Hey there. Welcome back to King of the Ride podcast. This is, it is unbound race week and I'm zipping

through back to back to back podcast edition. Welcome to episode 132. So maybe my memory is short,

but but so many times I will come off of a recording from a podcast

and think, man, that was fun. This conversation, this was fun. This was a blast. I was able to catch

up with my friend and former teammate from 10 long years ago, Mate Mahorich. Now, I love talking to Mate for lots of reasons.

When we were teammates, I was mesmerized by this 19-year-old kid, who at that point was already

a two-time world champion at an age that I hadn't even begun racing a bike.

I loved talking to him.

Then he presented this freshness, a view on cycling and performance that,

frankly, most people then found ahead of its time. He invented the peddling aerotuck,

for goodness sake, something we're going to talk about today. As a 19-year-old Neo-Pro kid,

for all intents and purposes, he was already supremely wise. Self-taught in training

methods, the benefits of aerodynamics, which is something we obsess about in today's modern

age of cycling with tall aerosocks and never even the thought of something fluttering in the breeze.

But 10 years ago, we had billowing jerseys and weren't worried about aerodynamics. We were

chomping down what we thought was a lot at maybe 50 grams of carbs per hour. If we were lucky,

such a contrast to the way things are now. So this professionalism, this progress over the years

has come, of course, to gravel, speaking of which, among the other Palmaris on Mate's list of

winnings, which includes stages of the Giro and the Vuelta and three stages of the Tour de France,

is taking the victory in the UCI Gravel World Championships last fall in Italy.

Ladies and gentlemen, the world champion, Matae Mhorich. So, so this just dawned on me

recently. I was the first guy to come to gravel from the world tour. I did the race that we now

...