What do Magnus Sheffield, Matteo Jorgenson, Ian Boswell, Lawson Craddock and new Ineos Grenadiers recruit AJ August have in common? They all came up through the same junior programme – the Hot Tubes Development team – one of the longest-running devo teams in the USA.
Toby Stanton’s Hot Tubes team helped to shape hundreds of athletes and has arguably the best track record of seeing riders head to the WorldTour in recent years. Although the team hasn’t taken on many junior girls, an exception is Emma White, who trained with the team and went on to become an Olympic medalist on the track for Team USA.
There are other junior development programmes across the USA in places like Colorado, California, New York and Virginia but Hot Tubes has had a long run and an extensive track record of setting riders on the path to becoming pro cyclists, plus Stanton has the same enthusiasm today as when he started the team in the 1990s.
For 30 years, Stanton has carefully handpicked a small group of junior riders and taken them to races across the USA and in Europe. Opening his riders’ eyes to the experience of racing in places like France and Belgium is one of the things that has kept him going.
“Every year, [it is like] Christmas morning with a house full of five-year-olds – they’re excited,” Stanton tells Cyclingnews. “They haven’t done these races before – they can’t wait for the flight – everything about it is exciting. That’s still a lot of fun for me.”
His team has, by his count, 125 national championship titles, from the first by Jonathan Page in 1994 through to this year’s junior 17-18 road victory by Darren Parham.
How Stanton produces this level of success year in and year out is a combination of consistent funding and support and treating personal development as equally important to athletic development.
“Toby’s kind of got some magic,” Will Frischkorn, who sits on the team’s board of directors and scored the team their first international victory at the Tour de l’Abitibi in 1998, tells Cyclingnews.
The passion that Stanton brings to the team and the sport is easy to see, even if he is a bit older and more subdued than the fiery tobacco-chewing director of the early years of the team.
Lawson Craddock, who raced with the team from 2009 to 2010, says, “Toby has his own special way of finding and developing and nurturing talent. It almost feels like it has very little to do with your ability to ride the bike and more developing the person behind it. I think that’s what…
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