Joe Laverick and Alex Dowsett

Faster with Dr Hutch

This time on Faster, the Dr Hutch podcast, I’m talking to Joe Laverick and Alex Dowsett, and the question is how exactly a rider makes that difficult transition from under-23 (what used to be called “amateur”) to professional.

Joe is a talented British U-23 rider based in Girona with the Hagens Berman Axeon team – probably the most successful development team in the world.

Alex rode for the same team in 2010, before moving on to Sky, Movistar, Katusha-Alpecin and Israel Start-up Nation and winning, among other things, two stages of the Giro d’Italia and almost as many national time-trial championships as me.

We look at the pressures on young riders, who have just two or three seasons to plot the biggest move of their whole careers. It’s a transition that has been made all the harder as Covid ravages their racing programme, and by changing demands in the World Tour – as Alex puts it, “Directors aren’t looking for under-23s anymore, they’re looking for children. They all want to find the next Remco Evenepoel.”

We discuss how to balance your own long-term development with the immediate need to attract attention, how you manage issues like body weight when you might be under pressure from coaches with a rather short-term view of your usefulness, and how you learn to not just ride like a pro, but live like a pro as well. (A base in Girona helps, apparently.)

And we hear how the current scramble for young talent might have led a top-level team to sign a rider based entirely on the results from a dodgy power meter.

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