At the Tour de France, it’s not just the 184 riders that start the race that are putting in the hard yards. For each of these sporting stars, there is a quiet army operating mostly behind the scenes – handing out bottles, preparing food, driving buses, dressing wounds, and massaging legs. In terms of time spent in the public eye, though, one of the most prominent of those workers this Tour de France is the UAE Team Emirates soigneur, Yoseba Elguezabal Manzanedo.
If you don’t know the name, I don’t blame you: I didn’t either. But maybe you’d recognise him. At the finish of every stage of the Tour, he’s the imposing bearded man who’s the first to greet Tadej Pogačar and his teammates as they cross the finish line. Given the attention on the yellow jersey in general and Pogačar in particular, this means that Manzanedo is often filmed handing out bottles of cherry juice and shepherding his charge through a thicket of cameras towards the podium. Part personal assistant, part masseur, part bodyguard.
At the top of Mont Ventoux, with Pogačar again extending his lead in the yellow jersey, the scene was especially chaotic. But after Pogačar had left – and after I’d had a quiet moment talking to Urška Žigart – I saw the big, slightly-intimidating figure of Manzanedo standing there waiting for the rest of UAE’s riders to come across the line. Time to get chatting.
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