Paris-Chauny was the last race contested by Quentin Jaurégui as a professional, on Sunday September 25. When the entire professional cycling peloton on the planet went on vacation last weekend, it is ending its final season. The Breton B&B hotels team did not wish to extend its contract which ends on December 31. The opportunity for the runner who lives in Lens but grew up in Cambrésis to open the memory box. He will continue. He now wants to retrain in a field he knows well: sport. Notice to business leaders who would like to have a young retiree from the professional peloton in their workforce!
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What are your best memories?
I felt like I had covered what I had to do. Apart from the Tour de France, I will have done everything even if I am of course disappointed not to have done it because it is a bit of the holy grail. I am happy with my career.
“What I did, I did with my heart, my guts”.
I did not have a contract proposal which seemed suitable to me given my past but I am not disappointed. What I did, I did with my heart, with my guts. I tell myself that if it stops, it must have stopped. I was not in end-of-career condition, I still did great things this year. I’m not a team manager, I can’t choose for them. I still have great things to do in sport and I will try to please myself.
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Mourad Alili
My best memory will remain my 3rd place at the junior cyclo-cross world championships, in 2012, behind Mathieu Van Der Poel and Wout Van Aert, also Paris-Roubaix, which I competed in 3 times.
Do you understand the decision of your B&B Hotels team?
I don’t understand, I didn’t have any explanations but I still have good memories of these two years because I was cycling with friends and I still had some great races, I’m happy with these two years.
How do you judge cycling today?
That’s also what bothered me a bit and made me retire. In professional cycling, riders no longer control anything, we have a headset, we have to listen to the instructions from A to Z, we don’t do anything instinctively. And it’s a bit boring, you can’t decide anything when you want to attack. Sometimes, we have to help a guy who’s less well because he’s in the cards and I didn’t like it more and more.
“We know before the race what we have to do and we have an interest in doing it.”
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The training sessions are calculated, recalculated day by day, the runner’s instinct is almost no longer necessary. My best years were at Lille Roubaix Métropole and AG2R. Me, it’s not necessarily the bike that I want to do, I want to have fun and do what I want on a bike. There is no more panache today than before. There are a few riders who do it because they know they can, like Van Aert, Pogacar, Van der Poel and Evenepoel. Everything is dictated, we know before the race what we have to do and it is in our interest to do it.
Is there also relief given the pace of life of a professional cyclist?
It’s true that on this level, we are never at home, we leave 180 to 200 days a year. I’m going to discover a new life, I have my little girl (9 months) who’s going to be happy, my wife too, I’m going to enjoy it.