FORT COLLINS — Not that Dan Martin was born to ride a bike uphill, but one of the first real bike rides the Irishman took was up L’Alpe d’Huez. He was 15.
Tackling the Tour de France’s most famous climb, a lung-exploding 8.3 miles up 6,138 feet of switchbacks at a 7.9 percent grade, wasn’t just the wild idea of a cocky teenager. This is how the Martin family would spend a leisurely afternoon on vacation at the Tour de France.
After all, when your uncle is Stephen Roche, winner of the 1987 Tour, and your father cycled professionally, you don’t spend many afternoons hanging out at the pub.
It also turned into a foreshadowing of Martin’s career. Now 22, he is Boulder- based Team Garmin-Chipotle’s new designated climbing specialist. He will try to help Christian Vande Velde win the Tour de France in July.
For the record, Martin finished that L’Alpe d’Huez climb in 1 hour, 8 minutes, about 31 minutes behind Marco Pantani’s record of 37:35.
“It felt a lot longer than that,” said Martin over a heaping plate of pasta and sausage at Rasta Pasta last week, after three hours of experimenting with equipment drag in a wind tunnel. “That’s something that has made me a good climber, because I can stay at a real high pain and heart rate, I suppose, for a long, long time.”
For those who’ve ever struggled biking up a one-block hill to work, don’t feel bad.
Martin was born to bike uphill. He’s 5-feet-10, 137 pounds and has the chest and arms of a ski jumper but the long, muscular legs of a small forward. What you don’t see is a mentality that thrives on the pain that forces mortals to quit and call a cab.
“The pain’s the same for everybody,” he said. “But because we’re a little bit fitter, we’re going a little bit faster.”
This isn’t a case of a kid following in his famous uncle’s tire treads. Martin never saw Roche race. Roche grew up in Ireland, and while Martin carries an Irish passport because of his mother’s nationality, he was raised outside Birmingham, England. Martin is as working-class English as a Southern Midlands steel mill, if any still existed. When Martin signed last year, the team nearly needed a translator, he sounded so English.
He picked up the accent from his father, as well as the cycling discipline and mentality. Roche? Now 49, he’s running a hotel on the French Riviera and is an official for the Tour of the Mediterranean, which Martin will start riding Tuesday.
“He’s just Uncle Stephen to me,” Martin said. “It’s kind of like, well, he won the Tour de France, but it never enters my mind when I’m with him.”
Jonathan Vaughters, Garmin-Chipotle’s Denver-raised director, started noticing Martin when he was with an amateur French team. There was a toughness about Martin he liked. Based in Aubagne, just east of Marseilles, Martin lived in a three-bedroom flat with two Moldovans, a Pole, a South African and someone from Japan.
Martin didn’t speak enough French to complain about the four-hour car rides that began the racing day at 5:30 a.m. and ended at midnight. But Vaughters also saw something else.
“In under-23, he was head and shoulders the best guy out there,” Vaughters said. “He was eating up the Italians and Spanish. He just knew how to win.”
In his rookie season last year, Martin had what Vaughters called “probably the best first year of anybody.” He won the Irish National Road Championship, took fourth in the Tour of Britain and won the Route du Sud in the South of France, blowing away Christophe Moreau, France’s top cyclist.
If Vande Velde is going to make the podium at the Tour de France, Martin will be a reason. What’s French for “pressure?”
“I don’t look at it like that,” Martin said. “It’s really weird. Even in the wind tunnel, it’s just normal to me.”
Besides, Martin has climbed mountains just as high.
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
