What have Demi Vollering and Lenny Martinez got in common? One thing is they both told their teams they were leaving earlier this season and quickly felt a chill in the air when around their employers.
There’s a joke that goes “I got kidnapped. My parents snapped into action. They rented out my room“. Sometimes pro cycling shares this mercenary reaction.
One example is when a rider changes teams. They can shake hands in March to move squads for the following year. Only the moment their current team learns of this it can almost be as if the rider might is gone and wearing their new team’s jersey. The team doesn’t see them in the same way, as if they’re no longer part of the pack.
None of this makes sense. A talented rider capable of winning races – and points – remains so for the rest of the season. But sometimes management can’t reconcile the frustration at losing a rider. Taking them to wind tunnels, selecting them for big races: it’s as if they’re improving them for the benefit of a rival team. That’s often intolerable, even if they stand to gain for the rest of the year.
It’s not new. The account varies according to the sources and recollections but one version of Eddy Merckx’s masterpiece Tour de France Luchon-Mourenx stage win in 1969 goes he’d heard Martin van Den Bossche was leaving for a rival squad and found this intolerable so he countered Van Den Bossche on the Tourmalet to go solo and take almost eight minutes, practically doubling his lead in the yellow jersey.
That’s in the moment but a few years ago the UCI points system allowed teams to hire riders and they’d bring ranking points with them. So a team losing a rider didn’t want them to score big as it might help a rival team the following year, see Jakob Fuglsang and others a decade ago.
It’s crude to refer to riders as “assets” but all the same, here are prize assets in the team colours only they can get marginalised with many months and some top races left. Stand back and the reaction looks more like the end of a relationship with one jilted partner giving up.
One obvious but imprecise example could be Demi Vollering in the Tour de France this summer. Everyone knew since spring she was leaving SD Worx. Wearing the yellow jersey she was among many to be involved in a crash with 6km to go on Stage 4 and lost over a minute to her GC rivals, almost two to Kasia Niewiadoma. There were no team mates around to help pace her back. Crucially if there were then maybe she’d not have been four seconds down overall at the finish in Alpe d’Huez. Imprecise because who can say for the timing; more so because some team mates were further by her side at the time of the crash and some of the confusion was blamed on race radios not working. In this case it looked like an example of the team not supporting Vollering all the way and many outlets wrote it up like that.
One example that is not seen on TV is when it comes to race selection. It’s been known for teams to dangle a contract at their riders mid-season with words to the effect of “here is a renewal deal for the next two years, sign it today and we’ll select you for upcoming races” but also with the implicit or even explicit message of “don’t sign and you’re off the Tour long list”. This leaves the rider in question with a dilemma, sign and get the security of renewal? Or continue negotiations with other teams but now knowing they’re out of some races that could boost their profile and results?
It’s awkward to give examples of this skulduggery but it’s certainly happening. But if you want to correlate Tour de France selections with the presence of the same riders on the squad the following year, go ahead even if there’s what statisticians call endogeneity as “core riders likely to stay” isn’t revealing either.
You can see this in reverse too. Look at the proportion of riders leaving the team being sent to the Tour of Guangxi and you might spot a match. If a team is not invested in a rider any more then best send them on a longhaul flight while core riders are kept happy by going on holiday early.
Not every case is like this, indeed it’s far from the norm. Had Ben O’Connor coasted through the second half of the season with him and Decathlon-Ag2r knowing he was going to Jayco, it’d be explainable if not understandable. Instead he kept on going and the team backed him too. In a recent radio interview Decathlon boss Dominique Serieys even said O’Connor was almost regretting his decision to leave although let’s not extrapolate too much from this. He’s leaving, just on good terms.
Having cited Martinez above as an example, he agreed to join Bahrain in March it seems. Only he rode the Tour de France so this disproves the points made above, right? Probably not as it seems the plan was for him to have a long summer break after three World Tour stage races (Catalunya, Romandie, Suisse) and then go to the Vuelta as a leader for Groupama-FDJ. Only because the team were coming up short of results and because he was leaving, they preferred to reserve the Vuelta for others and use Martinez as a joker in the Tour. If he was core for them next year and beyond they’d have stuck to the plan.
Conclusion
A note to record the way riders who are leaving a team can sometimes check-out the moment they’ve agreed to join another team. They could have six months of more of racing to do with their current team and stand to be paid hundreds of thousands in salary payments but culturally it can be as if they’ve left sometimes.
Did this mentality cost SD Worx the Tour de France? They’d say no of course. When this occurs sometimes the hard part is for outsiders to spot it, it’s hard to know who gets disinvited from a wind tunnel session or scrubbed from the Tour de France startlist. But it happens.
The old Woody Allen FBI/hostage story is a good one.
Now it seems that even with a contract, rich teams can buy up riders.
On the same tack, Van Gils has apparently told Lotto, with whom he has a contract to 12/26, he’s off. Has he been tapped up by a rival with an offer his current team can’t or won’t afford?
But being a big fish in a small pool can be advantageous with team backing and a hand-picked programme. Just look at so many future stars who have failed to blossom at Ineos and elsewhere. Is Martinez good enough to make a mark at Bahrein without the Groupama-FDJ support he’s known for three years – at least his bank manager and accountant should be happy.
There seems to be a lot of expectation for Martinez next year, not the “let’s see how he improves” and more the “ok, he’s got to start delivering”. He’s a good rider and ambitious, and despite the small size he’s been working hard on TTs. But, and this isn’t fixed, but there does seem to be a weight category for grand tour winners in the 60-something kg bracket, being below or above this and GC aspirations get harder.
At ~52kg he’d surely be better off focusing on KoM competitions and stages. That way, he can actually win stuff rather than becoming a top ten GT rider. But no doubt money will talk, and for reasons that are beyond my comprehension, teams pay more for the latter type.
You would hope that the O’Connor/ Decathlon-Ag2r example would be the norm: Professionals acting professionally. And both parties were rewarded for doing so.
Exactly, it should work like this. O’Connor might have wanted to move at some point but it sounds like being professionals meant things worked better for both sides to the point where both sides respected each other more.
I would imagine that it comes down to if a rider views themselves as either in ascendancy or on the wain. Worth burning a few bridges or not?
Absolutely and surely the treatment on both sides was noticed by other riders and teams.
Other riders will see that team more positively vs teams that freeze riders out.
That’s a great point about Demi Vollering. At some point the entire team should have come back to get her.
One wonders whether the team would have acted as professionally as they did, had Felix Gall been as good as the team had no doubt expected, i.e. in good enough form to ride as their main GC guy?
I cannot help but marvel at the genius of the title of this blog post, thank you as always Inrng for your wit!
This might be a naive question but why don’t riders that have signed with a new team mid-season just keep quiet about it until October?
1. Their current team would probably figure it out as they were refusing to sign with them.
2. People are stupid.
Things leak. Each time the transfer “news” comes out in August or September half the peloton and entourage, even bloggers, knew it months before. Within the smaller circle of agents and team managers it must be even more widely known.
But also it’s hard to keep quiet. October is late or too late by the way. Think June or July and it’s more a rider signing in, say, March, won’t have their agent ringing around teams trying to sell them; or the current team is asked to match or exceed an offer from elsewhere but hey can’t/won’t and so know the rider is off; plus it’s also practical to tell the existing team so they can fill the space / use the budget but at the risk of all the above.
Apart from it being practical, maybe some riders also think it’s the correct and honourable thing to do, to tell their current team that they’re leaving so they can plan for it and recruit someone else ?
OK, sport is full of egos and many who get to the very top (like Armstrong, Schumacher, various tennis players…_) seem to be utterly self-centred and lacking in any compassion or consideration for others.
But in cycling especially, pee off your current team mates or DS’s or management, and next year you won’t be able to call-in any friendships or alliances if you’re stuck up the road without your new team mates, you’re more likely to be ridden down for sheer bloody-mindedness
Different sport but there was a good interview with Toto Wolff where he said he knew about Hamiltons exist before he was told by joining up the dots from agents and other drivers. I can’t think of another sport where you’d try and hold back your current team in the way your show cycling doing
No, the sport is still in the dark ages in this regards…….Yet it likes to play up how professional it is, but in reality, it’s still miles behind most other major sports.
Absolutely, it’s a very old school (read, backwards) sport. The teams pretend to wield this enormous power over riders. Yet, the teams themselves are as fragile as anything. They aren’t even standalone businesses – not in the same category as professional football (euro premier leagues OR NFL), hockey, baseball, mlb, etc that have millions in paying customer revenue and tv deals.
Can you imagine if American football teams played some games for the NFL, some for other entities, and none of the entities shared money with the teams?
The Other Craig – absolutely, that’s why it seems so backward to me that the ASO doesn’t really revenue share with the teams.
Also, and I know the revenue picture is much smaller in Europe than in the US and Canada, but TV rights should be negotiated by the ASO. Note, I don’t say UCI, because it isn’t a for-profit group.
Trying to avoid a huge thread on this or letting this spin out of control (sorry Inrng), but the operating model of cycling is still very broken.
@both Craig and CA
Trying to compare something which is radically different under, well, pretty much any respect rarely helps.
Can you imagine NFL played by national teams?
Admittedly, many sport models have been exploring new settings for years or decades, so now the Premier League is a brand in itself, football players in Europe have created their personal brand and fandom at unprecedented levels, and, OTOH, cycling teams try to forge for themsleves an identity of sort etc. That said, the strong brands/entities in European football are still the teams (even if…) and in cycling it’s still the races and the top cyclists.
A useful question to better understand the subject is what material or immaterial *assets* are *owned* by the different kinds of actors.
Anyway, CA, what do you mean with “TV rights should be negotiated by the ASO”?
We’ll have this conversation in a century time 😛 to see if cycling is still there… and if NFL is. Not that I’m sure about the answer, but I’m sure that such must be the perspective.
Beyond traditionalism, which is part of the story of course, I suspect that some peculiar aspects of cycling are among the reasons for such an “irrational” attitude. The combination of a very-team-yet-very-individual sport, the extremely reduced number of winners or victories, the need not just to work hard but to sometimes literally *suffer* deeply in order to do your thing, be it to help others or to grab a result… all the above makes something we may call “loyalty”, or just “trust” really paramount.
The comparison with a sentimental relationship is actually spot on, in that sense. So often it’s not about what happens or not on the road, i.e., in life, but rather the inner perception of belonging to a shared safe space of mutual trust… or the lack thereof.
On a whole different level, (disclaimer: I haven’t been watching again that movie for years now, so maybe it’s just false memories) I think I recall a scene in Any Given Sunday when the new young rising quarterback star starts to feel he’s got a trajectory for him himself which goes much beyond his current team, which apparently depends much more on him than the other way around. He’s generally right of course. Then on a stormy day the rest of the team makes him feel what does it means not to have team support around, and it’s quite much a Vollering TDF moment (with much more physical hurting but probably way less psychological one).
An example of the above is the team / Mas / Superman López dynamics at the 2021 Vuelta, as well reported in the Movistar doc series.
Lack of mutual trust > derailed train crash.
De Lie (22), Van Gils (24), Segaert (21), Van Eetvelt (23), and Berckmoes (23) had a very promising season, too. Most of them with a contract until 2026, barring the latter all from the devo team, which now still includes the likes of Widar or DeSchuyteneer both 19.
Of course, not every young star is going to fulfill the whole promising perspective, just think from Lotto devo Goossens, Sweeny, Vanhoucke, still they hold a deserved place as WT riders.
Lotto is doing a great job, I hope they find the right way to turn it into money if the likes of Red Bull start to go wild poaching.
Ay ay Carera bros turning cycling into football…
And Nibali joining them…
Can a team expect a rider to really do the work when they are known to be leaving?
Of course news about transfers gets out. It’s in all agents’ interests to tell. Especially where an agent is working exclusively for one team.
Don’t some teams actually stand to make money from blossoming young riders who must be bought out of long contracts?
The payments for buying out riders can be small though. The standard rate is their salary multiplied by the number of years left. So for Cian Uijtdebroeks a year ago it was reportedly €100,000 x 1. No team will get rich doing this; to really land a big deal they’d have to be paying the rider in question millions but if the rider was earning that they’d not move. Which suggests the transfer fee needs to change and represent something more worthwhile for all sides.
Very interesting topic Inrng – perhaps the following approach would be in the benefit of the rider who signs with a new team in March:
~ Sign binding contract with new team March 31/April 1/etc.
~ This is binding, but keep it quiet, either until the transfer window opens or until your key races are done
~ the contract can always be re-dated later in the season too, to support the later announcement
And what would you tell your current team when they are offering a contract extension? Let me get back to you in August?
YES!!! Every other pro sport, if your current team makes you an early early extension offer you delay it, or say, send it to my agent.
A rider with multiple options doesn’t have to say no right away. They can hold off and say, let’s get through the next few months first, OR ANYTHING ELSE.
The offseason is long enough in this sport to have a transfer window. Teams and Riders cannot negotiate new contracts or contract extensions until the end of the last WT race each season. Teams and riders could focus on racing during the season
Training camps are considered important nowadays.
In a way we have this, there’s the August mid-season move but from October to December riders can break contracts and move. If Van Gils wants to move then like Uijtdebroeks last year it has to be done before 1 January.
One difficult thing here is budgets, teams have had their budget in place for the year so making big changes to this after that’s in place can be destabilising. It can be ok for teams with flexible budgets, the “unlimited line of credit” but for smaller teams trying to keep everything tight it won’t be so easy if they think they’ve got the books balanced for the upcoming season only to find a rider suddenly wants a pay rise or they’ll move.
The sport could have two transfer windows; one 1st December – 31st January….and another, say post Tour, ending 31st August…..
It does, only the August window is 1 August-15 August. Narrow but deals can be prepared and done any time before, it’s just the move has to occur during this 2 week window.
Rather than poaching riders, perhaps, at Bora they should ask themselves why is it such a common pattern for their team to buy promising athletes which normally have a positive or even very notable first season as they arrive, sometimes even improving their previous standards, only to later fade more or less slightly and often fall into total lack of consistency, with glimpse of quality surrounded by a trend underperforming. It is so general and impacting that it can’t be pure chance, it must be something between recruitment policies, physical training approach and psychological-social environment. Higuita, Kamna, Schachmann, Bennett, Politt, Grosschartner, Postlberger, Kelderman are among the examples in recent years of those who then went away and *sometimes* proved they were still up to higher tasks, but you can feel that the same risk is there, at different proportions, even for the likes of Vlasov, Dani Felipe, Hindley.
Demi Vollering is an interesting dilemma. I was not surprised to find she was leaving except why did it take so long. It felt already in previous seasons already that this team was missing opportunities to support her better in favour of another rider or 2 in the team. So in a way signing for another team may not have made a difference, it was already happening.
I can’t point to any incident as my memory is not that good but it was hardly a shock when she signed elsewhere so she probably thought the same.
It seems to be that there is a story to be told here – why does Vollering, who is the number one stand-out performer in any GT, end up in a situation where she apparently doesn’t have the full support of her team? I guess we may find out eventually.
Only 97 more days until the Omloop