Bike expertise has turn into so essential to elite highway racing groups that the game has, one rider mentioned, “become like Formula One”.
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When the primary important stage race of the season, Paris-Nice, begins on Sunday, riders might be watching their rivals and complaining that others have higher bikes.
“Everyone is talking about the bike now,” says French rider Axel Laurance.
“It’s so fast that the smallest difference becomes very important. In the peloton, you see the guy who goes at the same speed as you, even though he’s not pressing the pedals as hard.”
At Laurance’s new crew, the Belgian outfit Alpecin, his bike “moves on its own” in comparison with the one he had final season at B&B Hotels.
The machines might look the identical, however they aren’t.
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“On the surface, a bike is still a bike. It has wheels, handlebars and that’s it. In reality, it’s much more complicated. There are huge differences,” mentioned French rider Benoit Cosnefroy of AG2R-Citroen.
It is a pattern that, riders and crew managers agree, has accelerated in recent times.
‘Getting close to Formula One’
“Before, they all had almost the same bikes. Today, there are big differences,” mentioned French rider Anthony Perez of Cofidis.
“The frame, the wheels, the tyres… add everything up and you go from a tradesman’s two-wheeler to a rocket. Cycling has become like Formula 1.”
Thomas Damuseau, a former skilled racer who’s head of apparatus on the AG2R agrees.
“We’re getting close to it,” he mentioned, including that AG2R’s gear producer BMC “works with Red Bull and the same engineers who develop F1 cars”.
When he broke the world one-hour report in October, Italian Filippo Ganna rode a custom-built time-trial bike with a 3D-printed carbon-fibre body with aerodynamic lumps copied from bony tubercles on humpback whale fins.
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Last 12 months, Dane Jonas Vingegaard received the Tour de France in a median velocity of 42.102km/h, smashing the report of 41.654km/h set by Lance Armstrong in 2005, the final 12 months he completed first.
The American was later stripped of his seven Tour titles for taking efficiency enhancing medication.
“The bikes have become so efficient that it explains the increase in race averages,” mentioned Damuseau.
The sport’s governing physique, the UCI, has guidelines that racers should journey manufacturing fashions out there to the general public, a market that producers hope to seize with high-profile race victories.
The technological progress led to darkish mutterings within the peloton. After a rider was caught with a tiny hid motor inside her bike on the 2016 cyclo-cross world championships, the UCI stepped up the struggle in opposition to ‘mechanical doping’, toughening punishments and wheeling out x-ray machines and thermal imaging cameras to scan bikes.
Bike now comes first
The high quality of the gear is in peril of making, as doping did, a two-speed peloton the place the wealthy groups have an edge.
“Obviously, the rider continues to be the horse. But between fully-developed bikes from producers with means and others who’re extra restricted, it’s evening and day.
“The riders understand this, they talk about it among themselves in the peloton. And when they have to choose their future team, they look at the bike before the contract,” mentioned Damuseau.
The riders agree that the bike now comes first.
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“It’s an investment. If you have results with a good bike, your salary will follow,” mentioned Czech rider Zdenek Stybar.
“I will be at the end of my contract this season and for the years to come the bike is my number one priority,” mentioned Cosnefroy.
His boss at AG2R, Julien Jurdie mentioned bikes appeal to big-name riders who’re, in flip, the important thing within the “war to get the contract of the right manufacturers”.
“When it comes to recruitment, in all the discussions we have, the first question that comes up is the bike,” he mentioned.
“Those who have the stars also have the best bikes.”
Sometimes producers go straight to the star riders, resembling Slovakian Peter Sagan, who introduced his bike provider with him when he joined TotalEnergies in 2022.
“Without his bike, he wouldn’t sign. He has only ridden Formula 1s. He doesn’t know what a go-cart is,” mentioned Perez.
By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse
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