Re: Re:
Max Rockatansky said:
portugal11 said:
Alexandre B. said:
https://twitter.com/PavelSivakov/status/902088157855965184
Pavel Sivakov joins Team Sky.
These kids are ruining their future.
Quite interesting what Sky is doing. Replacing their strongest mountain helpers by the best U23 climbers and their best sprinter with a good U23 sprinter. Always a big risk.
It's also a risk for other reasons and has wider-reaching problems.
Sky don't run their own development team but are using their financial clout to leech other people's development work to take on the top U23 riders, but then that does run the risk that you don't have the same continual hand on their level that, say, Quick Step have with the Etixx and Beveren riders or Movistar have with the Lizarte guys. Bernal I think is pretty low risk as he's already adapted well to Europe with Androni and been racing with pros. But the issue is then that you don't know how close to the pro level their training and riding was as espoirs to know how much of a ceiling for improvement there is. Just see the stratospheric number of Danish and Dutch espoirs who've then failed to develop into top pros, or have become top pros but only at a level that's fairly limited compared to what they showed as juniors and espoirs.
The fact that a big money team like BMC can't afford to keep the espoirs that they're developing themselves is in and of itself alarming, and the lack of protection for teams developing riders only to see them swiped away by the bigger pro teams is a very real worry for teams on lower budget who thrive on giving young riders opportunities. Relatively self-rejuvenating teams like Lotto, Direct Energie and Movistar who have their own long-established feeders within their own self-contained amateur structure may be fine (although with riders emerging from more insular domestic U23 scenes, those riders often need a bit longer to develop to reach the same level as superstar international espoirs, exacerbated in the latter case by Unzué's often overly protective approach) may not be as concerned, but more internationally-minded or teams that don't have that national base to draw on - and though they do work as a quasi-national team for Britain I include Sky in this as their signings from the British national scene have been limited, and variable in their success - Russell Downing (2010), Jonathan Tiernan-Locke (2013) and Owain Doull and Jonathan Dibben (2017) from the national calendar, Peter Kennaugh (2010), Luke Rowe (2012), Josh Edmondson (2013) from the national development projects and U23 ranks. Even some of the young Britons they've taken on came through other routes - Dowsett and Tao Geogeghan Hart from US development teams, Peters from SEG Racing in the Netherlands. It's not the most ringing endorsement of the prospects for development in the British scene, either amateur or pro.
So if they're not confident in obtaining top prospects through the national scene, then their options are to either set up - as British Cycling did pre-Sky - an overseas base for development (out of which the likes of Cavendish and Kennaugh came) and make it an actual Sky feeder, doing various U23 races around Europe the way Lotto and, latterly, BMC's development teams have been made; do a deal with an existing developmental team like Zalf with Bardiani, Colpack with UAE, Thüringer Energie with HTC or Lizarte with Movistar, or use their budgetary advantage to entice prospects away from the established feeders. While there will always be potential offcuts from these teams that turn out to be good pros anyhow, but for whatever reason the developmental parent team passed on them, actively taking off the cream of the crop and leaving the team that put the money and resources into that rider's development with the offcuts is obviously going to foster resentment. And it's really coming to something when a team like BMC, who threw the wallet around way worse than Sky a few years ago to buy their position at the top of the sport, is the sympathetic party.
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