Words Andy McGrath Photography Francesco Rachello / Tornanti.cc
As if going toe-to-toe with fellow sprinter Lorena Wiebes wasn’t tiring enough, Italian rider Elisa Balsamo ends a day’s racing by pulling out a book to study ahead of completing her 30-page thesis.
She is in the final year of a university degree in modern and contemporary literature.
‘It’s about Latin philology,’ she says. ‘I’m one exam away from graduating, I hope to get my degree in autumn.’ Just some light bedtime reading, then.
After that, a master’s degree is next on her to-do list. That’s Balsamo, a planner, perfectionist and polymath, someone who has passed her tests on the bike with flying colours and wants to do the same off it too.
And this is all before we get into her past as a virtuoso pianist…
Queen of the world
For several years, Balsamo was a consistent challenger for bunch sprints and one-day races, usually finishing just off the podium – until September 2021.
In the Belgian city of Leuven, she burst off the wheel of her Italian teammates and into the consciousness of cycling fans.
Three-time Road Race World Champion Marianne Vos was put to the sword in a duel and Balsamo pulled on the rainbow jersey. Even she did not expect it.
‘I was hoping to come away with a medal,’ she says. ‘And I was maybe thinking bronze would already have been great for me, not gold. Every time I think back to that day I get emotional. It was a dream come true.’
To understand Balsamo’s reaction to her win in Leuven, it helps to know about the heartbreak that preceded it.
She had gone all-out for the track events at the Tokyo Olympics, where she was a favourite for the omnium and Italy looked good for the pursuit podium.
It was a disaster: two crashes took her out of contention in the individual event, while the squadra azzurra only managed sixth.
She got back home and didn’t want to even look at her bike. But Balsamo is stubborn. She refocussed and knuckled down with help from her nutritionist, coach and boyfriend.
When it came to the Road Race Worlds in September, less than two months after the Olympics, she wasn’t one of the favourites. Although often in the top five, she had only won one minor road race in 2021, the GP Oetingen in Belgium.
Yet her strong Italian team believed in her and rode unreservedly for her, before she put on the after-burners in the final 200m to beat Vos and Poland’s Kasia Niewiadoma.
Her life has transformed since then. The shy sprinter has done more interviews in the last 12 months than her entire career combined.
On training rides around her home city of Cuneo in northwest Italy, amateur cyclists ask her for selfies and wish her well; drivers even stop for a photo. She doesn’t mind.
‘It’s so special. Perhaps you only win once in your life, so you’ve got to seize the moment.’
Despite all the demands and invitations afforded by her new status, like every good student Balsamo put the work in over the winter ahead of this season.
She wanted to make a good impression at her new team, Trek-Segafredo. At the very first race, the Setmana Valenciana, she won the opening stage. So much for that old wives’ tale of the curse of the rainbow jersey.
‘It wasn’t easy,’ she says of the pressure she felt wearing one of cycling’s most iconic and recognisable garments. ‘But my teammates believed in me right away and gave me a lot of calmness.
‘We worked well together from the off. Maybe the most important thing was finding that good environment immediately.’
Her friend Elisa Longo Borghini, who encouraged her to join the team from smaller Italian squad Valcar, helped her to fit in.
It doesn’t hurt having the Paris-Roubaix winner in the leadout train, alongside Hour record holder Ellen van Dijk – that’s some engine room.
Appropriately for someone with the Italian words for ‘push’ and ‘go on’ stuck on her cockpit, rather than burdening her with expectation the rainbow jersey has moved Balsamo forward. The proof is her regular victories this season.
‘I believe in myself and my abilities more, even if I’m always still a bit insecure. It has certainly helped,’ she says.
All in the mind
Bike races aren’t just won with power, teamwork and timing – it comes down to brains too. Balsamo has worked closely with psychologist Elisabetta Borgia, who also joined Trek-Segafredo last winter.
‘I think it’s very important because, in my opinion, she helps us a lot to learn and express our views in a constructive way without arguing,’ Balsamo says.
‘That matters when we talk after the race to see what we can improve or what could have gone better.’
That extra five per cent, says Balsamo, can come from the mind: ‘Maybe more. When you’re not 100 per cent physically, you try to be at your best mentally.
‘I learned that it’s important that once you’ve set objectives, don’t look around but just focus on your own path.
‘My aims for the spring were from the Trofeo Alfredo Binda to the Tour of Flanders and even if before that I maybe wasn’t at my best, I realised I don’t need to worry too much, just be ready for the goals,’ she adds.
Some other bunch sprinters can be individuals with big egos and mood swings. The quiet, unassuming Balsamo is cut from a different cloth, although she’s not too nice for the cut-and-thrust of competition.
‘I get into a different mode in races – I transform a bit,’ she says. ‘But I think that’s normal. Respect is fundamental, but when you have a number on your back you become more competitive.’
The respect she has won is clear from the reactions of her peers, notably the way her Italian teammates joyously sung the national anthem at the foot of the podium after she won her junior and elite world road titles in 2016 and 2021, Balsamo smiling awkwardly as they belted it out off-key.
Or how the lead-out train members regularly mirror her victory celebration pose as they cross the line, seconds after her. When she smiles or wins, everyone around her smiles back and wins too.
Room to grow
At 24 years old, Balsamo is rising, but isn’t quite at the very top. Ask her who the fastest sprinter is in the world and she smiles.
‘Lorena Wiebes. We’re slightly different athletes. I’m someone who can hang on in races that are a bit tougher, but we come up against each other often and I like that. Perhaps one day she wins, then the next it’s me.
‘That’s nice – and she’s very quick so when she beats me, I go, “Well, that’s OK.”’
There’s an undeniable duality between her and Team DSM’s Dutch rocket. When Balsamo won her very first race in Europe in March 2018, the Omloop van Borsele, Wiebes finished second. Regularly, the pair finish within metres of one another.
‘There’s about a year’s difference in age between us, so we’re practically the same there too. There will be good battles between us for a fair few years, I hope,’ Balsamo says.
Wiebes bosses the pure sprints, Balsamo is more well-rounded. She has a predilection for Belgium, enjoying the mix of tension and adrenaline there – Flanders is where she won the rainbow jersey, after all.
‘Between me and the cobbles there is a kind of love-hate,’ she says. ‘I can’t wait to race in Belgium but then, when I feel their hardness, I wonder in my heart: who made me do this?’
Balsamo spent the winter working on her Classics edge and short climbs. The fruits of her labours came in a wonderful week in March when she took three WorldTour wins: Trofeo Afredo Binda, Gent-Wevelgem and the Exterioo Classic Brugge-De Panne, where she edged out Wiebes.
‘I don’t even think we need to just concentrate on her sprinting,’ says Ina-Yoko Teutenberg, the Trek-Segafredo directeur sportif who plies Balsamo with plenty of advice.
‘There’s a lot more to Elisa than that. She wins races like Binda, she gets over climbs and all that – that’s not really a sprinter’s race. She’s a really complete rider. And she’s still so young, she will evolve.’
Woman of many talents
It could all have been very different. In her first bike race at the age of six, Balsamo crashed. Her parents decided it would be better for her to look at other sports, so she tried her hand at skiing, biathlon and swimming.
An only child, Balsamo grew up in the Lombardy city of Cuneo. It is the last sizeable place of note before the road rises in earnest towards the Alps and the Franco-Italian border.
‘The only thing is it’s cold in winter and snows often. That’s also why I skied during winter,’ she says – the pistes were a stone’s throw from her house.
She had other options too, studying piano for eight years. Frédéric Chopin was her favourite composer. There are a lot of parallels with cycling: the hours of required training, the frustration, the sacrifice.
‘I had to stop because there wasn’t enough time, but I often listen to music still now. It’s relaxing,’ Balsamo says.
She would come back to cycling, staying upright this time, and started winning regularly as a teenager. Victory at the junior Road Race World Championships in Qatar in 2016 was an early sign of her sprint prowess and the result that made her realise that cycling could be her whole career.
However, leaping from the age-category ranks to the professional game is like trying to jump the Grand Canyon on a tricycle.
Balsamo still remembers her first race with the seniors: the 2017 GP Samyn, deep in Flanders, days after her 19th birthday. It rained. The cobblestones were muddy and slippery. She crashed, abandoned and must have wondered what on earth she was doing there.
‘It was a bit traumatic,’ she says. ‘In fact I don’t want to go to back to that race because I’ve got a few bad memories that stick.’
Balsamo praises her former team, Valcar Travel & Service, for helping her to slowly develop and bridge the gap. This cheap and cheerful operation, run on a shoestring, brings through much of the best Italian talent.
Amstel Gold Race winner Marta Cavalli of FDJ-Suez-Futuroscope and fellow Giro stage winner Chiara Consonni have also come through its ranks.
‘It’s more a group of friends, a second family,’ Balsamo says. ‘From the directeur sportif, Davide Arzeni, to the president, Valentino Villa, they work so hard with so much passion, taking these young riders and giving them experience in the biggest races.’
She would get her own opportunities for results at times and lead out Consonni at others. The women in purple pulled off occasional upsets against far richer squads, even if they were sometimes looked down upon.
‘At first, we were respected a bit less but then they saw we were strong and rode correctly, and we earned that respect,’ she says.
Valcar is a finishing school, and by the end of 2021, with her regularly sprinting to top-five finishes in WorldTour races, Balsamo was clearly ready to graduate. By the time she won the World Championships in September, she had already signed for Trek-Segafredo.
Her favourite win from her five formative years at Valcar was the very last one at the 2021 Women’s Tour in the UK.
The unglamorous Suffolk port of Felixstowe has an unexpected place in her heart: she won there in the rainbow bands before shipping out to Trek-Segafredo.
‘It was the conclusion of a journey together. It was beautiful to finish that way,’ she says.
The future is unwritten
Fittingly for someone with the words ‘#UnicornPower’ written on her Trek bike, Balsamo is rather like cycling’s equivalent of the mythical creature – a one-off, incomparable, riding her way to being one of the sport’s versatile champions while doing dazzling things off the bike too.
‘I think it’s important to live in the present and move on without looking behind too much,’ she says of her philosophy for life. Her rainbow jersey win isn’t nearly as surprising as it appeared at the time.
It was a linear consequence when you look at what came before and especially how she has backed it up since.
The Worlds is not enough for Balsamo – it’s just a stepping stone in her career to races such as Amstel Gold and the Tour of Flanders.
There are a lot more chapters to be written for Balsamo, whether that’s on deconstructing complex Latin or dropping rivals on the way to more triumphs.
Fast forward
A sprint through the cycling career of Elisa Balsamo
1998: Born 27th February in Cuneo, Italy
2016: Wins the Junior Road World Championships in Qatar
2017: Turns pro with Valcar-BPM
2019: Takes her first WorldTour win with a stage of the Tour of California
2020: In a Covid-interrupted season, claims European U23 road race title and a stage of the Ceratizit Challenge by La Vuelta
2021: Offsets Olympic omnium heartbreak with the Road Race World Championship title and wins the final stage of the Women’s Tour before joining Trek-Segafredo
2022: Wins at Trofeo Alfredo Binda, Exterioo Classic Brugge-De Panne, Gent-Wevelgem, the Italian National Championships and two stages at the Giro Donne
Elisa Balsamo on…
The Elisa problem
‘Elisa Longo Borghini and I are both on Trek-Segafredo and at first we wondered how we could tell the difference, because it could get confusing over the radio in a race.
‘So we call me by my nickname, Barzi, and the other Elisa is just Elisa. Easily sorted.’
Speaking English
‘I’m really trying to improve mine. My teammates speak it a lot and there are no issues understanding. Sometimes I mess up but they get what I mean all the same.’
Paris-Roubaix disqualification for a sticky bottle
‘We made an error and paid the price for it. I won’t do it again, that’s for sure.
‘I cried a lot and it took a few days to get over it, but in the end good and bad things happen in sport and you have to move forward.’