Pro cycling is a cruel sport. So many professional athletes are measured by their win-loss ratio. Yet in professional road cycling, where a race can feature up to 200 riders, there can only ever be one winner, and many, many more ‘losers’.
The average male pro rides 75 races a year, which would mean 750 races in a 10-year career. In the last two years, 27 top-level pros (male and female) retired after a 10-year career or longer with no wins at pro level (UCI .1 or above) at all. That’s possibly a 0-750 win-loss ratio. Considering what they go through at the top level of the sport, it seems harsh.
It’s a team sport, you may say. But it’s also a sport where you have to win to get yourself noticed and get a spot in the pro ranks, only to possibly spend your whole career not winning.
My fascination with the long-running pros who are yet to win had begun. To investigate this all-too-common phenomenon — there are countless riders I could have spoken to — I whittled it down to the six you’ll hear from here. They can all be considered very successful riders with long careers, forming part of wins ranging from Grand Tour team time trials to mountains, sprints and young riders jerseys. But none ever crossed the finish line first to win on their own as a pro.
A winning start
One thing that knits all the riders I spoke to together is how they fell in love with racing young and seemed to enjoy the simplicity of being quickly better than others at an early age. That’s not to say they were all winning as amateurs, though.
Belgian former pro Valerie Demey retired at 31 in December and is now a DS at Fenix-Premier Tech, having seen out her…
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