Many of today’s pro teams were founded in the 1990s by ex-pros. These founders have become part of the landscape and the teams almost institutions.
Because of time and retirement plans some of these founders are on their way out. In the case of Vincent Lavenu at Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale in recent days, brutally so and his forced exit tells us something about recent changes in the sport.
Ex-pro Vincent Lavenu founded the Chazal-Vanille et Mûre team in 1992, backed by improbable combo of a meat distributor and a company selling children’s perfume. It had just 12 riders but took on a stagiaire from Estonia called Jaan Kirsipuu who won a race for them in the late season and in the following years became a prolific winner.
In 1996 in came a new sponsor in “Petit Casino”, no gambling but a chain of mini-supermarkets belonging to major French retailer Casino. In 1997 Casino itself became the sponsor, joined in 1998 by Ag2r, an insurance company.
Ag2r the company grew with the team over the years, merging with La Mondiale to become one of France’s biggest savings and insurance companies. It’s a safe business, people subscribe to pension plans; the company invests in real estate. It’s gained plenty from the Tour de France, brand recognition has soared.
The Tour de France goes a long way to explaining the longevity and ubiquity of the French teams in the peloton today, they’re a quarter of a century old and almost institutions who have been able to continue in part because of likely start in the Tour de France.
Another figurehead closer to retirement than the start of his career is Marc Madiot, age 65. He founded the Française des Jeux team which is Groupama-FDJ today. He told the Face à Face podcast his team has gone from a family shop to a multinational business. Certainly budgets have soared in recent years, €20 million or more. Back in the day these founders started out doing everything chasing sponsors, recruiting riders, handling the media and all while driving the team car too. Today this is very different with teams having many departments from communications to performance, logistics to admin and payroll and often more than one team some have women’s squads and many have in-house junior and U23 development outfits too.
Being a business can mean risk-taking which brings us to Vincent Lavenu’s downfall. According to reports in L’Equipe and local paper Le Dauphiné he decided to modernise the team HQ in 2020 and took on debts for this. Then Citroën decided to exercise the right in a five year deal to pull out early, leaving the team with a sudden funding shortfall. Loyal readers will also remember the team has had issues with bike suppliers too.
Ag2r La Mondiale told Lavenu they’d buy the team off him for €8,000: not eight million, just eight thousand Euros but with this they’d keep sponsoring the team. Faced with this ultimatum Lavenu had no options.
The transaction went through in June 2022 and the new owners have appointed a general manager in Dominique Serieys who has a sports management background, having run the Paris Défense stadium and worked in motorsport. There’s also Béatrice Willems who also runs the Ag2r La Mondiale chief executive’s office, a clear sign of reporting lines going to Paris.
Reduced to an employee, this week L’Equipe noticed that Lavenu had vanished from the organigram on the team website and reported he was given notice of his dismissal at the end of July, which caused him to fall ill, even requiring paramedics being sent to the team HQ although fortunately they write he didn’t need to get in the ambulance. A brutal end, certainly not the exit he would have liked.
Marc Madiot doesn’t own any shares as the team has belonged to its sponsors from the start but he’s become more a totem figure over the years rather than the boss. Meanwhile Jean-René Bernaudeau at Total Energies is 68 years old and the search of a successor is on; apparently Julian Alaphilippe was almost in tears when he called to say he was going to join Tudor instead of Bernaudeau’s outfit, some of the sorrow may have come from knowing that without a star rider the team is going to keep struggling for invites and could run out of road soon. Meanwhile chez Cofidis the sponsor is the owner and facing relegation and poor results they’re considering changes too in the management.
So far so French but another team with a long history is Lotto-Dstny, it can be traced back to 1985. It’s in trouble because Dstny is leaving and there’s been a quarrel with the co-sponsor frustrated because they wanted the team to race abroad more while Lotto as the Belgian state lottery clearly wanted more presence in their home market, a clear tension. But if there’s no sponsor there’s a significant financial shortfall to close and all this needs to be resolved now, or even two weeks ago for some UCI deadlines, by autumn for other regulatory matters. If this is not not resolved quickly never mind promotion back to the World Tour and the bright prospects of Arnaud De Lie, Lennert van Eeetvelt, Maxim Van Gils, Alec Segaert and Jarno Widar to name some, they might not make it to 2025.
Meanwhile Movistar goes back to 1980 and the Unzue family still rule the roost. If Italy has lost its World Tour teams, Spanish fans must be concerned for their last team which is not the force it used to be, in part because financially it has struggled with the inflation in team budgets of late. It’s openly looking for a co-sponsor and Movistar itself is on-board with this because if the performance improves then Movistar will see its name mentioned more often, even if it is shared with another backer.
Behind a lot of this is a return of sponsor power. They don’t just provide the funding, increasingly they own the teams. This used to be the norm until the late 1980s when Cyrille Guimard and Laurent Fignon and others launched their own team which “sold” sponsorship to third parties and this model became widely copied. This still exists today with teams like Visma-LAB and UAE Emirates belonging to team management; but Ineos the company owns Ineos the team to the point where the senior figure behind the team is discreet; and EF Education-Easypost is no longer Slipstream as it belongs to the EF and the Hult family behind it. Likewise Red Bull don’t just sponsor their team, they’ve acquired it and so on.
The days of teams being led by one man are over, they probably ended a decade ago. We might still think of Soudal-Quickstep as Patrick Lefevere’s team but when the Jumbo merger was on a year ago he was in the dark at times as the real power and ownership is with Zdenek Bakala. A similar situation applies to plenty of other teams, although to varying degrees.
Conclusion
Nothing is eternal. Several team managers are contemplating retirement but those that can get out on their terms are going to be the lucky ones. Few can cash in their equity as without sponsorship there’s little value in a team, even if they have built up a kind of franchise.
Guiding a team through the 1990s to today is a feat, a tale of survivorship and probably luck too. During this time all teams have changed. While some still have their founders around, increasingly they’re figureheads for the media rather than the controlling power. Being able to delegate is itself a form of power. As budgets continue to increase and teams take on more and more the practices and customs of established businesses it’ll be interesting to see if they can also retain their identity, so often shaped by their founder.
These people are leaving cycling – or being forced to leave – largely because they are not very good at their jobs: they have not moved with the times.
Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale seem to be doing much better this season – probably because Lavenu hasn’t been running the team.
Groupama-FDJ seem to be very badly run – e.g., Pinot’s back injury being exacerbated by continuing to ride; being unable to control Pinot’s bizarre behaviour in last year’s Giro where he threw away stage wins over petty squabbles entirely of his own creation.
Movistar used to be a top team, but that’s been a while. And their tactics have been bafflingly terrible for years – e.g., not putting all their efforts into gaining a possible victory with Quintana in the 2015 TdF, instead ensuring that Valverde came 3rd.
The Unzues used to know how to run a cycling team well – whatever that involved – but look at their record in the last 15 years: a huge amount of their success was simply down to them having Valverde.
They have been a poor team since 2020.
Cofidis, Total Energies, Arkea are all mediocre at best.
Many riders seem to improve when they leave these teams. There must be reasons for that – and yes that might be the usual one that people inevitably cite, but it does also seem to be that these teams haven’t moved with the times, both tactically and in terms of training, etc.
Sadly, for the traditionalists like me (I almost entirely agree with Madiot’s views on cycling), the French, Italian and Spanish teams have been poor for some time – the French teams survive largely because they get invited to the TdF; there’s one top Spanish team left and no Italians.
Ah but that’s the figurehead role you’ve bought into, thinking these founders are in charge. Lavenu’s not been in charge since the summer of 2022 etc etc, Marc Madiot was unlikely to have been scanning the X-rays of Pinot’s sacrum himself and so on 😉
Whoever is running those teams is doing a bad job.
And if you’re the person who is at the top, the buck stops with you.
If the people who are actually making the decisions are doing so badly, then it’s down to the boss to change those people.
Convoluted answer below, but how do you jump from “making some mistakes” to being a bad team manager? Which are the metrics? And, above all, which teams are doing a good job right now?
Like, Lidl, Alpecin, full stop? Perhaps Intermarché (the Piva years, I guess)? Mmmmmm…
Or are you thinking so high of UAE, Visma, Ineos (???) and Quickstep?
The metrics are wins and UCI points…
@CA
So I guess Lavenu, Unzué and Madiot must be best ever, just sum up how many have they collected through their career.
Gabriele – well, metrics over a long period of time are a good indication of the best ever. These guys have been running teams for decades, so yes, if they have the most metrics over time, then they ARE the best ever….
Most sports skew points and wins to more recent results, but as you are a huge fan of the history of this sport, I’m certain you appreciate the older longer term performance.
Now, points from World Tour or World Cup, etc. might not be the best metric because it has been inconsistent over the years. Perhaps wins or podiums are a better measure.
Then again, look at Bora’s tactics on Stage 6. It was obvious from >50km out that they’d have to ride hard to catch O’Connor, and they just trundled along (despite what their DS hilariously claimed in an interview). Evidently, they didn’t rate O’Connor at all.
Still, Larry can stop worrying about riders being controlled by DSs – apparently, they haven’t the faintest clue what they’re doing.
Was anyone watching that stage thinking ‘They’ll catch O’Connor riding like this’?
And the likes of Visma and UAE weren’t smart either.
The Netflix series on Movistar seemed like a cycling version of The Office to me with the befuddled management.
Can’t disagree with you; these ‘traditional’ teams, appear to be stuck in a time warp, and while a part of me feels sorry for them, they need to do far better. Getting to the Tour shouldn’t be their sole aim every year, nor avoiding relegation.
They don’t deserve success if that’s all they care about.
At least Decathlon-Ag2R appear to have improved, and show signs of being a proper team.
You mean DSM, Jayco AlUla or EF?
Yours might look like a description of these teams (all supposedly very very modern) rather than the French ones’, which are extremely diverse each one from another, by the way.
Ag2R just a couple of seasons ago still had that specific project to foster their Classics’ programme with Jungels, Naesen, Van Avermaet etc., which among other things perhaps didn’t provide huge triumphs yet a good haul of points. What about Godon or Cosnefroy, constantly up to it until this very year?
And in the case if FDJ just have a look at Madouas or Küng or Demare at the Classics in 2022 or 2023, just to name the most recent seasons.
Neither FDJ nor Ag2R look worried about relegation.
Cofidis is more focussed on stage racing, but you surely can’t say they ignore Italy or Spain where they collected their probably most meaningful results in the last four seasons.
So, given that Total wasn’t interested in promotion, you’re actually referring, if anything, to Arkéa only (if anything… Mozzato and Vauquelin anyone????). Arkéa which was lured by the UCI into that WT position they themselves weren’t sure about.
Oooook…
It’s like you’re missing much much cycling outside the TDF and big headlines rather than the French teams doing do.
Give your head a wobble. I’m talking about the French teams. You ruin every thread with nonsensical comments which have nothing to do with the actual story.
I bet you’re fun at parties…..
You’re talking French teams but you write things which don’t really apply to them as much as to the above mentioned, if anything. Looks like repeating commonplace stereotypes without even checking if they actually make any sense at all.
So, yeah, I must guess you’re the sort of extremely funny party type which enjoys telling everybody stories about, dunno, migrants stealing our jobs, Latinos being lazy and women not being good at maths.
AG2R got fancy new bikes (and maybe other technical help, like wind tunnel access) and quite a bit of money from Decathlon, which probably also explains part of their improvements…
The Lavenu story is harsh. Business is business, but after all those years, wouldn’t AG2R feel some sense of duty to Victor? There must be some fairly deep human connections behind that relationship.
Yes, you have to feel for him. Sacked from the team he created, almost marched out of the building (but apparently he still owns this and leases it to the team)
Not normally one to praise landlords but this is a masterstroke!
Why, what’s wrong with landlords?
Yeah you definitely feel bad for him. I really hope he finds a way to rebuild a brand new team and blow ag2r-decathlon out of the water.
I understand this post is mainly about the French scene, but as Italy, Spain and even the USA have been dragged in, can I add the mystery of the UKs only WT team. Dave Brailsford is another boss who has exited the team he originally founded as team SKY, now INEOS. The team appear to be well funded, but have produced little or nothing since Brailsford’s sudden departure to pastures new. Maybe being close to BC, which has presided over the decimation of the home race programme has something to do with this malaise. Teams need leaders in the true sense of the word, with passion, vision and a definite sense of direction.
It looks as though WT teams in general, certainly in the USA, Italy, Spain and the UK if not France need to take a close look at themselves, their structures, recruitment, models and how they operate if they are still to be around for the next decade.
As far as the US teams go, Trek seem to be doing really well; sustainably in the upper part of the table despite not having had a true GC contender on the roster for years. Plus, their dev team is turning out some really talented riders. EF were precarious, financially speaking, for years before Vaughters sold the license. With EF now owning (not just sponsoring) the team, their situation seems much more stable. Their GC experiment with Carapaz hasn’t worked, so I’d imagine they’ll concentrate on being a classics and stage hunting team, which is what they’re actually good at. In any case, both teams seem to be in much better shape than a basket case like Movistar.
To what extent are Trek the team, not Trek the bikes, American?
They’re as American as Luca Guercilena himself ^___^
Whatever the ownership, it started as one of those one-man-vision led projects and to a notable extent it still is, even if it slowly became more of a shared things because of personal reasons.
It’s one of the undercover Italian structures in current cycling (in a range of different forms, same is true for UAE, Astana and Bahrain), although of course quite much mixed up and international: still, the relative majority of their riders and DSs are Italian (some 20-25% of the total with no other clear prevalent nationality).
Thats what I thought, I’ve always viewed them as a quasi Italian team.
Absolutely it’s very much a team with very strong Italian roots and connections. It’s very good that Trek have recovered from he who must not be named haha… apologies for the Harry Potter reference.
Trek (the company) are only American in the sense that they are incorporated in the US and their headquarters is still in Waterloo, Wisconsin. Their frames have not been made in the US for over a decade, and their engineering staff is very much international. Trek (the team) is registered in the US, which is why I refer to them as a US team, but I’ll concede Gabrielle’s point that they are essentially Italian under a different license.
If teams are belonging to their sponsors instead of their creators you wonder what happens if the sponsors feel they’ve got enough from the sport? They’ll only go so far to hand over the team.
They sell it to the highest bidder (most likely another sponsor, or maybe occasionally a billionaire who wants a new toy).
My take home from this article is the TdF invite for French teams has been artificially keeping them going when under normal market conditions the failing management would have been ousted a long time ago.
Maybe this means the French teams will become better in the long run and possibly return some result for their sponsor. Which must be greater that just TV time.
Although this isn’t a romantic vision of cycling. The sport is after all build on (especially the TdF and other GT’s), capitalism.
The sport is heavily if not mainly built on public money, although within a capitalist environment, which makes the above final sentence poorly elaborated to say the least.
Explain to me how Trek being a cycle company a company based in the US is built on public money? Trek just wants to sell more bikes in Europe. That is why they sponsor a Euro-centric WT road team.
The UK subsidizes cycling for the olympics as does France and perhaps Italy?
Inoes takes advantage of that fact by being UK leaning with riders, good for them.
How does Trek take advantage of US government money to get kids to race road or track racing for Lidl or EF?
Perhaps pro cycling might benefit from a more capitalist system? it really can’t because its not internatinal enough! procycling in the US is last page sports news, even if a US rider wins a gold in a olympic road race. The largest GDP in the world.
Trek is looking to sell bikes and other Euro sponsors should be too. enough with the hobby owners hiring only French/Italian kids to race for them, and complaining
that they don’t get invites to GT’s.
I’m speaking of the sport, not bike market (from which part of the money comes into the sport, though not surely the majority of it in any net balance).
Races, which *are* the sport, live on money paid by public local and regional institutions, public TVs, plus public services which are only partly paid or not paid at all like security or road maintenance. Then there’s the direct sponsorship from public money behind some strangely named sponsor like madeinitaly.gov.it or loteriasyapuestas.
Besides, you have team funded by public money in different forms and proportion, like FDJ, UAE, Astana, Bahrain, plus other sponsors which although privatised still retain strong ties to national politics both because of their history/human resources/management *and* via national contracts like PostNL, Total or Movistar.
National federations which manage most levels of the sport below the very top tier, grassroot, formation etc. of course receive a good deal of public money, from a variety of public administrations, NOC, and often other related to the benefit of sport for health.
Maybe in the USA cycling is more private-capital driven, but I wouldn’t say it’s working great for them. The sport has enjoyed past moment of relative success, but it’s not stable, organic, structured, sustainable or balanced.
The European model looks way better for the sport, but, alas (?), it’s far from being “built on capitalism”.
My suggestion of the spot being built on capitalism is in reference to two things. Firstly large GT’s were invented to sell papers. Indeed the reason local governments sponsor races, allow them to be put on and pay for TV is to promote tourism and revenue from this. So fits with the free market philosophy of attracting tourists to your region over others to sell hotel beds and ice cream etc for local business.
Capitalism also fits with publically funded companies sponsoring teams. Team management can go out and find alternative sponsors if they feel FDJ etc is not fullfilling their needs. These sponsors operate in the capitalistic strucure of pro cycling.
Most tourism today is rather a part of extractivism.
And a good part of what’s related to it depens on finance, speculation, politics quite more than selling hotel beds or ice cream for “local business” (within Europe, a significant part of it is related to a late and flawed self-balancing of European economy to compensate the problems of one single currency but different fiscalities and productive structures).
Anyway, a lot of the money actually flowing is seized by not-local capitals ranging from mafias to investment funds.
How many local economies based on tourism are you acquainted with?
As an example, local people are literally rallying against the current tourism model in the epicentres or ground zero of European tourism in Spain, just as institutions both academic ones and municipalities are trying to fight against this model through analysis and legislation.
By the way, although inrng always insisted and rightly so on the anecdotes about how GT were created, on this pages you can also find good posts about the hiatorical and long lasting tight connections between cycling and politics (nationalism, ideologies etc.).
Teams might need management, organisation and structure in a conventional business sense, but the advantage of a figurehead leader can’t be ignored. Surely Groupama-FDJ still exist thanks to the image and passion of Marc Madiot, and that passion is not incompatible with sound organisation and business logic.
The other managers cited don’t have the image, communication skills and visible passion of Madiot and it shows. Who would get excited listening to Lavenu, Bernaudeau, Hubert… though maybe Vasseur is an exception to that visible blandness.
Madiot will be sadly missed though his character might not be suited to being a defined – and constrained – element in a structure.
Finally, Cavendish could be a sort of Madiot figure bringing passion and publicity/celebrity to a well-financed, organised but bland structure. What about it, Sir Jim?
@DJW Manchester United don’t need or want a cycling figurehead.
Reading what J Evans wrote above had me asking myself a couple of questions, as it looked to me a little harsh and unnecesarily so, besides being slightly out of focus, even if I agree with most specific points.
What’s a well-managed cycling team? Some might say that it’s about doing a good service for your sponsors, some might say it’s about winning a lot; (which is not necessarily the same) and then, a lot in general terms or relative to your budget? Of course, one of the answers might be “improve your budget, so you win a lot”. Yet, improving your budget tends to come with a price, usually in terms of how healthy for the whole staff (athletes included) the team environment is, and how sustainable in the middle to long term the financial model is.
From my POV a well-managed team is one which survives different circumstances proving that its inner resources are solid and resilient, all while providing a context within which the athletes feel that they can fulfill their potential in a relatively safe way.
Long lasting teams and those where athletes like to spend a good part or their career, or to come back to are to me the true benchmark of success, as victories obviously come and go depending on several circumstances.
A strongly “national” team which lasts barely a decade only to leave behind and around a drained or scorched-out national scene isn’t a good example of management, irrespective of the number of wins they get.
A team several athletes athletes run away from isn’t a well-managed team, either, no matter how well-organised or modern they are (one must observe the more general trend, as a single athlete might find himself or herself fine or terribly in any given context depending on personal characteristics; when it becomes a trend, questions start to emerge).
Bullying athletes is never ok to me, no matter if it works to have them performing in the short term.
This is already uber-long and of course I have no perfect team in mind (they don’t exist) but I suspect that the whole subject should be tackled from better angles than victories or strategies, and we’d find out things are much more complex than the somewhat trivial binary oppositions which I’ve been reading above from some (not only J Evans).
“Lavenu” (Lavenu and his staff) for example has been able to bring in huge sponsors. That’s being a good manager, in recent seasons he repeatedly proved himself better than the Visma guys in that sense. Only, that’s what cost him his place and maybe the survival of the structure in the long term, unlike the previous model of “growing up together” (which probably was bound to finish anyway as through the decades Ag2R had become… itself too big for that).
Movistar’s got an issue managing athletes differently according to their nationality. Yet Quintana and Carapaz got their best results there and the team’s got a history of taking really care of their athletes from a human POV, all of them included (and despite the above heavy contradiction). Unlike so many other teams who at most (and thanks/cheers to those who do!) provide a psychologist when things already went mayhem on a mental health level. Who’s “managing better”? Movistar was probably the only team along with Astana able to partially match the disproportionate political and financial privilege (with all the well known consequences) of Sky during the dire London Olympics / Cookson age. Of course they did serious mistakes. Everybody does in sport. Yet they were surely able to get to the pinnacle of pro sport and often push rivals against the ropes, all despite their supposed lack of “modernity” against “the most modern” around…
UAE make a lot of tactical mistakes and don’t look like they manage inner relationships at best, yet if one was to judge them from their sheer success in fund-raising and of course victories, they’d be like what, best managers ever? Should we infer that the Movistar structure was able to work generally great with its up and down through so many different historical contexts and circumstances and change from the 80s to, what, 2018-2019 (Worlds-Giro)? Or simply 2016 (still best UCI team, beating Froome at the Vuelta)? But, alas, modernity finally caught up with them? At the same time… obviously no management skills are needed to have a successful women team or what? ^__^
Whereas the likes of Gianetti and Fernández now evolutioned much and became soooooo “modern” improving from their Footon or Lampre years? Or is Visma the epitome of modernity and good management after their struggles for sponsorship or the Vuelta farce? The same people who managed a dubious environment at Team Giant or Rabobank are now a model of management… or not?
Things in sport go through cycles, mistakes of every kind are impossible to avoid and it makes little sense to become fixated on them. The judgement should probably work better (as in athletes’ case) when you can appreciate a career as a whole and also properly measure the impact of circumstances above the control of any single actor. I’d say a good manager or DS can be deemed so when he or she is able to build something which lasts comparatively long, or is able to contribute positively through different teams (think Martinelli).
In the short term it’s very hard to differentiate a good manager from somebody who just stumbled on the right occasion, whether such a “golden bar” (cit.) is an incredible athlete, a lot of money, a political privilege etc. When you stumble on a champion or a great sponsorship again and again it’s when we might start to suspect it’s not only luck.
That said, as inrng pointed out above people do age, and sometimes their skills do age with them, which doesn’t mean that they hadn’t those skills before, or that the skills now needed must be “new”.
Probably the hardest skill so very very very few have is the ability to create something which can be passed over in a transition where you have grown up also those who are going to take care of the thing itself, that is, an environment which self-maintains at least through one generational change. In cycling I’d name Martini managing the Italian national team.
Could not agree more
Could not read it all – just far too long to make a point!
Everybody has their limitations 😉
And of all sports in the world you chose road cycling as the sport to follow?!
PS It doesn´t seem so long when you actually read it 🙂 When thoughts aren´t presented and arranged clearly and when arguments are hard to follow or inconsistent, *then* it can definitely be worth skipping over!
“Bullying athletes is never ok to me, no matter if it works to have them performing in the short term.”
This is, I think, a really important point, and something that really isn’t said often enough. For all the focus on equipment, nutrition and aerodynamics, none of those things matter if you’re creating a toxic environment in the team. From the outside looking in, we can speculate that Arkea or Cofidis (for example) don’t perform because they’re not sufficiently modern in their training methods etc, but often these things can come down to the human, psychological side of things. FDJ have had some very public problems with this recently, which is probably why (apart from the obvious financial reasons) someone like Lenny Martinez has chosen to leave. Seeing Laporte and Jorgensen do much better after switching to Visma is partly down to “marginal gains,” but a large part may be that they’re simply happier there. Happiness doesn’t show up as FTP or Watts/Kilo, but you’re unlikely to win much without it.
Exactly that. Bottled happiness would make the inventor the richest person in the universe.
Hope they aren’t just looking for something else which can actually come more or less bottled but which is more directly related to sheer wattage 😛
That said, I obviously agree with the general point, but I fail to see how, say, Bahrain have a more modern or human approach than FDJ’s (again, I agree things went terribly at the French team in terms of managing personal relationships with Martinez or Demare, but it happened in very recent periods… is it just that?)
More important than a specific management approach, is the fit between that culture and the riders’ personalities & expectations…it’s fine to have an autocratic or less-human approach, provided the riders you recruit thrive in that environment.
Where that is difficult is where those personalities & expectations can change over time – that is very much to be expected in a team filled with people in their twenties (or even their teens), and who may develop into successful riders who expect & demand different things (more money, more support, more status etc), but how a team reacts to those changes can be vital.
DSM seem to be the obvious example of a team that has a certain management approach or culture. They often get criticised when riders leave mid-contract, but they should perhaps be applauded for quickly recognising when riders have not gel’d with, or have outgrown their approach, and dealing with those situations rather than allowing them to become toxic.
On a roughly linked topic we see another young rider (Watson) leaving a middle-ranked French team (Goupama-FDJ) with a character manager (Madiot). He won’t have the same visibility with Ineos and probably not the opportunites, and may well disappear as so many others have done. The move might be good for Watson’s short-term remuneration but is it for his sporting career?
Maybe, maybe not. It’s sink or swim time. If he swims, then he’ll go far with them. But as you say, more seem to disappear than shine (but isn’t that the nature of cycling/sport?).
Watson leaving Groupama… On their devo-team golden year, with 7 riders coming to the WT, four of them are staying after two years, if I count right. Groupama-FDJ is almost becoming a formation center for the big teams : 1 or 2 years conti, then 2 years WT, and when they can finally have some big results they go elsewhere. Unlike football I don’t think there is some financial conterpart for the first team…
I’m afraid it will be the same with Decathlon in a few years, but maybe the brand has more money to spend on the team.
To come back to Lavenu, I find it strange that AG2R didn’t try to keep Lavenu as a mascott, cornering him like they did in the past year. Why did they have to fire him ? It really is bad PR management, no ? Was his aura still too strong in the team ? How cruel it would be if his former team, with O’Connor, finally manage to win a GT, after he’s fired…
I find a lot of readers are really harsh on french teams : they mostly do what they can with what they have. FDJ was a model of team gestion until two years ago ; the departure of Pinot and the failure of Gaudu seem to leave the team a little bit disoriented. Decathlon was always a serious team, doing some big results with a limited budget. Arkea is doing what they can and achieving some nice results. Total made a mistake with a completely demotivated Sagan, but nobody could say it would be such a disaster, and they are more or less back on track for a Proteam which is not directed towards UCI points. Maybe only Cofidis is like everybody says, even with their 2023 TdF… It seem they never manage to have a clear path.
The problem also for these small teams, it’s that if you loose your bet on one only leader, it can harm you for several years : Bouhanni, Sagan, Gaudu, Latour at a smaller extent and for various reasons illustrate the case.
“The departure of Pinot and the failure of Gaudu seem to leave the team a little bit disoriented.”
That sort of proves the point about French teams. They knew for a long time thatt Pinot was retiring and they knew it was more than possible that Gaudu wouldn’t live up to expectations but didn’t plan for these eventualities?
Yeah, plan what? Finding some oil to pay Lenny’s new contract? Because they actually had a third GC man rising up the ranks.
(Of course bringing the latter to this TDF was suicidal or punitive, hence I agree about dubious decisions by FDJ in recent years… unsure this proves anything at all about «French teams» ROTFL or even FDJ itself in a broader picture, like you couldn’t observe the same kind of situations in bigger and «more professional» teams like Visma 2004 once the money/luck/whatever steamed a pinch down).
Can you plan Gaudu to never be as strong as Paris-Nice 2023, where he was stronger than Vingegaard ? And anyway, they had their youngsters, as gabriele says. Lenny to the Tour was a pity in a cycling point of view, but they wanted to make a PR coup. I wouldn’t be surprised if the hour spent in the hot seat in the last stage of the TdF saved the game, and was more important for the sponsors than a 5th place in the Vuelta…
I agree a little bit with you though, their management since last year seems not so clever from an external point of view. I think they expected a lot from Penhoët, who hurt himself in the beginning of the year.
Apart from all that – I was amused to see the graph of Ag2r’s annual budget is shown in the same brown as their shorts…
Reading through everything about teams struggling with sponsors, teams that may disappear altogether, it’s a bit depressing. Especially considering the Groundhog Day nature of it all. Every year brings the same thing, with even the most solvent of teams (Ineos) being the subject of whispers and murmurs. If their benefactor pays more attention to his new shiny object, Ineos may become an afterthought. It makes me think that maybe Vaughters has a real point when he says the stakeholders should have real equity in the same way owners of football clubs do. If some fundamental change isn’t made, cycling is going to be forever caught chasing its own tail in search of sponsors. It’s not a sustainable business model (and barely a business at all by any definition). I’m not in favor of One Cycling as a solution (first because it’s Saudi money, and second because it does nothing to address the fundamental structural issues teams face). Structural changes need to be made. A team should be able to function as a corporation, and even sell shares as a public offering if it chooses to. Obviously this wouldn’t do anything to prevent mismanagement, and it wouldn’t mean teams couldn’t go bankrupt and disappear, but it would go a very long way to promoting some stability. Finally, teams need to be able to collectively bargain for broadcast rights to races. TV revenue is the main reason the Premiere League is so rich and so successful. Having a system of fragmented, ad hoc broadcasts benefits no one (except maybe ASO and Flanders Classics). I’d really like to see cycling grow and build some sort of truly sustainable business model, but I fear that this time next year I’ll again be reading about teams in crisis, on the verge of folding because their sponsors decided, for whatever reason, to pull their support.
No, it should be a syndicate or cooperative of athletes like tennis ^___^
How is it some people look at football as a sustainable model, I wonder, given that the model in itself isn’t? The very same model goes from working great in a country in a given decade to working terribly in a slightly different time-place setting. It clearly isn’t about the model. Not *that* model (in most countries just take urbanism and speculation away from it to see it crumble partially or totally down, same for some relevant parts of the baseball model in the USA). A debate already held somewhere else in this same blog.
Honestly, I’m open to any ideas. My main point is that team “owners” don’t actually own anything. They “own” a license, but in terms of equity that can be built on, nothing. They don’t even own a brand that can be marketed, since the brand is whatever sponsors they have on their shirt at any given time. Does anyone except a cycling fanatic understand that Reynolds, Banesto and Movistar are actually the same team? Wouldn’t it be better for the sport if a newcomer could make an immediate connection with the entire history of a team? Maybe this is part of the reason that cycling can seem like a hermetically sealed bubble to someone who’s never watched it. It’s likely that cycling traditionalists simply wouldn’t be open to the kinds of changes I’m thinking of because “it’s always been that way.” I simply see these same scenes of chasing sponsors and teams folding repeated year after year and wonder why nothing ever, ever changes. The status quo is not tenable, and Saudi money certainly isn’t the answer.
“I simply see these same scenes of chasing sponsors and teams folding repeated year after year”, and also teams finding new sponsors, and teams being created, and cycling getting bigger and bigger… I don’t really see your point here.
Pierre-Luc Périchon, the former Cofidis rider, is trying to make a new team with new principles : https://www.lequipe.fr/Cyclisme-sur-route/Actualites/L-equipe-qui-veut-tout-changer-le-projet-pour-2026-lance-par-pierre-luc-perichon-et-un-entrepreneur-lyonnais/1474422 (french) Maybe it will work. TdT-Unibet seems to have a slighty different model too, as BEAT cycling club. The old model may be more flexible than some might think…
Yeah and OTOH long lasting structure holding the same name are old French not modern enough ROTFL
Jokes apart, the question is that races are paramount, organising them successfully is very difficult (ask those Hammer Series guys) which means that those who are able to hold a substantial share of power. The issue doesn’t even exist as such in other sports.
Besides, people are overestimating the supposed constant economic tragedy of cycling (I already analysed the question before here), but the actual problems often lie elsewhere rather than in the woes of some teams. Many fans tend to believe the narration offered by several vocal team owners who, unsurprisingly, cry to get more money when their average budgets generally rocketed up in recent years. Which became a problem in itself, by the way.
I’d be more worried by cycling diffusion and accesibility, both as a practised and as a watched sport.
“ I’d be more worried by cycling diffusion and accesibility, both as a practised and as a watched sport.”
Absolutely. Broadcast rights are the lynchpin to the sustainability of any sport. If there were a “GCN+” type broadcaster co-operatively owned by all of the teams, it might go a long way to giving teams a financial footing that did not depend on sponsorships. It would also be better for fans (especially if you live in an area where some races are geo-blocked or simply not covered at all).
@RV
That might frankly be a good idea, but I’m afraid that Discovery/ES won’t let go the exclusive rights they paid a lot for.
The sponsor quarrels at Lotto-Dstny did not (only) have to do with their race agenda, but (at least) as much with the personal dislike the Dstny CEO developed for the national lottery’s CEO (who also got accused of toxic leadership & boozing on the job by the unions, so maybe the dislike is for good reasons).
It’s unfortunate, because obviously the team has been doing some really good things with young riders in recent years. And if they score enough UCI points, they don’t really need to be WorldTour to start in most races they want.
Sorry for the OT but comments on the Vuelta post are closed.
We’ve now had at least two (2) potential (according to inrng) or even already actual (Tiberi) GC candidates out from the race or competition for top positions with a full *heat stroke* (ambulance, needed stabilisation).
Hansen doesn’t care because, he said, “nobody complained”.
Same for serious *real* health issues at the 2024 Flèche but CPA didn’t care, whereas for all the Giro weather “activism” you never had as serious an episode there in these few recent seasons when “made in Hansen cancel culture” went havoc.
Wasn’t his role about riders safety rather than being a mere complaint officer?
By the way, dunno, at this Vuelta Woods went public on TV complaining about racing under such weather conditions and expressely asking for EWP. Guess he didn’t know he’d better text Adam. Privately of course. Or in some restricted whatsapp group.
I can’t get how all the above can be deemed a consistent policy or strategy or whatever.
The whole idea of doing such a tough endurance sport in the full heat of the day in Andalucia in August is a pretty stupid one really. I’m sure there were a few very solid reasons why the Vuelta was originally in April. The equivalent would be trying to race over the Stelvio in January. What to do though? Move the classics, or the Giro? Thats not going to happen. Maybe push it back to October?!
I’d say, without having delved into the issue as much as it would be required, let’s just move more or less everything with climate woes a couple of weeks ahead. Which is what the Giro has been asking for years now. You’d need to move the Worlds into October as the Vuelta shifts ahead, but nowadays I can’t see it as the same problem it would have been 15-20 years ago when October didn’t allow good weather racing more often than not. Now it’s often one of the best months of the year in nearly every European country (and elsewhere too, may I suppose?). You can even decide the whole calendar option depending on *where* the Worlds are held exactly, which is known years in advance. Some years the Giro and the Vuelta will maybe need to stick to the same dates as today (imagine Worlds in, say Norway…), but they will then be able to decide the route accordingly, while taking different decisions when the calendar block allows them to. Looks too complicated? Just check the frequent changes in recent years due to covid, Olympics, Superworlds etc. If it was consistently planned, it would be easier to focus on the right places for the right years and choose a different path when the calendar forces you too (you can tell candidate host towns and regions “not now, next year”, etc. rather than just having to say “mmmm no, too hot, we’ll see” as you’d need to do today).
(But my point was rather about asking people defending that Hansen is in absolute good faith with no vested interest… why is him and the CPA behaving like this? Is it that good, politically speaking, to show that you really don’t care about riders’ health, safety etc., all while saying nobody complains when riders complain on TV etc.? Is he copying from the “best” political figures which the world’s “democracies” are exhibiting on the political scene in our age?)
If Hansen is an honest person, his behaviour is utterly perplexing.
Certainly, the CPA’s (i.e. his) attitudes towards weather are illogical, at best.
Six degrees and rain, and we have Hansen complaining that it’s unsafe and having stages cancelled/changed/nullified, when we all know that it’s perfectly OK to ride in that weather. But heatstroke he’s fine with.
The CPA is not the voice of the riders because the riders do not get to vote individually. One rider from each team votes, and that vote is not anonymous. You can think for yourselves whether or not the team bosses decide how that rider will vote. Perhaps that’s why the teams back him.
The media, meanwhile, leaps to support any claims of ‘caring about riders’ safety’.
I suppose as an Australian maybe Hansen does find 6 degrees and rain more unpleasant than 40 degrees and unremitting sunshine. As someone from the damp and grey North of England I’d find it pretty unpleasant to ride for an hour in 40 degree heat. I suppose you could say that when your hands get cold you can no longer operate your brakes, but decent equipment can eliminate that as an issue.
Probably no need to change the dates. Spain has more than enough terrain north of Madrid to cater for a three week Tour. Not sure how this would play out with sponsors, but it is something that is possible. I agree that choosing Andalucía in August seems a little odd. BUT there are other possibilities.
Of course it would also make sense to stick to a stable format (as the Giro +/- does) always starting from the North (very apt rugged terrain) while going South later on, as you can place some serious mountain stages there. The Vuelta has often a general route which looks strange on the map, so they could really do better without breaking any established tradition. OTOH, they’re in a tighter spot than Giro/TDF from a financial POV (ASO owns them but it’s not like they put infinite money into the race…) so they might be forced sometimes to accept what’s on the table even knowing as everybody does that probably problems are coming. Luckily, the riders are fine with that, or so Hansen says.
Andalucia is in Spain so The Tour of Soain should visit there. There is already tours of the Basque Country, Catalunya and Asturias. It’s the timing that is wrong, not the location.
It’s lunacy to have the Vuelta in August. And that’s been clear for years.
It’s simple: move it to October. It can be the last race of the year, and can start after the WC. It could even be after Lombardia.
In 2020, it was 20 October – 8 November, and it was fine – and it wouldn’t have to be that late.
It would also leave a gap between TdF and Vuelta, so for those of us with ‘grand tour fatigue’, it would also increase interest in the Vuelta. And more GC riders would do it.
Is there a downside to moving it? (Other than Hansen complaining that it’s too cold.)
The Vuelta is strongly related to the Worlds. Of course, you should and could build an alternative calendar to go towards the Worlds, but this factor must be taken into account.
“The Vuelta is strongly related to the Worlds.” How and by whom? Prior to the mid-1990’s La Vuelta was held in the spring.
@Anon
Big tip for you. Go to http://www.google.com (maybe you don’t even need to, just type into the web address slot). Or choose an open source search engine. Then look for, dunno, “vuelta prepare worlds”. No need to include cycling. You’ll find a variety of cyclists explaining how they use the Vuelta to build form towards the Worlds, usually retiring after a couple of weeks, articles examining if and how the Vuelta option is effective or not, anyway being nearly always the default choice etc.
Yeah, it’s mainly about the last 25 years or so, which is what we ‘re talking about.
However, as I said, it would also be great to have riders preparing the Worlds racing a serious calendar of Autumn Classics in Italy, France or Canada. But it needs to be worked on a little more, I think.
“You’ll find a variety of cyclists explaining how they use the Vuelta to build form towards the Worlds, usually retiring after a couple of weeks”
OK, so ASO and the Vuelta organizers need to provide this? How did they EVER manage to race the World’s back when La Vuelta was in the spring?
And to the guy who wrote: “Broadcast rights are the lynchpin to the sustainability of any sport.” I ask how was cycling (or any other sport) viable BEFORE TV was invented?
@Anon No, they don’t need to provide anything, it might just be a good strategy on their part to take advantage of that situation in order to improve the stage-hunting / sprinting startlist (usually rather poor). Or, in UCI’s case, in these days and age, to foster a racing build-up vs. a home/Teide one. Who’s gonna race much later into the season without further big targets ahead? Probably even some GC men would stay away as weariness from a long season sinks in. They might try the change some given year, anyway, not a bad idea as such. But it’s not about just moving a single race.
As for the other subject, the answer is «a totally different mediascape» (and still evolving of course). Just as a wholly different approach to racing allowed a different calendar to work in a way which would just be unthinkable today. Check avg. racing days or simply typical race programmes. And even so the Vuelta benefitted hugely from the calendar shift, which also shows how much the right calendar slot can matter.
“And even so the Vuelta benefitted hugely from the calendar shift, which also shows how much the right calendar slot can matter.”
So much that it became so financially successful that ASO ended up owning it?
I wonder where the likely protagonists for this year’s World’s are? Pogacar, MVdP and the current Olympic gold medalist are glaringly absent.
@Anon
Really, ASO wouldn’t have bought Unipublic if the Vuelta didn’t work. Note that ASO bought the whole company a d started buying only the 49% of Unipublic before deciding after a 6 years “test” to get it all.
However, this sound like wasting my time which is going to be much less in the coming days and weeks so I’m sorry but I won’t follow up.
As for this year’s trends, just check what I wrote above about the UCI’s potential interest in keeping a strong Vuelta going *or* swapping it with an equally valuable alternative calendar rather than moving it forward full stop.
“Yeah, it’s mainly about the last 25 years or so, which is what we ‘re talking about.”
It’s clear that’s what YOU were talking about but that’s a lot of the problem IMHO…short memories.. like those “Greatest of All Time” lists that go back only a few decades
There are many regions in Spain, and the Vuelta a España does not (and can not) always visit all of them. The problem is more that if they don’t go to Andalusia, then there will also be no money from (the tourism board of) Andalusia. Same for other regions in the south.
(And if the regions up north know they will always be visited, then why would they bother to pay anything to ASO?)
Looks like the way Decathlon treated Lavenu ha spilled over into team tactics, if the way they treated Carapaz is any indication.
Carapaz can’t ride a straight line but has a lot of whining minions on the interweb. Pathetic.
What’s worst is that it looks like he’s got his «whining minions» among race judges, too. Four yellow cards…
Road blocking is so poor they’d really deserve 2-3 guys less on the team.