A couple of recent events have pushed me back to thinking about rider retirements. The first was the departure of Simon Yates, who caught us all on the hop when he took a long hard look at the demands of his 13th pro season in 2026 and decided that it wasn’t for him.
The second was an interview with David Millar, where he talked about the difficulties of retirement – he said it just left riders staggering into the real world spinning and disorientated, and it’s only getting harder for them.
This is the problem with being a pro rider over the age of about 32. It’s hard to know what’s more difficult, staying or going.
Pro sport, and pro cycling in particular, is a terrible thing to do to people. I’ve a friend who’s been involved in pro cycling for a long time who says their rule of thumb about bike riders is simple: “They remain the age at which cycling took over their lives. A rider might be 30 years old, but if they effectively turned pro at 16, for all practical purposes that’s the age they are now.” She says that if you don’t believe her, just ask one of them how income tax works.
I think this is a little uncharitable. But only a little. Pro cycling is a sort of un-education – you learn a lot about a weirdly specific activity, none of which is applicable anywhere else. Who wouldn’t get a strange world view if they’ve spent a decade employed in a repetitive, menial, manual job, and getting paid €300,000 a year to do it while fans surround their place of work holding up placards in their honour?
Michael Hutchinson is a writer, journalist and former professional cyclist. As a rider he won multiple national titles in both Britain and Ireland and competed at the World Championships and the Commonwealth Games. He was a three-time Brompton folding-bike World Champion, and once hit 73 mph riding down a hill in Wales. His Dr Hutch columns appears in every issue of Cycling Weekly magazine.
Many pros earn a lot less, of course. This doesn’t really help. While they might be a bit less adrift from the real world, they also have a much more urgent need to find something to do after they retire. Another friend, an accountant by profession, once found himself interviewing a British ex-pro for an entry-grade administrative job.
This was a rider my mate had read about for years, he’d seen him on TV many times. “And there he was, sitting across the desk, large as life, totally unqualified, completely unsuited to the world of work. He looked blank at the mention of Excel, so we talked about the 1998 Tour of Britain for a bit. Then he stole some biscuits when he thought I wasn’t looking, and went on his way.” You read that right; a retired bike rider can’t even steal biscuits from a job interview properly.
What exactly do you do with an ex-pro rider, then? Once upon a time they opened a shop, on the basis they’d already done the publicity for it. These days, the equivalent is to start a coaching business. Some of them are brilliant at this – they have deep experience and an understanding of the sport.
And some of them are a disaster, because the only rider whose characteristics they know about is themselves. I know one hard-nut ex pro who started a coaching business, over-trained every rider who came within a five-mile radius, declared modern riders were bloody soft, and went bankrupt. Twice.
Some pros never really retire at all. A sports director is just a bike racer in a car. Same races, same travelling, same crappy hotels, same leisure wear – just with thirty noisy, youthful (overpaid) reminders of the days of their glory.
But a handful get away. The start a new life. If you ever find yourself wondering, “whatever happened to ‘X’?” but can find no trace, however long you search, be comforted that they’re probably alive, happy, and doing a normal job under a new identity. They’re the lucky ones.
Acts of Cycling Stupidity
My attention has been drawn to a rider who, in order to improve his race performance, nicks a couple of puffs of his teenage son’s Beclomethasone asthma inhaler before racing. He is, as you would expect, very secretive about it, on the basis that it’s doping.
The first irony is that it’s not. Beclomethasone by inhaler isn’t actually banned, but he’s never bothered to check. The second irony is that if it’s working, it’s only doing so because of the placebo effect, although of course that’s much enhanced by his assumption that he’s a cheat. The third irony is that even if he works all this out, well, I’m sure we’d agree he’s still sort of a cheat anyway.
It’s quite a tangle. But the upshot of it is much simpler, and that’s that his son, who is also a bike racer, essentially has his dad over a barrel. And now I do too.
Great Inventions of Cycling: Tradition
Cycling’s traditions are its lifeblood. That why tradition started early. The moment someone attached pedals to a bike, there was a chap in a hat on hand to tell them that he preferred proper bicycles, ones that you scooted along with your feet.
It was the same when they invented the chain-drive safety bike. Magazines of the era were full of articles decrying the desecration of the dignified traditions of the sport, and complaining that all sorts of non-bicycle-type people would take up cycling now that it didn’t involve penny farthings, knee-high leather boots and certain death. (Especially women and vicars, as it turned out, but that’s perhaps a topic for another time.)
We could go on, but instead please just take it as read that there has never been a change in cycling, be it technical, social, aesthetic, or financial that we didn’t attempt to shout down with cries about tradition.
In practise, though, traditions are what makes up the sport. They bring people together, give them something in common to complain about, and without it Rapha would never have got their retro inspired kit ranges out of the shops.
But the very best thing about it is that tradition is, of itself, the easiest tradition to master. Just keep saying you preferred everything how it was in 2008, 1998, or 1988, and you can’t go wrong.
