Words Tom Southam
Images Chris Auld

I was talking to one of the team chiropractors the other day, passing time in the car park of a Belgian hotel while I waited for the riders to come down for training, and I mused on the fact that these riders are so young when they are being scouted and signed these days.

Aaron, a chiropractor with an air of ‘1950’s circus strongman’ about him, had a fascinating take on the whole process, thanks to the fact he also works in Premier League soccer, where players are scouted, he told me, “from eight years old”.

He explained how the system works; how each and every player who went into the clubs as a primary school child believed they would make it to the Premier League; how inevitably it is the 0.01% who do make it; and how, after ten years in a club going through the academy system, players are often told from one day to the next that their time is up and they are done. They leave, he continued, “with all their stuff in a bin liner the next day. That’s it. You’re out”.

It makes the fact that professional cycling teams are signing eighteen-year-olds seem quite humdrum in comparison, but I do wonder how long it will be before pro cycling goes in this direction.

When I was eighteen, there were two phenomena in the under nineteen category: Filippo Pozzato and Fabian Cancellara. Pozzato at the time was the more remarkable of the two, especially because he was the first rider in the modern era to completely skip the Under 23, or amateur, ranks of cycling and sign directly with a professional team. Even Cancellara (double world junior TT champion who would go on to be far more successful a pro than Pozzato) had to do half a season with an amateur team before starting with the pros.

At the time, certainly in Italy, it was a big story. Questions were raised about whether it was fair on the rider to be thrown into what appeared to have been the deepest of deep ends in professional races. To the credit of his team, Mapei, they had that season created a team within a team of young riders who would dip in and out of the big races but who would mainly be riding a reduced program of lower-level races which allowed the riders to not get too much of a hammering too often.

Fast forward to 2025 and most good under nineteen riders will have a World Tour contract in their back pocket before they even roll up to the start line of the World Championships at the end of the season. Turning pro directly from the youth categories has become the standard as opposed to the exception.

Many of these contracts do place a rider in a development team linked to, or directly forming part of, the professional team, but they are almost always backended with the guarantee of a World Tour contract after one or two years in the development team.

The contracts—and contact—also tend to start even earlier. A talented rider of 15 or 16 will often already be supplied equipment from professional teams before entering the Under 19 categories, to curry favour with the rider in case they do start to develop into a potential professional.

The gulf that used to exist between Under 19 riders (who only compete in races up to 130km, by the way) has disappeared. Changes in diet, lifestyle, the demographic of the athletes who are entering the sport, equipment available, and access to information have all intersected to reduce the physical difference between an eighteen-year-old kid and a seasoned thirty-year-old professional. The trend is there in all sports of course; a sixteen-year-old won the European Cup as part of the Spanish national side; a fourteen-year-old just hit a ton in the IPL, and so on.

As much as all that physical side must be true, kids are now stronger, better, and more developed than they ever have been before. The biggest factor playing into the recruitment of riders at such a young age, is the race to find The Next Big Thing.

Many like to point to UAE’s gigantic budget as the reason their recruitment is so good, but the biggest asset they have, one Tadej Pogacar, they genuinely talent scouted. Not many people were paying attention when Pog finished 13th in the 2019 Tour Down Under, but he has been the key to the team’s transformation from ‘Lampre with a new sponsor’ to a team that any seventeen-year-old would be desperate to go to.

I believe it’s in the wake of this extraordinary find that the real push into fighting for younger and younger riders has started. As much as that gap now seems easily jumpable, the desire from the teams to get their hands on the riders at such a young age stems from the idea that there may just be the next Remco or Pog waiting to be discovered, much to the pants-wetting delight of agents the world over who are—as always—right there to cash in on the situation.

If Premier League soccer is anything to go by, this pressure valve won’t get released and, instead, I imagine the teams will continue in the direction of signing younger and younger riders as early as they can. Contracts signed at sixteen… fifteen… thirteen, and on it will go.

For better or worse, the hunt is on; the game is changing; and cycling continues at a pace in new directions. Let’s see where the search for the fountain of youth ends up.