There is a consensus around Hugh Carthy, Britain’s latest breakout cycling name and a possible winner of the Vuelta a España as the race heads into the final weekend. It isn’t hard to find. “He seemed about 60 when he was 18,” says John Herety, who managed Carthy in his first two years as a professional. “The oldest 26-year-old in the world,” says Tom Southam, directeur sportif at Carthy’s EF Education squad. “He’s seemed like a weathered, seasoned professional since he was young.”
Carthy has a distinctive style on his bike due to his height – 1.93m is unusually tall for a cyclist – and he is different off it. He is more happy talking about snooker or darts than cycling, and is “set in his ways”, say those close to him.
“He has real sangfroid,” says Southam. “It’s hard to convince him of things, say that one handlebar might be faster than another,” adds Herety.
When the first stage of the Vuelta finished at the Arrate sanctuary on 20 October, the laconic, lanky Lancastrian already looked like a probable contender for the podium, finishing in an elite group of eight behind the race favourite and stage winner Primoz Roglic. As the race wended its way through northern Spain from one tough summit finish to the next, he moved to within 18sec of the race lead at one point, pushing both Roglic and his main challenger Richard Carapaz hard at times.
The moment that marked Carthy as a possible winner came last Sunday at the Alto de l’Angliru, seen by many as the toughest climb in cycling thanks to its interminable succession of slopes over 20% as it ascends 4,000 feet in just under eight miles. With the field reduced to walking pace at times, Carthy hauled his frame to the summit first, and he backed that up with fourth in Tuesday’s time trial to go into the final phase third overall, within close reach of Roglic’s race lead.
Carthy’s climbing ability has been obvious since 2006, when he rode up Mont Ventoux on a scaled-down professional bike with his policeman father, Sean, behind him in the family car, achieving a time for one of cycling’s toughest mountains that would have delighted an adult amateur. As an under-16 he was not suited to the circuit races that make up the British national series, but he won the junior Tour of Wales – the toughest under-18 race in Britain – in 2012, after which Herety and the JLT-Condor team came calling.
“He was shy and gangling like he is now,” said Herety. “But he’d won a junior stage race in the US. I signed him for his ability to time-trial”, Carthy had already gone below 20min for 10 miles, “because being a climber and a time-trialist is an unusual combination.”
After JLT, Carthy moved to the Spanish Caja Rural team, with whom he won the Tour of Asturias in 2016 before moving to EF. “He’s been allowed to work away, bubble under,” says Southam. “There’s always been 100% belief that Hugh would get to a high level, and he was smart enough to realise that at another team he might have fallen into another role.”
The signs were there when Carthy rode his first Tour de France in September. On stage two into Nice, his teammate Dani Martínez had a puncture just as the favourites were unleashed for the finish; it was Carthy who brought the Colombian back to the front against the odds. Five days later, when Martínez won the stage at Puy Mary, it was Carthy who pulled his teammate up to the race-winning break, and snuck into seventh on the stage.
In 2014, aged 19, Carthy won the Tour of Korea for JLT, where Southam was working at the time. Two episodes stuck out. On one stage Carthy got a puncture a few metres outside the 3km-to-go flag but had the presence of mind to wait until he was within the 3km mark before raising his arm to ask for a spare wheel. That meant even if he was unable to regain contact he would be given the same time as the stage winner. It was the kind of nous that a seasoned professional would show, not a teenager.
“Another day we were going up the finish climb, and he sat up, dropped to the back of the group and took his gloves off. I was like: ‘What does he think he’s doing’, but he stuffed the gloves in his pocket, changed to a higher gear and just destroyed them. He had been checking the other riders out. At 19, he was already showing the ability to think on the bike under pressure you see in more mature riders.” It was a classic case of old head, young shoulders; in this Vuelta, Carthy has finally fulfilled that early promise.
