The Tour of Guangxi is on and it’s a parade of sprint finishes on massive boulevards so far. Tomorrow sees the summit finish stage so look out for that to determine the GC.
Guangxi has been dubbed the “punishment tour” inside the peloton as riders who have not had a good season or are leaving their team get sent there just when they’d prefer to start the off-season but team management is not so sympathetic towards riders they’re not in charge of next year. It’s a caricature of course but look at the share of riders taking part who are leaving their team and you can see where the label came from.
It’s unfair to the race but such is pro cycling where new races take years to establish roots and the final race of the year is when many just want to be on holiday; an plenty of others are by now. What’s also notable is how the Asian calendar doesn’t tie up. The Tour de Kyushu and this weekend’s Utsunomiya Japan Cup offer a Japanese option, at literally the same time as the Chinese World Tour race. Race dates can’t be moved at the stroke of a pen or click of a mouse but some coordination would be sensible and could benefit both paths. Likewise for the recent Gravel Worlds and Paris-Tours.
One rider Ineos may have wanted to send to China is Tom Pidcock as he might be leaving. Snark aside, he’s in form and the uphill finish does suit. But there’s obviously been a big internal row culminating in him being dropped from Lombardia at the last minute and now increasing transfer speculation. This is keeping the rider merry-go-round spinning more than usual with plenty of deals yet to be struck. Some riders are left like jigsaw pieces that can fill places once the main players are in position. See the domino move of Mike Teunissen to Astana which has meant Visma-LAB have picked up Dan McLay from Arkéa. Others are not waiting, Lilian Calmejane has announced his retirement. Pidcock would be the latest rider to break a supposed long term contract… and also a further sign of troubles at Ineos. Can they afford to lose him, can they afford to keep him?
To moves of a different kind now, and Dutch Pro Conti team TDT-Unibet will ride under a French flag in 2025 and also change name to Unibet Tietema Rockets. Why the French flag? No mention in the team’s press release yesterday but coincidentally the Netherlands is banning sports sponsorship by gambling companies in 2025 and Belgium is following too which probably explains things.
2.15.052 The members of a UCI WorldTeam may have no link with the members of another UCI WorldTeam, with a UCI ProTeam or with an organiser of a UCI WorldTour event likely to influence the sporting course of events or to be perceived as so doing. In exceptional cases, which do not challenge the integrity of the competition or the sporting fairness, the UCI Management Committee may grant an exception.
Only they may not yet have found a safe haven. Loyal readers will remember the blog post from January when FDJ the company said it wanted to buy Unibet. The takeover has gone ahead so the speculative questions are now real questions. As the UCI rule quoted above shows the issue is that no World Tour or ProTeam are meant to be linked. There might be ways around this but how much of Unibet’s corporate structure will be defined by the need to keep one cycling team away from the other remains to be seen.
Talking of flag changes, French team managers Marc Madiot, Emmanuel Hubert and Cédric Vasseur spoke to L’Equipe about their shared problem of France’s payroll taxes, a problem explored here before. Put simply when they hire a rider they must pay 40% on top of the salary in taxes and so their wage bill is structurally higher, and significantly so which means things like budget caps are won’t alone level conditions. The managers were even speculating for some kind of tax breaks but given France is having an emergency budget to raise revenue to plug the public finances, cutting taxes for sports teams and millionaire athletes may not be a priority shared by politicians.
French teams do all benefit from a massive advantage: the Tour de France. It’s this that entices corporate sponsors and consumer brands to back teams because of the vast publicity available in July, something Italian or Belgium teams just don’t get on the same scale. One work-around could be to change jurisdiction on the quiet but this might prove politically problematic and bring publicity the sponsors don’t want. Still if actual national projects like Astana and UAE can be quietly run out of Luxembourg and Switzerland…
One of the team managers complaining in L’Equipe was Arkéa-B&B Hotel’s Hubert. He’s got an exodus with Vincenzo Albanese and Clément Champoussin reportedly leaving the team. He says they have release clauses activated because the team’s title sponsorship deals don’t go beyond the end of 2025 but that sounds odd: if the team is valid for next year then normally so are the contracts. So there’s a small alarm bell ringing in the background here about the team’s resources today, especially as other core riders are out. Arnaud Démare’s valued lead out Dan McLay is out as mentioned already and Louis Barré is joining Intermarché. While Astana have been facing relegation because of a poor points haul in 2023 and 2024 they’ve gone on a shopping spree, Arkéa faces relegation and is now losing some of its best points scorers. Relegation is unwanted but if it happens it’ll mean the team is still on the road for 2026 and beyond.
This week saw migrants taken by the Italian navy to an internment camp in Albania for the first time. It’s a controversial scheme in Italy and beyond because the migrants are held in detention centres run by Italian penitentiary staff on Albanian soil. But you’re not reading a cycling blog for that, instead the cycling connection is here because the Giro d’Italia is set to start in Albania next year, marking the cooperation between Rome and Tirana. How political the Giro’s grande partenza will be remains to be seen, look out to see if the race visits sites linked to the scheme and tries to broadcast what jolly places they are, plus whether Italian government ministers take part.
Staying with grand tour routes, only no controversy. The Tour de France 2025 route gets unveiled soon with the presentation on Tuesday 29 October. As ever almost the entire route has leaked out via France’s prodigious regional press – regional newspapers outsell national dailies – and most often the news is about start and finish towns, most of which sound very familiar, to the point it feels like a repeat. All grand tours reuse roads but this seems particularly likely. We’ll see at the presentation what comes in between such as time trials and which climbs feature along the way before several famous summit finishes, including the Col de la Loze where Tadej Pogačar famously radioed in “I’m gone, I’m dead“.
Pogačar’s is duty-bound to do the Tour de France next year but the rest of his race program will be closely watched by everyone from fans to rivals, with some teams bound to take particular interest in the events where he isn’t racing and probably to an extent we’ve not seen before. How much of this will be openly discussed remains to be seen.
Finally a thought for the weekend… Will Pogačar fare better or worse next year? On one side, some regression to the mean feels likely and many a rider with a stellar season has looked more ordinary the following year. But another reflection is that his wins were born out of defeat at the Tour and Worlds in 2023. Racing the Giro was in part a way to win a grand tour away from Jonas Vingegaard based on ideas this time a year ago. Above all there was a sense of dejection that led to several changes, notably his training methods, his position, coaching staff and we’ve seen the results, see his time trialling. Remember a year ago his weakness was supposed to be long climbs on long days, especially on hot days; now recall Plateau de Beille. Anyway 2024 was just the first season for a lot of these changes which suggests there’s room to optimise with lessons learned… so he could well improve further.
That’s quite the bombshell to leave it on: ‘so he could well improve further’.
Seems fairly likely he’ll go for the Tour-Vuelta double next year but no Paris-Roubaix (but another crack at Milan San Remo I assume). He doesn’t have an Itzulia in his palmares either does he, or a San Sebastian. Interesting to see if he’s bothered or not.
Not really. He improved from last year. It’s logical to say it can happen again.
He could also have a shocker of a year with illness, injury, loss of motivation, anything.
I think Teunissen has gone to Astana from Intermarche, but I might be wrong.
On Pog, Grand Tours are hard to predict but its not hard to imagine him winning the Tour and Vuelta next year. Or deciding the Giro was such good prep for the Tour to do that again. It’s almost nearly impossible to imagine him getting beaten in Liege or Lombardia unless they drastically flatten out the courses. The worlds is very course dependent. So my bet is he’ll win 2 grand tours again and swap the worlds for one of MSR and Flanders, most likely MSR if he does the Giro again.
Teunissen was due to sign for Visma but a late change happened and it’s Astana now.
The Rwanda Worlds are going to be quite much climber friendly, hard to look beyond Pogi, Vingo (if he can find some one-day racing mojo) or Remco… Enric Mas? O’Connor? Carapaz?
I was just looking at a breakdown of the course:
https://tugende.rw/the-roads-of-the-world-championships/
Although Pog will definitely be the favorite, it looks like a course that offers more possibilities for team tactics than the past couple of editions. That could favor Remco, since Pogacar will probably be isolated fairly early on. I’m really curious how riders will plan their seasons, since this is a much harder course with the added factor of flying to Africa and recovering from jet lag thrown in.
Jet lag? It’s the same time as Europe no?
Yes, you’re right. I realized that right after I posted, business there’s no edit function….
Ha, “business “ should be “but since.” I really hate autocorrect!
Harder tends to mean that the cream surfaces, i.e., even less prone to team tactics. That said, racing dynamics are paramount and anything can happen on any route (we can all remember mayhem flat races or mere transhumance through the steeper mountains). But as a general preview, I suspect that teams will be shattered after Mt. Kigali.
And I’m afraid that for MvdP victory will be totally out of reach, unless he goes with the morning break, which will take away one of the few rivals potentially able to match Pogi’s attacks on short climbs (shorter than these, anyway). I’d hope for a full form Wout to go early and add some real competition, be it for his own sake or, ahem, supporting Remco.
Jorgenson maybe?
Barring the very top athletes, we’re not living a great age when climbing is concerned, probably even less so if we speak of the hilliest one-day races. Old riders from the previous generation can still grab very notable results, same for some known force of a slightly lesser quality level that suddenly find himself near the top of the table. But those expected to give the final jump to excellence often get stuck into mediocrity.
This isn’t a general trend: in ITTs, heavy-men routes or on the cobbles the situation – equally *well behind* some hors categorie monstres – looks pretty much different. Although kept away from victory by the amazing guys, we can clearly identify a set of solid competitors who consistently took possession of the top section of the table plus some minor races when the Big ones are resting.
I was thinking that about the other day regarding hilly one day races. Pogacar and Evenepoel are light years ahead of a very mediocre pack. I reckon if Valverde made a comeback he’d still be good for some podiums..!
@Richard S
Podium might be a tough call, but it’s safe to assume that he’d be pretty competitive, as in 2022, the year he retired, at the early age of 42 yo, his *worst results* in each and every top Classic (WT or .Pro) he finished was… 7th at LBL (first group behind Remco), then 6th at Lombardia. Among other results he was *runner up* (!!!) at Strade, Flèche and Agostoni, plus a good deal of other top results in hilly Classics or semi Classics like Tre Valli or the Mallorca races.
Now, the man was a pure and probably even wasted (!) talent, but, hey, this isn’t the best advertisement for current competition in those races.
Bardet, also retiring, is the one who came closer to Pogi this year at LBL…
Checking the top 5 of hilly Monuments is telling, few names appear steadily in the last 5 seasons, barring the supernatural guys, of course. When the turnover is so high, it means that the average level is probably mediocre in statistical terms, because a lot of athletes are very close to each other and small factors bring some on top for one edition, others the following year, and so on.
I’d approximatedly place it somewhere near the last couple of Italian ones, not the Duitama or Innsbruck category, although that single Mt. Kigali ascent is difficult to categorise.
Thanks for the link, RV. As far as I can make out the big climb comes before 14 small loops in the men’s race – am I right?
That being the case, it might be too far even for Pog to go solo there… assuming the others organise a chase (not to open up that debate again).
Can anyone work out how long that finishing loop is – i.e. how far Mt Kigali is from the finish?
I have tried and failed.
https://ucikigali2025.rw/competition-program/men-elite-2/
104km from the end
The website says 9 small loops, then Mt K, then the last 7 small loops.
Interesting that the notes say ‘the slopes from the Nyabarongo River Valley to the summit of Mount Kigali is called Norvège by Rwandans since the topography and climate over the valley reminded them of Norwegian landscapes.’
Seems ever so slightly more likely that the (French-speaking) Belgian colonisers came up with that name, rather than the Kinyarwanda-speaking locals, who we have to assume didn’t do a lot of travelling to Norway back then.
By my reckoning the only one day race Vingegaard has won as a pro is the Drome Classic in 2022. On that basis a very nearly zero, if not very actually zero, chance of winning a 265km circuit championship against the best in the world…
Yeah, I totally agree on that take, hence my disclaimer above. And it’s not because he never tried, either. But just as he trained for a different kind of effort for the 2024 TDF, it’s something he can work on, obviously for a favourable watt/kg oriented course. Mas hadn’t (and still hasn’t) a great score in one-day racing, yet on a given day and on the right course he beat the very best, plus he confirmed that wasn’t a mere fluke with a handful of other very interesting racing days which brought him top-10, top-5 or even the podium, of course only when the route suited.
Vingegaard has only done very few one-day races the last years and it seems to be only as an afterthought. We don’t really know what he can do if he (Visma) will switch focus. He was part of the Danish team for this years Worlds but decided to drop it (and the rest of the season) to recurperate if I understood it correctly.
Its hard to see an in-form Pog not winning in Kigali. The organizers boast of the hardest route ever, and as Pog now seems to be immune to any outside factors such as heat, humidity, … why shouldn’t he just copy one of his trademark 60-80-100 solo breaks?
Indeed.
If anything, the current limit *looks like* (as in “seems” rather than “is”) the general organisation of calendar, with the need of some relatively long (5-6 weeks at least) breaks with no racing at all, not even a Tour of Slovenia, between one-month spells of top form.
Some assume that he could do without anything of that, but it’s not a safe assumption: no available counterfactual for now. We’ll understand more as time goes by.
Actually, what’s been shocking this season is that he repeated the trick four times, when three wasn’t uncommon but surely not for everybody.
However, even considering all the above a TDF-Vuelta-Worlds combo is feasible. Yet that record 5th Lombardia could prove more challenging than 2024’s. But he’d have more freedom to programme a strong Spring.
An important factor is going to be competition. Visma’s 2024 was a one-off or is it the beginning of an Ineos-like *slow* cycle of decline (yep, remember how long did it take for Ineos to slightly lose grip from the top)? Is QS back again on a slightly raising curve as Bora appears to be? Will Trek or Decathlon (or Israel) continue their progression, maybe even getting their hands on some potential GC prospect whose base-layer is stronger than Ciccone’s or O’Connor’s (or Gee’s)? Will some other team get its turn on “better bikes”?
Finally, I was on the course last weekend, and let me grant you that although the finale apparently suggests otherwise, actually Pogi was brought close to a situation where he’d have had some more issues to sort things out. I believe he’d have won anyway, but it was a different kind of music playing. A less excellent day by Christen (who gave his all and beyond, and couldn’t make it to the finish line) plus a couple of teams not losing their cold blood in the peloton… and the racing would push Pogi just a bit closer to his limits.
In the main, I agree. Pog’s four tops are even more impressive when you take into account that he showed *no* weakness at all. Even the Le Lioran stage where Vingegaard beat him, was likely more a combination of bad tactics and V riding his seasons best.
And if UAE are sure they can repeat this, then it leans into the Giro-Tour-Vuelta treble and Kigali as an afterthought to the Vuelta. 2025 will be the year to do it.
I didn’t watch Lombaria live (I was certain Inrng’s predictions were bang on – as they turned out to be), but I did zap though the race afterwards. I didn’t see Christian and co do their work, but from what I hear I agree with your points on his stellar performace.
However I don’t think it would have made any difference at all, even if he had a bad day. At the crest of Sormano Pog was around 1 minute ahead of Remco and 2-2:15 ahead of Ciccone, even even though Ciccone rode the last 40km as a possessed, he lost around 2:30 and Remco 2:15 to Pog. And thats even including the last stretch where Pog slowed down. It was just as supernatural as Pog’s PDB, but in a terrain that wasn’t even playing into his strengths.
I really don’t know what to make of it.
As for the competition, well…. I agree, Lidl doing well, QS and Bora are on rebound but they are still much too thin. Ineos a slow-moving train wreck, and Visma the big question mark. An in-form Vingegaard is the only credible challenger to Pog in the GTs, and I even doubt that he can do much even at his best. Let alone if Visma is crumbling.
2025 will likely be a strange year – teams chasing the non-Pog races as madmen…
I could delve into a deeper analysis, but to keep it short I believe that the peak reached during the Spring was not as high as the two later ones. In fact, Narváez beating Pogi in the first stage of the Giro is clearly enough a manifest “low” (of course relative to the range of values expressed by the athlete through this whole season), just as Oropa wasn’t as amazing on his part, not to speak of … the victory (sic)… at Prati di Tivo. And one could add the failed attempt to anticipate the sprint, again during the first week. All great performances, no doubt, but there’s no doubt for me, either, that they weren’t even close to the level showed later on.
Liège could also be thought about again when checked against later races, even more so if we think that the chase wasn’t furious uphill and indeed still allowed MvdP to keep striking distance with the podium.
gabriele
I have no idea how UAE planned the Giro, nor do I have any insight into Pog’s brain, but I will agree. My guess is that the Giro was an experiment and that the plan was to start controlled to avoid the “blackouts” of TdF ’22 and ’23.
Don’t see teams clamoring for Pidcock. Generational talent or not he’s been too distracted with MTBs and comes across as a rogue agent?
If the most British team doesn’t want the most British rider something is a miss.
Human factor, apparently. Things don’t look smooth around him in terms of personal relationships, trust, respect and so on. A pity as he’s hugely gifted on the bike(s).
We’ll probably learn more in the coming weeks/months. I hesitate to place any blame on Pidcock right now, as Ineos has clearly been a basket case for at least a couple of years now. If Dan Bigham couldn’t work there anymore (even after working with Ganna on the hour record etc.) I’d say it points to larger problems in the team. Pidcock is probably just peripheral to all that, but without anyone actually going on the record, who knows?
Not only Dan Bigham, but even Sky/Ineos lifer Luke Rowe apparently walked into the AG2R hotel during a race, to agree a post-riding DS job…
What I reported above comes from a trustworthy common acquaintance whose personal opinion had been shaped by direct contact.
That said, I still appreciate hugely Pidcock as an incredible athlete, especially when you consider his performance across the different disciplines, and I also think (now from a totally external POV) that mistakes are quite much shared between him and the team, with he himself looking maybe more at fault as far as the TDF events are concerned, whereas the Lombardia situation comes across as terrible decision making on the team’s part. As far as we can know from the outside, of course.
This is pro bike racing. Teams want winners. He will be sought and paid well by some concern.
I’d find it impossible to pick a TdF winner between Vingegaard and Pogačar right now. People seem to have very short memories and think that Pog will walk everything next season. At the end of last season, he had ‘no chance’ against Vin. Hopefully, they’re both fit, and we actually see a contest. And, equally hopefully if Pog does the Ronde, WVA and MVDP are fit too.
Right now I don’t believe Vingegaard will stand a chance. Pog has somehow been able to do an entire season with no signs of fatigue whatsoever, and I would be surprised if UAE/Gianetti, now they know the formula, would fail to re-run 2024.
Yep, yet I’d note that for now present age doesn’t look like the last couple of steady reigning powers.
Not that it’s “more of this” or “less of that”, just differently organised at several levels
Probably some of what we’ll see in the near future will depend on Lappartient’s IOC presidential bid.
Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised by Pogi going just as super in 2025 (a regression to average is equally possible, including factors beyond human control loke crashes, illness etc.), but I’d be if he was to get the very same level of *results* for further seasons *in a row*.
That said, as in any kind of unique circumstances (the combination of talent, team and political context), forecasts are by default close to meaningless.
Perhaps a quite vaguely comparable situation was… Big Mig’s? 😉
Good analogy. At 26 Big Mig and team had found the formula that worked, and propelled him to the top for the next 5 years. But given that his level(s) were still much under what Pog has shown also here in his 26th year, it would be frightening if this heralds a similar 5 year evolution. Its bad enough as it is.
Yes, but look how Big Mig grew into a nearly unbeatable machine honing his calendar and skills, then the perfection reached in 1992 and 1993 already showed some crack in 1994 at the Giro. Subsequently, he adapted leaving the Giro aside but bringing back more ambitious one-day racing and minor stage races, which he had still indulged in 1990 or 1991, but which he had reduced especially in terms of actual commitment and effort during his top two years. It worked quite well in 1995 but in 1996 a similar approach led to burnout and a quite abrupt career end which few expected. When he destroyed competition in both GTs in 1992 (4-5 minutes on 2nd placed, 7-10 mins on 3rd placed), few would have thought he could “soon” be beat at the Giro… in 1993 competition was a little closer, in 1994 the Giro was lost and the winning formula had to be worked on again.
garbriele:
One thing to note about Big Mig was that it was very much on the strength of his TTs. He won the 92 tour by about 4 minutes to Chiappucci, but just the first ITT gave him 5:26 to him.
*gabriele* – not “garbriele”. My bad, sorry.
@MediumMig
Of course the comparison was strictly limited to the future perspectives of a top athlete with exceptional talent in a solid team with good technical support from many POVs and, probably even more important, in an “open” political context, once they found a “winning formula”. Not as much on the specific combination of qualities which made each of them look unassailable during their prime.
Por lo que se refiere a la errata en mi nombre, despreocúpate, pues la verdad es que así acababa llamándome casi todo el mundo en mi club ciclista de Barna; sospecho que, aun siendo una errata, debe de ser tan recurrente por alguna subyacente razón fonética.
gabriele
Yeah, the extra “r” falls naturally for me.. 😉
And Vinny managed to do an entire season with a near death experience crash included…
Not quite. Vingegaard had planned to do at least the Worlds (and perhaps Lombardia), but cut it short by two months.
Never knew there was an obligation to pick a TdF winner of next July in October when this season just ended.
How about the lottery numbers on May 23?
Regarding a hypothetical change of jurisdiction for French teams; it’s certainly a possible solution, and one that might see a future Lenny Martinez type stay instead of moving on to Bahrain. The question it raises is whether FDJ and other French companies would be willing to continue sponsorship of a Swiss based team. If not, it really doesn’t solve the problem at all.
I suspect this is not possible?
I am guessing a sponsorship of French teams brings some tax breaks? One could just have a French company hiring services from abroad but then would, I guess, French labour protection kick in.
Very good points @Inrng. UAE has found the way for at least Pog and Hirschi to improve their – even before 2024 already immense – capacities. Pog to an extend we have really never seen before in modern cycling, and, yes, this includes Merckx given the competition and level of professionalism, training-know-how and equipment available to all teams now.
And the scary thing is how much Pog has improved just from 2023 to 2024.
And I also agree that Pog’s racing calender will be watched closely by all other teams. I wouldn’t fault even the WT teams if they decide to focus mainly on the non-Pog races.
I read UCI rule 2.15.052 with some puzzlement. Does it not apply to a team’s bike supplier?
Seem to recall ‘a brand’ issuing brightly coloured bikes to all its riders at one Olympics to get wins and there surely have been Worlds where some tactics played out in its favour, mutually helped by riders on that brand.
– Or does the rule only apply in races where it’s trade teams competing? If so, how come there are some teams on the same bike brand? Or does this come under an ‘exception’ as granted?
Bike brands and smaller sponsors don’t fall under this rule otherwise we’d have Shimano vs SRAM conflicts etc (the 1988 Giro did see tactics and even the final result possibly influenced by collaboration between Shimano backed teams but that’s another story). It’s more about a shared “paying agent” as in the owner or backer of the team.
Any chance Campagnolo comes back to World Tour racing?
Mario Cipollini given three year prison sentence for domestic abuse.
Former cyclist called an “extremely violent and extremely abusive man” by prosecutor.
An Italian court forced the Government to take back from Albania the people they had deported there.
Only subjective, but after several gifted individuals burst onto the scene at the turn of the decade, the conveyor belt of new superstars seems to have slowed a bit. I find it surprising because I thought the better performances were due to advances in science and improved professionalism. This should help Pogacar dominate a while longer (I wonder if the Covid lock-downs have delayed the new generation’s emergence somewhat).
I don’t see Pogacar being any worse next year, but that doesn’t mean he’ll dominate again as other teams will look at what UAE did in 2024 and adjust accordingly.
One commenter (MediumMig)says “Pog to an extend we have really never seen before in modern cycling, and, yes, this includes Merckx given the competition and level of professionalism, training-know-how and equipment available to all teams now”,
while another (Richard S) says “Pogacar and Evenepoel are light years ahead of a very mediocre pack”
Well it can’t be both!
Personally I think (as has been pointed out many times by Gabriele and others) Merckx faced very strong competition, which doesn’t seem to be the case with Pogačar at present, the levels of “professionalism, training-know-how” etc etc notwithstanding.
As for “other teams will look at what UAE did in 2024 and adjust accordingly”, what on earth does that mean? Spend a fortune on buying riders, or something else?
Richard S will correct me if I got him wrong, but he was pointing at “hilly one day races”. Paradoxically (or not), Pogi is facing harder competition precisely in the races which aren’t as perfect for him and his qualities as Liège and even more so Lombardia are. Sanremo, Ronde, some Worlds’ courses aren’t just more complicated on paper (or less uncomplicated) for him as an athlete, the question is also that on that terrain he’s facing one of the best ever in MvdP, add WVA when available, plus several riders with an excellent pedigree and even some more or less slight margin for further growth as Pedersen or Philipsen. You simply can’t currently get to name 4 athletes of comparable quality in hillier races.
And of course I could add a second layer of solid although not as prolific excellent competitors in Van Baarle, Stuyven, Küng, Mohorič, Benoot…, with some sparse heavy or less heavy victories but even more relevant all them with a robust string of top 10s across several seasons and Monuments. If he finds consistency and more one-day instinct we could even add Girmay.
If I had to pick among contenders of hillier Classics, I’d struggle to find some with, say, half a dozen top-10s in Monuments, some Classic wins and maybe just maybe even a Monument… ol’ & now retired Bardet?!
Obviously, there are expectations about young guns as Healy, Van Gils or even Vauquelin or youngest Grégoire, while Hirschi, Powless, Madouas or Cosnefroy can mature further on, Pidcock could switch team and bet on more road, Gaudu could switch away from GTs to improve one-day racing… lots of hope-so and what-if but for now the simple truth is that no competitor meets the above-sketched metrics.
Alaphilippe of old is sorely missed… but he’s growing *actually* old now.
And if somebody is tempted to think that it’s been always like that, well.., no! After the Cancellara-Boonen era, for example, it was the other way around, if anything. Valverde’s rivals were also very solid like D. Martin, Kwiatkowski (still around sometimes, imagine that), Rui Costa, Purito and again Gilbert, S. Sánchez, and you can throw in the mix the likes of A. Schleck or Nibali. Gerrans is the low profile guy, there. It didn’t always mean great racing, it was often the other way around, but the consistent high level of performance by those athletes suggest they were generally very good.
Yes I was basically referring to Liege and Lombardia. It doesn’t help that the next best rider after Pogacar and Remco is Pogacar’s teammate . The field in cobbled classics is decent when all on song and not crashing. Grand Tours are also reasonable at the moment with the ‘Big 3.5’ (Pog, Vingo, Remco & Rog). Even if there seems to be an obvious pecking order within that.
My point is that I don’t believe that the average top-rider today is inferior in any way to what he was in Merckx’ days. On the contrary. We have 1000+ riders at WT and just-sub-WT levels, and their training, planning, support, equipment, and knowledge is superior to *anything* 40-50 years ago. Yet Pog seems to be just as far ahead of the pack as Merckx was back then. At least this year.
I fully agree with the points in your last question. There is no way any team right now can “out-UAE” UAE. Pog could likely ride on any WT or CT team, and still wrap up the same wins, and even if Remco got support from Almeida, Yates, Ayuso, … he would still by crushed by Pog.
Preparation and materials are hugely better, but the available average athletical level in a sport tends to depend a lot on how broad is the pool you pick the (so to say) “future athletes” from, in order to have a generally high base of sheer physical qualities. Cycling has become geographically broader but its base is way thinner than 30 years ago or 60 years ago in mere quantitative terms. Much much less *male* juniors athletes and junior races in most core countries, and even less grassroots in many countries which were not so central yet historically important (Eastern Europe for instance), be it only as a term of comparison with a different, more comprehensive selection system. A different facet of the same phenomenon can be formalised in abstract as the probability for a naturally priviliged athlete to end up as a cyclist as one of the first choices against other sports. This is of course variable through time and in different times, but we’re now in a downward curve *as a whole*.
The geographic expansion plus technological evolution allows the apparition of relatively more very top talents (those who are really really great and maybe even especially apt for cycling have probably more chances than ever to be detected and picked) but when we’re speaking of filling the ranks with a solid middle class, the pure athletic qualities are less available for cycling than in other periods (as a whole, let me insist again). Obviously you can optimise them better, but…
Another good example is checking the best times of amateur athletes on the same climb through several decades in a core country. Despite many factors, they’re surprisingly stable, not really improving much. More widely available training technology and marginally lighter bikes don’t make for the sheer reduction of the athletical base pool.
Will we get a final update regarding the relegations/promotions-situation?
Keep up the good job with the blog!
Yes, the official UCI rankings come out tomorrow so we’ll have a look at this year’s rankings and what’s going on around them then, with Astana not being among the UCI WorldTeam applicants and more.
40% is a big premium for French teams to pay. Been listening to The Cycling Podcast and they make the point that this also makes things like a budget cap hard to implement as it impacts teams in different ways.
It’s a premium but as touched on above, it can be worth paying. The Tour remains a giant event in France with the kind of publicity that money often struggles to buy, the likes of Ag2r have found it valuable. The Tour can generate publicity for many sponsors but in France it really takes over a lot of the airwaves, half or more of the global audience watching live is in France etc.
To pay up the sponsors need a good story. As much as we’ve seen some managers complaining of late, Decathlon-Ag2r didn’t join the chorus. Above all nor did FDJ-Suez, the women’s team is the example to follow of offering sponsors plenty in return, with a positive story and improvement and the team boss Stephen Delcourt – who long worked during the day as a bank manager and run his team in his spare time – can probably give some useful advice to more established teams.
A budget can be based on ‘net’ – i.e. after taxes.
*A budget cap can be based on ‘net’ – i.e. after taxes.
It could be taken into calculation but imagine the complexity of checkin tax rates every year/month in different jurisdictions as Lorcan suggests in order to balance things out, and then the debates and arguments about this as teams brandish tax rates etc. One of the side effects of caps in other sports is the amount of arbitrage that goes on as teams try to game the rules.
The whole cap thing would be complicated (and teams would always try to get around it), but I still think it’s worth doing.