Martinez draws negative attention during the Tour, says Bahrain: "We’ll handle it internally"

Martinez finished 79th overall in Paris. “It's difficult to analyze his Tour in the heat of the moment, a few minutes after the last stage,” Kreuziger told DirectVelo. "Lenny did more or less what we expected of him; we saw him on the attack in several stages. He fought long and hard for the polka dot jersey, which was good. “We really wanted to see how far he could go in this classification, so we pushed him in the Alps to fight for it.”

Martinez made headlines after several extremely conspicuous sticky bottles in the eighteenth stage. He was penalized for this, but the criticism from the press and the public was particularly harsh, especially since he still managed to win the mountain sprint afterwards. Richard Plugge, among others, commented on the incident. Kreuziger sees it as a moment of learning. “He still made a lot of mistakes that we need to keep working on.”

The Bahrain sports director is not afraid to express his opinion to the press, but he seems to have learned a lesson. He does not want to throw Martinez under the bus and is keeping their plans for further progress private. “It's better if it stays within the team. We'll sort it out among ourselves and work on it. I think he can be satisfied overall. He didn't win a stage, but he tried, and that's good.”

The Czech is trying to take the positives from the Tour. Last year, his French rider finished 124th in the overall standings, so this time he made up 45 places. “It's the first time he's had momentum at the end of a Tour, which is very important for the future.” Martinez crossed the finish line in 11th place in the final mountain stage to La Plagne, which Thymen Arensman won.

When the camera was behind the peloton, there was a good chance that Martinez was in the picture. He struggled a lot, especially in the flat stages: in the first stage, he finished last, 3 minutes behind the last bus. He was also very erratic in the mountain stages: after an attack on the Col du Glandon, he collapsed in the 18th stage, finishing 149th, behind Jonathan Milan in the green jersey. “The plan was for him to play his cards right in certain stages and ride a little more calmly in others. That's not a problem for me. Some things aren't right, but his inconsistency isn't one of them,” counters Kreuziger.

Martinez was brought in as a potential winner of major tours in the future, but his sports director does not see that as realistic, and probably not for a long time. “We'll have to wait and see what happens with the rest of the team and what choices we make in the future. But I think Lenny still has a long way to go to win the big Grand Tours. For week-long races, he's good, yes, he's already proven that, but three weeks is something else entirely.”