Anthony Turgis: Running & Freedom

He had this movement to grasp the table between the thumb and the index. “Here, I touch wood.” However, Anthony Turgis is not particularly superstitious. Unlike other cyclists in the professional peloton, French has no pre-couring rituals. Neither favorite music (he listens to everything) nor a sign of protection, even less Talisman. He even has fun with pretenses: “Sometimes you have a teammate who says to you:” You put this pair of glasses, it’s that you are preparing something! ” You give them the head [il mime, l’air mystérieux] : “Yes, yes, I prepare something.” But actually not at all!The 31 -year -old runner, who is about to put on Saturday the first bib of his eighth Tour de France, is a rational man. But when it comes to talking about her heart, Anthony Turgis touches wood.

His two brothers developed a right -wing dysplasia of the right ventricle, a potentially cause of sudden death, while they were also professional cyclists. It was first the Benjamin, Tanguy, whose heart was excited in 2018, while he was playing a semi-classic in Belgium. “I was on the place of the race, it started really strong, recalls Anthony Turgis. As my uncles too have it, my parents quickly knew what it could be. It’s genetic. ” The exams ended up showing the same thing for Jimmy, the elder. With a similar consequence: end of sports career. “What happened to my brothers is hard.” He marks a break. “”Much harder than a bicycle race, because these are things you feel but you don’t control. ”

We know something about it. Four years ago, our hearts also caught up with us, when we came back from Liberty by bike. The metronome was packed suddenly, from the Andante to the Prestissimo before we fall unconscious on the ground. Transport in the hospital, hereditary cardiac malformation – an aortic bicuspidia, for cardiologists who read us -, operation, all the tremor. Not nothing, but everything is better. After an hour of conversation, we explain to Anthony Turgis that that’s also why we wanted to meet him. And not simply because it is one of the best runners of French classics of its generation. It welcomes information with the phlegmatic smile of the one who knows: it can happen to everyone.

Anthony passes between the drops, still keeping an umbrella at hand. Every six months, it submits to an effort test and once a year, it is harnessed with a holter to verify that the thrilling remains reglo. “As I am a high -level sportsman, I am controlled more regularly than someone else. That you for example. It’s reassuring. For the moment I have all the green lights so I take advantage until I am told something. ” He says it all with calm. “Anthony is the composure, Summarizes Jean-René Bernaudeau, the general manager of his Total Energies team. His victory on the Tour last year explains everything he is. ” On July 7, 2024, Turgis went to seek his best success in Troyes, at the end of a stage run in part on white earth roads, knowing how to hold his pedal strokes in the final, not to follow the slightest attack to better settle the exhausted in the sprint. He ran with his head. But also “With a brother in each leg”as he dropped it after the line.

The front page of The team The next day is supervised in the living room of its large house of Yvelines, where the city fades for the countryside, not far from where it grew up. First of all in the suburbs, between Bourg-la-Reine and Cachan, then in Essonne, on the side of Linas. His mother, secretary, and his father, retired RATP mechanic, are still there. Anthony Turgis is above all a child in the cycle. Raising your family tree is telling the atavism of a whole sport. Rémy, the father, directs the cycling team Linas-Montlhéry and is a tireless racing organizer, known throughout the amateur environment. He does not hold it out of nowhere: his own father was a cyclist while his mother directed the Igny-Bièvres cyclo-club. Same topo on the side of Anthony’s mother, Valérie. She was born Croquison, another large family of Ile -de -France cyclists, and put on the throbbing in her young years. Like his brothers. And like his mother and his father before them. “The family is very important to me. And given my family, I couldn’t escape the bicycle ”sums up Anthony Turgis. From the heart, diseases are not the only hereditary. Passions too.

Anthony Turgis recounts weekends spent at cyclo-cross in the undergrowth of the region, Sunday meals transformed into vast debriefing sessions and, every month of July, the Tour de France. “We all had a favorite. My grandmother was Lance Armstrong Fully, I liked Jan Ullrichfor his Challenger side. “ The two were finally convinced of doping. Anthony Turgis is a member of the movement for credible cycling, whose name sums up the ambition, and highlights a “ethics” work. By trying to keep a pleasure dimension in mind. “Sometimes I drive to Chartres just to see the cathedral in the distance.” In his least intense outings, he offers his wife to accompany him. Because, of course, he is married to a white Legagneur-Turgis cyclist, herself from a long line. On a shelf, a black and white photo reminds that the grandfather, Alphonse Legagneur, was teammate of Jacques Anquetil under the colors of the Helyett Cycles brand and Leroux chicory.

Anthony Turgis runs for a petro -gas major – in any case it is the fossil fuels that bring the most money to his sponsor the most. It circumvolution: “I was at Direct Energie, it was bought by Total … Well, Total did well, but also less good things, like any big business. Afterwards, I’m here to play sports. ” We push the discussion: are there teams where he could not sign because of the identity of the sponsor? “Yes. I’m not going to quote them, but there are teams that are linked to certain things, I could not go … “ The professional peloton notably houses teams with the names of the Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Israel or Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan.

On the finance side, Turgis also remains discreet but admits to being “Well paid”while considering being “has [s]we price “. He plans to move in a few months. For Andorra or Monaco, like the Cadors of the Paloton Pro? “No, in the vicinity of Rouen, where there is my in-laws. It is a life project. And there are also a little more marked bumps than in Ile-de-France… ” The bike is never far away.

May 16, 1994 Birth in Bourg-la-Reine (Hauts-de-Seine).

2018 Heart discomfort of his brother Tanguy during a race.

2019 Last professional race by his brother Jimmy.

2022 2nd place in Milan-San Remo.

2024 Wins the 9th stage of the Tour de France.