When Lenny Martinez was asked over the winter what advice he’d give compatriot Paul Seixas about how to handle a sharply increasing weight of expectations this year – and now in the Tour de France – he barely had to think twice.

“I’d tell him not to listen too much or too hard to what the outside world is saying,” the Bahrain Victorious racer said. “Never go on social media and start reading what the people are saying; think about yourself and what you like as a racer; don’t get hung up about things.

“If you can win – great; if not, then, so be it. And finally, don’t get pulled in too many different directions at the same time.”

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That Martinez knows what he is talking about is obvious: just a few years ago, he was being held up by home fans as France’s next big hope to re-conquer the Tour and put the host nation back at the top of the cycling world.

Now that unofficial role, and all the stress that goes with it, is centering much more on Seixas. However, no matter who the star that gets put on a pedestal, the issues that lie beneath it about managing expectations remain the same. And as top riders get younger and younger, it becomes increasingly important to ensure they have the right strategies and the right protection from their teams to shield them from excessive pressure.

Asked what his favourite tactic is to avoid getting overwhelmed, Martinez says, “Motivation is my biggest resource. If I’m motivated and the team has lots of faith in me, whatever happens, that helps me to do better.

“They tell me to do the best I can, and if I don’t get the win, then that’s just how it is. Then if I do win, then so much the better.”

Given Martinez is only 22 and set for the Tour de France for a third time this year, he recognises his squad offers him a lot of critical support in handling those expectations. And so, too, does teammate Antonio Tiberi, another key young hopeful who will carry a lot of Italy’s expectations on his shoulders this July.

“The thing I need the most from a team is tranquillity. If they transmit calm, if they show they believe in you, that’s the most important thing, because then when you have that mental stability as your base, you perform much better,” Tiberi tells Cyclingnews.

“When your work is valued, and the technical support is there as well, it automatically allows you to boost your performance level. It makes you think as clearly and as well as possible. It helps the team stay calm as well.

“So the team has to give you a lot, but you have to remember to give back something to them as well. It’s always 50-50.”

A two-way street between rider and team

If handling that two-way street of communication and mutual confidence-building between team and rider is increasingly important, that’s where a staff member like Bahrain Victorious performance manager Rod Ellingworth can be key. And having taken on similar responsibilities at Ineos, Sky and British Cycling beforehand, Ellingworth recognises that keeping the younger riders like Martinez and Tiberi free from excessive expectations and pressure currently forms a critical part of his job.

“For one thing, I don’t allow any outside influence to affect me at all,” Ellingworth says when asked to explain how he walks the fine line between keeping the pressure at bay, but not getting the riders to sleep on their laurels, either. (He too – and it’s surely no coincidence – is a keen believer of Martinez’s recommendation of not following social media at all.)

“All I’m interested in is encouraging the team around me, the staff, coaches and sports directors to do their absolute best to support the bike riders, so that’s one part of the job. Are we doing our best with what we’ve got? Do we wake up every day and do our best? Yes or no?

“Then the other side of the job is to get the riders into a position where they understand what’s expected of them, so they understand what it’s going to take, they understand the gaps that they have now to where they want to be.

“After that, then it’s about the negotiation of ‘What’s it going to take you? What’s going to stop you from being able to achieve that goal?’”

Originally brought in by Bahrain to work most closely with Martinez, who feels he has benefited from their relationship – “He sees lots of things I don’t,” Martinez says – Ellingworth took on a much broader role at the team at the end of 2025 to handle a lot more of the performance side. Since then, he’s been heavily involved in the process of establishing clear expectations without overstating them.

In the case of Bahrain, that began back at the first training camp for 2026, when the entire squad spent what Ellingworth calls “a massive session” regarding the country’s reasons for sponsoring the team.

“When you look at what the sponsors value, it’s things like the WorldTour rankings so you can’t ignore that, either, and it helps guide us a little bit on what the expectations will be and how to tackle the season,” Ellingworth says.

Then it comes to the biggest target of them all, the Tour de France. Ellingworth says that with someone like Tiberi or Martinez, part of handling the pressure in July is not even in the race: riders will manage it better if they have gone for other goals beforehand. And that strategy helps keep the team on their toes as well.

“It’s not like, we’re just gonna aim for the Tour de France, and that’s it, and you get there, you crash, and you have nothing for the season,” he explains.

“No, it’s like from day one, come on, bang, let’s go. Let’s get racing. At the end of the day, we’re a bike racing team, nothing else. More than numbers or the training, we’re a bike racing team, and that’s what we’ve got to do.”

‘A lot of people do the talk, but it’s about the action you take’

Yet if Ellingworth is working on both keeping pressure at bay and helping riders achieve their goals, it might surprise some to hear that an important component of his management of those processes is by not being lax about discipline, either.

It’s true that Ellingworth was also once famous back in the 2000s when he was running the British Cycling Academy for overseeing its notoriously tough ‘boot camps’ for young riders barely in their twenties. But whilst not intended to heighten the pressure, as Ellingworth explains, both now and back then, “The riders also set their own consequences. They signed up for it. They knew exactly what it was about.”

Woe betide anybody turning up late for training rides, then, which has exactly the same consequences at Bahrain as it did back at the Academy training camp. The team, having warned the riders, will leave without whoever fails to be punctual.

“There’s no bullshit in that, is there?” Ellingworth replies rhetorically when Cyclingnews asks whether he still stands by the same principles as back in the early noughties, in general, and that rule in particular.

“It’s more about just setting expectations. I’ve been talking a lot about that with the riders, and I’ve been telling them – have some high standards for yourself. Set some rules and then let’s just go for it, because if we’re talking, a lot of people do the talk, but it’s about the action you take.”

Back at the Academy, Ellingworth says, “They were a group of young men you’d got to whip into shape a little bit. There’s got to be some discipline within it.

“Here they’re a little bit older, but there are still rules, and they’ll still abide by the Bahrain Victorious way of doing things.”

He gives a couple of examples where he pulled riders aside during a training ride and said: “Come on, tell me why you’re doing that, I don’t agree with it.” One during what was supposedly a 15-minute all-out effort: “One rider comes past me, and he’s got his phone out.”

“I mean, they’re all capable of doing an effort and looking at something on their Garmin, but this guy had his phone out. Well, he explained to me what had happened, and I go ‘Yeah, I get it’. But I said I wanted to know and I brought him up.

“I didn’t just sit and bypass it and think ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter’. It does fucking matter. Because it’s about applying yourself, and also – all these lads on their phones, all the time. It’s like, no. Have a standard.”

Yet it is always a two-way street for Ellingworth, to the point where he handed out an anonymous questionnaire this winter to the team’s riders. “Because I want them to know what the direction is, and I want them to be part of the decision going forward. I want them to feel happy and comfortable enough to give me that honest feedback.”

This year’s Tour de France

On a specific level with Martinez, Ellingworth says, the raw material he had already shown huge potential. The Frenchman joined the squad at the beginning of 2025; he impressed with his level of progression, particularly how the young Frenchman won races in three different ways. That versatility “showed that he’s a real winner, and he’s got that killer instinct.” But Ellingworth was also impressed by Martinez’s willingness to move into a completely new kind of team.

“We were really happy with how he integrated. If you think that he’s been with French teams his whole career before that, then he had the guts to come out of that and go into a very international team where of our 28 riders, we’ve got 16 different nationalities. And in 119 staff, there’s 26 nationalities too. I don’t know if there’s a more international team,” he says.

“For me year one was just about getting wins on the board as early as you can, but understanding the team as well. Yet also [before Bahrain] he said he’s never had anybody talking to him about performance planning, all the ‘how do you get the best out of yourself, how do you take the team with you’ and so on.

“Slowly but surely he’s getting it, but it takes time, doesn’t it? And progression is just taking all that to another level.”

So Martinez has shone in a lot of levels in 2026, yet while Ellingworth says he’s hoping for a stage in the Tour de France this year, to call last year’s Tour performance erratic would be no understatement. Dead last on stage 1 into Lille, Martinez slowly turned things around in the days and weeks to come, and that, Ellingworth says, is what makes him optimistic about the young racer for 2026.

“The first stage of the Tour, he was in pieces. He was just not on it, and it was not physical, purely a young man sort of trying to find his way through life a little bit. Looking at him, a French rider going into the Tour, there were five or six things you’d put together and go ‘OK, there you go, you understand why. So God, yeah, he took a hiding at the Tour the first few days, but it just shows you his strength.

“OK, we didn’t win a stage. But he bounced back in some areas; he made mistakes in others. I said to him, ‘You can’t fail here, maybe it looks like you’re failing to the public, but in terms of your experience, it’s invaluable, isn’t it?’ I think it’s his time in his career where he’s learning about who he is, what he can do.”

When it comes to Tiberi, already much better established in the GC targets and with a hugely impressive win and spell in the lead at the UAE Tour this spring, Ellingworth is equally sure of his possibilities in his Tour debut this summer.

“For now, Antonio, it’s up to him. He’s got the potential, it’s all there. He finished fifth in the Giro, so he knows how to survive the three weeks. We’re all here to support him, and it’s up to him to now really commit to this and show that it’s not just potential, there’s actually something in there. And I think he’s capable of that,” Eliingworth says.

“I had a tough year, a special one, in 2025, lots of highs and lows, and I didn’t have the feeling I had in previous years,” Tiberi says.

“There were some good moments like in Tirreno and the Tour de Pologne, but then in the big objectives of the Giro, where I crashed, and the Vuelta, where I was sick, I couldn’t perform as I wanted to.

“Fortunately, I learned to handle this to take things as calmly as possible, try to be up there as much as I could and not make too many mistakes. So that was what gave me more courage and determination to look at 2026 with more willpower.”

If it sounds as if Tiberi is more sure of himself, he, like Martinez, warns against the dangers of listening too much to over-expectations, but in this case, Tiberi warns against the riders themselves getting too ambitious, too soon and putting themselves under too much pressure.

“It’s not easy. You need to be a bit diplomatic and sometimes you are scared to express yourself too much, then you could get criticised or attacked, about what the objectives are, and sometimes for not getting them. Of course you want to do the best work possible, but obviously, we’re all human, too; we can have problems,” he says.

“We’re doing a sport where you have to be at 100% to get your objectives, so it’s normal that thousands of things can affect you. A normal person gets a cold, for example, and that’s it, but in our case it affects your oxygen intake. So even if it’s just five per cent, that five per cent is what, in battles like ours, can make all the difference.”

As for the rider with a key position in Bahrain’s Tour hopes and coming back to the pressure he and Seixas now feel in France, Martinez says simply “I do what I can.” But he also points out that he has faced an ever-rising tide of expectations.

“People always want more and more. But if you do achieve more, then people always act surprised and say ‘What could he do on top of that?’ Anyway, I know I have to concentrate on myself and not look at others.

“I learn more from victories, because you gain in confidence. When I took a stage win like in Paris-Nice last year, for example, then I knew I could do more. Each time you win something, you realise it’s something more you can do.”

And be it Paris-Nice or the Tour de France, that’s as true in one race as it is in any other.

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