Adieu, Patrick

It's the end of the road for one of the few team managers you've heard of

As I write this, I’m only been home a few hours from Major League Baseball’s annual Winter Meetings in Dallas. This year’s venue, the Hilton Anatole, is a famous one because in 2011, a man walked straight into, and fell on his face in, one of the large decorative fountains in the lobby, right behind the MLB Network set.

What does this have to do with cycling? Nothing. Except the video is hilarious, and has taken on cult status with in the baseball community, so you should see it for yourself.

I mean, it’s a security camera tape of a dude just strolling straight into a fountain and falling on his face. It’s just as funny as you’d think.

Anyway, Winter Meetings are MLB’s biggest event between the end of the World Series and the start of spring training, and only partially because of the scheduled events that take place over the three days. There’s the draft lottery, and the Rule 5 draft,¹ and various press conferences, and job interviews for people who are just starting out in the industry. But mostly this is about putting all the general managers, agents, analysts, and reporters in close proximity and seeing what happens.

It’s a small world now, but for reasons that are not entirely clear even to me, no amount of internet or long-distance phone connection can replace bumping into a colleague at a hotel bar. This is why so many trades and free agent signings happened in the past week.

Here’s the part that’s relevant to cycling: While I was poking around the hotel lobby with a Shiner in my hand, or sitting in the audience at the draft lottery, it hit me that I know who so many of these people are. Of course I do—I work in the sport, I’ve met various operations managers and assistant GMs and scouts and communications directors from every team in the league. But so do fans. The GMs² are in some cases better-known than the players themselves. A lot of smart fans have opinions about scouting directors and player development coordinators—guys and (increasingly, if belatedly) gals who are like 10 people down in the front office line of succession. The executives are incredibly important, and famous.

You know where that’s not true? Cycling.

Training and technology and data are integral to the sport, but the face of the team always belongs to a rider. Only a rare handful of general managers or directeurs sportive achieve celebrity status themselves, and most of those—Marc Madiot or Bjarne Riis—merely remained famous after highly decorated riding careers.

Rare are the more workaday pros who, after retirement, went on to achieve their greatest fame while running a team: Cyrille Guimard, who brought through Bernard Hinault, Laurent Fignon and Greg LeMond in less than a decade in the late 1970s and early 1980s is probably the greatest. But there’s also Jonathan Vaughters,³ Johan Bruyneel⁴ and Patrick Lefevere.

This week, Lefevere announced that after 22 years at the helm of the team now known as Soudal-Quick Step, he’s retiring at the age of 69.