It’s a discussion that starts when you leave the supermarket. Sebastien Gros leaves the premises with the bags well filled with minced meat, flank steak, onions, garlic cloves and aubergines…” We leave on a moussaka he blurts out enthusiastically. This Friday at the end of April, no Challenge Tour for him in the United Arab Emirates for lack of sufficient category to enter the field. The Rhodanian therefore took the opportunity to play the Win the Pro-Am organized the day before domain of Saint-Clair to maintain technique and, above all, to refine his double role as player and businessman.
The second function is pompous, but the work is actually warmer. Newly associated since the beginning of the year with the founder of winning tour, Stanislas Caturlato create the event structure Win events with Kevin Turlan as a third partner, Sébastien Gros works behind the scenes with them with a defined goal: “Let the pro-ams have an interest in the pros and amateurs again. » He specifies : “I get out of the races, so I am aware of inflation and the need to ensure minimum bonuses for players (currently at 300 euros per day for Win Pro-Am, editor’s note) while giving back an experience to amateurs that they have, for too long, accepted to no longer have. » If the ambition goes even beyond with a big project for 2024 whose content he keeps secret, he is already satisfied with the events accomplished. Proof of this is his participation as a player in the first two Win Tour of the year, which he concludes in first and second places – his best performance on this circuit since 2021. “As a friend told me, I should associate with the DP World Tour since it works well when I’m associated”he shares in a joking tone.
He and the European circuit have not seen each other for five years. After a meteoric rise in 2016 and results that brought him close to the Holy Grail of victory, he descended from it at the end of 2018 to, since then, evolve in the second division. A half-decade far from being the easiest of his career. During 2017, he separated from his then coach, Benoit Teillerwith whom the collaborator relationship had nevertheless turned into a four-year-old friendship. “I thought this was what I neededhe begins. He let me go because he wasn’t happy with the guy I was becoming: that is to say that the circuit was eating my mind because I was lacking in results. » His first year on the Challenge Tour was then in the hands of Franck Lorenzo Verawith whom he worked for almost two years. But like a sentimental regret, he returns in 2019 to his first love and reiterates his round trips between the Rhône and the Basque Country. “He first called the friend back before the coach”confides on his side the one who trains him again. In a period when he was not at the best of his game and his form, the Basque then advised him to travel, which the player applied by rushing to take a tour of the Polish roads for three weeks. A necessity at the time.
