Late Calls

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Sam Watson was out training and one and half hours into a five hour ride got a call from the Ineos team to turn around , pack his bags and get to Switzerland. The next day he won the prologue of the Tour de Romandie. It’s a good news story but these late calls can also be dreaded by riders.

Riders will sit down with team management to discuss a race programme at their December training camp and every rider from Tadej Pogačar to a neo-pro on minimum wage to a veteran domestique on their final season gets a say at this point, within reason.

Outside of the World Tour calendar under the rules organisers and teams discuss participation well in advance. At least 40 days before the race the organiser must confirm to the team they’re riding; at least 20 days before the team has to confirm it will participate and often a provisional list of riders. 72 hours is the deadline for the entry form with the appropriate number of riders and two reserves.

Only these best laid plans certainly go awry. This can start within the first week of the season. A rider might crash out of the Majorca series, or another falls ill two days before the Etoile de Bessèges. So a replacement is called up, usually without the Watsonian triumph.

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Matthew Brennan impressed this spring and partly because of late calls. Visma-LAB have had injuries and illness, think Christophe Laporte’s absence. Jonas Vingegaard’s crash in Paris-Nice caused a domino effect where he opted not to ride the Volta Catalunya so Brennan was given the spot… and he took two stages.

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The top riders can change their schedules at will. Mathieu van der Poel looked at the weather forecast for Spain and saw several days of rain and so opted to ride and win Le Samyn. The unseen part was an Alpecin-Deceuninck rider got bumped from the team to make room; it worked but the rider in question lost out.

So far so wow. But this is where the problems begin with riders being called up at the last minute to stand in for colleagues. They might have a very different goal and be in the middle of a training block, or having a rest period and now they’re suddenly on a plane heading for a race they didn’t expect. In some cases it’s just to fill a gap and so they may not even be suited to the role: a climber sent to cover a classic; a rouleur dispatched to a hilly stage race.

There’s a whole cohort of riders who find their programme keeps changing. Someone might be putting the finishing touches on their Giro training right now but will get a call in a few days that begins “er, sorry”. This rider probably knows they won’t ride the Tour and the Vuelta could be out too, so a whole season sans a grand tour awaits. A rider who needs results or even just racing to prove their value as a team mate is now having to react to events; team management know it too and a late call-up or stand-down is often an awkward call. It’s part of pro sports but needs delicate management. A rider hoping for a contract renewal doesn’t have much bargaining power to say no when asked to take one for the team, they just have to make the most of it. Indeed you can imagine a rider who works as a helper might prefer to be stay at 95%, to pluck a ratio, for longer rather than be 100% for a target race given the propensity for schedule changes.

All this is separate from bigger changes, say a rider who is dropped because of an argument, benched because they’ve signed for another team or their form is clearly short, even if these predictable events can have unpredictable knock-on effects on others.

There have been some memorable late call-ups. Sam Bennett got a knee injury before the 2021 Tour de France and so Mark Cavendish was asked to step in… and he won four stages plus the points jersey. Beating Merck’s record relied on many things, including Bennett’s knee.

From memory of a magazine article Norwegian rider Dag Otto Lauritzen was expecting to spend July at home and had started painting his house only for the phone to ring and he apparently rode the Tour de France prologue will paint still on his legs. Certainly in 2004 Matthew White was riding the prologue course in recon only to crash after leaving the course and riding in the “technical zone”, where he rode over a cable conduit, slipped and fell. With hours to spare Cofidis got Peter Farazijn, largely because he could be reached by phone at lunchtime that day and lived close enough to the start in Liège to be able to drive there in time.

Adam Hansen rode 20 consecutive grand tours… accidentally because after his 16th, the Tour de France in 2016 he was due to skip the Vuelta because of a saddle sore only for Rafael Valls to drop out and so as one spot disappeared down under another appeared in Spain Hansen took part and continued the run.

Conclusion
Sam Watson’s a fun example of a late call-up. So much for planning and preparation, he was doing a five hour ride one day and the next, after frantic travel despite the Spanish powercuts, he’s winning a 3.4km prologue.

But more often it’s not such a fun experience, plans change and riders can found themselves bounced around, filling gaps and caught between training and recovery and careers have ended prematurely because of this. It’s inevitable given the injury, illness and crash rates but one reason of this blog post is to highlight this because no rider can say out loud they’re being flicked by their team management unless they’ve got a contract with another team and even then few will speak out.