The other French hope: Mathys Rondel eyes Giro debut with quiet ambition

There is more than one exciting young talent in French cycling on the cusp of a Grand Tour debut. Mathys Rondel hasn’t been generating the same headlines and expectations as Paul Seixas, but the 22-year-old has been quietly gathering eye-catching results across his first two seasons as a pro.

This year alone, Rondel was the last man standing in the face of Remco Evenepoel’s onslaught at the Trofeo Andratx in January. He weathered all manner of conditions and terrain to place eighth at an attritional Paris-Nice. And he warmed up for the Giro d’Italia by placing an assured fifth at the Tour of the Alps, just behind his Tudor teammate Michael Storer.

Although Rondel has never raced a Grand Tour before, he will line out in Italy with ambition, even if he was keen not to make any bold proclamations about his prospects of a high overall finish just yet.

“We’ll see with the team how it’s going to be, but the objective would be to do three good weeks, to perform across the three weeks,” Rondel told Domestique. 

“We’ll see if that means going for breaks in the third week or if that means that I try to go for GC, that’s not sure yet. But the goal is also to help Michael Storer in the mountains for as long as I can and then we’ll see where that leads. We’ll see at the end of the second week.”

Storer, who placed tenth overall a year ago and who has two Vuelta a España stage wins on his resume, is the obvious leader of Tudor at the Giro, but Rondel will also set out with a specific role. These days, debutants can no longer treat their first Grand Tour simply as a learning exercise.

“In modern cycling, unfortunately, it’s not even in the vocabulary anymore to go to a race just to get experience,” sports director Matteo Tosatto told Domestique. “We have a plan for him. He’s very ambitious and we’re ambitious, too. He’ll go to the Giro with aims for the GC, which could be top 15 or top 10, but we’ve got Michael Storer too, of course. 

“I don’t want to say there’s one captain: we’ve got two guys who’ll have their chance. Michael has experience on his side, whereas it’s Mathys’ first Grand Tour, so he must go a bit day by day, but also with clear objectives. We have a competitive team to support the two of them for GC. We’ll take stock with Mathys after the first week, and then we’ll see. But we know where we want to go with him.”

Rondel is also a rider with clear ideas. His father, Antony Rondel, was a world record-breaking inline skater, and Mathys was very competitive in the discipline as a teenager before switching his attention to cycling.

“I always did a bit of cycling to help training for inline skating and speed skating on ice, but I made the switch at the end of 2019,” Rondel said. “I started to take cycling more seriously and I wanted to see where I could progress.”

As an under-23, Rondel would initially race for VC Pays de Loudéac, feeder team of the now-defunct B&B Hotels squad, but his performances soon caught the attention of Boris Zimine, the head of Tudor’s development team. 

Zimine signed Rondel to Tudor ahead of the 2023 season, and his development continued apace over the next two seasons, with sixth at the Tour de l’Avenir, fourth at the Giro Next Gen, and some striking cameos with the elite team at the Settimana Coppi e Bartali and the Tour of the Alps. 

By then, the French WorldTour squads were circling, but Rondel preferred to stay within the Tudor structure when he turned professional midway through 2024.

“They came in quite late for me, they didn’t believe in me as much as Tudor,” Rondel said of his French suitors. “And they didn’t offer me the same opportunity as Tudor, so it was a logical choice for me, and I didn’t necessarily want to go to a French team in any case. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone, and I saw that French riders on foreign teams tended to do well.”

Rondel’s desire to go his own way wasn’t limited to his choice of team. A native of Le Mans, Rondel opted, like many French riders, to move south in search of hillier training roads. But rather than decamp to Nice or Annecy with the rest of the milieu, he opted for the Pyrenees, buying a farmhouse in the Vallée des Nestes. 

He shares the home with his brother Lucas and sister Léa, also cyclists, his mother, and a Pinot-esque menagerie of animals that includes chickens, rabbits and a miniature pig called Hertha.

“I moved down there because it’s peaceful and quiet, it’s a place where you can work because you have flat roads and climbs, and it’s not too close to any cities, so you don’t have any distractions,” he said. 

“I already had a friend living down there, a bike mechanic, and I’m just fifteen minutes away from him, which is great too. It’s great because he’s my friend, obviously, but also, if I ever have a problem with my bike, it’s fixed pretty quickly…”

Rondel travels to Bulgaria this week for the Giro, where he faces the next step in his development. A strong climber with clear powers of recovery, he might well find the discipline of three-week racing to his liking.

“Last year, he improved in some area in every race that he rode,” Tosatto said. “And this year, he’s more mature. He’s getting results, but he’s also hitting objectives along the way with a view to growing. Paris-Nice was very impressive in that regard, because it’s not just been a physical maturation; it’s been mental too. With our young riders, we need to have a bit of patience, but we also like to give them a lot of trust.”