When Florian Lipowitz – one of cycling’s most exciting current general classification talents – first visited the offices of Bora-Hansgrohe in late 2019 to meet team management, he immediately impressed. It wasn’t his numbers and data, though that invariably did impress, and nor was it his results as a rider, because up until that point, he had never ridden a competitive bike race. But instead, it was his approach and commitment to training. While everyone else would have driven to the team’s HQ on the German-Austrian border, Lipowitz, 18 at the time, turned up with his bike and cycling kit. “I went there by train, and because I still wanted to train, I rode 150km back home,” he reflects. “I started at 3pm but there was a super strong headwind the whole time and I didn’t arrive home until 9pm. My speed was never faster than 24kph – it was really horrible.”
An unpleasant late afternoon and evening, maybe, but teenager Lipowitz had wooed the team; staff still talk about that ride today. And recently they’re also talking about a lot more impressive rides: second on GC at Paris-Nice and fourth at the Itzulia Basque Country this season, as well as seventh on debut at last year’s Vuelta a España. As Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe begin to look to a post-Primož Roglič future and rumours link them with Remco Evenepoel, Juan Ayuso and others, perhaps their answer is the softly-spoken German whose professional sporting career could very well have involved two skis and a rifle instead of two wheels on a carbon frame.
“I started biathlon when I was seven or eight after my brother Philipp had first got into it because we had a biathlon arena quite close to our home,” Lipowitz, 24, tells Rouleur. He was raised in the Swabian Alps in south-west Germany. “But we didn’t have too much snow, so when I was 14 and my brother was 15, we went to boarding school in Austria.” Minor correction: they were enrolled in the ski academy, the Stams Ski High School in Tirol, Austria, which has produced more Olympic and world champions than anywhere else. The Lipowitz brothers were very good: Florian winning national event races and always figuring in the top 10, and Philipp becoming junior world champion in 2021. “We wanted to be pro and go to World Cups, and that was the place to be,” Florian, a year younger than Philipp, says. “Most people thought I would have a biathlon career.”
But injuries, first knee-related and then a torn ACL sustained on a kite-surfing holiday, gradually killed off the skiing dreams of the younger Lipowtiz. Cycling, an activity he had been doing with his family since he was a kid – he completed the 120km Dreiländergiro Nauders Gran Fondo aged nine, and rode from Germany to Nice via the Alps aged 16, and then across the Pyrenees a year later – became his new sport. In 2019, at the age of 18, he won two Gran Fondos, one in Switzerland and the other in Austria, and his father, Marc, who himself was riding the long-distance events (his mother, Evelin, was running marathons), got in contact with Dan Lorang, Bora’s long-time head of performance, who also previously coached biathletes. “He organised some bike testing, saw that I was kind of good, and he put me in touch with the U23 team Tirol KTM.” It was to be the beginning of Lipowtiz’s cycle racing career. But things didn’t start well.
Photo by Zac Williams/ SWpix.com
“My first races were in Croatia,” he says of the 2020 editions of Trofej Umag and Poreč one-day races, typically won by rising stars. “It was super dangerous with a lot of crashes, and I fell twice at Umag. It was horrible. And then a week later Covid started and I didn’t have any races. I really didn’t know if I had made the right decision, and I was thinking that I shouldn’t have changed from biathlon.”
Lipowitz quelled those fears as soon as racing resumed several months later, though, and in April 2021, having previously just ridden 10 days as a bike racer, he was the third-best young rider at the Tour of the Alps, competing against WorldTour opposition. “It was my first really good result and the first time I really enjoyed racing, because U23 races were just super stressful.” More eye-catching results followed, prompting Bora to recruit him as a stagiaire midway through the 2022 season. His progress since then has been consistent if understated: GC triumphs at the Czech and Sibiu Tours, third at the Tour de Romandie, and those aforementioned results at the Vuelta, Paris-Nice and Itzulia. A ski star has become a cycling star.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a pure climber because I’m just a bit too heavy” – he weighs 68kg – “but I'm good at everything, can do quite good TTs, have good numbers on the flat, and can do steep climbs, even though my preference is 5-7% climbs,” he says. “My goal is definitely to be a GC rider, racing for the podium in one-week stage races, and then the next step will be to be a co-leader in Grand Tours.” The Vuelta, in which he played a key role in Roglič winning, was a big learning experience for him. “I’ve never before spent so much time on a bike!” he laughs. “Physically I wasn’t on the limit so much, but mentally it was exhausting.”
His emergence has inevitably prompted a degree of excitement in his home country, the German press now largely over its previous disdain of the sport and starved of a genuine GC star since the days of Jan Ullrich. “I’m a guy who doesn’t really like to be in the spotlight, and the team is doing a good job of handling the media,” Lipowitz says. “I don’t know how successful I will be in the future, but I accept there will be more attention on me. I’m learning to deal with that.”
Next week, Lipowitz takes part in the Critérium du Dauphiné, going head-to-head with the 2024 Tour de France podium: Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel. Focus will be almost exclusively centred on that trio, but Lipowitz will also feel several eyes trained on his every movement. It would, after all, be foolish to ignore his capabilities. “There are definitely more people in the peloton who know me now and there are eyes on me in the race and even before races,” he says. “When you enter the WorldTour without any results you have some doubts if you belong there, and people ask the same question, but now I’ve proven myself and to others that I can ride there.” He certainly can: whisper it quietly, and don’t place undue pressure on his shoulders, but Germany has a new cycling hope.
Cover image by Max Friers / Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe
