What have Demi Vollering and Lenny Martinez got in common? One thing is they both told their teams they were leaving earlier this season and quickly felt a chill in the air around their employers.
There’s a joke that goes “I got kidnapped. My parents snapped into action. They rented out my room“. Sometimes pro cycling shares this mercenary reaction.
One example is when a rider changes teams. They can shake hands in March to move squads for the following year. Only the moment their current team learns of this it can almost be as if the rider might is gone and wearing their new team’s jersey. The team doesn’t see them in the same way, as if they’re no longer part of the pack.
None of this makes sense. A talented rider capable of winning races – and points – remains so for the rest of the season. But sometimes management can’t reconcile the frustration at losing a rider. Taking them to wind tunnels, selecting them for big races: it’s as if they’re improving them for the benefit of a rival team. That’s often intolerable, even if they stand to gain for the rest of the year.
It’s not new. The account varies according to the sources and recollections but one version of Eddy Merckx’s masterpiece Tour de France Luchon-Mourenx stage win in 1969 goes he’d heard Martin van Den Bossche was leaving for a rival squad and found this intolerable so he countered Van Den Bossche on the Tourmalet to go solo and take almost eight minutes, practically doubling his lead in the yellow jersey.
That’s in the moment but a few years ago the UCI points system allowed teams to hire riders and they’d bring ranking points with them. So a team losing a rider didn’t want them to score big as it might help a rival team the following year, see Jakob Fuglsang and others a decade ago.
It’s crude to refer to riders as “assets” but all the same, here are prize assets in the team colours only they can get marginalised with many months and some top races left. Stand back and the reaction looks more like the end of a relationship with one jilted partner giving up.
One obvious but imprecise example could be Demi Vollering in the Tour de France this summer. Everyone knew since spring she was leaving SD Worx. Wearing the yellow jersey she was among many to be involved in a crash with 6km to go on Stage 4 and lost over a minute to her GC rivals, almost two to Kasia Niewiadoma. There were no team mates around to help pace her back. Crucially if there were then maybe she’d not have been four seconds down overall at the finish in Alpe d’Huez. Imprecise because who can say for the timing; more so because some team mates were further by her side at the time of the crash and some of the confusion was blamed on race radios not working. In this case it looked like an example of the team not supporting Vollering all the way and many outlets wrote it up like that.
One example that is not seen on TV is when it comes to race selection. It’s been known for teams to dangle a contract at their riders mid-season with words to the effect of “here is a renewal deal for the next two years, sign it today and we’ll select you for upcoming races” but also with the implicit or even explicit message of “don’t sign and you’re off the Tour long list”. This leaves the rider in question with a dilemma, sign and get the security of renewal? Or continue negotiations with other teams but now knowing they’re out of some races that could boost their profile and results?
It’s awkward to give examples of this skulduggery but it’s certainly happening. But if you want to correlate Tour de France selections with the presence of the same riders on the squad the following year, go ahead even if there’s what statisticians call endogeneity as “core riders likely to stay” isn’t revealing either.
You can see this in reverse too. Look at the proportion of riders leaving the team being sent to the Tour of Guangxi and you might spot a match. If a team is not invested in a rider any more then best send them on a longhaul flight while core riders are kept happy by going on holiday early.
Not every case is like this, indeed it’s far from the norm. Had Ben O’Connor coasted through the second half of the season with him and Decathlon-Ag2r knowing he was going to Jayco, it’d be explainable if not understandable. Instead he kept on going and the team backed him too. In a recent radio interview Decathlon boss Dominique Serieys even said O’Connor was almost regretting his decision to leave although let’s not extrapolate too much from this. He’s leaving, just on good terms.
Having cited Martinez above as an example, he agreed to join Bahrain in March it seems. Only he rode the Tour de France so this disproves the points made above, right? Probably not as it seems the plan was for him to have a long summer break after three World Tour stage races (Catalunya, Romandie, Suisse) and then go to the Vuelta as a leader for Groupama-FDJ. Only because the team were coming up short of results and because he was leaving, they preferred to reserve the Vuelta for others and use Martinez as a joker in the Tour. If he was core for them next year and beyond they’d have stuck to the plan.
Conclusion
A note to record the way riders who are leaving a team can sometimes check-out the moment they’ve agreed to join another team. They could have six months of more of racing to do with their current team and stand to be paid hundreds of thousands in salary payments but culturally it can be as if they’ve left sometimes.
Did this mentality cost SD Worx the Tour de France? They’d say no of course. When this occurs sometimes the hard part is for outsiders to spot it, it’s hard to know who gets disinvited from a wind tunnel session or scrubbed from the Tour de France startlist. But it happens.