Eusebio Unzué, the manager of
Movistar Team, has been in charge of several cycling teams for over 40 years and is one of the people who know the inside of high-level road cycling the best. He has analysed some of the changes in recent years and changes he would make.
"No, no, honestly. Not at all. There are times that I would like to be a little calmer," Unzué told Diario del Triatlón regarding if he's tired of the length of his stint in cycling. "But that's it, you can't. This has a speed and the commitment, you know, or it's 100%, or it's better not to be there. We've had a couple of difficult years, but hey, I'm still fighting". Unzué has managed the likes of Pedro Delgado, Miguel Indurain, Francisco Mancebo, Oscar Pereiro, Alejandro Valverde and many other big names who have marked cycling, specially Spanish cycling.
However, there are aspects of cycling he would like to change. He was keen on pointing out the possibility of a substitution mid-race: "I remember Marc Soler, when he broke his arm in the Tour and did the last 40 kilometers with the effort, the pain to get there. We had to wait for an X-ray to confirm the fracture and the impossibility of continuing. In our sport you don't have someone to replace it. Sometimes we do barbarities that are accepted and that are things that feed the epic and I think they are expendable".
"Well, I would like that if someone falls, the rider can be changed," he argued. "You see that the peloton does not stop until the fallen one gets up. I would like to be able to assess if it has damage and if it is serious to be able to replace it. This is how any other sport works, isn't it? But what we have is that the rider gets up exhausted and we have to wait to see if he reaches the finish line and recovers for the next day".
That idea has been brought up by some people within the cycling bubble, however until now relatively unbothered by governing bodies. It would be a dramatic change to cycling, however one that is possible for the future.
As for Spanish cycling, Unzué is keen that "it is still active and thriving. You can't always have the best cyclists, but we always have one of them. That continuity is what gives meaning to all the effort we make. It also excites the women's team project [Movistar's women's team included], we have become part of the objectives that Telefónica raised at the time and of which we all have a feeling of pride, of helping the evolution of women's cycling".
