The Friendly Ghost
What do you do if you're the Cleveland Guardians of cycling?
As a fan of EF Education-EasyPost, I find transfer season a little stressful. Cycling is the only sport I follow where my allegiance is to what you might call a small-market team. (An artifact of growing up in the shadow of one of the biggest cities in North America, whose sports teams—while not always run competently—are usually pretty free-spending.) When free agency rolls around, elite talent generally slides in one direction. The best riders want (and deserve) the most money, so the teams with the most money get first pick of the litter.
Beyond that, there’s a distinction between teams that are actually trying to compete for victories and those who are after1 prestige and attention. Teams in the second group will throw big money around for big names, regardless of whether those names come with as much punch as they once did. Julian Alaphilippe to Tudor is one such transfer from this window, but it’s an unnecessary example. I bet you didn’t realize that Chris Froome is still under contract with Israel-Premier Tech for one more season.
EF, to its credit, has leaned toward the competitive side. At the biggest races, that usually doesn’t mean competing for victories. If you want to be in it in a grand tour or a monument or a world championship, you usually need a Tadej Pogačar or a Mathieu van der Poel—a leader making more than $3 million a year,2 plus half a dozen handsomely compensated support riders, plus top-tier trainers, chefs, strategists, engineers, and equipment for same.
A team like EF can’t compete for riders and infrastructure like that, but it can put together a squad that makes a good fight of it. The boys in pink, and argyle before that, have been on the World Tour for 16 seasons now—17, if you count 2008, when they won the team time trial at the Giro as a wild card invitee. In those 17 seasons, they’ve taken 93 World Tour victories. Only four of those were monuments. They’ve only won the GC at a single grand tour, and only six World Tour-level stage races of any length.
But they’ve won 42 grand tour stages—roughly two or three a season—and put riders on the podium at three other grand tours and four world championship races. You’ve got to find success where you can.
Cycling has plenty of races where a win will make the entire year for a rider or a team, but there isn’t a unified season-long champion.3 For a team like EF, ambition is a nebulous concept, shifting sometimes from day to day. But it still needs to pick up quality riders in order to stay in the fight.
In most team sports, underdogs can attempt to find a strategic angle. Park the bus, run the option, throw a bullpen game, roll out the neutral zone trap. An unexpected tactical wrinkle, or a high-risk, high-reward approach, can topple the evil empire. That’s not really the case in cycling, where as beautiful and vast as the tactical universe is, everything is subordinate to watts.
The next-best thing is to try to find stars in unexpected places. This EF has done throughout its history. The original roster of the team mostly comprised riders like its founder, Jonathan Vaughters: Athletes scarred from doping scandals, searching for one last chance at redemption. This is the team that pulled Bradley Wiggins off the track and slimmed him down into a grand tour contender and turned a washed-up Canadian middle distance runner, Mike Woods, into one of the best puncheurs in the world. It put Hugh Carthy, who at 6-foot-4 is almost a foot taller than most grand tour contenders, over the top of the Alto de l’Angliru and onto the podium at the Vuelta. In recent years, EF has recruited heavily from South America, outside the scouting footprint of most European teams.
And once EF develops these riders, they leave. Wiggins, Woods, Dan Martin, Daniel Martínez, Davide Formolo, Alberto Bettiol, Rohan Dennis, Sergio Higuita, and so on.
I guess the hope is you find the next big thing and he wins a bunch of major races before Visma-Lease a Bike or Ineos or UAE snaps him up. Or, you can look at what constitutes success for a team on this level: A lot of grand tour stage wins and national championships. Every couple years, snipe a major classics race or one-week stage race, or place a rider on the podium of a grand tour or monument.
And just go find riders who can do that.