{"id":7799,"date":"2025-03-18T10:38:02","date_gmt":"2025-03-18T09:38:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/uk\/?p=7799"},"modified":"2025-03-27T10:49:03","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T09:49:03","slug":"is-rider-substitution-a-good-idea-for-grand-tour-cycling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/uk\/2025\/03\/18\/is-rider-substitution-a-good-idea-for-grand-tour-cycling\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Rider Substitution a Good Idea for Grand Tour Cycling?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In team sports such as football, baseball, and rugby, and even in tennis team competitions, such as the Davis Cup, injured or ill players can be replaced by other members of the team for the duration of the match or competition. But in cycling, which is, after all, also a team competition, that has never been the case.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As a result, there have been cases of teams finishing stage races without half of the riders with whom they began the race or even fewer. For example, Remco Evenepoel\u2019s Soudal-QuickStep finished the 2023 Giro d\u2019Italia without six of the eight riders who started the race, including Evenepoel.<\/a> The reason for almost all of the abandons was COVID-19, which played havoc with all sports for a few years.<\/p>\n

XDS Astana joke gets attention <\/strong><\/h2>\n

As far as I know, though the issue of rider substitutions has occasionally been raised, UCI has never seriously considered such a rule. That is why a social media \u2018joke\u2019 post<\/a> during the recent Paris-Nice by XDS Astana caused a mild stir. \u201cA great initiative from the organisers,\u201d the post read. \u201cOn Stage 8, they allowed a rider substitution in a stage race as a test project. In our team, Davide Ballerini will replace Cees Bol. Will we see it at @LeTour as well?”<\/p>\n

Here are the facts. Bol abandoned the race after stage 6 for an undivulged reason, but there is no evidence that he was replaced by Ballerini or any other XDS Astana rider. And the team has not commented since about its post. Perhaps it just wanted to start a conversation.<\/p>\n

I have not discovered any groundswell of support for the idea from riders, team managers or even fans of the sport. On the contrary, when Movistar<\/a>\u00a0boss Eusebio Unzu\u00e9 suggested a rule change that would allow any team losing a rider during the first week of a Grand Tour to replace him, an informal poll<\/a> by CyclingUpToDate<\/em>, which elicited 313 responses, found that two of three respondents were against it because it was \u201ctoo easy to exploit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Remco<\/a>
Remco Evenepoel\u2019s Soudal-QuickStep finished the 2023 Giro d\u2019Italia without six of the eight riders who started the race, including Evenepoel. The reason for almost all of the abandons was COVID-19, which played havoc with all sports for a few years. \u00a9 Profimedia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lefevere says no<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Asked about the issue, the former Soudal-QuickStep boss Patrick Lefevere, one of the legends of the sport, came out against it, saying that a big appeal of cycling is seeing riders respond to misfortune and hardships.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, crashing and getting sick is part of it,\u201d he told Het Laatste Nieuws<\/em><\/a>.<\/em> \u201cA big part of your team’s success is being resilient, being able to switch to a Plan B. Those are the moments when the great champions rise up and bounce back from a setback. That’s what people want to see. Racing is like boxing: just because you’re hanging on the ropes at a certain moment doesn’t mean that you lose the match.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lefevere also questioned how you could determine if a rider is unwell or injured to the extent that they must leave a race, as opposed to simply in bad form. That way, teams could replace a weak rider with one of their better riders who has been held in reserve and is coming into the race fresher than his peers.<\/p>\n

Matxin Joxean Fern\u00e1ndez, team manager of UAE Team Emirates\u2013XRG, \u00a0had similar reservations. \u201cIt’s complicated,\u201d\u00a0he told\u00a0Het Laatste Nieuws<\/em><\/a>. \u201cWho is going to evaluate whether a crash is big enough? How serious should an injury be? Do you have to break your kneecap or is pain in your knee enough? And what about fatigue? After two weeks of racing, exhaustion seems very much like being sick.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Tour de France is like climbing the Everest<\/strong><\/h2>\n

But Fern\u00e1ndez had a suggestion of his own that would involve changes to the peloton late in a Grand Tour race. \u201cWith no medical criteria, I would give each team the right to switch one rider in the last week.\u201d<\/p>\n

That would certainly suit the big GC riders such as Fern\u00e1ndez\u2019s superstar, Tadej Poga\u010dar, or his arch-rival at Visma\u2013Lease a Bike, Jonas Vingegaard, because they could get one rested support rider for the mountains. Or, depending on the nature of the stages in the last week, a team could insert a fresh sprinter to try and win some races against tired opponents. And if everyone has the chance to make a change, then it\u2019s fair.<\/p>\n

Yes, fair it may be, but it\u2019s also cheesy. Lefevere is right. Any substitution would reduce the credibility of the race and also of the riders. Imagine a team trying to climb Mount Everest when, halfway up, one of the climbers falls ill. A substitute mountaineer is helicoptered in and finishes the climb with the team. \u201cWe did it,\u201d they rejoice when they\u2019ve come off the mountain.<\/p>\n

Well, yes, but, ahm, you didn\u2019t really. Lefevere\u2019s boxing metaphor is very good, but I\u2019ve always seen riding in the Tour de France as akin to mountain climbing. There are the individual mountains to climb, of course, but the course itself is like a mountain that needs to be climbed from stage 1 to the \u201csummit finish\u201d of stage 21. This year, that mountain will be 3,320 km high. You either climb it from start to finish or you don\u2019t climb it at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In team sports such as football, baseball, and rugby, and even in tennis team competitions, such as the Davis Cup, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":7851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"global-categories":[],"class_list":["post-7799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-the-latest"],"yoast_head":"\nIs Rider Substitution a Good Idea for Grand Tour Cycling? - \u0160koda We Love Cycling - United Kingdom<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/uk\/2025\/03\/18\/is-rider-substitution-a-good-idea-for-grand-tour-cycling\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is Rider Substitution a Good Idea for Grand Tour Cycling?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In team sports such as football, baseball, and rugby, and even in tennis team competitions, such as the Davis Cup, […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/uk\/2025\/03\/18\/is-rider-substitution-a-good-idea-for-grand-tour-cycling\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"\u0160koda We Love Cycling - United Kingdom\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2025-03-18T09:38:02+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2025-03-27T09:49:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/d2p6e6u75xmxt8.cloudfront.net\/18\/2025\/03\/Tour-de-France-Peloton-profimedia-0704565592-CVR.webp\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"990\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"660\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/webp\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"hettie\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Siegfried Mortkowitz\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/uk\/2025\/03\/18\/is-rider-substitution-a-good-idea-for-grand-tour-cycling\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.welovecycling.com\/uk\/2025\/03\/18\/is-rider-substitution-a-good-idea-for-grand-tour-cycling\/\",\"name\":\"Is Rider Substitution a Good Idea for Grand Tour Cycling? 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