{"id":304360,"date":"2025-07-30T16:36:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T16:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/304360\/"},"modified":"2025-07-30T16:36:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-30T16:36:12","slug":"he-made-a-lot-of-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/304360\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cHe made a lot of mistakes”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lenny Martinez<\/a> was an active figure towards the front of much of the 2025 Tour de France<\/a>, eventually finishing 3rd in the King of the Mountains classification, only beaten by Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard. Despite this however, it seems not all within Bahrain – Victorious<\/a> were impressed by the French climber.\u201cIt\u2019s hard to analyse his Tour just moments after the final stage, but Lenny more or less did what we expected of him,” Bahrain – Victorious’ Czech DS Roman Kreuziger<\/a> detailed to Direct Velo<\/a> on the\u00a0Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es, seeing the highs and lows of Martinez’s Tour de France performance. “He raced aggressively on several stages and fought hard for the polka dot jersey \u2014 that was a real positive. We wanted to see how far he could go in that classification, which is why we pushed him to target the mountains in the Alps.\u201d<\/p>\n

As mentioned though, not everything went totally to plan for Martinez. The Frenchman was embroiled in controversy late in the third week after being caught taking the stickiest of sticky bottles before taking maximum KoM points in the breakaway. This eventually came back to bite the team too. As footage was shared widely on social media, the race jury were forced into action, fining both Martinez and Kreuziger, and docking the Frenchman key points in the fight for the polka-dot jersey.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cHe made a lot of mistakes,” Kreuziger admits, although he’s not willing to divulge any further information. “There’s things we need to keep working on. But I\u2019m going to keep that to myself \u2014 it’s better it stays internal to the team. We\u2019ll work through it all together. On the whole, I think he can be pleased. He didn\u2019t win a stage, but he tried. That matters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite this blip however, Kreuziger mainly comes out of the Tour with positivity towards Martinez’s future. \u201cThis is the first time he\u2019s built into form at the end of a Grand Tour. That\u2019s very important for the future,\u201d he assesses.\u00a0\u201cThe plan was for him to go all-in on some stages and take it easy on others. For me, that\u2019s not an issue. There are things that need fixing, yes, but his inconsistency isn\u2019t one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ending the wait for a French Maillot Jaune winner is still some way off though. \u201cWe\u2019ll have to see how the rest of the team shapes up and what choices we make for the future. But right now, I\u2019d say Lenny is still quite far from being a GC contender at a Grand Tour,\u201d Kreuziger admits. \u201cFor one-week races, yes, he\u2019s already proven himself there. But a three-week race is a different beast.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lenny Martinez was an active figure towards the front of much of the 2025 Tour de France, eventually…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304361,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[4230,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-304360","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114943163429062728","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304360\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}