with the achieve early days. It's not something I would really pay close attention to these days, but it really enabled the cycling fan base to connect with the riders and show the human element of the sport too. So I think just bridging that gap really sort of draws a lot of people in. And I'm not sure how much extra value that gives the sponsor, but it definitely creates a great engagement with the fan base. Gail, let's finish up with a couple of rapid for questions.