The calendar is soon to tick over into December, and any last off-season enjoyment is shortly to be replaced by preparations for 2023 – but some riders have no plans in place for next season.
This year, there is once again a long list of riders who are without a contract and without a team at this deep stage in the winter.
The global pandemic skewed the transfer market for a couple of years and left swathes of talented riders scrambling for cover. Now, economic and and political instabilities have created a similar situation.
There are 28 riders currently at WorldTour level who are still unsure of their future. With upwards of 75 riders from ProTeams also without contracts, there are more than 100 pro riders on the market, with a month to spare until 2023 contracts start taking effect.
Here, we run through the names, the teams, and the factors at play.
Mark Cavendish
The most successful sprinter of all time is facing uncertainty over his career and that all-important question of whether he can take the outright record of Tour de France stage wins.
Mark Cavendish has been set to sign with the B&B Hotels team since the summer. The problem is, the team’s future is way up in the air. A string of major sponsors have been rumoured but as of today there is no money to run the expanded project that team boss Jérôme Pineau dreams of, and not even enough money to be sure of continuing at all.
Cavendish is understood to have agreed to join the team but has not signed a formal contract. Until Pineau gets his prospective sponsors across the line – and convincing them that the 34-time Tour stage winner is on board is fundamental to that – then he can’t put that piece of paper in front of Cavendish. There should be a resolution soon, one way or the other, with Pineau having missed two deadlines to register his team but negotiating a third, which is Wednesday, November 30.
Cavendish is waiting patiently, if anxiously, knowing this represents his best chance of a top contract for 2023 – perhaps the last of his career. It’s no secret that his salary when QuickStep picked him up off the scrapheap in 2021 was a shadow of what it once was, and having returned to the top of the sprinting game in such spectacular fashion, he hired a new agent this spring to redress the imbalance. If Pineau pulls through, all will be in place, and rider and team can be all-but assured of an invitation to the Tour. If not, Cavendish would surely still have options but, in December when…
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