With three Tour de France stages and two Monument titles, Alexander Kristoff is one of Norway’s most successful riders. Kristoff’s professional career spanned more than 15 years and came to an end at the end of the 2025 season, but ‘The Stavanger Stallion’ will remain in the sport as a co-owner and mentor of the Team Drali-Repsol the Norwegian developmental team. At Rouleur Live 2025, Kristoff sat down with Rouleur to look back on his career in professional cycling. 

Rouleur: You were at the top of the sport for over a decade, how were you so consistent?

Alexander Kristoff: Training was always priority number one, and then everything else had to fit alongside the training: Family life, vacations, everything. As a professional, you had to do it. You cannot say, ‘Ah, my kid has a football game, I need to watch it before I go train.’ It has to be the other way around. So for sure you had to miss out on things. But I now feel a bit of relief that I can follow up with the kids more at home. I can help my wife at home. She's been under a huge pressure to have all this responsibility alone. If it was only me and my wife, I could race for a few more years. But it's not anymore — I have four kids, and soon to be five, so there are a lot of things to consider.

R: Did that professional pressure take away from the enjoyment of bike riding?

AK: I enjoyed some of the training, at least in good weather, more as I got older. With age I started to appreciate the training sessions, even if they were at a maximum effort. But I kind of enjoyed racing less and less. I enjoyed it more when I was younger, and less as I got older. I don't know why, but that's what we are paid to do, we have to race and to get results. Of course, there is pressure, but I was always good at coping with pressure — I cannot do anything about it. So I don't really know why I didn't enjoy it so much. But for sure, the speed got higher, it got more dangerous. I think it's as simple as that. So maybe it's because everything became more on the limit. We went faster into corners, we went faster in the sprints, we went faster downhill. We braked later because we had better brakes, so we could go faster into the corners and brake later. So everything had less margin of error and maybe that's why I enjoyed it less, because I felt it was more dangerous.

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R: Did being a dad influence that?

AK: Not really because, as long as I was a good professional, I was a dad. My first son was born 14 years ago. So I don't think this was affecting me too much. For sure, with age, you've seen a lot of situations that you recognise from before and often these situations turn out fine and nothing happens, but I’ve also seen it not be fine. So maybe you touch your brakes earlier just because you've been in it and it went wrong before. And as a young rider, you haven't experienced the same situation before, and you don't think about it being a dangerous situation, so you don't touch your brakes.

Kristoff at Rouleur Live 2025 (Image: Sean Hardy)

R: The peloton changed a lot since you started out, how do you find adapting to that change?

AK: It's always changing as young guys come up. So everybody has to adapt as well as they can. I felt I struggled with it more and more. Maybe my best year was 2015, so it's been 10 years of being at a slightly lower and lower level. But still, you just had to do maximum for yourself and make yourself as good as possible and hope for it to be enough. You cannot do anything more. I cannot control how fast Mark Cavendish will be, for example. That's out of my league, out of my reach. So you can only work on yourself and make yourself as fast as possible. 

R: What was the hardest race you did?

AK: The whole team had a hard moment in the Tour de France in 2019, the second year I was in UAE. We struggled a bit with some of the nutrition. We gained a lot of kilos, mostly from creatine, during the race. So that was hard to get through that Tour, and you saw the results from UAE that year (best result was Kristoff’s second on stage four, the team only got five other top 10s). I think they miscalculated the amount of creatine and it was hot so we had 50 bottles. I think the maximum was supposed to be two bottles. I think we never got a clear answer as to what it was, but a lot of guys gained weight, but the next year we were flying again.

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At least we figured out what the problem was and dealt with it. I would say the team did a good job adjusting to challenges, but we didn't manage to adjust during that Tour, and that was kind of a small crisis that year. I still got second place, but that was my hardest Tour to get through because I was very heavy.

Kristoff won stage one of the 2020 Tour de France, a year after a disappointing campaign (Image: SWpix.com)

R: What was your most cherished victory?

AK: I would say the Monuments stand out. They are such big events, the biggest race in their countries, and maybe Flanders, since I raced a lot in Belgium, stands out for me. The Sanremo victory is my only victory in Italy and it was also my first Monument. So back then, it was by far the biggest. But at least in the way Flanders was raced, it stands out compared to Sanremo more — I was more active and in the front so it was a cooler victory.

At Sanremo I didn't do anything spectacular, right? I pressed on the Poggio and I won the sprint — I didn't do anything else. It's difficult to win for sure, especially if you're not fast, but  now they are attacking earlier and going really fast. I kind of gave it up in the last couple of years because it was too fast.

R: If you could replay one race differently in your career, which one would it be?

AK: I don't really know what I should have done differently, but in the Worlds in Bergen in 2017, I was second. It was so close, it was really marginal. If I could have taken the win there, then it would have been the biggest. I was centimetres away from the biggest I ever achieved. It's small margins.

R: Do you feel a sense of responsibility for helping the next generation of Norwegian riders with your co-ownership of Team Drali-Repsol?

AK: Now I have a little bit more time, we can use my name. I can talk a bit to sponsors and the guys if they need some advice. It's local to me, in my city, so it's easy for me, if they need me in the office or something to talk with somebody I can easily drop by.

R: And the idea is to have a pathway for Norwegian riders?

AK: Yeah, it's for the guys who are not ready after the juniors to go into the WorldTour. Not everyone is ready straight from Juniors — I was not. So it’s to have a team in Norway so that the riders can stay in Norway and they don't need to pay for their own bikes and stuff. There are many of these developmental teams in Europe and it was easy to lose Norwegian talents. They might go straight to Visma, for example.

R: What was your favourite post race meal?

AK: I enjoyed it in the USA and Canada, they have some really nice meals with a lot of calories, like milk shakes and burgers and stuff. After Quebec one year, we went for some buffalo steak. The rest of the team were eating super strict, like some rice, and we went out and ate some buffalo.

R: Would you choose Roubaix cobbles or Flanders bergs?

AK: For me, I was always better in Flanders bergs. I have three podiums in Flanders, so I think it suited me better. 

R: Do you like the bergs or is it just that you prefer them to the flat cobbles?

AK: I don't like the flat cobbles, to be honest. It's really not fun.