It wasn’t supposed to end like this, but Zdeněk Štybar has been around this game long enough to know that a man rarely gets to choose the manner of his exit. There will be no grand send-off for the rider who made such a smooth transition from winning cyclo-cross world titles to chasing Classics victories a little over a decade ago. Barring a late, late reprieve, his final race as a professional rider on the road will be thousands of miles from home at the Tour of Guangxi. So it goes.
“It’s not easy to end your career in China, far away from your family,” Štybar told Cyclingnews in Beihai on Friday. “But on the other hand, I’m trying not to think too much about it. I’m just racing here and I’m doing what I have to do. I would still like to do some cyclo-cross races this winter, but on the road, I think that’s it.”
Štybar’s affability has been a calling card since he first turned up in Belgium as a young man and started beating the home riders at their own game in the muddied fields of Flanders, eventually joining them on the road after his compatriot Zdeněk Bakala started backing the QuickStep team in 2011.
Even though the last three years, blighted by injury and illness, have not been kind, Štybar’s perma-smile remained intact as he talked Cyclingnews through his ill-starred season with Jayco-Alula, which was itself interrupted by double iliac artery surgery.
Jayco’s signing of Caleb Ewan this week means that their roster for 2024 is now complete, while the confusion engendered by his former QuickStep team’s proposed and then shelved merger with Jumbo-Visma only complicated his own, forlorn hunt for a contract.
“Unfortunately, I didn’t re-sign as there is no place on our team,” Štybar said. “And then with the situation of the past weeks with such uncertainty about teams, I think this is probably my last race. Of course, my manager was still speaking to teams, but after all those surgeries, after my performances and my age, nobody is really interested.”
Surgery
Štybar’s last victory came at the 2020 Vuelta a San Juan, when he powered to a canny win on the Villicúm motor-racing circuit. After landing Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and E3 Harelbeke the previous year, he looked poised for another Spring at the core of QuickStep’s cobbled Classics squad, but that momentum ground to a halt when pro cycling went into hiatus during…
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