Six weeks or so had passed since the 2023 Tour de France when Jai Hindley sank into a chair in a hotel lobby in Québec. The dark circles beneath his eyes were only partially explained by the leap in time zones on the long flight from Europe the previous day. By early September, a rider whose entire year had been built around the Tour was already likely to be wandering around with a thousand-yard stare. It comes with the territory.
“I was pretty banged up and bruised, and pretty done physically and mentally, let’s say, after the Tour,” Hindley admitted. “I was pretty cooked.”
