IN- DEPTH: THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
There is a golden generation of ver y young riders emerging in professional cycling and winning the world’s biggest races. Procycling looks into why the earl y 20- somethings are doing so well
Procycling meets the young riders who have taken the cycling world by storm in 2019
The received wisdom in cycling decrees that riders tend to peak in their late 20s and very early 30s. Outliers will always skew the numbers a little, but when you look at the winners of the last 50 Tours de France, exactly half were aged between 27 and 30. The race’s other 25 yellow jersey winners range from 22 to 25 and from 31 to 34 – the older and younger winners are spread almost exactly twice as thinly, as you’d expect.
However, we now have a 22 yearold Tour winner. Egan Bernal is the third-youngest Tour winner ever, and the youngest since 1909. The closest historical precedents are Jan Ullrich, who was 23 when he won in 1997 and Laurent Fignon, who was 22 when he won in 1983.
The interesting thing about Bernal, however, is that he appears not to be a complete outlier. Tadej Pogacar recently finished third in the Vuelta a España and won the Tour of California at 20. And Remco Evenepoel may have achieved one of the best results by a teenager in the history of cycling by winning the Clásica San Sebastián aged just 19. In the cohort just above these three young talents, we can find Mathieu van der Poel, who is 24 but a relative novice at road racing, winning the Amstel Gold Race, while the new men’s world champion Mads Pedersen is just 23.
Where has this all come from? The best explanation is that training theory has evolved in
leaps and bounds in recent years. Coaches and riders are working at a level of details in terms of wattage, efforts, rest, recuperation and structure that has taken a lot of the guesswork out of training. The old style of training - long slow miles through winter, more efforts into spring, has echoes in modern periodised training, but highlevel coaching is very specific now. Riders are also becoming ‘professionalised’ much younger – the U23s live and train like the pros, and juniors live and train like the U23s to a large extent. Training techniques like weights, core strength and flexibility have trickled down so that when riders turn pro, they are already ready for the rigours of the WorldTour.
Teams are also less hierarchical than they used to be. If a team knows that a rider is in a position to lead, from their ‘numbers’ and physiological output, the pragmatic decision is to support that rider. Ineos were the prime example of this at the Tour – once it became clear that Bernal was the best placed to win, all resources were put into place to support him, even though it meant potentially frustrating the ambitions of the defending Tour champion Geraint Thomas. Points are becoming more and more important in cycling, and a team cannot afford to sacrifice any on the altar of the ego of a more senior team leader.
However, these theories will only be testable and proven in a few years when the next generation of young riders comes through. It’s equally possible that the BernalPogacar-Evenepoel-Sivakov cohort is a golden generation like those of 1990 and 1980. Peter Sagan, Nairo Quintana, Michael Matthews, Thibaut Pinot, Rohan Dennis, Romain Bardet and Michał Kwiatkowski were all born in 1990. A decade earlier, Tom Boonen, Fabian Cancellara, Alejandro Valverde and Philippe Gilbert were all born with a short time of each other between 1980 and 1982. Whichever is true, cycling fans will be keenly anticipating a decade or more of grand tour clashes between Bernal and Pogacar and, in a few years time, Evenepoel.