World Tour Cycling Teams Continue the Trend of Signing Young Talent
by Meg Smith
A couple of years ago, when the likes of the Ineos Grenadiers, Jumbo Visma and UAE Team Emirates started offering junior and first year U23 riders World Tour contracts lasting between 3-5 years, many people were surprised. However, the trend has continued.
Team Ineos Rider Egan Bernal © Getty Images
Here are some of the most notable recent signings:
Rider: Age: Team:
Egan Bernal 21 Ineos Grenadiers
Josh Tarling 18 Ineos Grenadiers
Jorgen Nordhagen 17 Jumbo Visma
Juan Ayuso 17 UAE Team Emirates
Quinn Simmons 18 Trek - Segafredo
While some might criticise these decisions, in my opinion, introducing young riders to well established World Tour setups is an essential stage of their development.
More recently, fatigue resistance has become a major determinant of performance and indicator of success, in all forms of racing from the Classics to the Grand Tours. A well-developed resistance to fatigue is a pre-requisite in the peloton today, in order to keep up with the competition, leading to the talent identification process becoming even more of a challenge.
Due to the nature of junior races, with shorter events and a different style of racing, race outcomes are less determined by fatigue resistance when compared to a World Tour. Hence, fatigue resistance does not play as big a role in the prediction of performance in these contexts, making it a difficult parameter to assess for a rider’s longer term performance.
Therefore, if fatigue resistance is to play such a significant role in performance outcomes at World Tour level, then how can one go about preparing young riders for the next level? Perhaps this is an explanation as to why some of the biggest teams in the sport have started signing young riders.
By gradually introducing these young talents into World Tour setups, they are exposed to the high training volumes necessary to drive aerobic adaptation. This is a key step in developing and improving fatigue resistance. As the potential for improvement is difficult to predict among juniors, assessing their adaptability to these training stimuli could be an indicator of talent, allowing young riders to develop their aerobic capacity in preparation for the next step.
Therefore, offering young riders contracts lasting anywhere from 3-5 years in a safe, proven team setup is an essential step that gives them the time to gradually develop and adapt to training load, before competing on the World Tour stage.
References:
van Bon, Marco. (2023). TALENT DEVELOPMENT: Fatigue resistance as a performance parameter in the talent development of road cyclists (part 2 - end). 77. 22-27.