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’s Soudal-QuickStep finished the 2023 Giro d’Italia 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.
XDS Astana joke gets attention
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 ‘joke’ post during the recent Paris-Nice by XDS Astana caused a mild stir. “A great initiative from the organisers,” the post read. “On 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?”
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.
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 boss Eusebio Unzué 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 by CyclingUpToDate, which elicited 313 responses, found that two of three respondents were against it because it was “too easy to exploit.”
Lefevere says no
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.
“Unfortunately, crashing and getting sick is part of it,” he told Het Laatste Nieuws. “A 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.”
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.
Matxin Joxean Fernández, team manager of UAE Team Emirates–XRG, had similar reservations. “It’s complicated,” he told Het Laatste Nieuws. “Who 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.”
The Tour de France is like climbing the Everest
But Fernández had a suggestion of his own that would involve changes to the peloton late in a Grand Tour race. “With no medical criteria, I would give each team the right to switch one rider in the last week.”
That would certainly suit the big GC riders such as Fernández’s superstar, Tadej Pogačar, or his arch-rival at Visma–Lease 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’s fair.
Yes, fair it may be, but it’s 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. “We did it,” they rejoice when they’ve come off the mountain.
Well, yes, but, ahm, you didn’t really. Lefevere’s boxing metaphor is very good, but I’ve 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 “summit finish” of stage 21. This year, that mountain will be 3,320 km high. You either climb it from start to finish or you don’t climb it at all.
