ANALYSIS: LONG CAREERS
Van Vleuten is performing well into her late 30s. Procycling looks at some of her forebears
All the talk through the second half of the 2019 season was that cyclists were getting younger, or at least winning at a younger age. The narrative was taking shape with the precocious performances of 19-year-old Remco Evenepoel in the early part of summer, was set with Egan Bernal winning the Tour de France at 22, and so by the time Tadej Pogacar came third in the Vuelta a España at 20, the paradigm had definitively changed.
However, impressive as these performances are, cyclists are also getting older, or at least winning at an older age. The 2018 World Championships road race was won by Alejandro Valverde, 38, and
Philippe Gilbert won Paris-Roubaix in 2019 at 36. Annemiek van Vleuten has also emerged over the last two seasons as the world’s best female cyclist – she’s won 21 races over 2018 and 2019, including the Giro Femminile twice, La Course, Strade Bianche, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and both time trial and road race world titles.
It seems that we are entering the era of Schrödinger’s champion, who is both getting older and younger at the same time.
Riders are entering the men’s WorldTour earlier. Evenepoel has been the most notable teenage debutant in the sport since
Eddy Merckx, but it looks contagious – Trek-Segafredo signed junior world champion Quinn Simmons, who is still only 18, for 2020.
On the women’s side, the stats would suggest that there are even more young riders coming through – compare nine male riders born in 1998 or later in the top 300 riders on CQRanking with a surprising 48 on the female side. However, there’s no U23 category for females – if there were, many of those 48 would ride in that category before turning pro, as they do on the men’s side.
At the same time, riders are hanging around for longer, though a few outliers tend to distort this trend. Valverde is one of the best cyclists in the world and he was born in 1980. Van Vleuten’s the best female
and she is 37. Whether this is indicative of a trend or not is hard to say, because Valverde and Van Vleuten could both be described as one-offs. There’s been a broad shift towards careers lasting longer since the 1980s – with exceptions, riders tended to retire around 32 back then, but modern riders go on longer. The ultimate expression of this in the modern era is the Peter Panlike figure of Davide Rebellin, who continues to soldier on at the age of 48, though it wasn’t clear if he has a team for 2020 as we went to press. It’s been 16 years since he won a monument and 11 since his last WorldTour win, but he did win Coppa Agostoni in 2015 when he was 44.
In 2020 there are just 26 riders out of 539 in the men’s WorldTour peloton aged over 35. In the women’s WorldTour and Continental teams, that number is just 15. The question as the season begins is, how long can outliers like Valverde, Gilbert and Van Vleuten keep winning? Gilbert has just signed a three-year deal with Lotto Soudal, which will keep him going until he is 39. If he is to fulfil his crowning ambition of winning Milan-San Remo, he will have to become the oldest rider ever to do so –
Andrei Tchmil was just over 36 years old when he set the race record in 1999. Valverde will turn 40 in April, and he has made no secret that the Olympic road race is his biggest aim for the year, although he can take heart from the fact that the London 2012 Olympic road race winner, Alexander Vinokourov, was 38 at the time of his victory. And Van Vleuten is arguably the best she has ever been as she starts 2020 as the world champion.
However, all three have a while before they can equal the records of the past.
The oldest rider to win an established major race is Maria Canins, who was 42 when she won Trofeo Binda in 1992. Canins managed to combine a career as an international cross-country skier with being the best female cyclist in the world in the mid-1980s before Jeannie Longo took over her crown. When she won the Tour Féminin in 1985 and 1986 she was also Italian national cross-country skiing champion – she only took up cycling in her early 30s. Canins is also the oldest winner of the Giro Femminile – she was 39 when she won the inaugural edition in 1988.
On the men’s side, the only rider over 40 to have won one of the major races – the five monuments, three grand tours and Worlds – is Chris Horner, whose victory in the 2013 Vuelta at the age of 41 was an anomalous result to say the least. Every other rider who has won through their late 30s and beyond was also a prolific winner earlier in their career. However, Horner spent his early career mainly as a US domestic pro and only ever squeezed into the top 10 of another grand tour once – eighth place in the 2010 Tour, which was two higher than he’d originally finished, before Alberto Contador and Denis Menchov had their results stripped for doping. However, Horner was more than equal to the challenge of Vincenzo Nibali
“On the men’s side, the only rider over 40 to have won one of the major races is Chris Horner, whose victory in the 2013 Vuelta was an anomalous result”
and Alejandro Valverde, who shared the Vuelta podium with him.
As yet, no male rider over 40 has won a monument, but there have been winners of classics in their late 30s ever since Louis Lesna won the 1902 Paris-Roubaix at the age of 38. Lesna held the record for a monument for the best part of a century – it was only when Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle took his second consecutive victory in the 1993 Roubaix that it was broken, and Duclos-Lassalle was less than seven weeks older than Lesna had been on the day of his win. Valverde’s 2018 Worlds win wasn’t quite enough to make him the oldest winner of the rainbow jersey – Joop Zoetemelk was a few months older when he won the 1985 championships, but his 2017 Liège win did enable him to overtake 2010 winner Vinokourov as the oldest winner there. In the other monuments, Tchmil, who was representing Belgium at the time, heads the list at Flanders and San Remo, while the record at Lombardia has stood for almost 100 years – nobody older than 1928 winner Gaetano Belloni, 36, has won it since.
What is certain is that even the indefatigable Valverde and Van Vleuten realistically have few years left winning big races, though Van Vleuten insists that physically she is still, incredibly, getting stronger. To put things into perspective, if Evenepoel were to maintain his career to the same age as these two riders, we’ll still be talking about him in the late 2030s. What better evidence is there that cyclists careers are extending in both directions?