YOUNG GUNS

From delayed Olympic dreams to lining up with Peter Sagan, Matt Walls’s last year on his way to the WorldTour has not been lacking in action

- Paul Knott

Lockdowns have been the unfortunate theme of 2020 and, so far, 2021, with stagnated training the norm for both the pros as well as us mere mortals looking for their group ride fix. For WorldTour neo-pro Matt Walls, taking part in group physical activity was less of a problem because his house-mates Ethan Hayter (Ineos Grenadiers) and Fred Wright (Bahrain- Victorious) form arguably the strongest household training bubble in the United Kingdom.

“I couldn’t exactly complain, because you could ride with your household so the three of us riding together was pretty cool,” Walls says.

“We moved in just before lockdown in March, just after the Worlds so it was good timing. We were all on the academy together, I lived with Fred in Manchester in the academy house for a year or two years and then I lived with Ethan when I was out in Italy with the academy. So we have all lived together at some point and all get on well so might as well get a house together.”

During the spring lockdown, these training days were common – Wright was pictured with an old race number fashioned into a sign reading “we live together” on his back. At that point Walls still had dreams of going to race on the track at the Olympics in August 2020, just a couple of months later he’d sign a contract with BoraHansgrohe as the German team’s road sprinting protege for 2021. But as summer rolled around and the Olympics were shifted to 2021, Walls’s track commitments and his housemates’ WorldTour schedules left him training alone once again. It wasn’t the ideal lead up to what is now a 2021 season pregnant with possibility but the amiable and upbeat Walls seems unfazed.