This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 142
In a parallel universe, one in which Filippo Ganna wasn’t an era-defining time triallist, slayer of the track and Classics contender, the tall, stocky and powerful Italian could have been an aquatic sportsperson. His mother, Daniela, was a waterskier, and his father, Marco, represented Italy in sprint canoeing at the Olympic Games. There’s a reason why Ganna Junior never made a name for himself on the water, though.
“I like water to take a shower, but that’s it,” the Ineos Grenadiers rider jokes. “If I go to swim, I like it until I see it’s all dark underneath and then I don’t feel comfortable. Last summer my girlfriend had a party by the river and there was a platform in the water. I couldn’t jump off it because I was fucking scared.” Emulating his father, then, was never a realistic possibility. “I tried canoeing as a kid but I didn’t like it,” Ganna says. “Better to be a cyclist,” he chuckles. Indeed.
This spring, 29-year-old Ganna is going in search of his first Monument title, arguably one of only two big results missing from his glittering palmarès – the other being a stage of the Tour de France. He’s won two time-trial world titles, claimed seven world golds on the track, triumphed in seven stages of the Giro d’Italia, and is the reigning Hour Record holder, setting a benchmark of 56.792km in 2022. But as he marks his tenth year in the WorldTour and almost a decade at the top, Ganna – a big cuddly bear, as some describe him – is still striving for more. He wants his greatness to become eternal, his achievements to stand long after he’s hung up his racing wheels. He never became a watersports athlete like his parents, but his father and the lake in which he grew up beside continue to mould him. “It’s nice to go back, to see the home where you were a child,” he says.
Raised in the hills
Ganna and his younger sister Lotti were brought up in a small village outside of Verbania, which sits on the celestial blue shore of Lake Maggiore in the north-west of Italy. It’s Italy’s longest lake at 64km, and takes on the form of a meandering fjord, with the turquoise water passing around several islands. One, Isola Bella, houses an expansive garden and stunning palazzo with an incredible collection of Baroque art and architecture. The Swiss border is just 40km away, and the imposing figure of the Matterhorn mountain that inspired the triangular shape of Toblerone chocolate lurks in the background. The winters are cold, but the summers are warm and long. It’s a magical place to be born and raised.
“A lot of memories come to me when I think about the village I was born in,” Ganna says backstage at Rouleur Live. “It’s a really tiny place in the hills, close to the lake. Maybe 1,000 people in the summer, and in the winter even less. When I was a child we had a proper country house with a nice garden and dogs.”
It’s an Alpine landscape that not only encourages sporting endeavour but demands it. Alongside the water sports, hiking, skiing, mountain biking, and more extreme pursuits can all be practised and mastered. Ganna’s parents, he says, were always going to raise sporty kids. Marco competed at the 1984 Los Angeles – 32 years before his son made his Olympic bow in Rio as a fresh-faced 20-year-old track cyclist. “I’m really proud to have a father who went to the Olympics,” Ganna says. Marco didn’t get beyond the repêchage, but he’s got the tracksuits, memorabilia and photos to show for it. “He had some books about LA and it’s nice to see the pictures,” Ganna adds. “He used to have some trophies in my grandpa’s house but he doesn’t anymore. He prefers the memories to the trophies.”
Marco is a modest, humble gentleman – he doesn’t talk much about his own sporting glory, only the lessons he holds dear from it. “He did sport during the Iron Curtain era and he used to race a lot in Germany when the Berlin Wall was still up,” Ganna explains. “He would meet a lot of guys from the other side of the Wall and he explained to me how much sport can connect people.”
The first sport Pippo – as his family and friends refer to him – first came entranced by was volleyball. “I was left-handed – a lefty, and tall, but I was too young to play,” he sighs. So he took up basketball. “I was a good player because I was the tallest in the team so it was pretty easy,” he says. “Looking back, it could have been nice if I tried to push it a little bit more as it’s a really nice sport, but when you’re young you want to do lots of different sports. It’s nice to remember these parts of my life.”
It was at the age of eight that a young Ganna took part in his first cycling race – a local cyclocross event organised by his father. First impressions were not good, though. “I said after one race I wanted to stop because it was too hard and I didn’t want to do it anymore,” Ganna recalls. He’d soon be won over. “I started to ride again, mainly mountain biking and cyclocross because my Dad liked to organise local races. Year by year I was doing more races.” And year by year he was getting better.
By his mid-teens, Ganna was fully fixated on cycling and one of Italy’s best youth riders. So good that education fell by the wayside. He remembers one pep talk from his father, always by his side sharing wisdom and advice. “I lost a lot of school days and missed a lot of exams and I needed to spend more time studying to recover the gap I had with the other guys of my age,” Ganna remembers. “I took the decision to stop school and to focus on cycling after my Dad said to me: ‘It’s like a train. If you jump on the train now, maybe you can stay on it for a long trip. But if you don’t jump on it now, you’ll lose the moment and then what do you do? Nothing.’ So I made the big decision. I think the resilience I have in sport came from my father.”
Every step of the way Ganna’s father has been his sounding board. He beams with pride when he discusses his Dad’s athleticism. “He’s not as tall as me but he has broad shoulders like me,” Ganna says. “He’s proper muscle. He weighs over 90kg, has muscle in his chest, arms, lifts weights, but has nothing in his legs. Yet he did a marathon once. Everyone said he couldn’t do it, but he’s fucking strong and he did it.”
Ganna is has multiple Olympic and World medals on the track (Image: Ben Stansall / Getty)
Made on the track
Ganna began his professional road career with UAE Team Emirates in 2017, riding for the team in their first two years of existence, before joining Team Sky, the British team he has represented ever since. His first notable results as a senior rider were not on the road, though – they were on the track. He took his first medals at the European and World Track Championships in 2016, and has beat his own world record for the individual pursuit four times in the ensuing years. Even as he became one of the road scene’s most recognisable figures in his formative pro years, it was still the track where he was truly dominant. An Olympic team pursuit gold medal at the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021 remains the highlight and so far he’s earned 14 medals from the Track Worlds.
“I was born with the track,” Ganna smiles. “I started with London, my first Worlds [in 2016, when he won individual pursuit gold], and now I have nine rainbow jerseys, seven from track.” Mere mention of the track stirs emotions inside him. It moves him, enthuses him. “The track stays in your head and your heart and I would like to continue to do it,” Ganna says.
It helps that the team pursuit squad is a bunch of long-time mates, including Lidl-Trek’s road duo Simone Consonni and Jonathan Milan. “If you think back to 2016 when I first joined the track team, not more than ten years ago, it was with the same guys, the same staff, and so we have the same jokes, the same funny moments. They are good memories and good vibes I can tell to my children in the future.” You imagine he’ll play the same fatherly role as his own Dad.
On the road, Ganna admits he has been overtaken by Remco Evenepoel as this generation’s leading time triallist. It frustrates him, but it doesn’t defeat him. The pair’s physiques couldn’t be more different: Ganna is a brute; Remco is a slim Grand Tour-winning climber. “I think we’re two different athletes, no?” Ganna rhetorically asks. “I can’t say I need to do exactly the same as him as it’s not the perfect way for me. Physically I can’t do any more with my body. In the Europeans [time trial Championships last October, where he was second to Evenepoel], I did numbers I’ve never seen before. I can do 30 minutes at 600 watts average. I can do that. But I physically can’t do any more.”
The next title that Ganna holds that Evenepoel might go after is the Hour Record. “For sure he can try to do it but it’s a brutal sport, a brutal discipline,” Ganna warns. “If he wants to try it, why not? I’d be happy if he tried to do it.” Evenepoel has indicated that at some point he will attempt to better Ganna’s mark. If and when he does, Ganna will be back for more. “If he takes it off me, maybe in the future I will try to take it back,” Ganna declares. “I will try to push the level even harder.” And, he points out, he’d do it ‘fairly’, just like he did in Grenchen in 2022: “Next time I wouldn’t do it at altitude but at sea level like last time.” The discipline could be set for the kind of superstar back-and-forth action it’s not witnessed for decades.
Read more: Remco Evenepoel wants to break the Hour Record 'at some point': will he smash Filippo Ganna's time?
In the here and now, there are more pressing and immediate appointments, such as Milano-Sanremo and Paris-Roubaix. Ganna won the Paris-Roubaix Espoirs as a 19-year-old and has twice finished second at Sanremo, but outright victory in the senior races still eludes him. Win either, or both, of them and his legacy as this generation’s most successful Italian male cyclist will be enriched. “I would like to win just one of them, just one and I’ll be really happy,” he states. “For me, I have the feeling that Roubaix is like Sanremo for Tadej [Pogačar]. I try every time but it never comes off.”
Home bird
Ganna sees the romanticism and family symmetry in stopping his Olympic career in Los Angeles. But that would deny him one final Games. Why make four appearances at the Olympics when he can make five? “I’d prefer to make it to Brisbane [in 2032],” he says. “I want to ride more. But this is the new cycling – you never know. Every year everyone is stronger, every year there is a higher level, every year it’s more intense. You start to train one week earlier than before every winter. It’s hard to do this.”
That makes switching off and stepping back a necessity. When he does park his bike and let cycling take a backseat, Ganna often reverts to the child that grew up by the shores of Lake Maggiore. If it’s not the PlayStation he’s playing on with friends – “Put a controller in my hand and I can feel it,” he says – then it’s Lego. “I have a lot of boxes of Lego,” he reveals. “I bought an Eiffel Tower Lego that’s one metre tall after the Olympics but I’ve not built it yet as the house isn’t too big at the moment. I need to decide: the Lego or me… I need to speak with my girlfriend to see if I can do it!”
Where he’ll always find space for his Lego sets is across the Swiss-Italian border and back to his family home, the place it all started. The place where, he says, he recharges in the company of his family. “You can stay focused for 365 days a year in cycling, but if you do that you’ll kill yourself,” he states. “You try to be as normal as possible. If not, you’ll crack your head.”
Quite often before a race, especially the major ones – think the Grand Tours, Olympics and World Championships – Ganna will head back home to unwind with his family, seek out advice from his wise father, and connect to his roots. Lake Maggiore’s water petrifies him a little, but the serenity and majesty of its surroundings ground him in reality. “I like it when I’m back home and I have my routine and I go walking by the lake at night. Especially when you find a moment to meet old friends, to drink something.” He smiles a big beaming grin. “It’s nice.” It’s home, too.
There’s no better place to discharge and unwind than by the lake and the mountains that gave birth to Top Ganna.
