Barely Out Of Nappies

Last year saw an explosion of youth talent at the top of the sport – and there’s more to come

It’s not just that we’re getting older – top cyclists really are getting younger. Some of the most successful pros of the past year are still under 23, and there’s a wealth of talent coming up through the ranks. Cyclist looks at the factors behind cycling’s youth explosion

At the 2018 Vuelta a España, Pavel Sivakov made his Grand Tour debut for Team Sky. At 21 years of age, he was the youngest rider in the race, and he looked it as he emerged from the team bus for the start of Stage 14. There was a haunted look in his eyes. He didn’t appear to be enjoying his first threeweek race. Then again, he was also heavily bandaged after a bad crash at the end of the first week. ‘It’s not going like I wished,’ said the Russian. ‘I’m struggling every day.’

He was in ‘survival mode’, he added, ‘hoping I can make it to the rest day. The wounds are healing well but my recovery isn’t very good. But I’m not going to just stop. I’m going to fight.’

Sivakov seemed most of all to be trying to convince himself. The fight went out of him a couple of hours later and he climbed off, ensuring that the three letters that would appear next to his name for his first Grand Tour were DNF.

Coaches will tell you there is no physiological reason why an exceptionally talented rider in their early twenties can’t compete

This was hardly unusual for a first-year pro, especially one at such a tender age. But it was quite an adjustment given that only 12 months earlier Sivakov had won two of the biggest under-23 races in the world, the Baby Giro and the Giro Ciclistico della Valle d’aosta. Then he was the King of the Mountains in the Tour de l’avenir, where he won the final stage alone, and by two-anda-half minutes. Oh, and before that, he had won the junior editions of Liège-bastogneLiège and the Tour of Flanders.

Joining the Worldtour with Team Sky was a jolt to the system. ‘It’s hard to accept at first,’ he said during that Vuelta. ‘You’re going full gas and you think there will be a gap behind but you look back and the whole peloton is there!

‘But it’s OK,’ he added. ‘There’s no rush. I’m only 21 years old. I’m trying to learn, and I have to accept that I’m not going to win yet.’

School of hard knocks

Sivakov’s rough baptism at that Vuelta wasn’t only expected, it was accepted as part of his induction to professional racing. After all, there’s no shortage of talented juniors or under-23s, but it’s only in the Worldtour, as they struggle and suffer while learning their trade, that we – and they – discover if they are made of the right stuff.

Sivakov didn’t have to wait long. In 2019 everything changed, for him and fellow members of what we might come to call a golden generation, which includes Egan Bernal, Remco Evenepoel and Tadej Pogačar.

Bernal, at 22, became the youngest winner of the Tour de France for more than a century. Evenepoel, in his first year in the senior ranks, won a major one-day race, the Clásica San Sebástian, as well as the European time-trial title before – perhaps most astonishingly of all – claiming a silver medal behind Rohan Dennis in the TimeTrial World Championships.

Pogačar, at 20, finished on the podium of his first Grand Tour. He was third at the Vuelta a España, where he won three stages, having won the Tour of California and the Volta ao Algarve earlier in the season.

As for Sivakov, he won the Tour of the Alps from a field that included Vincenzo Nibali. Nibali went on to finish second in the Giro, where Sivakov also shone. The Russian – who was born in Italy and grew up in France – got stronger as the race went on and came home ninth overall. It was a remarkable performance for a 21-year-old, especially as he had expected to be riding in a support role for Bernal before the Colombian crashed and broke his collarbone a week before the start.

More was to come. In August Sivakov won the Tour of Poland, a Worldtour race. Behind him in the top 10 were Jai Hindley (23), Sergio Higuita (22), Tao Geoghegan Hart (24), Chris Hamilton (24) and James Knox (23). The decisive stage, where Sivakov was second, was won by Jonas Vingegaard, a 22-year-old with Jumbo-visma.

It was fitting that at the end of a breakthrough season for a generation of riders in their early twenties, a 23-yearold, Mads Pedersen, became the Road

Race World Champion in Yorkshire.

Golden oldies

It didn’t used to be so unusual for riders in their early twenties to produce such performances. Fausto Coppi was 20 when he won his first Giro d’italia; Jacques Anquetil 23 when he won his first Tour de France;

Eddy Merckx 22 when he won his first Giro; Felice Gimondi 22 when he won the Tour; Bernard Hinault 23 when he won the Vuelta a España and, a couple of months later, the Tour.

Admittedly the above were all outliers: each would go on to be considered among the greatest riders in history. The average age of a Tour de France winner is 28.5, so the sport’s blue riband event remains largely the domain of the more mature athlete.

Speak to some coaches, however, and they will tell you that there is no physiological reason why an exceptionally talented rider in their early twenties can’t compete with those in their late twenties. But for a few generations it didn’t happen (an exception being Jan Ullrich, who was 23 when he took his first and only Tour win in 1997), and so one question rears its head: where did all the exceptionally talented youngsters go between the time of Hinault and now?

Inevitably, one theory involves doping. Tyler Hamilton, a former teammate of Lance Armstrong, claimed that in the 1990s and early 2000s there was an understanding that young riders would not (with one or two exceptions) go straight on to blood doping, and that the induction would last, typically, 1,000 days.

‘A thousand days of getting signals that doping is OK, signals from powerful people you trust and admire, signals that say, “It will be fine,” and, “Everybody’s doing it.” And beneath all that, the fear that if you don’t find some way to ride faster, then your career is over.’

Whatever the reasons, something has changed. And rapidly. This time last year some of us were wondering how Evenepoel,

One question rears its head: where did all the exceptionally talented youngsters go between the time of Hinault and now?

who won 36 out of 44 races in 2018, would cope with not winning – little imagining that in his first year as a professional, and as a senior, he wouldn’t have to.

Sivakov has a theory, one that has been voiced by a few people, about why younger riders are developing more quickly. And there’s a perfect illustration of his point on the day that we speak over the phone.

Every day’s a school day

It’s mid-december, Sivakov is in Mallorca on the Team Ineos training camp and social media is abuzz with Geraint Thomas’s enormous training ride the previous day.

The 2018 Tour winner had ridden a lap of the island, 309.4km, in eight hours, 35 minutes and 15 seconds, at an impressive average speed of 36kmh.

We knew this because Thomas posted a picture of his Garmin on Instagram. Reports in the cycling press duly followed, noting – with information culled from other riders’ social media – the exploits of his teammates: Christian Knees joined him on his lap; Filippo Ganna did 167km; Ethan Hayter did 181km; Michael Kwiatkowski and Giro winner Richard Carapaz did 67km and

93km respectively.

Knowing in such detail what some of the best riders are doing in training, thanks to social media such as Strava, is a new phenomenon (if Coppi did a lap of Mallorca we’d never have known), one that might partly explain why young riders appear to be fast-tracking their development. Instead of having to learn the dark arts of training over several years, they can see straight away what it takes to perform at the highest level.

‘It’s true that social media means you can see more of the inside of every team and how it works,’ says Sivakov. ‘Everyone has more access to the professional level. Maybe there aren’t so many secrets as there used to be.

‘You have to be careful with it – like the ride the guys did yesterday. You cannot see everything. You can’t see the efforts, what you did before, how you fuelled. A lot of important details are missing. It’s dangerous to think, “He’s doing this so I need to do it also.”’ (A phenomenon that has been dubbed ‘Stravanoia’.)

Sivakov stresses that he can only speak for himself, ‘and I don’t know how it worked before [although his father and mother, Alexei and Aleksandra Koliaseva, were both professional cyclists], but I think younger riders are being taken care of better. I see the support I have, and I also think young guys are not as scared as they were. When you see other young guys doing well, it has a big psychological effect. If you see a guy your age winning, it takes down a barrier that might have been there in your head.

You think, OK, I can do it too.’

He describes a virtuous circle: ‘There’s better coaching, coaches have a lot more knowledge, and the more that young riders are doing well the more seriously coaches are looking at younger riders.’

This goes for Worldtour teams, too. Rod Ellingworth, the new principal at BahrainMclaren, suggests teams are looking more closely at the junior ranks, and believes that the under-23 category may in time disappear. But both he and Sivakov caution against extrapolating too much from the success

of Evenepoel in particular – ‘Insane,’ says Sivakov of the Belgian’s San Sebastiàn win.

Yet his own wins have been almost as eye-catching. So what clicked in his second year as a pro?

‘I think having a full season in my legs definitely helped, both physically and mentally,’ says Sivakov. ‘You know how the team works, how the Worldtour works, how races work. All of those details add up. I also changed coach, from Xabier Artetxe to Tim Kerrison and I love working with him – his way of coaching suits me really well.’

Both work for Ineos: Artetxe with Bernal and most of the South American contingent; Kerrison with Chris Froome, Thomas and most of the English-speakers. The differences between the coaches are small but significant, says Sivakov: ‘It’s like a high-performance bike. At the top level they’re all pretty similar and the differences are very small.’

There were few signs before the Tour of the Alps that Sivakov might be on the brink of a breakthrough.

‘I had prepared with Tao [Geoghegan Hart, his Ineos teammate] and we knew we were at a good level but I never would have guessed. On the first day Tao won, and then I won the next day and it was an amazing feeling. You grow up seeing guys like Nibali on TV, but it’s more afterwards that you think about that. In the moment, you don’t think about it at all.

‘But the Tour of the Alps is one thing, the Giro is something else. It’s a different level. The field was really strong and I wasn’t supposed to go there as a leader. I prepared to be a domestique, a high-mountain support rider, but then Egan crashed and I got the chance to ride for myself.

‘When we got to the high mountains I realised I could be capable of a really good performance. There was one stage [14, to Courmayeur] where I was up there with Nibali and Majka and it was really enjoyable, realising I could compete with them.’

Fantastic Four

Of course, the challenge for the four outstanding young riders of 2019 will be to back up their performances in 2020. The pressure comes in part from each other.

‘For me personally their performances do put pressure on, but it’s pressure that you need to transform into good pressure,’ says Sivakov. ‘It’s easy to get carried away and think, “These guys are winning races, I need to win too.” I do feel that. And I know other people will expect it of me.’

It won’t be easy to win in a team with as many top riders as Ineos, and Sivakov knows his main role is likely to be as a support rider.

‘I want to keep progressing and be able to do better and when I’m better I’ll get the support: that’s the way I think. If I’m good

I’ll have opportunities.’

The other challenge is thinking longterm. Bernal, Evenepoel, Pogačar and Sivakov could theoretically have 15-year careers ahead of them. Sivakov’s view on this is fascinating, and perhaps instructive.

‘Of course I think about that,’ he says.

‘But cycling is getting younger – I think it’s happening in all sports, actually, that younger athletes are winning.

‘You have to listen to your body and if you feel you’re able to do it, why not? If you start thinking only long term, time might run away. You have to find a balance. Don’t rush too much or push yourself to your limits, because you can crack physically or mentally – mentally especially – but you also have to remember that your career is short.’

Richard Moore is a cycling journalist and author, former racer and co-founder of

The Cycling Podcast

‘Cycling is getting younger,’ says Sivakov. ‘I think it’s happening in all sports, actually, that younger athletes are winning ’