I got skills, they’re multiplying

Not all that long ago, it appeared that road racing at the highest level was being won by the specialist. As more resources poured into the sport and riders trained better and were more orientated towards increasingly narrow goals, the age of the specialist grew.

Riders were increasingly doing one thing and doing it well, whether that was opting to concentrate on one strand of cycle sport, or a niche within road racing, such as chasing grand-tour victory, one-day Classics or time trialling. It’s also long been common for a rider to transition from one sport to another: Geraint Thomas was an Olympic gold medal winner on the track long before he won the Tour de France; and 13 years prior to winning the yellow jersey, Cadel Evans won the mountain bike cross-country World Cup twice.

As multi-talented as these riders are, their success came when concentrating on one sport at a time. Times are changing, however, and the new stars on the road have names as recognised in Cycling Plus’s sibling title MBUK as they are here. If we had track, cyclo-cross or gravel magazine titles, those lines would be further blurred. There are riders performing at the highest level in different cycle-sport genres at the same time. Marianne Vos won the cyclo-cross world championship seven times during her peak road-racing years and was perhaps the prototype for the new generation of stars, such as Tom Pidcock, Mathieu van der Poel and Wout Van Aert, who also juggle their careers like this.

Both Pidcock