HOW THE MIGHTY ARE FALLING

In cycling, success is no guarantee of survival. Just ask the manager of the team with the most wins this year

One of the paradoxes of professional cycling is that success can breed failure. In 2011 the world’s most prolific team, Htc-highroad, was forced to close when they couldn’t find the sponsorship to keep going.

Seven years later Quick-step Floors has won more races than any other team but now faces the same crisis, which arises in part because success can increase riders’ salaries to unsustainable levels. And if teams lose the riders they’ve developed, there is no system of compensation.

Patrick Lefevere, who runs QuickStep Floors, reflected recently on a model that doesn’t work for teams in the way that it does in other sports. ‘If you look at the team since around 2000, I’ve brought through 100 or more young riders into the sport.’

‘If you pay €50,000 to a kid but after two years he leaves, you have nothing. That’s different to football and most other sports. As a cycling team, you have no rights, so if you’re lucky you get a thankful rider saying thank you and goodbye. That’s it.’

Lefevere has a wealth of talent in his roster – Julian Alaphilippe, Fernando Gaviria, Philippe Gilbert, Bob Jungels, Elia Viviani among them – but no title sponsor for 2019, with Quick-step planning to step back and become a secondary sponsor.

‘That’s cycling,’ says Michael Mørkøv, who joined the team this year. ‘It’s always a struggle to get the money you need. It can seem like a joke, Patrick having the most successful team seven years in a row, having this amazing season and still having difficulty picking up a sponsor. The organisation of cycling should have been done differently many years ago. As long as the sponsor is the main part of the budget it makes the teams really weak.’