How Sepp Kuss Became Pro Cycling’s Chillest Champion

Sepp Kuss appears at the door wearing a pair of fuzzy slippers and a warm grin. “Did you find the place OK?” he asks, leading me inside. “How was your drive down?”

The smell of freshly brewed coffee fills the hallway as we walk past paintings of wooded mountains and snowy landscapes. It’s as if we’ve entered a ski chalet in this tucked-away neighborhood of Durango, Colorado, and not the home of Kuss’s parents, Sabina and Dolph. But they’re here, too, lounging in comfy chairs, waiting to watch their son be interviewed about an incredible feat of athleticism and willpower. His historic victory at the 2023 Vuelta a España last September, when Sepp became just the fourth U.S. rider to officially win one of cycling’s three-week grand tours, is what we’re set to discuss. I’ve driven six hours from Denver to Durango to talk about the Vuelta, and also to attend a festival and parade in Sepp’s honor. But right now the Kuss family just want to know if I’d like a cup of joe and maybe some breakfast.

“I tell you, we were not even low-level fans of cycling before all of this,” Dolph says. “We’ve had to learn everything.”

Were it not for his son’s big victory, I would gladly spend half my time interviewing Dolph. At 93, he’s a living connection to the primordial days of the American ski industry, and he’s partly responsible for transforming Durango into a mecca for outdoor sports. The list of his skiing accomplishments could fill its own story, so here are the CliffsNotes. He built nordic centers across Colorado and helped develop the local ski area, Purgatory Resort, in the mid-1960s. He coached the U.S. Nordic team at the 1964 and 1972 Olympics and taught multiple generations of skiers to love the sport.

But even Dolph, with his vast experience coaching hundreds of athletes, seems dumbfounded by his son’s achievement. “I used to think some of my cross-country racers were workhorses, but he puts them all to shame,” Dolph says. “I admire Sepp so much for his physical achievements, which I think are historic and, to be honest, mind-boggling.”

They are. In 2023, Sepp completed all three grand tours: the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, and the Vuelta—that’s 6,225 grueling miles of bike racing. Few cyclists ever tackle all three events in a season, and those who do are usually too exhausted to win anything. Sepp served as the key helper, or domestique, for Jumbo-Visma teammate Primoz Roglic when Roglic won the 2023 Giro in May. Then, in July, he shepherded another teammate, Jonas Vingegaard, to a second straight Tour de France win. And, finally, Sepp won the Vuelta in September.

“And he looked like he was having a lot of fun the whole time,” Sabina, 72, says. “Sepp wouldn’t do something like that if he wasn’t having fun.”

The conversation flows as Sabina and Dolph share memories. “I was still breastfeeding him when we’d go skiing,” Sabina says. “He was the easiest kid in the world to raise.” Six-year-old Sepp strummed a guitar and performed Elvis tunes. In middle school, he started his own small business importing bike parts and selling them on eBay.

Dolph smiles and Sabina looks moved. Soon the midmorning sun beams through the windows, and it’s time to get down to the serious stuff, to address the Vuelta and a bizarre drama. A bitter inter-squad rivalry at Jumbo-Visma nearly tore the team apart in the final few stages. Sepp found himself in a wholly unprecedented situation: a domestique leading the race and having to fend off his two team leaders, Roglic and Vingegaard. Media intrigue ratcheted up the pressure for one of the three to back down. Sepp refused. He fought on and chased after his teammates on the steepest mountains, and in doing so won the affection of cycling fans across the world.

“I still feel confident that if we went all-in, head-to-head, the three of us together, I would still win the Vuelta,” Sepp says. Was he the strongest rider? “Given all the components of the race, yes,” he answers.

There are different types of strength, of course, and perhaps Sepp did not have the most powerful legs. But he had the mental fortitude and interpersonal skills to navigate what was essentially a hostile workplace. He could have rolled over—most riders would have—but something compelled him to stand his ground against his higher-profile teammates. Where did this courage come from? I’m willing to bet that the answer can be found somewhere here in Durango.

During his Vuelta victory, Kuss grabbed almost as much attention for his easygoing attitude as for his success. After his first stage win, he grabbed the ceremonial magnum of champagne and gulped down mouthfuls of it, then added an exclamation point in the form of a massive belch. Throughout the race, he smiled, hugged his competitors and teammates, and seemed to bask in every moment of the event—even when controversy enveloped him.

The affection he showed for his competition wasn’t lost on riders from previous generations. Lance Armstrong caused a stir earlier this year when he poked fun at how the current crop of cyclists treat rivals. “These guys hammer each other, and some guy will lose,” Armstrong said in a podcast interview in March. “The guy who wins is waiting at the finish line—they’re fucking hugging it out!”

A fixation on toughness and independence permeated the sport for decades. I frequently encountered it when I was the editor of the cycling magazine VeloNews, and heard it invoked to explain why American cyclists repeatedly failed at Grand Tour racing in the years after Armstrong and his cohort left the sport.

In 2008 and 2009, I traveled to Belgium and the Netherlands to report on American attempts to discover the next Armstrong. Each year USA Cycling, bike racing’s governing body, would ship a handful of American youngsters to a tiny town in western Belgium called Izegem, where they competed in development races. The events were breakneck and hyper-aggressive, and the living conditions dreary. The program did produce some pros, but no American was able to topple the Europeans at grand tours.

Everyone I spoke to said that they knew why. It was the way Americans trained, or their diet. They were coddled and spoiled. Across Europe, cycling often attracts hard-nosed kids from the working classes, while in the U.S. cycling is a sport for the wealthy. Maybe the new generation were just too soft. According to this argument, Armstrong, Floyd Landis, and even three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond had all overcome painful personal trauma in their respective pasts, giving them preternatural abilities to out-suffer their rivals. LeMond had nearly died in a hunting accident, Armstrong grew up without a father figure, and Landis had endured a rigid Mennonite upbringing. No American kid from a normal middle-class background was gritty enough, the argument concluded.

Of course, this theory was eventually put to rest when Armstrong and Landis copped to doping, an admission that forced pro cycling to confront the rampant PED use that unfortunately defined competition in the nineties and aughts.

After my trips to Europe, I came away with my own answer to America’s shortcomings at grand tours, and it had little to do with toughness or trauma. I saw how thousands of Belgian and Dutch teenagers raced, and how their critical mass supported well-funded club teams, coaching academies, and dozens if not hundreds of junior races. Similar scenes existed across Europe. American youth cycling was comparatively tiny, and the kids who were drawn to it faced a litany of financial and social hurdles.

Brent Bookwalter, a Tour de France veteran who turned professional in 2005, recalls how American cyclists were perceived at home back then. “I was the weirdo in high school who stopped playing football so that I could race bikes,” he says.

And then something amazing happened: across the U.S., thousands of kids started racing bicycles. In 2009, a California cycling group for kids, the NorCal League, created NICA, the National Interscholastic Cycling Association, and began setting up competitive mountain-biking programs for high schoolers across the country. Americans still weren’t winning grand tours—the last to do so was Chris Horner at the 2013 Vuelta—but more were cycling. By 2019, NICA’s participation reached nearly 23,000 across 30 state leagues. And unlike European cycling leagues, NICA preached fun over winning.

Youth cycling organizations that were separate from NICA also formed. In Durango, one program began in 2006. Called Durango Devo, the group was founded by local cyclists Chad Cheeney and Sarah Tescher, who led kids on mountain biking excursions along the town’s famed trail system. The purpose of Durango Devo was to create a lifelong love of cycling, not to groom superstar athletes.

But kids and their parents loved it. As the group swelled, Cheeney, a former racer at Durango-based Fort Lewis College, saw an opportunity to organize structured competitions.

“I always loved the team aspect of sports, but I never saw bike teams practicing together,” Cheeney says. “We created the idea of this team season where there are weekly practices and one race a month, just like high school sports.”

Still, Cheeney stressed the importance of fun to his competitors, even as more kids joined the program. Today, hundreds of kids now wear the Durango Devo team jersey in Durango. The program’s ethos has stayed the same since 2006. Cycling is a glorious hobby, an excuse to race your buddies, and not a life-or-death endeavor. During Durango Devo’s inaugural season, Cheeney welcomed 12-year-old Sepp Kuss. He was skinny and lacked the speed of his peers, but he was an immediate hit with the team.

“Sepp was extremely goofy,” Cheeney says. “He was always joking around and scarfing down food in this braggadocious way.”

Kuss continued with Durango Devo through junior high and into high school. The program swelled, and some of the kids matured into national-level racers, including future Olympic mountain bikers Christopher Blevins and Howard Grotts. Kuss, meanwhile, seemed to enjoy his daylong training rides even more than racing. As he passed through puberty, his body strengthened and his natural talent became apparent. Eventually, Cheeney placed Kuss on the Sweet Elite squad—a team of top junior riders—and took him to the biggest races. At a 2012 event in Fruita, Colorado, 16-year-old Kuss jumped into the pro category and won.

“We had stayed up late the night before doing wheelies in the parking lot,” Cheeney says. “The next day he wakes up and drops everyone, and it’s like, Whoa—Sepp has a motor.”

As he matured into an aspiring pro, Kuss stood out for other reasons. Grotts, who’d graduated from the program and begun racing professionally, says that Kuss dealt with failure differently from his peers. “I never saw him get fazed,” Grotts says. “Not getting bogged down when things don’t work out—that’s a lot easier said than done in cycling.”

I first met Kuss in the winter of 2016, when he was the 22-year-old breakout star on the U.S. road-racing scene. He’d started racing just a year earlier, after winning three collegiate mountain biking national titles for the University of Colorado Boulder. Kuss began the 2016 season as an unknown, riding on an amateur team sponsored by a Harley-Davidson dealership. After winning the Oak Glen stage of the Redlands Bicycle Classic—one of the hardest climbs in North American racing—he signed his first professional contract with the Rally Pro Cycling team. Rally was the top squad in the domestic scene; its riders were regularly invited to the Amgen Tour of California and other international races.

I interviewed Kuss at Rally’s winter training camp in Colorado and marveled at how different he seemed from other pro road cyclists. Road racing rewards maniacal attention to diet and other training details, and it can also breed big egos and deep insecurities. Prickly attitudes abound, as do type A personalities and anxiety problems. But Kuss was utterly laid-back. He seemed to place no pressure on himself. To him bike racing appeared to be like a fun hobby, not a career path. By then others in the domestic cycling scene had noticed his unorthodox attitude, too.

“He was obviously super competitive, but it didn’t override his personality like it did with a lot of past American roadies,” says Marc Gullickson, the former mountain-biking coordinator for USA Cycling. “People loved him because he was so humble compared with the Armstrongs and Horners of the sport.”

Road cycling has a way of pummeling the joy out of budding pros with cutthroat gamesmanship and painful crashes, and I assumed Kuss would eventually lose his carefree spirit. But a year later VeloNews published a cover story on him, and I was able to spend more time in his presence. By then he’d earned a spot in pro cycling’s big leagues, the WorldTour, with Dutch squad LottoNL-Jumbo (which would eventually become Jumbo-Visma, now Visma–Lease a Bike). While Kuss was excited to earn a shot at the Tour de France, he admitted that donning a race jersey for a living still felt temporary.

“I was pretty indifferent about a career in cycling,” he says. “It wasn’t a do-or-die thing. If it didn’t work out, then it would just be one door of my life closing. I knew I’d still love riding my bike, even if a career doing it didn’t come to fruition.”

This was not an act. One of his roommates at the time, Charlie Howard, who lived with Kuss during and after college, told me that Kuss intentionally separated his lives as an athlete and a student. He studied hard, partied harder, and never bragged about his success. What’s more, the traditional cyclist diet didn’t apply. “Sepp and I were frequent visitors to the Taco Bell drive-through at 2 A.M.,” Howard says.

Kuss also had emotional maturity beyond his years. In Boulder, he lived with three guys in a small house, and at times the pressures of school and social life led to tension. The roommates turned to Kuss to arbitrate their quarrels because he didn’t seem to get angry.

“He never engaged with our drama,” Howard says. “He was the most composed person.”

Kuss left Boulder for Spain in 2018 and never looked back. In the ensuing years, he blossomed into one of the best climbers in the peloton and a valuable domestique for the Dutch team. In 2022, he married a Spanish cyclist named Noemi Ferré, and the two settled in Andorra. Those who know him best say that his grounded attitude toward life and cycling never changed.

“He finds ways to see the positive in all situations,” says Richard Plugge, the team manager for Visma–Lease a Bike. “He still appears to ride for fun.”

“I had met a lot of cyclists, and they were so cocky. Sepp was very humble,” Ferré told me. “Sepp could win the Tour ten times and he’d be the same person.”

When I asked Ferré about the origins of her husband’s levelheaded attitude, she pointed to Dolph and Sabina’s constant love and support. When I asked them, they mentioned Cheeney and Durango Devo. When I asked Cheeney, he presented several answers: Dolph’s sporting guidance, the group of kids Kuss raced with growing up, and Durango’s chill mountain-town vibes. “Whatever it is, he can be a fierce competitor one moment and then just turn it off,” Cheeney says.

At the highest level, professional cycling imposes a rigid caste system. A handful of star athletes gobble up most of the victories and earn upwards of $1 million a year. Most riders earn somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 annually and rarely get the opportunity to win.

Kuss blossomed into a position between the two—called super-domestique—an elevated title that gave him a leadership role at smaller races and a higher salary, but still left him squarely in the workhorse category for grand tours. He won stage 15 of the 2021 Tour de France—the first American victory at the race in a decade. But he downplayed his ambitions to compete for overall victory in three-week races.

Team leadership was even less likely for Kuss on the eve of the 2023 Vuelta a España. Jumbo-Visma had two of the best riders in the peloton: Roglic, a three-time Vuelta winner, and Vingegaard, the defending Tour de France champ. The only question was which man would prevail.

But the pecking order was upended on the sixth stage, which finished with a soaring climb in eastern Spain. Roglic and Vingegaard stayed in the peloton and shadowed the defending champion, Remco Evenepoel. Up ahead, Kuss attacked from the peloton and joined a 41-member breakaway, which pulled out a massive four-minute advantage on the mass of riders. Then Kuss pulled free on the final climb and won the stage, crossing the line 2:52 ahead of Vingegaard and Roglic.

Two days later, when Roglic won the stage, Kuss took over the red leader’s jersey with a 2:38 overall advantage. I assumed that he would lose the jersey during the stage ten individual time trial—an event he had struggled in. But he powered along the 16-mile course and lost less than a minute to Roglic and 11 seconds to Vingegaard.

“In most races I never had to push myself to the limit in a time trial,” Kuss says. “Being in the red jersey, there was no other option than to go to my limit physically and mentally, because for the first time in my career there was something to lose.”

Over the next week, the race tightened as Kuss, Vingegaard, and Roglic stepped into the first, second, and third positions overall. Behind them, the nearest competitor, Juan Ayuso of UAE Team Emirates, was more than a minute down. Three teammates dominating the podium at a grand tour was unprecedented in pro cycling’s 100-year history—and it caused problems.

“There was no textbook that we could open and say, ‘Oh, here’s how they did this in the past,’” Plugge told me. “We had to figure it out ourselves.”

On the race’s final rest day, the team met to discuss strategy. Riders and directors presented two options: they could ride in defense of Kuss, or let the three battle for the win. After a discussion, the team agreed that it was every rider for himself. “Of course I would rather have had the support of everyone from the get-go,” Kuss says. “I was also open to letting everyone do their race. You don’t want to win a grand tour and wonder if I raced with an advantage.”

The strategy created immediate tension. The next day, Vingegaard accelerated out of the peloton with two miles remaining and won the stage. Behind, Roglic bolted away from Kuss, who had to work with riders on other teams to catch up. His lead over Vingegaard shrank to just 29 seconds. It became obvious that the three Jumbo riders were tearing each other apart.

Pro cycling has a long history of inter-squad rivalries, and Kuss’s situation unearthed memories of LeMond’s bitter fight with Bernard Hinault at the 1986 Tour, Armstrong’s tensions with teammate Alberto Contador in 2009, and even the strained relationship between Chris Froome and his Team Sky leader, Bradley Wiggins, at the 2012 Tour. In all those situations, cameras caught the icy and sometimes hostile body language between the teammates. But any comparisons dissolved at the Vuelta when Kuss, after crossing the line on stage 16, rolled up to Vingegaard and gave him a big, sweaty hug. Kuss then praised him in the postrace press conference.

The rivalry peaked the next day, when stage 17 finished with a climb up the Alto de Angliru, a barren, shark-fin-shaped peak in northwestern Spain. As the peloton chugged to the summit, riders dropped from the front group until only the trio remained. Then Roglic attacked Kuss on the steepest ramp and opened a sizable gap. Vingegaard also left Kuss behind and rode up to Roglic. Together the two riders pedaled away, leaving Kuss alone in the fog. Eventually, he was joined by Spanish rider Mikel Landa of team Bahrain Victorious, placing him in an uncomfortable position—if he chased, he might drag Landa back to his teammates and jeopardize the stage win. But if he continued riding at Landa’s pace, he’d lose the red jersey to Vingegaard.

“I was like, This is ridiculous,” Kuss says. “My two teammates are ahead, and I’m behind this guy who’s our rival. My mind was still stuck in the role of a teammate—I’m not going to pull Landa closer to Jonas and Primoz. But my teammates are riding away from me.”

Roglic won the stage with Vingegaard on his wheel, and then the clock started ticking. The first three finishers received time bonuses of ten, six, and four seconds. Nineteen seconds later, Kuss rolled across the line in third place to grab the extra time. “If I had played it differently, I feel like I could have stayed with them,” Kuss says.

Whatever disappointment Kuss felt evaporated—maybe it was never there. As the cameras rolled, he pedaled to his teammates, embraced Roglic, then hugged Vingegaard. He grinned and laughed as he high-fived everyone. The race jury tabulated the time and added the bonuses: Kuss had retained the red jersey by all of eight seconds.

The dramatic finish, plus Kuss’s positive attitude, led to an immediate reaction from fans and media. On the NBC Sports broadcast, the commentators called Roglic and Vingegaard “cold-blooded killers.” Broadcaster Sean Kelly, winner of the 1988 Vuelta, blasted the two for being selfish during his analysis on the Global Cycling Network. “When you see Sepp Kuss, the way he’s been so loyal to those two riders over many years, winning big races for them, they didn’t show anything there, they just kept going,” he said.

On X, the hashtag #GCKuss began trending, and many messages were not kind to Vingegaard or Roglic. Angry replies mounted on the team’s social media handles after news of the result spread.

Jumbo-Visma management called a meeting that night. The next day was the final mountain stage of the Vuelta—the last opportunity for Roglic or Vingegaard to try and dethrone Kuss. The details of the discussion remain confidential, but Plugge told me that riders and managers agreed that the inter-squad battle had gone too far. “This was not us,” he said. “The Angliru result was not our culture.” After the meeting, the team decided to ride in support of Kuss for the final mountain stage. Four days later, he secured the overall win.

A month after the race, Merijn Zeeman, one of the team’s directors, spoke to the Dutch cycling podcast WielerFlits and admitted that one rider pushed back on the decision in the team meeting. “Seven riders unanimously agreed. Primoz Roglic had a more difficult time with this, but he conformed to the group,” Zeeman said. Roglic would leave Jumbo-Visma after the season. “I think it’s better for everybody that he’s on a different team,” Kuss told the Global Cycling Network after the news came out.

Roglic’s departure should create more opportunities for Kuss to win, and in July he’ll head back to the Tour de France to support Vingegaard before defending his Vuelta victory in September. Whether Kuss has the sole leadership role for this Vuelta or will colead with Vingegaard is a storyline that won’t become apparent until after the Tour.

Back in Durango, I cradle my empty coffee cup and watch the Kuss family recount the last days of the Vuelta. Sabina had flown from Italy to Spain to watch the race’s final three stages. Sepp replays the battle on the Angliru, using his hands to illustrate the tactical moves. I can’t help but wonder: What would have happened if he’d lambasted Roglic on television or berated management that evening? Would Sepp’s teammates have supported him in that fateful meeting if he was just another aggressive type A cyclist? After some prodding, Sepp admits that after each stage, late at night, he would allow himself to get disappointed, maybe even angry. But only for a moment or two. “Mostly I felt it was better to keep it to myself and with my wife—I didn’t want to make it a bigger issue than it was,” he says.

Dolph, watching his champion son, beams in approval. “We were so proud of him that he reacted that way.”