It's barely Valentine's Day, but in the hollow office parks and parking lots around the Arizona state capitol just west of downtown Phoenix, Arizona, over a hundred of the best junior cyclists in America are flinging themselves around a figure-eight course like it's a Tour de France stage finish in July.
Even in the large peloton on the final day of the 33rd annual Valley of the Sun stage race, it's easy to pick out the favorites, Hot Tubes Cycling, with their trademark blue checkmarked kits. Hot Tubes has been the top team on the American junior scene for the last 30 years. It's an undying institution in a sporting landscape that seems to be perpetually on death's door.
Toby Stanton, a straight-talking charismatic New Englander, is the team's founder and director and has been described by others in the sport as the Godfather of American junior cycling. Stanton began the project in 1992, shepherding some local New England kids to races in his old Volkswagen van. Now, he's known as the guy who gave Matteo Jorgenson his start. Hot Tubes has dozens of junior national titles and is an official development wing of the Ineos Grenadiers.
Attacking alongside the Hot Tubes riders are the insurgent teams – the scores of riders who want to either beat the Hot Tubes riders or join them. Firmly in the camp of rivals is Education First-ONTO. ONTO, formerly a feeder to the Hincapie U23 team (which produced Toms Skujiņš and Joey Rosskopf), now has the backing of the EF WorldTour team and has brought the pink argyle to the junior scene. It's led by Rusty Miller, who has a few years less experience than Stanton, but is a formidable peer with a long string of developing talent and an immaculate handlebar mustache.
Yet to say the race was down to two teams would be wrong. The field was full of potential winners, both regional teams and ambitious privateers – and all of them were in Arizona on this mid-February weekend to try and earn a spot on a European trip with the USA Cycling Junior National Team.
Nobody would call this particular area the “cool” side of Phoenix like upscale Scottsdale or even downtown with its arts districts and tattooed hipsters. In reality, the location of the Valley of the Sun criterium is a liminal space, much like the state of road racing in America these days.
Valley of the Sun, for all its relative obscurity in the sport, is fierce, weird, and fundamental to the construction of talent development in the United States of America. It's step one on the pipeline to the ultimate goal of the WorldTour. The entry of Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel to the pro ranks as 19-year-olds – in Evenepoel's case straight out of juniors – and their stunning success reshaped the entire development pathway for junior riders worldwide. But in places like the US, the sport's erratic profile, and the country's sheer geographic size and distance from the European heart of the sport, create additional challenges.
Where it was once rare for riders to skip the U23 ranks, it's now common, and not only for mega talents. With the timeline for that all-important WorldTour target creeping up, that urgency, for ever-younger riders, has reshaped juniors racing into a far more serious endeavor than ever.
Down the street from the finish line while the 17-18 year olds were flying around the course were three folks in street clothes: ONTO's Rusty Miller and two of his charges, long, lanky characters at various states of puberty.
Jack Klau and Jacob Heines are two high schoolers from Virginia and Maryland who finished third and fifth, respectively, in the 15-16 category. With several years of junior racing still to come, they had less to fight for, but the competition is still fierce and getting fiercer every year. There was no selection spot up for grabs at this moment; instead, they are in the age group where you get ready to get ready for the WorldTour.
“It’s nice to be on one of the best teams in the country and have that backing behind you,” Heines told Escape Collective about being in the pro development pipeline at 16. “But it's important to always make sure you're having fun and loving what you're doing, not just to go pro.”
Seamlessly, Klau jumped in. “Like Jacob said, going pro from America is so difficult to do, and you know that signing up, but the main thing is enjoying the time you have while you're still pretty young and keeping your love for the sport as it's still in this young and fun stage.”
Five years ago, these riders would be riders who perhaps would do other sports or dabble in cycling. Yet now they too are on the development clock. And while Heines and Klau can speak eloquently of the joy of cycling and the fun at the core of what they do, the pressure is still there in a way it wasn't before.
Miller's job still has some familiar contours. “I scout them and find them and develop them in pink. I can hand them off to Aevolo U23 in pink, or another WorldTour dev team, and that pathway can continue to the WorldTour," he told Escape. And although ONTO is affiliated with EF, there's no expectation or requirement they stay in the EF pipeline. "We don't force them to take any particular path; we provide them with opportunities," he said.
But the window for those opportunities opens and closes earlier than ever, which means the timeline for getting riders ready has compressed dramatically. “Oh, it's changing so fast, it's changing so fast,” Miller said of the shift for this generation of junior cyclists, repeating himself for emphasis. “The new wave of the sport puts you in a different position, because now you're shepherding people to the WorldTour when [before] it was just preparing them for the U23 step. We've now established proof of concept that you can have a true pathway or pipeline that goes from juniors up."
While Miller has had some great riders come through his program – like Ashlin Berry, who has already signed with Visma-Lease a Bike's Continental devo team for 2026 – his program has always been a bit of an outsider. Hot Tubes is frequently the big fish in the pond, but so too have been programs like Lux Cycling, which in late 2010s produced Brandon McNulty, Quinn Simmons and Matthew Riccitello.
From his position as an underdog, Miller has seen a slightly different side to the scene and what juniors are going through on the path to the top. Some of this, like defined paths to the WorldTour through formally aligned development teams, is good. Others, like the examples of mega talents like Pogačar and Evenepoel, are less productive.
“It can be challenging because it creates kind of a FOMO," Miller said. High-profile successes like Pogačar can distort the reality of development. "There's a little bit of the social media effect where Instagram and social media can make people unhappy. Because you're reading the curated version of the best version of anyone's life, and they know no one ever posts about their boring day or their crummy day, and so you think everyone is having a better life than you all the time.
“What the recent attention on juniors has done, starting with Remco and then three or four guys after that [who] made the WorldTour at 19, has unfairly created an expectation among 16- or 17-year-olds that that is the way that it's done. What a 16- or 17-year-old needs to remember is that 97% of the guys who are in the WorldTour now did not get there when they were 19. The danger is in juniors thinking that's the way it's done, just because that gets so much attention.”
On this particular morning criterium at Valley of the Sun, it was Enzo Edmonds of Hot Tubes who took the win after a strong performance from the team. While Edmonds won the day, the automatic selection spot for the national team actually went to Beckam Drake, a privateer from Amarillo, Texas and the only rider from Hill's Sport Shop in the field, and who rode a fantastic opening time trial and held on for the overall victory.
The Valley of the Sun stage race is one of a few USA Cycling selection races. The other selection race often changes, but for many years now, Valley of the Sun has had pride of place as the first one.
For some, these selection races can be the only way to find a place on the national team. For others, their place on a trip could be already secured. Yet for everyone, the stakes are much higher than the low-key feeling of the Sunday morning criterium suggests.
With few opportunities to compete against a full junior field in the United States and multiple discretionary spots available, any winning opportunity at Valley of the Sun can be vital. But even with a key national team spot on the line, the race never disintegrated into every-man-for-himself chaos.
Hot Tubes, in particular, raced in the crit with standard tactics, teammates sacrificing their chances for one rider. That's a practice that team founder Toby Stanton never wants to leave behind no matter how crazy juniors racing gets.
“When one guy wins, every single one of them feels that, not that token 'I stick my arm up in celebration because my guy won the sprint,' but a genuine feeling that they were a part of it,” Stanton told Escape.
“I trust them and I believe in them, and then I just set an expectation of excellence, but excellence can look like a lot of different things. Sometimes their best isn't very good, and sometimes their best is unbelievably awe-inspiring. In life they're going to experience both of those things.”
For Stanton, when that is the shared mentality of the team, there is a balance of honesty and ambition that can bring the best out of junior riders at a key juncture of their career.
“This is something that I say to guys now: the best day you ever had on the bike where you were just fucking brilliant is what you're capable of," he said. "Nobody rides above their ability. Most people rarely ride to their ability. My goal is to get you to ride closer to your ability more often, and that comes from surrounding them with really good guys, really good teammates that are motivated in that same way.”
By the numbers, Massachusetts-based Hot Tubes is a one of a kind program. From its first season as a loose unit of Stanton and a few local juniors, to current WorldTour alums Matteo Jorgenson, Magnus Sheffield, AJ August and Artem Shmidt, the blue checkerboard kits have always signified one thing: junior development excellence.
“I had stopped racing because I was a young dad and I wanted to be able to have time with my kids," says Stanton of the team's inauspicious beginnings. "And some local guys asked me if I would take them to a race because I had a van. So, you know, that would be probably creepy now, but back in '92, you know, it was less creepy to have a bunch of guys in a Volkswagen van.
“Ultimately, we went to the National Championships in Bloomington, Indiana, and we won. That was a shocker to all of us, probably, except to Jonathan Page, who did win, and so that sort of started it.” (Page, of course, went on to become one of the best cyclocross racers America has ever produced, with four elite national titles and a silver medal at the 2007 World Championships.)
While the practice of junior development has changed dramatically, the core of it all for Stanton is the same as it ever was: a fun pursuit where the mission of success devolves from that romantic ideal of giving the sport all that you have and letting the cards fall where they may.
“The core reason why I do it is the same – it's supposed to be fun,” Stanton continued. “It's supposed to be fun for these guys, but the racing is too hard for fun to be the only reason. You know, back then there was no WorldTour. There were all the Euros racing in the Tour de France, and Greg LeMond was just about at the point of retiring. So there wasn't like this pathway to the pros, but there was a good pro scene in America, so it sort of became, ‘Hey, let's see how good we can get.’”
Underneath the surface of all of these conversations is an assumption, an assumption that junior cycling is on something of a knife edge. In some ways, junior cycling is experiencing a revolution. In other ways, it's like a bomb went off and shattered everything everyone thought they knew about it.
The man who is at the center of the operation to make sense of all of this is Gavin Mannion, the director of the USA Cycling junior development program, a title he has held for the past three years. Mannion cuts a different figure at Valley of the Sun. While Stanton and Miller are hustling around, corralling their juniors to and from the van and race course and managing the intense parents who always seem to hover nearby, Mannion sits back a little. He is still busy, constantly moving in and out of conversations with the folks around him as he takes in the scene.
“It's changed a lot since I was a junior, and more so in the last five years than in the 25 years previous to that,” Mannion told Escape.
Gavin Mannion raced seven seasons at the Pro Continental level, including in Europe; he now runs USA Cycling's junior development program. (Right photo © Gavin Mannion)
Mannion was a stalwart on American professional teams like UnitedHealthcare and Rally Pro Cycling before retiring in 2022. He never broke through to the WorldTour peloton, but raced extensively internationally, including WorldTour events, and had consistent results in big American races (like a win in the Colorado Classic and second overall at the Tour of Utah). That experience gave him a depth of perspective on what it takes to make it – and what happens when you don't quite get there – that is essential for taking on the development mantle as junior cycling has exploded.
“The junior program is our largest full-time program in terms of national teams on the road," he told Escape of USA Cycling's focus. The organization does U23 development as well, including European training and racing trips, but the junior men and women are paramount. Tellingly, "the U23 stuff is sort of shrinking,” he said.
That focus on young riders means that "it's almost easier than it's ever been as a junior to get into that pipeline, but if you're not in that pipeline, it's exceedingly difficult to break in at 21. A few years ago, that was still a reasonable age to start knocking out world-class performances and get noticed, whereas now it's a last-ditch effort. The most important thing we can do is get as many 19-year-olds into [Continental] development teams as possible."
The Valley of the Sun crit rolled on for the rest of the day in Phoenix as the junior riders, teams and parents trickled away from the venue and masters racers slowly took their place. In that turnover there is a lesson to be had about American cycling. None of the races are just junior races; there are amateur fields, waves of masters age-groups, and the mixed Pro/elite amateur category. Everything is mashed together in the dwindling race organisations that forge ahead despite all the forces working against American road racing.
Nevertheless, in bringing all those categories of riders together, what is clear is the intensity and vibrancy of the junior scene. You get the impression that if all those other categories were cut, the race would be fine with the hundreds of junior racers and their parents filling the void. While the fact that the rest of the racing is an afterthought might not be positive for the sport as a whole in the United States, it reflects the undying core of the intensity of the sport in the United States amongst a youthful generation, led by riders like Jorgenson and McNulty, which is now playing a fundamental role in global professional racing.
The question that many in the cycling world are asking, however, is what if the intensity is set too high? Or to put it under a more distinctly American lens, if the pro race later in the day meant more, would we have a healthier structure even if it was producing top professional talent less efficiently? Would junior riders feel the pressure to train as intensely as they do now?
“A lot of these WorldTour development teams are getting TrainingPeaks data access to 16-year-olds and are kind of blown away at how much they're training,” Mannion said. “They are a little bit scared. If this 16-year-old is already doing 20-hour weeks pretty consistently, and WorldTour guys are only doing 22 or 24 hours, how is he going to get to that level? Like, where is that improvement gonna come from?
“If you're a world-class junior by the time you're 18, then yeah, an 18-hour week probably needs to be pretty standard. But for 15-year-olds, if you're only 5-6% off the total annual training volume of WorldTour riders, I think that's a bit much.” But for US riders in particular, that training data has to make up for the fact that there aren't a ton of opportunities for juniors to prove themselves in races against international fields.
For Hot Tubes and ONTO, finding those key racing opportunities has meant more trips to Europe. With the backing of WorldTour teams, that is simpler than it sounds. Both programs have confirmed trips planned to the top junior races on the European calendar. And for the fastest riders amongst those teams, further trips with Gavin Mannion await.
Yet for everyone else, and especially everyone younger, the pathway is now just a little bit longer and starts a little bit earlier. All of it is in an effort to get young riders to races, to learn the craft, and to keep the flickering flame of American road racing alive, even if the races here seem to be withering on a vine.
“When I was a junior, all you focused on was learning how to race your bike well,” Mannion said. “You understood that even if you turn pro at 23 you were going to spend the first four years learning from these veterans of the sport how to do things. And that sort of doesn't happen anymore.
“Some of it's probably good. I think a lot of people were hindered by that, and the way training is going now, you're sort of coming in at a much higher level, and can get results a lot sooner. But I sort of think we've lost this focus of learning how to race a bike well before you're worried about [things] like weighing your rice and monitoring your HRV.”
If American juniors are going to keep up with the pace and pressure of international junior development, some of that racing has to happen in the United States, even if it's in the weird part of Phoenix, Arizona on some February morning. Races like Valley of the Sun, teams like Hot Tubes and ONTO, and riders like Drake, Edmonds, Klau and Heines are essential to stoke the fire of road racing in the United States and keep it burning for years to come. Without it, American riders will have to race in Europe younger, longer, and earlier – increasing the risk that instead of stoking the fire, it ends in burnout.
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