Adam Yates’s Orica-Scott squad has quietly assembled one of the best Grand Tour teams in cycling. Procycling looks back at the precedents
Adam Yates is one of a trio of genuine Tour contenders in Orica-Scott. How will the team manage their ambitions?
Orica-Scott have a luxury problem, born of the success of their recruitment process. They’ve got three rapidly up-and-coming Grand Tour contenders – Adam Yates, Simon Yates and Esteban Chaves - and at some point it seems inevitable that their ambitions will clash. The Yates twins, at least, are used to it. They have had a lifetime of sibling rivalry, and wanted to ride together. One of the reasons they chose Orica to represent in the first place was that the Australian team wanted to take on both riders, while other teams had hesitated at taking both.
So far, the cohabitation has been a harmonious one. All three are at similar stages of development, though Chaves is perhaps slightly ahead in terms of his results. The Colombian is two and a half years older than the Yates twins but he lost a year in the rehabilitation from a horrific crash in 2013. The benefits of sharing the pressure have outweighed the potential block on one or another rider’s ambitions.
The similarity in the three riders’ trajectories and abilities is striking. Chaves rode a Vuelta and a Giro as pack fodder, to gain experience (he was 41st in the Vuelta in 2014 and 55th in the Giro in 2015). His breakthrough came in the 2015 Vuelta, where he was fifth overall, followed by second and third, respectively, in the Giro and Vuelta last year. He was closer to winning the Giro, getting pushed out of the pink jersey on the final mountain stage, but his performance in the Vuelta was arguably just as good: the two best Grand Tour riders in the world, Nairo Quintana and Chris Froome, finished ahead of him. Chaves is also good at the Classics – he won Il Lombardia in 2016.
Adam Yates also rode two Grand Tours for experience before going in as a leader. He was 82nd in the 2014 Vuelta and 50th in the 2015 Tour. In last year’s Tour he rode as a contender and finished fourth. He’s also good at one-day racing – he won Clásica San Sebastián in 2015 and was runner-up at the GP Montréal the same year.
Simon Yates rode two Grand Tours for experience. He rode two thirds of the 2014 Tour de France and made a planned withdrawal, while lying 83rd overall, then came 89th in the same race the following year. In 2016, he went to the Vuelta with an eye on the GC and came sixth overall while supporting Chaves to his podium finish. He’s less prolific in the one-day races than Chaves and his brother, but Simon Yates is
If all three continue to develop, Orica may end up with three of the best six or seven GC riders in the world on their team
building a formidable palmarès in the weeklong stage races – in 2015 he was in the top six of Basque Country, Romandie and the Dauphiné, and he was runner-up to Richie Porte in Romandie this year.
So far, so good. Orica’s strategy in the three Grand Tours has been well managed and nobody seems to have had their toes trodden on. In 2016, Chaves got the Giro leadership, Adam Yates the Tour leadership and Chaves the Vuelta leadership while Simon Yates made his first foray into riding GC in a Grand Tour. This year has been more complex. The original plan was: the Yates twins at the Giro, Chaves at the Tour and all three at the Vuelta. However, Chaves was withdrawn from the Giro with a knee injury, so Simon Yates was taken out of the Giro team to focus on the Tour, as a back-up for Chaves, depending on the Colombian’s form in July. The team should still follow Plan A at the Vuelta, with all three going (although that will depend on how Yates and Chaves emerge from the Tour).
And after all that, if all three continue to develop in the way they have so far, Orica may end up with three of the best six or seven GC riders in the world on their team. It may sound like an excellent problem to have. Which team in the world wouldn’t want three such strong riders on their books? But the situation will still have to be carefully managed. It doesn’t necessarily help that the three have such similar strengths and weaknesses – if one was a much better time triallist than the other two, then Orica could select according to the parcours, but all three are excellent climbers who have to ride defensively in time trials.
Strong teams are not new in cycling. There is plenty of precedent for squads counting three or more genuine Grand Tour contenders in their number, and there’s even a recent example of such a trio containing two brothers. In 2008, the CSC team went to the Tour de France with the Schleck brothers and Carlos Sastre – Sastre won the race, Fränk Schleck was fifth and Andy Schleck was 12th after being one of the strongest climbers in the race and conceding most of his deficit after inexperience led him to eat improperly and blow up in the biggest Pyrenean stage. The result was a great one for the team, but the cohabitation put too much pressure on the three riders and Sastre left the team at the end of the season. Fränk Schleck, who was in the yellow jersey until Sastre’s Tour-winning attack at Alpe d’Huez, has gone on the record expressing disappointment at Sastre having attacked a team-mate, although he recognises that the result justified the means. The Schlecks were so disillusioned with the management of the team that they ultimately left to form their own (Leopard, for whom they finished second and third in the Tour in 2011).
Different teams have used different methods of working with multiple Grand Tour contenders. In 2009, Astana finished the Tour with Alberto Contador in first, Lance Armstrong in third (later stripped) and Andreas Klöden fifth, and in terms of
team cohesion, the race was a shambles. The hierarchy was clear-cut, with Contador much stronger than Armstrong, but Armstrong spent the race undermining his team leader. Klöden just quietly got on with things without attracting too much attention, which more or less summed up his career.
Going further back (see table), many teams have finished with multiple riders in the top 10 of the Tour, but it’s often been the case that the climbing domestiques are so strong that they are dropping many of their rivals, rather than competing for team leadership. And the PDM team, in the 1989 Tour, had a unique problem of four different riders, Gert-Jan Theunisse, Steven Rooks, Rául Alcalá and Sean Kelly all wanting GC leadership (which left five domestiques for four leaders). The lack of cohesion led to the spectacular failure of getting all four in to the top 10, but missing the podium.
The best example of all is of La Vie Claire, the French team, in the 1986 Tour. The squad was so strong that they came first and second overall, with Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault, but also fourth, seventh and 12th. It wasn’t a happy family, however, with LeMond and Hinault at loggerheads throughout the three weeks.
So far, Orica has managed the challenge of handling three ambitious and talented riders much better than their antecedents. It could even be argued that since none have yet demonstrated the kind of physical superiority over the entire peloton that Chris Froome and Nairo Quintana have, the team could still realistically hope to win the Tour de France by going in with all three and overwhelming the opposition with aggressive tactics and weight of numbers. At the same time, that will necessarily involve sacrifice, and Orica’s biggest job might not be handling a potential Grand Tour winner, but managing the riders who don’t win.