SPRINTERS: A STACKED FIELD
Who is the best road sprinter in the world? Nobody really knows, and there is more congestion at the top of the hierarchy than there has been for many years, if ever. Dylan Groenewegen won the most races last year – 15; Caleb Ewan won the most Tour stages – three. Pascal Ackermann won two at the Giro; Sam Bennett won two at the Vuelta. Elia Viviani won the most in 2018. Fernando Gaviria has been troubled by injury recently, but we cannot overlook his four Giro stages in 2017 and two Tour stages the following year.
These six riders are probably ahead of the rest, but even then the lines between them and the rest are blurred. Fabio Jakobsen and Jasper Philipsen are fast coming up, there’s always the chance of a career resurrection for Nacer Bouhanni and we won’t write off Mark Cavendish and André Greipel until their P45s have been definitively filed. And what if the race is longer or hillier than usual? Then Peter Sagan, Alexander Kristoff and John Degenkolb must be factored in.
In short, there’s barely enough road for all the top sprinters to share. Headto-heads featuring every top-tier sprinter are rare; even rarer are the occasions when all are delivered into a sprint without getting lost in the fight for position. If there’s a single race when all six line up, it will be one of the clashes of the season.
The early 2020s look like a golden era that will be every bit as compelling as the few years in the early-to-mid-2010s when Cavendish, Marcel Kittel and Greipel swapped stage wins at the Tour de France. What really makes this an interesting time is that the current top six plus Jakobsen and Philipsen are all in or coming into their primes. However, their rise to the top is arguably bad timing. Just when we’ve got a real battle on our hands, it appears that the three grand tours are incrementally reducing the opportunities for the sprinters in favour of ratings-grabbing hilly stages and the slow burn of the GC battles. The Giro d’Italia has realistically six stages for the bunch finishes in 2020; the Tour officially lists eight, but closer inspection reveals significant climbing on some of these days – it could be as low as four, and the flat days are really spread out, making fatigue a factor; the Vuelta a España currently looks like the best option, with seven, though crosswinds could always reduce that.
The best races for sprinters have changed a little as a consequence over the past few seasons. A Tour sprint win will always trump everything else, which is why Ewan has such a strong argument to be the man of 2019. But with so few sprint stages and so many sprinters vying at the very top, somebody’s going to leave empty-handed. Nowadays, the UAE Tour attracts most of the top sprinters, and the flat one-day races that haven’t heeded the siren call of more hills, gravel and cobbles – Eschborn-Frankfurt, Hamburg Cyclassics and RideLondon - have all seen regular bunch finishes, even if RideLondon and Hamburg clash this year. In 2020, perhaps these races, along with the grand tours, will finally allow one of the top six sprinters to elevate himself above all others.