This post focuses on the recent spate of public demands being made by successful professional cyclists – broadcast through the media and internet – for next year’s contracts, following their strong performances at this year’s Tour de France. I could not help but immediately notice this approach, which seems a radical departure from the usual procedures in place when I was racing in the 1980s and early 1990s. I believe it is significant in its implications for a number of reasons that range from benefits and drawbacks to the individual cyclist, their teams and the sport as a whole.
Let’s begin with Jurgen Van Den Broeck, a young talented Belgian racer who was hired by Silence Lotto to be a lieutenant for Cadel Evans to help him win the Tour de France. He decided after the race that it was time to go to the press to demand co-team-leadership with Evans for next year. Admittedly, this was after Evans’s failure in the race and Van Den Broeck’s strong showing in the mountains and race overall. Presumably he acted on his own, and not at the direction of the team manager, in his many attacks at the front of the field, since these attacks did nothing to help Evans.
Van Den Broeck was not alone in doing this. For example, Franco Pellizotti, the 31-year-old Italian on Liquigas who just took the King of the Mountains jersey at the Tour de France after finishing third overall at the Giro d’Italia, used a very similar tactic. He went straight to the media and demanded sole leadership for next year’s Giro d’Italia, a position he shared this year with his teammate Ivan Basso, a former winner of the Giro. Even Contador’s agent, his brother, has disclosed Contador’s refusal of Astana’s offer of $16 million euros to extend his contract for another four years at $4m/year, a tidy sum of money. By making this private financial offer into a public refusal, he appears to be using the media to leverage his salary and position with other teams.
Despite these riders’ outstanding performances, I can’t help but wonder why they would go public with their demands. Is cycling becoming like a reality TV show, where the popularity of a voting public determines the outcome? Is it simply that tweeting and the internet are so easy and accessible that riders automatically use them to communicate with their fans? At the same time, these tools function strategically to leverage one’s cause through the media and public support, with outcomes that potentially could transform a rider’s career.
But what are the downsides of this turn of events? Because most sponsors and fans do not know the intricacies and complicated strategies inherent in winning diverse types of races over a long season, if they hear a rider’s demands after a strong performance, they may pressure the team director to comply when in fact that may not be the best decision for the team in the long run. Team leadership is earned through proven successes, which draw the trust and respect of teammates and team management, as well as through maturity in representing the sponsor publicly before the media.
During my years of racing, the process of negotiating contracts and one’s role on the team were matters of private discussion with the team owner, director, and athlete. In part, this is due to the way professional teams are structured, both then and still today. The team owner guides the team like the CEO of a company, either solo or through a director and/or manager who functions as the COO of the team. Their leadership roles include choosing the athletes, negotiating their contracts and intuiting their various roles on the team in relation to the overall team objectives, and then actually running the team throughout the season, financially, logistically, strategically. The team owner approaches sponsors with their product – a professional cycling team, perhaps one with particular goals which can be modified to suit the sponsor’s needs – which in turn offers a marketing service to the sponsor in exchange for financial support.
To give one specific example from my own career, in 1987 when I was racing for Len Pettyjohn on Team Lowenbrau, I had by far my best season ever. I was ranked second in the national standings, won about 20 races including the World's Trials, Cascade Cycling Classic, Mt. Evans, and the Battle at the Brewery - the only race I ever competed in at Superweek. I was selected as the team leader of the US team at the Pan American Games (placing 4th) and also at the World’s, although a crash kept me from starting that race. As the season was winding down, I had several discussions with Pettyjohn one-on-one to discuss my salary and my leadership position on the team. It was clear that his position was fairly firm.
He had hired me under a two year contract as one of several team leaders, along with a couple others including Alexi Grewal (1984 Olympic gold medalist), and I had agreed and this was not going to change. From his perspective, his job was to have a team that represented the sponsor with as many successes as he could bring. He knew that the season was long, spanning from February through October, and that different riders excelled at different periods of the season and at different types of events under different conditions – stages races, criteriums, one-day races, climbing, sprints, altitude, etc. He also was perceptive enough to work with the riders to get them to all have personal opportunities to shine and get results without causing infighting or conflict.
The reason this matters is because cycling is a team sport – as Lance recently told Contador via twitter, “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team’” and to “drop this drivel.” Therefore all riders have to want to support each other throughout the season since the sport is so difficult. It truly is a real world example of the sum being so much greater than the potential of its individual parts. Without incredible team cohesion, respect, and sacrifice amongst each other, plus their willingness to listen to their team director, teams are not successful. Pettyjohn’s strategy was therefore not only good for the team, but was also good for business – both for the sponsor as well as for the athletes and the staff. Out of my ten years of racing, my five years with Pettyjohn were by far the most stable, enjoyable and successful.
Why is it useful to compare then and now? While I feel like the media blast approach has the potential to benefit individual riders in their negotiations (which I support), it may do so at the expense of undermining the foundation of what is at its heart a team sport with incredible self-sacrifice. Imagine how these self-proclaimed (rather than director-proclaimed) demands impact the teammates of these riders, especially in light of the fact that it takes years to mature as a cyclist with the tenacity, mental focus, physical endurance, and consistency of right decision making to earn your team’s respect. Without the self-sacrifice of the many, the few will find their opportunities greatly diminished.
Two examples drive this point home. A few years ago, the team many thought was the best in the world, Team T-Mobile, went to the Tour de France to try to unseat Lance Armstrong. They had Alexandre Vinokourov, Jan Ullrich, and Andreas Kloden – 3 potential tour winners – all on the team. Over and over, they chased each other down in the race. It was a spectacular display of a meltdown of one of the top sporting franchises in the world, in an event that has extremely high visibility worldwide. To be sure, the management was trying to stop the infighting, but it couldn’t be done. The riders took control and ruined the team’s chances to win.
Similarly, let’s look briefly at Contador’s press conferences after winning this year’s Tour de France. For a man who should be very excited about winning his second Tour de France at only age 26, along with recent wins at two other grand tours, instead he went on a spiteful rant about how he did not respect his teammate Lance Armstrong nor the rest of his team. Furthermore, a few days earlier in a post-stage 17 interview, he only meagerly admitted to making a slight mistake when he attacked and dropped his teammate Kloden from the four-rider break, when they were both with the two Schleck brothers on the final climb of the hardest mountain day. Contador’s sole responsibility at that moment was to sit on and make the Schlecks pull, conserve his own energy and help Kloden stay in the break, and hope that Lance could catch on the descent. By attacking and dropping his teammates, all he did was hurt them; see my blogpost below on Astana’s rare double mistake. If instead he had helped Kloden, and Lance had caught on the descent, the three top GC positions after that stage would have been held by Astana. In fact, based upon their results in the remaining decisive stages of the race, it looks as though Contador and Lance would have taken first and second overall, and Kloden and Schleck would have been competing for third with only seconds separating them, making an Astana podium sweep a real potential and a feat not seen since 1914 at the Tour.
This new trend may just reflect a shift in the sport’s popularity and riders’ access to media and the internet – for example, I could never tweet or blog in 1987 to raise my case before the fans. Furthermore, back then cycling publications were all in print, so there was a huge lagtime between events and their publication, and such small stories did not count as news. This new strategy of negotiating in public definitely marks the onset of a new star system in professional cycling that, while potentially offering riders more influence to their benefit in negotiations, may at the same time signal a self-centeredness that threatens team cohesion and the effectiveness of team management. Only time will tell.
