Ian Mansel-Thomas journal: why 16 is too young to sign for a European team

Ian Mansel-Thomas co-manages camsmajaco, the mixed-gender junior super-team formed this season from the merger of Fensham Howes–MAS Design and Tofauti Everyone Active, alongside Giles Pidcock. This is the second of his journal entries for The British Continental.

For every British rider the move to a European team has worked for, Ian can point to another it hasn’t. Here he argues that the problem isn’t Europe but the age at which riders go: 16, with school, exams, and friendships all still at home.

A few years ago, there was a minor exodus of British under-16 boys looking beyond the UK for their next step, joining a range of junior teams in mainland Europe.

This was before the emergence of junior teams funded by WorldTour teams, but the apparent kudos of being picked up by a European team—sometimes any European team—was enough to tempt riders into thinking this was the key to a professional career in Europe.

Least surprising spoiler of the week: it wasn’t.

The list of riders who have decided that signing for a European team was the wrong call, and who have come back to the UK, is long

Today, those European super-teams that form part of WorldTour pathways are a reality, able to pick, and sometimes pay for, what they think is the very best talent at youth level worldwide. That is a very small pool of riders, and so far it hasn’t included many Brits. Below the likes of grenke–Auto Eder (Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe), Decathlon CMA CGM U19, Soudal Quick-Step U19, and JEGG-SKIL-DJR (Team Visma | Lease a Bike) sits a range of other teams looking to recruit beyond their own borders.

What Fensham Howes, Tofauti, and now camsmajaco have seen is that for every British rider such a move has worked for, there is another it really hasn’t. The list of riders who have decided that signing for a European team was the wrong call, and who have come back to the UK, is long. Seth Jackson, Henry Hobbs, Rory Gravelle, and Gus Dutton have all reached that conclusion in the last couple of years. We have had many more conversations with riders who felt they had made the wrong decision but stayed with their European team in the end.

Image: Milan Josy/The British Continental

The list of reasons is as long as the list of riders. The common thread is the challenge of only seeing your teammates at a race, where riders converge from different countries, often the night before the start. That isn’t conducive to building team spirit, or a bond between riders. A big part of being a team is the shared experience of travelling to races together, training together, understanding each other through having fun, and building shared reference points. You can’t cram all that into an evening in a team hotel before you pin a number on. It also increases the pressure on parents, who have to arrange to get their child to a race in the south of France, say, at a given time, without help from the team and usually at their own expense. Parents may also feel they can’t put their 16-year-old on a plane alone, which doubles the cost and eats into holiday entitlement.

European teams tend to have big squads too, so that appealing race calendar looks less appealing when you realise you are fighting a large group of peers for each start. The bigger WorldTour-linked teams will also tend to race to strict team orders. Even being picked for a race isn’t a guarantee that it is a genuine opportunity to ride for a result, which is crucial to long-term progression. There’ll be the “you’ll get your opportunity in time” line from the team, but we know that time doesn’t come for every rider.

A rider’s options can narrow sharply, because everyone around them is trying to make sure they go to Red Bull, Visma, Decathlon, or whoever is paying the wage bill

Where a junior team is funded by a WorldTour team, its staff are paid by the WorldTour team. The overriding function of that staff is to produce senior riders for their bosses. If they don’t do that, they aren’t doing their jobs. Which I understand—but it means a rider’s options can narrow sharply, because everyone around them is trying to make sure they go to Red Bull, Visma, Decathlon, or whoever is paying the wage bill. It’s team-first, not rider-first.

So it’s not all that surprising that British riders have found out the hard way that racing for a European team isn’t one long café ride in the sun.

The riders are still children. They are sixth-formers, they are in full-time education, they are not adults, their friends are in the UK, and they are certainly not professional bike riders. What parent would think, “I know, I’ll send my child to a sixth form in Germany rather than one in the UK, because it might help them get an engineering career at Audi”?

I’d hazard a guess at no one.

And now it seems we are about to see the mistakes of many British junior boys repeated by British junior girls. Suddenly it’s seen as Instagram-cool to have a European team. On the women’s side, those teams aren’t yet part of the structures of the leading Women’s WorldTour teams. Some have links to the WorldTour, and I’d say that can be better than being employed by them—there is doubtless less pressure to deliver riders to a fixed WorldTour team if you aren’t being paid by them. But I think that is only a matter of time, as the money in women’s cycling continues to ramp up. A junior women’s Lidl-Trek team has been rumoured for a while.

Having been doing this for some years now, we’ve seen it play out on the boys’ side, and I fear we will see the same on the girls’ side before long. The European grass looks very green for the girls right now, but that view rests on a very small number of British riders who have made the step. The experience of far more boys over the last few years suggests the grass is a lot less healthy than it looks.

It is far too early at 16 to decide that a foreign team with foreign riders is what you need to make it as a professional

The junior years aren’t the end goal. They are a small next step towards becoming a professional. Gradual development is key—it is far too early at 16 to decide that a foreign team with foreign riders is what you need to make it as a professional. That is a huge step at any age; we’ve seen it with riders stepping up from us to professional set-ups at 18. At 16, with so much else going on at home, we think it is a step too far. Again, a little like my take on rider agents for under-16s and juniors, you are not a professional bike rider at this age. You don’t need to behave like you think professionals do.

Chill out and have fun, because if you have the talent and the application you can make it, and it won’t matter which junior team you are on. Ability will always out. So why not make the last years of a rider’s cycling childhood a time they can spend with close friends, with shared experiences and similar backgrounds? Travelling the roads of Europe as a tight-knit team, having fun with their established mates. There will be a time for some of them to ride for European teams with a mix of nationalities. But I’d suggest that time isn’t when they are already juggling school, exams, and friendships at home.

The key is to take your time, have fun with your mates, race your bike, and gradually develop as a person, not just as a bike racer

This doesn’t mean limiting opportunity, of course—far from it. We’ve seen that if you have the talent, you will make it to the pro ranks when the time is right for you.

The key is to take your time, have fun with your mates, race your bike, and gradually develop as a person, not just as a bike racer. Cycling should be person-first, not even rider-first, and certainly not team-first.