Few riders exemplify cycling’s modern status as a cosmopolitan, international sport like Pavel Sivakov. He was born to Russian parents in Italy, moved to France, turned professional for a British team and now rides for UAE Team Emirates XRG, along with riders from 17 other nations.

At the same time, there is no doubt where home is. We are sitting in spring sunshine in the Pyrenean village of Loudenvielle, a tourist-friendly and picturesque spot which has made occasional appearances in the Tour de France in the last 30 years and is a nice place for a coffee and choclatine. (“Don’t call it a pain au chocolate, you’ll get killed,” advises Sivakov.)

It’s two days after Liège-Bastogne-Liège, where Sivakov was 38th, but in the same group as fourth-placed Simone Velasco. Thirty-eighth is neither here nor there for the French rider – he decided, with the victory safely in the hands of his team leader Tadej Pogačar, that getting involved in the fighting to sprint for a more or less meaningless finish somewhere around 10th place wasn’t worth the stress and danger. On the other hand, it’s evidence of a return to form after a short period of illness.

Sivakov is in the Pyrenees to spend a few days visiting his mother in Soueich, the village where he lived from the age of eight, and to remind himself about a few of this summer’s Tour de France climbs. There’s a time trial from Loudenvielle to Peyragudes on stage 13 where we’ve already spotted Jonas Vingegaard riding with Grischa Niermann, his team manager at Visma-Lease a Bike, and after our interview Sivakov will ride up the Peyresourde as far as the junction with Peyragudes, then carry on over the top of the col. Then he’s going to have a look at Superbagnères, the finish of stage 14, which he does, riding up at chatting pace with Vingegaard, who seems to be on a similar schedule, before setting a new Strava KOM for the descent back to Bagnères-de-Luchon.

“I was not born here, but all my memories of growing up are mostly here in the Pyrenees,” says Sivakov, who still lives in the range, though now in the rarefied air of Andorra. “Every time I come here, the roads, the houses, the nature… it’s home for me, and it was a really nice upbringing, really calm.”

And he still loves riding in the Pyrenees. “You do get hard winters here. On this side of the Pyrenees it’s quite wet and cold, but in Andorra, it’s more dry and you have more sun. And especially where I used to live, it was great because I had flat roads, but also big climbs super close. It’s some of the best riding in France.”

There are also happy racing memories for Sivakov in this area. In 2017, his final season as an under-23 and the year in which he turned 20, he was probably the most successful stage racer in the category. He won the Baby Giro and the Giro della Valle d’Aoste, two of the biggest under-23 races on the calendar, and though he faltered in the Tour de l’Avenir in terms of the GC, he still won a big mountain stage and the climbers’ classification. However, his first big win came in the other major French under-23 stage race, the Ronde de l’Isarde, which happens to take place on his local roads. One stage was cancelled due to flooding, but in the three very hard mountain stages that remained, Sivakov won two and was second in the other, winning the overall ahead of the late Bjorg Lambrecht by two and a half minutes. His breakthrough came on the opening stage, which finished at Hospice de France, a summit-finish offshoot of the Superbagnères climb.

“It was the start of a great season for me,” he says. “After I won, I had a lot of confidence, and I just kept going. We passed just next to Soueich that day, so it really was my home stage.”

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At the end of 2019, when Sivakov was still a young professional, and I was editor of Procycling magazine, we picked up on the extraordinary performances that young riders had put in that year. Egan Bernal had won the Tour de France, aged 22. Tadej Pogačar won the Tour of California and came third in the Vuelta, aged 21. Remco Evenepoel had won the Tour of Belgium and Clásica de San Sebastián aged 19. We devised a cover recreating a photoshoot done by The Who, as part of the publicity for their movie The Kids Are Alright, which meant we needed a fourth rider, and the only choice was Sivakov. In 2019, his second season as a professional, he’d won the Tour of the Alps and finished ninth in the Giro d’Italia at the age of 21. These four riders were winning major stage races almost straight out of the under-23 ranks, and in Evenepoel’s case, straight out of the juniors.

From the perspective of 2025, this is no longer an unusual thing. However, Sivakov is the first to point out that his palmarès now don’t quite match those of his three rivals, though the trajectory of his career has been a typical one for the modern era.

Sivakov spent the first six seasons of his career, 2017-2023, with Team Sky/Ineos Grenadiers. He’s now in the middle of a three-year contract with UAE Team Emirates. He won three races in 2019 – a stage and the GC in the Tour of the Alps, and the Tour de Pologne. And he’s won a race per season since 2022 – in order, the Vuelta a Burgos, Giro della Toscana, a Giro d’Abruzzo stage and this year’s Ruta del Sol. At the same time, he has carved out a career for himself as a climbing domestique, with a key role for Tadej Pogačar at UAE Team Emirates. The bigger WorldTour teams have been building extraordinarily strong squads in recent years – Sivakov can look around the UAE team and see riders like Adam Yates, João Almeida, Juan Ayuso and Isaac del Toro, all Grand Tour specialists with the capacity to win or finish on the podium, and none of them team leader while Tadej Pogačar is around. Or he could look across to Visma-Lease a Bike, who can rely on Sepp Kuss, Matteo Jorgensen and Simon Yates to support their Grand Tour leader Jonas Vingegaard. Or to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, where Jai Hindley, Aleksandr Vlasov and Dani Martínez are part of Primož Roglič’s mountain train. It’s honest work, and it’s well-paid work. And for riders who don’t have the luck, resilience, ability to absorb pressure and je ne sais quoi of the likes of Pogačar, Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Roglič, it’s the perfect job description.

“I spoke to Matxin [Joxean Matxin, UAE sports manager] when I joined, and I’m in the team to be a domestique with Tadej in races like the Ardennes and the Tour, then on other races, if I have the level, I can go for my own chance. It’s a really good position to be in; I’m really happy with that,” says Sivakov.

“I’m not the only rider like this in UAE, and that’s how the team works. When Tadej is there, no questions. Like, when it’s a hard mountain stage or a Classic, you work, and the chances he wins might not be 99 per cent, but it’s 95 per cent. He brings everyone up. But in the other races, maybe you don’t have the support that you do when you’re the lone leader, but then you don’t have the pressure. Being a domestique is easier – you have less pressure, and you know your job. And here, we have a really good team so we can back each other up. When you have a day that is not the best, someone can replace your role, and vice versa. But I couldn’t only be a domestique; I can’t do this just where I am now, at my age and at this point in my career. With Tadej, I really enjoy it, but also, I want to win races. 

“I’m in my best years now. The best numbers I have ever done were last year at the Vuelta, and in Il Lombardia. Long and hard races are what I’m best at. When everyone is under fatigue, that’s where I perform best. So long races, climbing races like Liège and Lombardia, I love those races and these are what suit me the most. Last year I had the legs to finish on the podium of Lombardy, but I mismanaged the final a bit. I would like to podium in a Monument in my career, and I think I have the capabilities to do it.

“Then, Grand Tours. Winning a Grand Tour now is, I think, really complicated. I’m going to the Tour in a domestique role for Tadej, but definitely in my career, if I can win a stage in a Grand Tour I would be happy. And I still like to ride GC. I have it in my DNA, so why not podium a Grand Tour at some point? For a rider like me, not a top-tier rider, but really strong, sometimes you have these, not lucky seasons, but seasons where you are in a good place at the right time, you win, or you go in the break, you take time on GC, then you hang on. When I see a rider like Ben O’Connor, we are really similar riders, and he was second in the Vuelta last year. I’m not saying I’m better than him or anything, but we have a similar profile and actually to see guys like this do so well is really motivating for me.”

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Pavel Sivakov’s parents were both professional cyclists. His father Alexei Sivakov rode for the Roslotto-ZG Mobili and BigMat-Auber 93 teams at the turn of the century, finishing the Tour de France three times, as well as the Giro twice and Vuelta once. His mother Aleksandra Koliaseva won the prestigious Tour de l’Aude, as well as two gold medals at the World Team Time Trial Championships.

There are obviously huge advantages, both genetic and cultural, for the offspring of two professional cyclists, if they also want to go into the sport. Sivakov inherited his parents’ physical aptitude for cycling, and there was an instantly available knowledge base for him to access. “I got a good education about the lifestyle, like when you have to rest, how to approach races, all this kind of stuff,” he says. “But then, on the other hand, the Pyrenees are not the biggest cycling hub in France and you don’t have so many riders starting races here. You have small pelotons, and I would just smash the races. I’d attack and go alone, and when I started racing bigger races, I missed a little bit the skills and craft of peloton riding.”

There is also some very subtle nuance in the difference between being a young French rider who is the offspring of two professional cyclists, and being a young French rider who is the offspring of two Russian professional cyclists. While he took out French nationality at 18 and has two passports, he was racing under a Russian licence.

“I didn’t get French nationality straight away,” he says. “I was Russian and starting to get better at cycling, and you start moving into the departmental teams, then to regional teams. I was good, I was winning. But at some point, somebody read the regulations, or somebody probably complained and said I wasn’t allowed to race the regionals because I wasn’t French. And it starts to get a bit complicated, and that’s why I started racing with the Russian national team.” In the end, Sivakov took out a French licence in 2022, and now represents France, rather than Russia, internationally.

But he also sees far more advantage in his background and heritage these days. “In France, now it’s so cosmopolitan, you have so many different nationalities that come here. France is my home, and that’s where I grew up. One hundred per cent. But because of my parents and background, and my name, also, I’m never going to be like, let’s say, all my roots being here. I’d say it was even a positive thing. It helps me now because I think I have a good ability to understand different cultures. I adapt very quickly. It opens you up more.”

However, there are some other related things about being Pavel Sivakov that have both pushed him to where he is now, and also held him back. Paradoxically, these appear to be true at the same time. Whether it’s a direct consequence of being conscious that he is a second-generation immigrant, or the product of a more complex combination of influences, Sivakov has an ambivalent relationship with pressure, which is tied up with his upbringing and cultural heritage.

When he went to lycée [high school], he chose the hardest Baccalaureate – Bac ‘S’, which is the science-focused course, when the ‘ES’ Bac – économique et social – might have suited him better. “With my parents being Russian, it’s this school of going the hard way,” he says. “I’m not 100 per cent French, and I think when you are an immigrant, sometimes my parents would say, you have to be the best, because if you’re not French, they might choose the other person. You’re a Sivakov. You’re Russian. You have to be the best.”

And then, just as school was starting to get really hard, Sivakov’s parents split up. From the children’s perspective, there’s no ideal time for parents to divorce; however, when this happens to young teenagers, the aftershocks may be lifelong.

“Sometimes this happens in life – they split up and my dad left,” he says. “It was towards the end of lycée, when cycling was starting to be a bit more serious. It was not easy.

“It was also, let’s say, economically a bit hard, and in my head, it was like: I have to succeed. I chose cycling as the path and always put quite a lot of pressure on myself. Until not so long ago, actually. I had to kind of support the family, which I still do – I had to jump into this role and it was a complicated period. My mum was really good – she really was the most important person in my career, more than my dad – but inside, I could feel like the hopes were on me. It was also complicated for my sister, because on weekends we would drive to races, and it was a lot about me. So I could feel this pressure to be responsible for the family. But life is like this sometimes. You don’t choose.”

The problem was, Sivakov carried this tendency to put pressure on himself into his professional career. And at the same time, he realises that without it, he might not have been able to achieve what he has. 

“I had this period where I struggled with pressure, maybe putting too much pressure on myself and I didn’t really perform. I performed in my second year – I won the Tour of Poland, Tour of the Alps, but after this I stagnated quite a bit and had a lot of crashes. I was a bit down and, looking back, it was because I was stressed in the peloton. Now I feel I got better at it and I feel much more comfortable, even in stressful moments in the races.

“The really big thing I did was learn that I’m doing this for myself more than anybody else. Maybe at the beginning I was more doing it for pressure, being responsible for the family. But I’m now at a point where I’ve made it in pro cycling. It’s an ongoing process, but I’ve worked on my confidence, and being confident in general about my choices.

“It was not easy, but I wouldn’t change it. Sometimes pressure creates strength in you – I think without this pressure I would not be where I am today.”