Lights

Comments

Tadej Pogačar points to the sky in celebration as he rides to victory on stage 21 of the 2024 Tour de France, Slovenian flags waving in the background.

If you have a Pogačar or an Evenepoel, you aren’t letting them go

The three-time Tour de France winner plus Remco Evenepoel and a tiny handful of other stars are winning at an unprecedented rate. That makes them irreplaceable assets.

Dane Cash
by Dane Cash 06.11.2024 Photography by
Cor Vos and Kristof Ramon
More from Dane + EscapeCollective Paywall Badge

Even in the depths of the offseason, cycling has been keeping us entertained with news and rumors of big-time riders and their contracts. The purported details of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s attempt to pry Remco Evenepoel away from Soudal-Quick Step emerged this past weekend, and then on Tuesday, La Gazzetta dello Sport laid out the specifics of Tadej Pogačar’s new contract with UAE Team Emirates.

The top line news item is simple: The biggest stars aren’t going anywhere.

Try as other teams might to pry them away, it just makes no sense for UAE or Soudal to let their stars be poached, and so men’s road racing is left with its own version of the so-called “lock-in effect.” Like the American housing market – where homeowners who might otherwise be interested in selling their houses instead stay put to hold onto the great mortgage rates they secured a few years ago – the biggest teams in cycling are increasingly focused on what they have already invested in the sport’s select few real superstars. As such, those superstars are not on the market for anyone else either.

To put it simply, if you have a Tadej Pogačar or even a Remco Evenepoel, you aren’t giving him up. And if you don’t have one of the very, very select few stars winning the vast majority of races on the calendar these days – or if yours is halfway through his 30s – you are left to beg, borrow, or steal trying to get one of the big winners.

As the biggest stars keep delivering on their status as favorites in the biggest races, their teams are rewarding them with similarly unprecedented contracts. Back when Tadej Pogačar signed a four-year deal to stick with UAE Team Emirates from 2021 through 2024, it felt like a comparatively lengthy deal. UAE has since extended him twice, most recently for a six-year period through 2030, a contract length practically unheard of a few years ago.

Meanwhile, over at Visma-Lease a Bike, Wout van Aert recently signed a lifetime deal. At least there is a chance that Pogačar might spend his twilight years on a different squad, whereas Van Aert really, really isn’t going anywhere. For reference, Jonas Vingegaard will also be with Visma for quite a while, as he is signed through 2028, as is Mathieu van der Poel at Alpecin-Deceuninck.

Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar, and Remco Evenepoel on the Tour de France podium.
Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogačar, and Remco Evenepoel are all staying put for a while.

Primož Roglič is the only member of the so-called “Big Six” who will be out of contract at the end of next year, but he is also the only one in his mid-30s (Van Aert is oldest of the rest, having recently turned 30, and Van der Poel will follow in January). Red Bull understandably committed lots of money but over a much shorter time period to Roglič, who can’t fight off Father Time forever. This year, already, his results took a big hit compared to 2023, partly but not entirely due to two months out of competition after that Itzulia crash.

With most of the big races won by the big stars, and with most of those big stars signed to long-term deals, it makes sense why the rest of teams in the pro peloton would at least try to kick the tires to figure out whether those contracts are really as ironclad as they seem. While there are no trades in cycling, contracts are sometimes broken, and contract terminations are sometimes negotiated. That latter point is more important now that the UCI is trying to discourage contract violations with stiff penalties, but unfortunately for the have-nots, the haves are not budging. You can understand why.

Pogačar’s case is simple. He is the sport’s best rider. UAE literally can’t do better than having him on the team. In a sport with a clear main event, a rider who can win that race and most of the other big races is worth more than any combination of other stars. Pogačar’s “termination clause” is so absurdly expensive that the amount does not even matter.

No one team can come up with the reported asking price of €200 million. UAE’s entire annual rider payroll is less than a fifth of that number. It’s not a number meant to set a starting point for bidding on Pogačar’s services; it is a number intended to end any conversation before it starts.

Evenepoel’s case is more interesting because the team that currently has him under contract does not have the resources of the United Arab Emirates, and because there have been credible reports of Red Bull trying to pry him away. Soudal team boss Patrick Lefevere has also been known to let big stars walk in the interest of saving money for the next big star. At the end of the day, however, it seems that Lefevere has managed to secure Evenepoel for the foreseeable future, apparently standing in the way of any poaching efforts and also working with Evenepoel to keep him happy.

And why wouldn’t Lefevere have done just that? At the end of the day, Soudal has gone all-in on Evenepoel. What was once the sport’s premier squad for the cobbled Classics has shifted focus, with its monetary resources invested in supporting Evenepoel’s goals. Having remade the team around Evenepoel, Lefevere can’t well lose him without replacing him with a rider of equal caliber – but none of those very few riders is going to be available any time soon because their team bosses are operating in the same way. That’s the lock-in effect.

So what are the have-nots to do if they can’t pry those stars away? The simple answer is to work worth with the talent they do have while they try to find and develop the stars of the future. Lidl-Trek is among the teams doing the best work in that department right now. The team ranked fourth in UCI points this season, with the likes of Mads Pedersen, Jonathan Milan, Toms Skujiņš, and Mattias Skjelmose enjoying success across the calendar, and Lidl-Trek has also invested in youngsters like Thibau Nys.

Could Thibau Nys be part of the “Big Six” of five years from now?

Maybe Nys will evolve into the sort of rider that topples today’s Big Six. Again, time comes for every big star eventually. Then again, UAE and Visma are just as laser-focused on signing and developing the next big thing too. After all, Visma wrested new under-23 road World Champion Niklas Behrens away from Lidl-Trek’s development team, while UAE has high hopes for Pablo Torres, the Spaniard who will turn 19 next week and then race at the WorldTour level next year on a deal that, like Pogačar’s, runs through 2030. Nobody said it would be easy for Lidl-Trek. At least for now, they can enjoy results in those races not won by the “Big Six” while feeling optimistic about the future because they have a sizable budget and an eye for talent.

It takes both of those things to even try to succeed in the increasingly stratified world of men’s road racing. The Ineos Grenadiers have plenty of money, for instance, but had the fewest wins in their history in 2024, and it’s hard to be all that optimistic about their future either, at least unless Tom Pidcock becomes the road racer they’ve long been hoping he would.

As for the rest of the peloton, the prospect of joining the rarified air currently enjoyed by the few “haves” seems increasingly grim. Even if they do find the next Pogačar or Evenepoel, how are those teams without big budgets supposed to sign those riders long-term in the age of six-year multi-million Euro deals? There is no easy answer, of course, and it is a question that those teams will be trying to answer for the foreseeable the future. In the meantime, we will have a sport of haves and have-nots, and the haves are going to do whatever they can to stay that way.

Did we do a good job with this story?