Juan Ayuso feels like he’s been misunderstood, both by the cycling public and his peers.
“Undoubtedly, yes. A different story has been told of me. Even coming here to this team (Lidl-Trek), when I speak with everyone and get to know all the staff, everybody’s told me that I’m completely different to what they had in mind. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, but if you read the f***ing press!’
“But I understand it’s part of the game and what sells. Two or three things happened in the past that from the outside look completely different to what actually happened and it stays.”
Let’s rewind. Ayuso was — and still is — Spain’s greatest hope to end a run of 11 years and counting without winning one of cycling’s three Grand Tours. For a nation that has produced seven Tour de France winners and 40 percent of the Vuelta a España’s champions, that’s a barren and painful stretch
Signed to the sport’s richest team, UAE Team Emirates-XRG, from the age of 18, Ayuso finished third on debut at the 2022 Vuelta. Everything was set for the Catalan-Valencian to take cycling by storm.
For various reasons that’s yet to happen, and last summer he engineered a move away from UAE and to Lidl-Trek, breaking his contract that still had three years left to run on it.
In expressing his frustration with his now former employers, he famously referred to UAE’s management style as a “more like a dictatorship”, while there were constant murmurs emanating from the peloton about his apparent unwillingness to work for the team’s other leaders, Tadej Pogačar and João Almeida.
It all ended rather unpleasantly, and in his first press conference as a Lidl-Trek rider in December he read a prepared message defusing and settling the situation that read more like a hostage statement.
But now the 23-year-old is free, and he goes into next week’s Tour de France as Lidl-Trek’s GC leader. If everything goes well, the podium is the aim. That’d be a bonus, ahead of schedule, but the bigger picture remains the same for Ayuso: realising his enormous and undoubted potential by winning a Grand Tour.
“I don’t want to say it’s a matter of time because then everybody will take it out of context or whatever, and especially this year I think it’s going to be very difficult, but, totally, in my mind I do see that it can happen,” he says. “That’s why I work so hard for it and that’s the motivation.”
Ayuso pictured after winning stage seven of the 2025 Vuelta a Espana (Josep LAGO / AFP via Getty Images)
Ayuso welcomes The Athletic into his motel room-like apartment at Sierra Nevada, six weeks out from the Tour. His drying bib shorts are hung up on the coat hanger in the entrance, and a jersey is draped over a seat on a chair on the balcony that overlooks the ski station and Pico Veleta, the highest paved road in Europe at 3,394m.
It’s Ayuso’s second altitude camp of the season in his home country of Spain. But Spain isn’t where he grew up — not from the ages of two to six, anyway.
Due to his economist father’s work, the Ayusos — Juan is one of two siblings — relocated from Barcelona in 2005 to Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. Ayuso doesn’t remember too much about living in the USA except the family dog, the garden and playing soccer, but it was an experience that shaped the rest of his life.
Most prominently in his language skills — he speaks English as fluently as a native — but also in his cultural and sporting preferences. Though he moved back to Spain in 2009, settling in Jávea on the Valencian coast, since becoming an adult Ayuso has often returned to the States in the off-season.
“I don’t know if I feel American, but I definitely love the States and really enjoy going,” he says. In the last few years he’s been to Miami and New York — “It’s my favourite because I love eating and if you’re foodie it’s the place to go,” he says — and later this year, after a trip to Bali with friends and then supporting his girlfriend in the New York Marathon, he will begin his preparation for the 2027 season in Los Angeles. “It’s a super beautiful place to start training,” he says of LA.
He’s already got most of his fall trip planned. “Just now I was planning my vacation actually,” he says. “The schedule for the NFL season just came out and knowing that I was going to LA I’ve already bought tickets for the Chargers.
“People are going to laugh, but I have quite a few (favourite teams]) I’ve created a connection with every team I’ve been to see. So the first team I saw in the NFL was the (New York) Giants. Then I went to Miami and saw the Dolphins, and I’ve also seen the Chargers in LA.
“I say the (Atlanta) Falcons also. I’ve not seen them but I grew up there and when I see them play I want them to win. So I have these four teams. If you say in Spain you have four soccer teams, they’d probably hit you!”
If he must choose out of the quartet, who’s he rooting for? “The Giants are struggling a lot, so I’ll say the Chargers.”
The Chargers have only appeared in one Superbowl final, all the way back in 1995, and they lost, so you can hardly accuse Ayuso of being a glory supporter. But on the bike he’s all about winning.
Ayuso has feelings for the Chargers, pictured here in their only Super Bowl appearance, in 1995 (George Rose/Getty Images)
The wider cycling world started hearing about the tall, skinny-framed Ayuso when he was 17 and dominating the domestic junior racing circuit in Spain. Pogacar’s then coach, Íñigo San Millán, fanned the flames of excitement in 2021, declaring that Ayuso “has the conditions of Tadej… he goes well in the mountains, on the flats, in time trials.
“He is the most professional rider I have seen in my life… He thinks Tadej is not his ceiling — but that his ceiling is to be better than Tadej.”
UAE’s sports manager, Joxean Fernández Matxin, who had a father-son-like relationship with Ayuso until things turned sour, uttered similar messages around the same time: “He has class, ambition, a winning personality and character. He is a pure talent and this you cannot buy.” When UAE did secure his services, Ayuso’s father had to sign the contract because he was underage.
“I’ve been winning races since I was seven years old,” Ayuso says, when asked how he dealt with the wonderkid headlines. “But until juniors I thought becoming a pro was something very far away. I didn’t think about the WorldTour.
“Then Remco (Evenepoel) jumped directly (from the junior to senior ranks, skipping out the under-23 division), and Carlos (Rodríguez, who signed for INEOS Grenadiers) did too. In Carlos’s last year as a junior we were always the two best (junior) riders, so that gave me confidence that I wasn’t far off the best who were turning WorldTour.
“I knew then it was a matter of time, but I never thought I’d be on the podium of a Grand Tour in my first year.”
It wasn’t even the plan for him to even try to ride for the top-three at the Vuelta. He was 19, for goodness sake. Only one teenager, 19-year-old Henri Cornet, had ever ridden to a podium finish in a Grand Tour before — and that was all the way back in 1904, at the second edition of the Tour de France.
A teenage Ayuso on the podium of the 2022 Vuelta a Espana (OSCAR DEL POZO/AFP via Getty Images)
But the more the race progressed, the more evident it became that Ayuso was one of the race’s best and most consistent climbers. A historic third place was secured comfortably. Evenepoel, the other emerging superstar, won his only Grand Tour to date.
“It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster,” Ayuso says of his career so far. “In 2022 being on the podium… going back to the mentality (of being a winner) you said, in my head the logical thing the next year was to win the Vuelta. That was the next step, the next thing. And I improved a lot that winter but then 2023 came.
“I was injured for three months and couldn’t touch my bike and lost half the season. From there it was just trying to get back to where I was, get back on my feet.”
He kept recovering — knocked down frequently by niggles and illnesses — but setbacks continue to lay around many a corner.
To depict a picture of Ayuso failing to fulfil his potential thus far would be inaccurate. He’s won two of cycling’s so-called ‘Big-7’ one-week stage races, and claimed 18 victories in his five years in the pro ranks. Those are returns that almost any other pro would dine out on.
Not Ayuso, though. He wants to be the best. He wants to be a Grand Tour champion, multiple times over.
“In 2024 I had to abandon the only Grand Tour I did (the Tour de France) with Covid, and then 2025 we all know the story.” As a reminder: he won the first mountain stage of the Giro d’Italia, and was third in the GC with just six stages remaining. But a collapse on stage 16 ended his pink jersey chances and then a bee stung his right eye, prompting his face to swell up and him to abandon.
At the subsequent Vuelta a España, Ayuso escaped to win two stages but worked only occasionally for Almeida who was pushing Jonas Vingegaard hard for the win. There was also that explosive interview.
Ayuso’s mid-contract transfer to Lidl-Trek is thought to be the most expensive in the history of men’s cycling (Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP via Getty Images)
By that time, he had already verbally agreed to join Lidl-Trek, in a move said to have cost the German team €10m. Cycling doesn’t really keep track of transfer fees like soccer does, but if it did it’d almost certainly be a world record.
Ayuso won’t speak about the specifics of his exit from UAE, but he is willing to speak more generally about his time there. “It was my first team, there was natural progression, and I grew with them,” he says, with a genuine appreciation in his voice.
“There are great professionals there, great people around, and a lot of people helped me achieve what I achieved and to become the person I am today. I was helped by the fact it was the best team in the world.”
There was division, though. A rift that could not be healed. It’s not that he was an unwilling helper or a disruptive force, he says, but more that he’s a born fighter who wants to win himself.
“Obviously you prefer that if a story goes out it’s the right story, so it’s not that I don’t care, but I can’t let it affect me because I have no control over it,” he says. “A guy who doesn’t know me from anything that reads two things in the media and makes two conclusions is not going to take my happiness away. You can’t change people’s opinions and it’s not something that I really worry about.
“I’m calm about it all, and I know that in this team, in a different atmosphere, people are going to see more of who I am.”
His compatriot and team-mate Carlos Verona, who he’s built a strong friendship with in the past year and will also go the Tour with him, attests to that. “I didn’t know him before, but when I discovered the person he was, I realised that the stories in the media were not true. It’s not the reality,” Verona says.
“He’s a really nice guy, super young, but with a lot of talent and experience for the age he is. He has everything a big leader needs. He still needs to improve many things but he’s on the way to being one of the great leaders of cycling in the next few years.”
The white jersey for best young rider will be one of Ayuso’s aims at this year’s Tour de France (Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP via Getty Images)
When it became apparent that his recently-hired agent Giovanni Lombardi would be able to facilitate Ayuso’s exit from UAE, multiple teams were interested. INEOS Grenadiers (now Netcompany-INEOS), Movistar and XDS-Astana made offers, but joining Lidl-Trek was a decision he didn’t have to mull over too much.
“We had a first call, and one meeting in person. After that for me it was mentally decided. The first time I spoke with Luca (Guercilena, team manager) he was very clear, very direct, and that gave me a lot of confidence,” Ayuso reflects.
“A lot of teams want to sell you their project… but Luca was very honest about how the team is running now and where they want to go. From all the teams I spoke with they were the ones I believed the most, that they weren’t just trying to sell me a story but actually what they could promise was true.”
Ayuso won February’s Volta ao Algarve, beating the French wonderkid Paul Seixas, but then crashed out of Paris-Nice when in the yellow jersey and similarly exited Itzulia Basque Country because of stomach issues after only a few days racing.
Just before the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes — formerly known as the Critérium du Dauphiné — in June, it was announced that Guercilena would be leaving Lidl-Trek after the Tour de France and handing over to Andy Schleck in a move that The Athletic reported has caused widespread discontentment within the team.
All Ayuso can focus on is himself, and the signs — except for the previously mentioned abandonments — have been encouraging. “Before Paris-Nice I was doing my best ever numbers,” he says. “I just hope I can get back to that level and be there at the Tour.”
The Grande Boucle, as the French nickname their national race, starts in Ayuso’s city of birth, Barcelona, with a 19km team time trial and boasts a relatively new format where riders can clip off the front of their team formation and sprint to the finish. It’s essentially a very long leadout train.
At the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes’s 28.4km team time trial, Lidl-Trek were the fourth-best performing team, and Ayuso — a very capable time triallist — recorded the seventh quickest time. Could he be in line to seize the yellow jersey on day one of the Tour?
“We’ve got a really good team for the TTT and the team is also very optimistic,” he says. “In every TT we’ve done we’ve always been up there. Barcelona is going to be the biggest stage to do it on and I really think we can… I don’t want to say we’re going to win it but I think we’re going to be up there.”
As for the rest of the Tour, he accepts he’s unlikely to better Pogačar and Vingegaard, but he goes there aiming to rise above the rest of what is a very crowded field of GC talent. “It’s my first Tour going to do the general classification,” he says.
“It’s perfectly compatible to go to learn and be ambitious at the same time. We can still aim for a big result but with all the setbacks I’ve had I first want to get the Dauphiné done and then we’ll set goals after that, see what’s realistic.”
“We’ve got a really good team for the TTT and the team is also very optimistic,” Ayuso says (ANDER GILLENEA / AFP via Getty Images)
Third at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes indicates that he will be a podium Tour contender — “I had a feeling that every day I improved, (that) I was getting better, so I’m happy,” he said — but challenging Pogačar and Vingegaard still seems some way off. That’s fine for Ayuso though. He’s in a rush, but he’s also a realist.
“When I was younger the end game was all about the result,” he says. “Now I really enjoy the process of getting there. Being here (at altitude) and trying to get the best out of myself every day, suffering through it all.
“I’m in a position now that when I was seven years old I would have been dreaming of just being in this interview with you right now. That’s what I have to live for every day and I have to be grateful.”
That might be true, but he hasn’t lost his insatiable appetite to win. “As you say, I’ve been winning races since I started riding a bike, so that mentality has grown with me. Now it’s much harder to win a race than when I was seven years old, but it’s still there.”
Ayuso has been in the cycling spotlight since his mid-teens. He’s used to the attention, the pressure, and more recently the criticism. In pursuit of achieving his dreams and emulating his hero Alberto Contador, Spain’s last Grand Tour champion, Ayuso has recently turned to self-help books. Specifically, Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy. It’s all part of him ticking off every possible box for him to accomplish those sporting ambitions that first started to form when he was a little toddler running around in parks in Atlanta, Georgia.
“These books help me realise that in the end the dream is not to win the Tour, but to prepare to win the Tour,” he says. “That’s the dream for me. That’s why I train, why I sacrifice basically my whole life: to win. I don’t do it to try to be second. You can come second or third and maybe it’s a great result but you work to win.”
