🔴🇪🇸 #LaVuelta23 - Iniciamos la última etapa de @lavuelta en el Hipódromo de la Zarzuela con el recuerdo de nuestro apreciado amigo y periodista, Pepe Domingo Castaño. Gran aficionado al ciclismo, falleció este domingo a los 80 años. #DEP
"We need more funds right now" - Enric Mas hopes for investment in Movistar to have domestiques capable of matching Jumbo-Visma
CyclingMonday, 18 September 2023 at 17:40
More money is flowing into cycling and some teams are accumulating enormous amounts of quality riders. Unfortunately however for other teams, it leaves the playing field quite unbalanced. After a Vuelta a Espana where he finished sixth, Enric Mas laments Movistar's inability to sign big support riders.
“The differences between Jumbo-Visma and us? We hope that a second important sponsor joins our team. We are all waiting for it and we hope that this happens as soon as possible," Mas told AS. "Everyone wants to compete on equal terms with their opponents and we need more funds right now. Eusebio Unzué has said it on several occasions: this is what we need to strengthen our team in all aspects."
Whilst INEOS Grenadiers remain a team of high budget, over the past few years UAE Team Emirates and Jumbo-Visma have soared above the rest of the peloton by far when it comes to mountains. Besides having leaders such as Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard and Primoz Roglic, they have a whole array of very strong climbers and other types of riders in their rosters, which they use for extreme success both in the classics and Grand Tours. More and more the top teams sign the biggest young talents and premier domestiques, whilst teams whose budget does not rise struggle to keep their leaders on board.
Movistar is indeed a prime example of that, having lost Alejandro Valverde last year they signed Fernando Gaviria who has not been anywhere close to achieving the same results and Ruben Guerreiro. However they're losing Matteo Jorgenson this winter, one of the new stars in the peloton who developed in the Spanish team. No replacement is expected, the Spanish team have in fact not signed any riders for the 2024 season - no public announcement, at least.
Now at the Vuelta, the Spaniard felt this difference in team qualities quite abruptly. Whilst Jumbo-Visma finished first, second and third in the race, Mas was no match and except for Einer Rubio in a few summit finishes - where he wasn't even required to work - the 28-year old was largely isolated. This also meant Movistar simply did not have the firepower to make the race hard when they desired, and had to race trying to match their rivals when the mountains arrived.
“I still have three or four races on the calendar," he says. Last year he finished second in the Vuelta, and he hopes to come out of it with the same for he had last year which saw him win the Giro dell'Emilia and finish second at Il Lombardia. "My big goal between now and the end of the year is Il Lombardia and I'm already thinking about it. Now I have to rest, recover and prepare well for those one-day races that I really enjoy."
Read also
claps 8visitors 1152
Just in
Popular news
Latest comments
- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024