“I turn up, I drive the car, I go home,” Team Sky’s lead directeur sportif Sean Yates once said.
The role of sports director, to use its Anglicized title, is not nearly as simple as that self-deprecating statement makes out. The Netflix cameras in Unchained principally make the job look like a polarised mixture of dry PowerPoint presentations delivered on team buses, motivational conversations in hotel rooms, or in-car camera reactions to racing which combine encouragement, ecstasy and expletives (“You’re a fucking motorbike, Wout!”).
The figures in this time-honored role are usually former racers, working vicariously through younger physiological freaks to try and win a bike race. Umpteen unseen components go into that, but it’s also just the tip of the iceberg.
Away from the limelight, they are the level-headed thinkers, carrying the can for the team’s tactics and fretting over decisions in the dead of the night. Their tasks extend far beyond the race too. A DS can be driving through the night to deliver new bikes or waking up a rider in the dark for a rush to the airport so he makes it to the birth of his child.
How do they deal with two leaders who want to be number one on the team? How crazy is driving in the convoy? What is the life of a sports director, and how will pro cycling’s “endless role” change in the future?
“Five years before I stopped racing, I didn’t want to be a DS. Well, I hadn’t thought about it,” Sam Bewley says. During his final years competing in the WorldTour with BikeExchange-Jayco, he spent more time with sports directors, talking to the likes of Mat Hayman and friend Zak Dempster. On the bike, he enjoyed interacting with young riders and was passionate about making them better.
“Being a DS would provide those things I wanted to continue to do,” he says of his realization. He went through the interview process at Israel-Premier Tech and got a job there after retiring at the end of 2022, becoming one of their nine sports directors. For 2025, he leads the now 12-director staff under the direction of general manager Kjell Carlström and sports manager Steve Bauer (also both longtime pros).
Bewley was a career-long domestique, and domestiques tend to become the sport’s leading sports directors. Think of Giuseppe Martinelli, Giancarlo Ferretti, José de Cauwer, Brian Holm and current Visma-Leasa head of racing Grischa Niermann.
They have won a few races themselves, but been at the front of the bunch for leaders and toiled in the gruppetto a lot more, gaining a deep understanding of the various roles in the sport and their demands. “I think there’s a lot of skill sets that go across to being the DS really quickly that you learn from being a domestique and maybe don’t learn so much from being a leader,” Bewley says.
He sees parallels with top management figures in sports like rugby and basketball. “Steve Kerr coaches the Golden State Warriors to however many titles – of course, he won NBA titles as well, but you wouldn’t see Michael Jordan doing that,” Bewley says. (One might argue there is also greater necessity: champions earn a higher salary and many don’t need to earn their crust this way; in Jordan’s case, his post-player role in sports has been as executive and team owner.)
“As a domestique, you’re always at the service of other guys. If you’re the leader, you have a certain selfishness, I suppose, because everybody’s there for you,” says Bewley. “You can pull the strings a little bit inside the organisation. Whereas a good domestique who has a long career first does a really good job on the bike, but they’re the guys the leaders want around them off the bike as well. They inspire the group, they speak up in team meetings. You’re essentially trying to do the same thing [as a DS]: inspire a group of guys before the start of a race.”
The nuts and bolts of the job is getting the best out of their riders. “First and foremost, you’re the one who’s trying to work out how to win a bike race,” Bewley says. “So you’ve got to be good at planning strategies.” The actual work for a given race – research, course recons and other challenges to be faced – starts well in advance.
Picnic-PostNL coach Matt Winston starts implementing a plan weeks before the race when he and his colleagues call every rider and outline goals so the roles are clearly defined. Bewley talks to some riders, but not all of them. “I got nothing out of it [as a rider],” he says. “It wasted 10 minutes of my time and their time [and] there was no need for that call, unless it’s really important or a part of the strategy you need to talk about.”
Often, sports directors do an outline of their work, aided by the game-changing VeloViewer analytics platform, in the couple of weeks leading up to a big race. They tend to finalise the actual plan on the day, factoring in up-to-date variables, such as the field racing, the weather or previous day’s results, as well as predicting how other teams might race.
Pre-race, PowerPoint presentations do a lot of the heavy lifting at briefings and a little tech proficiency to make a professional-looking document goes a long way. “There are some directors who are 65 years old who don’t even own a computer. Not in our team. But that is the case and you can’t do that as a DS,” Bewley says.
Ahead of bigger races, they bring everyone together online in a meeting to talk as a team. The night before, the tactical part is covered in the briefing. Winston says that it is an open conversation: for all their planning, they also want buy-in and important nuggets from riders with 50 years of collective racing experience who may know the roads inside out. It makes the morning’s team bus meeting more of a recap of agreements made and when they want to take key actions.
Post-race on a tour, they also have daily one-on-one meetings with riders, usually in the room or during massage, about the day and their state to understand where they are mentally. (Their experts provide the data to let them know physically.) It’s a matter of evaluating the positives and negatives, mulling over whether, or where, improvements need to be made.
But the job also takes in a far larger scope. Logistics, for one, is never far from mind. Directors must have a firm handle on the equipment at their disposal, making sure what the riders might want is in the truck at the race, not 800 miles away at the service course.
And the core role of directing – getting the best out of riders – requires significant investments of time and care that underline that Yates was making a dry joke about just driving the car. To know what any given rider is capable of on race day, the modern DS needs to have a good understanding of their training – why they are doing certain sessions, or what they’re capable of in terms of historical wattage output, all to answer a simple question in the heat of a race: can he or she repeat five minutes at that pace?
Winston enjoys working with different personalities and working out how to draw out excellence. “I think I’m pretty good at reading people: the ones I work with a lot, I know whether they’re on a good day or a bad day. I can tell by body language, quite quickly,” he says. “I’m really interested in personality traits, the online tests and insights.”
Overall, making a race plan comes down to channeling a huge amount of study and information into simple ideas which riders from all over the world can buy into, understand and put into practice during intense pressure of a bike race. But above and beyond a solid strategy, gaining trust is essential to success. That doesn’t come from a PowerPoint.
“No player ever remembers the tactics they were told in their career, only how someone made them feel,” EF Education-EasyPost DS Tom Southam says, paraphrasing a quote he read in a book about football. “That’s the thing that counts. Obviously, you don’t want to get things wrong. If you’re true to yourself and get the basics right, then you’re gonna do a good job.”
Southam has been a WorldTour sports director since 2017 after learning the ropes at British team Rapha Condor. He’s learned that it boils down to working with people authentically. It helps to nail down basic values like reliability, never over-promising, and punctuality early on in the relationship.
“Your style of being a DS has to come from you,” says Southam. “If you’re not your genuine self, people realise. If you’re trying to be “a DS” in the image you think, you’re doing it wrong, in my opinion. Because people know it’s bullshit. If you’re a relaxed person but think you have to be uptight and scream at people, it won’t wash.”
He mentions the example of Soudal-Quick Step stalwart Davide Bramati, loved by riders for his passion because it comes from a genuine place. Bewley also brings up Matt White (Jayco-AlUla) as another popular DS who transmits his absolute love for the sport to his charges and keeps them motivated.
Transparency and clear communication is paramount in their dealings with riders. Many modern DSs calling the shots are shaped by their own experiences with authority figures in the peloton. At RadioShack in 2010 and 2011, Bewley says his bosses were a bit hardboiled. He missed having “a young DS who had a bit of sympathy for a young guy from New Zealand who was getting his head kicked in every race, rather than some dude just screaming at your face every time you fucked up. We all did. That was how the sport was. DSs were different then … the sport hadn’t got to the point it’s got to now with sport science, training, nutrition – the one-percenters.”
The ranting, raving DS stereotype seems to belong increasingly to the past, especially as the current custodians know they are dealing with a different generation. “A 20-year-old doesn’t react to constructive feedback in the same way somebody who is 40 or 50 might because parenting is different,” Southam says. “Schooling is different, people are different … we have to be the ones that change, which is what is interesting about this job. It’s no good me just being an old, cantankerous stick-in-the-mud.”
Sometimes big calls need to be made, but such decisions are not made on whims or feelings anymore. Data is readily available for everything from sleep scores to power figures, over months and even years, and the numbers don’t lie. A smart DS has a sixth sense to see the things that riders don’t see – or don’t want to admit.
“If they’ve been skipping training or they’re a little bit heavy, they know deep down. If you’re both honest with each other, you get through those conflict moments,” Southam says.
“The most difficult thing we face is two riders of a similar profile in the best shape,” he adds. “And then you have to go back to ‘What were they told about coming to this race? Or this team? Why do you think they should have this position as leader here?’ A lot goes into that and you can undo a lot of good work with a rider in a very short time. They feel like they’ve been overlooked or they were the wrong call. Sometimes they never forget that.”
For Southam, it’s about sticking to the party line. “Peer to peer [discussion] is super important, debriefs where people actually speak to each other.”
Sometimes, it goes back to the racers doing some of the talking. “In my position if you stand there and bollock the riders, it goes in one ear and out the other quite often because that’s what they expect you to do,” Southam says. “But if one of their teammates says ‘Where the fuck were you?’, it really cuts them. You need to create those opportunities in the dynamic too: let’s let these guys make this work.”
Going from the saddle to the driving seat of a following car is a sudden transition. Bewley stopped racing at the end of 2022, so the 37-year-old has the advantage of a fresh understanding of modern racing. But he is also calling the shots to riders he raced with and even worked for himself. “Sometimes you have to have those conversations with your mates: ‘I know you want to lead tomorrow, but the reality is we’re gonna go down this path [with someone else],’” he says.
There are not the same intense pressures on a DS as a pro rider. There are fewer mood fluctuations, not experiencing the abject misery of being down on luck and away from home for weeks on end. But they still love racing and being a part of the wider team environment.
“This is a job where you basically write how you do the job as you go, because [as DSs] we don’t do all the same things,” Southam says.
It can occasionally require going beyond the call of duty. One day in late March, Southam got a phone call at four o’clock in the morning and woke up his South African rider Stefan De Bod so he could catch a plane and get to the hospital for the birth of his child. He made it in time, although Southam cracks wryly that “it left me with five riders at Settimana Coppi e Bartali though.”
The Briton knows of a fellow directeur sportif who drove through the night to pick up some new bikes after a mechanic totaled the race leader’s ride driving into a low barrier in a parking lot.
Like referees in a big soccer match or cycling journalists at a race – I live in fear of taking out a passing cycling champion with my tote bag as he or she rides past – a directeur sportif should never be the story either. If that’s the case, something has gone badly wrong.
Think Addy Engels stopping his Jumbo-Visma team car for an ill-timed nature break during the 2019 Giro d’Italia and not being there when Primož Roglič had problems with his front shifter and needed help. On a teammate’s bike, the team leader later crashed on the descent to the finish. Or Quick Step’s Bramati getting a one-day suspension from the 2015 Tour de France for not wearing his seat belt, caught out by one of the team’s own social media videos, of all things.
Then there are the numerous managers over the years who have also found themselves penalised for giving overly sticky bottles to riders after crashes, punctures, or other misfortune. Those are publicly bad days on the job.
There are precious few qualifications needed to be a sports director and those that do exist are relatively new. Bewley simply had to get a UCI Sport Directors license, achieved at the annual five-day course (costing $2,000 a head) at the sport’s governing body HQ in November. Passing this regulation-packed examination, which began in 2009, is compulsory for those working with UCI WorldTeams, UCI ProTeams and UCI Women’s WorldTeams.
When race day itself rolls around, after the pre-race briefing and radio check, their daily task is driving within centimetres of the next team car in the convoy. There is no training for that.
The first time Bewley drove in-race was the 2023 Tour of Catalonia. “I was shitting myself,” he says now, laughing. Getting convoy etiquette down takes time. For example, when it rains and every rider wants a rain jacket, which team goes first? It’s a case of looking, learning and listening to race radio for call-ups. “Nothing’s second nature to me yet so I still make quite a few fuck-ups. Normally, you find out pretty quickly too because the car behind you gets pissed off,” Bewley says.
“It’s a little bit like the peloton in some ways. When it gets really stressful, all the cars are trying to be in the same spot at the same time. The horns are going and everyone’s yelling at each other. There are moments where you lean out the window and go, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ But once you finish, it’s all done and you see them at the hotel that night.”
In the heat of the action, different directors give differing amounts of information. Tom Southam attempts to not talk unnecessarily: taking a roundabout with 100 km to go on the slightly-faster side doesn’t make a tangible difference. Besides, different riders also want different amounts of guidance. His former charge Magnus Cort (now with Uno-X Mobility) just needed a few facts about what was approaching when he is up the road, whereas young talent Georg Steinhauser thrives off more information or reminders to use other riders.
“We’ve got this perspective, but they’ve got the feel more than us as to what’s happening,” Southam says. He saves some pearls of wisdom for when they matter most: “There is a value to ‘The last bend is 200 metres to go,’ or, ‘Remember, it’s a headwind finish,’ or, ‘keep going because you can come back, the group in front is stalling,’ because you can see it on TV and they can’t. Those little things, those are the real moments you change a race, and those are so small. Sometimes I feel like we talk just because we have to, though we all try not to. I’m sure the riders know the difference in that.”
In terms of how that guidance can influence the race, Southam thinks back to the 2019 Amstel Gold Race, won by Mathieu van der Poel, and its frenetic finale. EF rider Simon Clarke was in no man’s land between breakaways Jakob Fuglsang and Julian Alaphilippe, who were cat-and-mousing and about to be caught, and a fast-approaching chase group led by the dazzling Dutchman. As Clarke was swept up in the chase, Southam counted in the riders in front of the Australian, giving him a clear overview of the tangled race: “When you catch these two, you’re sprinting for the win,” he said at one point. Clarke finished second, ahead of many more heralded names in the sport.
So much DS work – and influence on the race – goes unseen. They can scheme for months on strategies which, thanks to circumstances, never see the light of day. It is an exacting job in times of travel, time and mental energy. Matt Winston says he is on the road for over half the year: “It’s a lifestyle rather than a job. You can’t do this when you just want to do 9 to 5.”
It is a fickle sport. The coach can remember his first Grand Tour, the 2019 Giro, with former winner Tom Dumoulin as Team Sunweb’s leader. When the Dutchman crashed out on stage 5, all the anxiety was for nothing. “I’m not going to put myself through that again in terms of that level of nervousness. Because all your preparation for six months of the year can be out of the window like that,” he says, remembering his thoughts.
“Sometimes, when it doesn’t go quite so well, you also have to coach yourself not to take it too hard. Like the Tour de France [in 2023], I was pretty open to the outside [reaction] and the team; I was disappointed with how it went.”
Given the mental load, it raises the question: who is looking out for the sports directors? “Generally, we tend to support each other,” Southam says. EF’s head sports director Charly Wegelius ensures everyone is in good nick and functioning to their best, beyond their tasks. If they have to be at home for an emergency, it’s allowable and others can cover.
But at times, it is an unavoidably solitary job. “When you do a race alone, it’s quite odd because you are like a department of one,” Southam says. “At the end of anyone’s day, they just want somebody to talk to that kind of gets what they’ve done. That’s why it’s hard being a bus driver in a team. If you’re a soigneur, you’re one of six or eight; if a mechanic, one of four.”
While the role is as boundless as any individual wants to make it, it is also more specific and more shared than it used to be. Back in the day, the DS used to virtually be a one-man band, corralling two soigneurs and two mechanics, unfolding paper maps, worrying about finding sponsors, struggling with unfamiliar language – English on the race radio? Fat chance – while steering manual-transmission cars with their knees, driving into the peloton itself to talk to riders and (probably) chain-smoking cigarettes.
Today, most WorldTour men’s teams have between six and nine sports directors and some DS staffs go into the double digits. The majority of modern sports directors are not involved in contract negotiations for riders. And while they keep an eye out for prospective future signings, it is not their responsibility. In Grand Tours now, every team also has a driver in the first team car, meaning lead directors can fully concentrate on tactics from the passenger seat.
With invaluable tools like VeloViewer, parcours information has transformed. There is no need to look into a road book during races. Logistics require planning, but many race road books have a QR code to scan and Google Maps irons out navigational kinks.
Of course, there is a certain romance to how things used to be. “I would love to do a race like an old school DS,” Matt Winston says. “I think we’re spoiled: we just punch into a GPS and we’ll be directed to Hotel Regina in Lido di Camaiore. We send an email, here’s your flight ticket, off you go.”
But there is no going back: the job of directeur sportif will continue to evolve. So, what is the future of DSing? “We’ll probably be redundant in a few years. We’ll be taken over by AI with some robot talking on the radio pre-programmed with better knowledge than we have. We’ll just be there to drive the cars,” Sam Bewley jokes.
He expects it to become a more high-performance based job where comprehension of training data, cutting-edge tech, and the holistic picture is fundamental.
Who knows? We could yet see a set-up closer to Formula 1, with team managers sitting in a paddock or central location, watching on TV and helped by expert analysis from an abundant team thousands of miles away, with radios strong enough to relay perfectly-clear messages. A number of teams already get assistance from war rooms set up at a race or the team’s service course.
On the race radios note, Tom Southam hopes that they stay in the sport. “Speeds aren’t going to get slower if riders don’t have information. I think it’s unsafe if a rider has a crash and can’t tell us, or we miss a rider,” he says. “I don’t think that technology has taken away the simple, basic tactic in cycling which is you have to be ruthless, do less than the next person, and beat them at the end.”
Ultimately, sports directors remain an essential human element between the rider and the team. They are organisers, motivators, confidants, tacticians and psychologists all in one – and that is impossible to replicate.
“The basic work we do can be taken away from us quite easily: getting to the race start, planning things out,” Southam says. “What needs to exist within the machine is always people.”
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