When Florian Lipowitz – one of cycling’s most exciting current general classification talents – first visited the offices of Bora-Hansgrohe in 2019 to meet team management, he immediately impressed. It wasn’t his numbers and data, though that invariably did impress, and nor was it his results as a rider, because up until that point, he had never ridden a competitive bike race. But instead, it was his approach and commitment to training. While everyone else would have driven to the team’s HQ on the German-Austrian border, Lipowitz, 18 at the time, turned up with his bike and cycling kit. “I went there by train, and because I still wanted to train, I rode 150km back home,” he reflects. “I started at 3pm but there was a super strong headwind the whole time and I didn’t arrive home until 9pm. My speed was never faster than 24kph – it was really horrible.”

An unpleasant late afternoon and evening, maybe, but teenager Lipowitz had wooed the team; staff still talk about that ride today. And recently they’re also talking about a lot more impressive rides: second on GC at Paris-Nice and fourth at the Itzulia Basque Country this season, as well as seventh on debut at last year’s Vuelta a España. As Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe begin to look to a post-Primož Roglič future and rumours link them with Remco Evenepoel, Juan Ayuso and others, perhaps their answer is the softly-spoken German whose professional sporting career could very well have involved two skis and a rifle instead of two wheels on a carbon frame.

“I started biathlon when I was seven or eight after my brother Philipp had first got into it because we had a biathlon arena quite close to our home,” Lipowitz, 24, tells Rouleur. He was raised in the Swabian Alps in south-west Germany. “But we didn’t have too much snow, so when I was 14 and my brother was 15, we went to boarding school in Austria.” Minor correction: they were enrolled in the ski academy, the Stams Ski High School in Tirol, Austria, which has produced more Olympic and world champions than anywhere else. The Lipowitz brothers were very good: Florian winning national event races and always figuring in the top 10, and Philipp becoming junior world champion in 2021. “We wanted to be pro and go to World Cups, and that was the place to be,” Florian, a year younger than Philipp, says. “Most people thought I would have a biathlon career.”

This article was published on Rouleur in June 2025. You can read the full article here.