Ned Boulting reflects on the human cost of pro cycling
Ned considers the rise of one young star, the tragic loss of another and the high price of a pro career
“I am amazed at the readiness of the youngest members of the peloton... I fear for them. I admire them”
he dust had scarcely settled on the Tour of Tours, when we were forced to reconsider everything we had just witnessed. As awestruck as we rightly were with the performance of Egan Bernal (22), the brilliance of Wout van Aert (24) and the sheer showbiz of Julian Alaphilippe (27), a ride by a teenager at the Clásica San Sebastián the weekend following the final stage of the Tour de France knocked everything into stunning perspective. Suddenly, the young guns of the Champs Elysées looked superannuated, as cycling took another massive step back into its future.
At just 19 years of age, Remco Evenepoel, the reigning Junior European and World Road Race and Time Trial champion became the youngest ever winner of a WorldTour race, by simply riding faster than everyone else. One by one, they flailed in the diminutive wake of this packet of muscle and energy from Belgium. It was almost unfair.
In an instant, the already voluminous comparisons with Eddy Merckx became a torrent of high hope and hyperbole expressed on his behalf. I joined in the fun, tweeting that someone should stick a few quid on Evenepoel for the 2020 Tour de France.
TA colleague of mine on the ITV Tour de France team had just cashed in a £150 bet at 25-1 on Bernal to win the last Tour. He’d placed the bet in May 2018. I wanted some of the long-odds action.
Poor young Evenepoel, saddled with the huge weight of expectation from a nation that has not come close to producing any kind of Grand Tour champion since Johan de Muynck took the Giro in 1978. They think, probably quite reasonably, that this kid could be the one. Yet, here’s the striking thing about this wunderkind. He started his sporting life as footballer; and not just a Sunday League clodder – he was decent enough to have been highly rated by PSV Eindhoven and Anderlecht’s youth teams, and to have represented Belgium at U-15 and U-16 levels. Then he switched to cycling.
Seeing him win in the San Sebastián, I was struck by the weirdness of his chosen field of excellence. Although the streets were lined with fans, it was hardly a football roar. And, coasting to the win in a bicycle race, head shaking in disbelief, is a bathetic equivalent to smacking a ball past the despairing dive of the keeper and seeing it ripple into the net.
I marvel at the choice he made to embrace the sheer unrelenting hurt of his chosen sport. The selfsacrifice, the hours of solitary mortification, the entry-level requirement for road racing. Sure, the money will be good for Evenepoel in cycling. But he could surely have gone on to become a rich man as Anderlecht’s number 9, and without the endless torment in the saddle. Which brings me to the other, darkest shadow that pursues racers throughout their career. It was only a week later that news emerged from Poland of the sudden, violent death of Bjorg Lambrecht. He’d crashed at high speed, alone, in the middle of a race, lacerating his liver. He was found in an un-saveable condition by the medics in attendance. They had “needed a miracle” and “none had come”. He was 22.
Much changes over decades in road racing, but certain constants endure. The suffering will always accompany those who seek to succeed beyond the point at which normal mortals pack in. And the dangers of the road will never recede around the next hairpin until they vanish beyond the horizon. It will, occasionally, exact the highest price.
I do not know if it is worth it. I am constantly amazed at the readiness of the youngest members of the peloton, whose brilliance is moving the sport on its axis, to join the grizzled ranks of those who have burned themselves to a frazzle on the sacrificial pyre of this most exacting of disciplines. I do not know what drives them on. I fear for them. I admire them.