Elia Viviani has warned that pure sprinters are an endangered species in the professional peloton, adding that fast finishers must add additional strings to their bows in order to prosper in the current era.
“The pure sprinter is going to disappear,” Viviani told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “You have to be capable of hanging on in the climbs. Routes are getting harder and these days a sprint finish can come after 2,000 metres of altitude gain. You can’t just stay on the wheels and wait for a suitable stage anymore."
“Sprinters are struggling more and more because there isn’t the same logic in races in modern cycling. It only takes a kilometre of climbing for the race to explode.”
Viviani has won stages in all three Grand Tours across his career, but he didn’t feature in any three-week races in 2022 following his return to Ineos Grenadiers. That wasn’t entirely surprising given Ineos’ overall ambitions in each race, but Viviani noted that even the sprinters who were selected for Grand Tours were racing with reduced lead-out trains.
“The art of getting by comes into play, in the sense that a team is no longer built to facilitate the sprinter,” he said. “In a sprint you can count on the help of two or three teammates at most, and not even that in a Grand Tour. In a team of eight, the GC man has three riders for the mountains, two more to get through the first week and then there are two places left, one of which goes to the sprinter.”
Obvious sprint opportunities have also diminished in Grand Tours over the course of Viviani’s career. This year’s Tour de France saw only four stages decided in bunch sprints, though Mark Cavendish sounded an optimistic note following the presentation of the 2023 route, reckoning there to be about “seven or eight opportunities.” Even then, the bulk of the likely sprints at the 2023 Tour will come after the race has traversed the Pyrenees.
Viviani identified Alpecin and his former squad QuickStep as being among the few WorldTour teams to give sprinters a privileged position, while the relative paucity of UCI points on offer for stage wins means that sprinters are increasingly diverted towards one-day WorldTour races.
“But with so many targeting those races, the competition is getting bigger so it’s harder and harder to win,” he said.
Asked to name the fastest sprinter currently in the peloton, meanwhile, Viviani opted for his former QuickStep teammate Fabio Jakobsen. “In a flat sprint, Jakobsen is unbeatable in the last 200 metres,” he said. “For the future, the most complete is [Olav] Kooij: he already has real consistency, and he’s only going to improve.”
