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Fernando Gaviria celebrated victory in the Vuelta a San Juan on Wednesday as if he had won a stage in the Tour de France or a major spring classic.
And rightly so.
In today’s scene of highly competitive sprinters at the top of the elite men’s peloton, every win counts.
For sprinters, the pressure to win almost every galloping opportunity is massive, ironically they have fewer resources and opportunities.
Of course, that’s always been the case for the hard-knock, high-pressure world of sprinters, but it’s even more so these days.
For Gaviria, Wednesday’s victory was confirmation that he can still win.
The Colombian has struggled for two years with COVID and suggestions that he was not doing the work he needed to do, so a win at the otherwise low-ranking San Juan Tour is the best last chance to prove he can Still a player in bunch sprint. ,
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Several factors are adding up to make it tougher on sprinters these days than it has been in decades.
speed reward
First, the sprinter field holds tremendous depth at the top of the elite men’s peloton.
Every race on the men’s calendar will see at least four or five leading sprinters in the bunch. In San Juan, apart from Gaviria, Sam Bennett, Elia Viviani, Fabio Jacobsen and Peter Sagan are all desperate for a win.
In this weekend’s Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, there are Caleb Evans, Michael Matthews, Daryl Impey, Ethan Hayter and many others.
Things would heat up in the “desert” races in Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE Tour, and then the early season races in France and Spain.
And that’s just January and February. Once the calendar shifts focus to the premier races, add Dylan Groenewegen, Mark Cavendish, Watt van Aert, Biniam Girme and Mathieu van der Poel to the mix. And the list goes on.
Pro riders know they lose more than they win, so any time a top-tier sprinter can leave a race with a win, it’s a significant milestone.
Race organizers don’t make it easy
Second, sprinters are less likely to move around.
Race organizers have been spreading course design for two decades, largely at the expense of the traditional, old-school bunch sprint transition phase.
It’s rare to see a stage without at least one or two climbs to spice things up. This makes for more enjoyable racing, but it is anathema to the fastest racers. Riders such as Tyler Farrar, André Greipel, and Marcel Kittel were nearly thrown out of the sport after they failed to cross the string of punch climbs on so-called “sprint” stages to keep anything in line.
That’s what sprinters have had to lean on during the past decade, many times at the expense of their pure power.
These lumpier stage profiles have also cast the net wide on who can win on any given stage. Riders from van Aert and van der Poel to Grand Tour winners like Tadej Pogacar can also force their way into the frame, creating even more finish-line traffic for pure sprinters.
Smaller Roster, Less Support
Third, there are fewer spots on the roster, which is especially felt in the grand tours.
Gone are the days when teams dedicated entire Grand Tour squads to the leadout train. It is now rare for a sprinter to come close to a 20-season win.
Grand Tour rosters have shrunk from nine to eight, putting pressure on the sprinters and their respective trains.
Jumbo-Visma, for example, cut one of the fastest sprinters from the peloton at Groenewegen last year as the team put the yellow jersey as top priority.
During the Tour de France it is rare for a team to field more than one rider dedicated to helping a designated sprinter.
It depends on the team, of course, and both Intermarche–Circus–Vanti with Girme and Astana–Kazakhstan with Cavendish will bring sprint-focused teams to the Tour in 2023.
Raises points fight profile
Yet there is a ray of sunshine for the faster men of the peloton: UCI points.
A late 2022 panic in the bottom half of the elite men’s WorldTour has seen teams pouncing on riders in lower-tier races in a frantic chase for salvation.
The teams that survived, and the few that didn’t, learned that a slow but steady harvest of UCI points is best served with a select few sprinters on the team.
Even with changes to the UCI points system, one-day races and stage wins still carry a weighting factor in terms of how many points can be generated on any given day.
A top-5 in a one-day race is worth more than a GC placing in a full week of racing.
The teams were already talking about it during the Santos Tour Down Under, with sporting directors saying they would not get caught in the scramble for points again.
The relegation/promotion system still exists, for both the season-end rankings that determine wild-card invitations as well as the three-year rankings for the next round of WorldTour licences, with points at the heart of each team’s strategy.
And that means sprinters will see their importance and relevance inside the peloton grow again.
Will the peloton see a revival of the Petacchi-esque train for the grand tours? Probably not.
But teams will be slotting in a few more riders to support their sprinters.
Look no further than Movistar, the team working hard to have a Grand Tour on the WorldTour chopping block at the end of 2022. It signed Gaviria on a one-year deal for 2023 to snatch some points throughout the season. Even if he’s not winning, the top fives start adding up.
With every team chasing points, this can only be good news for anyone who likes a mass gallop to a fast finish to victory.
This also means that the pressure increases even more.
Those finish-line celebrations will be even more intense and emotional, simply because the stakes are higher than ever.
