THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
How youth bossed the 2019 pro cycling season
2019 was the year of the young guns in elite road racing, with Egan Bernal, Tadej Poga ar and Remco Evenepoel leading a wave of new talent to success in cycling’s biggest races. Peter Cossins examines why precocity has suddenly trumped experience at the top level
Having seen a very youthful Manchester United beaten 3-1 on the opening day of the 1995/96 Premier League season, pundit Alan Hansen famously claimed on Match of the Day that “you can’t win anything with kids”. It was a phrase that dogged him for the rest of his broadcasting career – and even bolstered it, according to Hansen himself – as Alex Ferguson’s team of precocious talents went on to win the league and FA Cup double.
Fast forward almost a quarter of a century and professional cycling has experienced something very similar. We’ve seen 22-year-old Egan Bernal become the youngest Tour de France winner since 1909; 19-year-old Remco Evenepoel win the Clásica de San Sebastián, making him the third-youngest victor in history of a one-day Classic; 20-year-old Tadej Poga ar win three mountain stages at the Vuelta a España and become the youngest podium finisher at a Grand Tour since 1974; and 23-year-old Mads Pedersen become the youngest winner of the World Road Championship since Oscar Freire in 1999. Inevitably, as these two-wheeled tyros have piled up victories, the obvious question is why is this happening?
There are almost as many theories as there are young riders ripping up the long-established template for a pro cyclist’s career path. Some suggest that the allpervasiveness of social media has meant that promising riders are now far easier to pick out and don’t slip through the cracks in the scouting network; others that a levelling of the competitive playing field as a result of better anti-doping controls has helped youngsters make the transition to elite level more comfortably; while there's the suggestion that the emergence of a crop of supreme talents at the same time is pure chance. In short, there is no obvious common denominator, although many suggest it boils down to one thing: technology.
“I think it’s just one of these things that happens sometimes, that when you break it down there are maybe five or six riders who are really excelling young. But I would say the one big difference between me aged 24 and guys that are now 20 is that accessibility to power meters has changed massively even in those three or four years,” says Ineos and Team GB rider Tao Geoghegan Hart. “When I was a junior, no one was riding with power, but now I guarantee that they’d almost all be trained to power like professionals. I suspect that’s really raised the level of juniors and even more so of U23s. Bear in mind, too, that it’s not just the device and your bike that’s crucial, it’s also better understanding of power to weight, combined with improved perception of pacing and effort.
“I can’t remember one instance when I was a junior, for example, when I did anything other than very short efforts,” the Londoner continues. “I think small changes like that have basically professionalised the lower levels – it’s a case of the equipment and knowledge trickling down.”
Geoghegan Hart’s teammate Owain Doull agrees with this assessment. “You have guys doing as juniors what you would only previously do as a professional. Most young riders nowadays have power meters, they have a better
understanding of their bodies and they’ve got their coaches,” says the 26-year-old Welshman. “When I was a junior, I never raced with a power meter. I think the first time I got one was when I was second or third year U23.”
Doull, though, adds the proviso that having access to this kind of technology isn’t enough on its own to explain the success enjoyed by the likes of Bernal and Evenepoel. “You have to be a talented bike rider to develop and follow through, especially on the WorldTour,” he asserts.
Innate ability, clearly, is a basic requisite. “Maybe there have been some improvements in coaching techniques and so on, but at the end of the day those riders are just really talented guys,” says Brandon McNulty, the American winner of the Giro di Sicilia just days after he turned 21 in April, who is now set to join UAE Emirates on a threeyear contract. “While the level of the U23s is getting higher and higher, I don’t think it’s ever going to be easy to make that jump up to elite level. It’s always going to be a huge leap. But there will always be a few who will be able to take it in their stride.”
One of the most courted U23 riders at this year’s World Championships, Britain’s Tom Pidcock, the bronze medallist in the road race who is also the world and European U23 cyclo-cross champion, also sees better technology as the key. However, he believes there’s a danger in starting to expect too much of younger riders, in pushing them too hard and too soon.
“The WorldTour guys have been doing everything to the max for a long time and it’s just trickling down to the younger riders, but I don't necessarily think it’s good, to be honest. I’m not going to the WorldTour next year because I want to develop and it takes time. I could do but I want to enjoy being young,” says the 20-year-old Yorkshireman.
“There’s no rush. There’s nothing in the WorldTour that I need or that I want right now. I want to enjoy racing and winning. When you go to the WorldTour it gets serious. I can still enjoy messing around and winning races.”
Another aspect of cycling’s technological advance that appears to be playing a significant role in younger racers being more competitive is the improvement in aerodynamics. “The peloton is moving quicker these days, and when you’re inside the bunch it’s easier to sit in because of lower rolling resistance and aerodynamics,” says online TV channel GCN’s tech editor Simon Richardson. “I think that means racing is favouring the more explosive, younger riders. The war-of-attrition effect that would have favoured an older, more experienced rider has less of an impact, because it’s actually harder for them to get away. You need to be more explosive now.”
Richardson backs up his point by indicating the phenomenal success enjoyed on the road by cyclo-cross stars Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert. At 24 and 25, respectively, this pair aren’t as young as the likes of
“Most young riders nowadays have power meters and a better understanding of their bodies”
Poga ar and Evenepoel, but have essentially made a similar breakthrough within the road hierarchy. Up until this season, both principally focused on off-road racing, where they became well accustomed to making extremely intense efforts over comparatively short periods, often no more than an hour in duration. Since transferring that ability to the road, they’ve repeatedly shown that they are well capable of accelerating away from the peloton or small groups of strong riders, bagging 15 wins between them this year.
It’s a tactic that has also become the trademark of Julian Alaphilippe, who went close to winning the Tour by producing a series of stinging attacks during the first half of the race, then doggedly hanging on during the second until Bernal produced an unmatchable attack of his own to claim the yellow jersey just two days from Paris. Like van Aert and van der Poel, the Frenchman races in what had until recently been a very unorthodox fashion, occasionally attacking from distance rather than in the closing kilometres or the final few hundred metres of a race, as is typically the case.
Poga ar, Evenepoel and Bernal have all raced and won in this same style. This perhaps suggests that road racing is not only entering a golden age with regard to its young talent, but, more importantly, in terms of the way they race. There’s less sitting in and waiting, and more unbridled aggression.
According to GCN presenter and former pro racer Dan Lloyd, the advent of an almost unprecedented group of highly talented young riders may also indicate that pro peloton is now cleaner than it has been in recent decades. “Back in the 90s, doping was rife. I reckon that as you turned pro as a 19, 20 or 21 year old in the 90s, however talented you were, you got your head kicked in. At the end of your two-year contract, you had a discussion with the sports director who said, ‘If you don’t do what everybody else in the sport is doing, you’re going to continue getting your head kicked and your life as a pro cyclist is going to be very short.’ But I genuinely believe that the majority of performances that you see in the peloton today are done clean, albeit there are still some people still cheating out there,” he says. “When you turn pro at 18, 19, 20 years old now, you don’t face that decision. And if you’re good enough, talented enough and work hard enough, you’re going to get the results in races very early on.”
In truth, there is no single answer to why youth is thriving so successfully in pro racing now. We could be seeing no more than a glut of talent emerging at the same time, a modern-day version of the fabled “class of 1970” that included the likes of Marco Pantani, Michele Bartoli, Ivan Gotti, Wladimir Belli, Pavel Tonkov and Francesco Casagrande. Better scouting of riders may also be another significant factor, notably in the case of Bernal and other Latin American riders, whose ability may previously have been missed.
The only thing that can be said for sure is that there has been no better time for male riders in their late teenage years and early 20s to take the step up into road racing’s elite level. For all kinds of reasons, they’re no longer cannon fodder, getting their heads kicked in by wise old pros. Indeed, thanks to the confidence or arrogance of youth, they are changing the approach to racing, making it more unpredictable and more exciting. The prospect of Bernal, Poga ar and Evenepoel mixing it with the likes of van der Poel, van Aert and Alaphilippe in the Grand Tours and Classics is something to truly relish. Kids, it now seems, offer one of the best ways to success.
“If you’re good enough and work hard enough, you’re going to get the results in races very early on”