'I'm happy to have made it to 39' - Simon Clarke counting the days to retirement from professional cycling

After 17 seasons as a professional cyclist, Simon Clarke will call an end to his career in January on home soil at the Mapei Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race. It has been 22 years since Clarke first came to Europe as a junior and the now 39-year-old explained, "I don't want to be in the peloton when I'm 40."

The rider from Melbourne, Australia, has had all of the ups and downs of a professional athlete over the years. Clarke went winless in his first two pro seasons with ISD-Neri but showed enough progress to sign with Astana in 2011. After moving to the new Orica-GreenEdge team in 2012, he won stage 4 of the Vuelta a España from a breakaway and won the overall mountains classification.

In 2015, he led the Giro d'Italia for one stage but left GreenEdge at the end of the season for the Cannondale team, now EF Education-EasyPost, and won a stage of the Vuelta with them in 2018. A brief foray with the Qhubeka team in 2021 nearly ended his career after it folded, leaving Clarke scrambling for a place to continue. He found a home with Israel-Premier Tech in 2022 and had the biggest moment of his career on stage 5 of the Tour de France when he out-sprinted Taco van der Hoorn for the win.

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Since then, Clarke's victory column has remained static, with the post-COVID-19 pandemic style of racing making it harder and harder to stay at the top.

"The last few seasons, I've really noticed that age does catch up with you eventually," Clarke told Cyclingnews before the Maryland Cycling Classic. "Every year, you put in as much, if not more, effort than ever and you don't see the same results, and you think maybe, maybe it's time to call it an end. I'm more than happy with everything I've achieved. I'm happy to be able to stop in January at my home races, and thanks to my team for helping me make that happen."

It's a refrain that continues to repeat - young riders like Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel have surpassed veteran riders and raised the level of pro cycling to new heights, forcing everyone to fight to improve just to keep up.

"The level is obviously continuing to increase," Clarke says. "You have to finish every season and go 'right, next year, I need to be 2% better', because that's going to be the same as last year. I lived that my whole career, and I've always strived to come back each season that little bit better."

Clarke attributed the sharp increase in the level of the peloton to "technology and knowledge that a young rider can apply now that we didn't really apply until we were already professional. These young kids are already with nutrition and training schedules and whatnot, training at a professional level already when they're 15. That didn't happen when I was 15."

Even with all of the available tools to find his top level, Clarke says, "With age, you get diminishing returns, and you come to a point where it's harder and harder to find those gains. Eventually you need to call time on it. I'm happy to have made it to 39 and still be a professional, and I think that's enough.

"I've also got a wife and two kids at home, and for me, it's really tough to be away from them so much, and that's getting tougher and tougher. I'm glad I've made this decision, because I want to spend some more time at home. Yeah, that's the main motivation."

Professional cycling has become so tough that Clarke wouldn't recommend the sport to his kids, either.

"It worries me how much they like riding, and if that's what they want to do, I'll support it, but I won't be encouraging it," he says. "It's a tough life, and it takes a lot of sacrifice and a lot of commitment, and if they're up for the challenge, I'll support them, but I want it to come from them. And that's in anything they choose to do, so I would just be there for support in whatever they decide."

The sacrifices - early nights, strict diets, intense training, altitude camps and demanding travel schedules - aren't just tough on the veteran riders. Even Pogačar, who is just 26, was questioning how much longer he would keep at it following his fourth Tour de France win in July.

Ide Schelling recently announced that he would retire at the age of 27 after struggling to match the ever-increasing level in the bunch.

"He's 12 years younger than me," Clarke said. "I think the average [age of retirement] will come down, but that's part of the sport evolving. I always say adapt or die and I've lived by that my whole career. If I still tried to use the same mentality and the same traditions I used the year I turned pro, there is no way I would be a pro now. So you have to adapt with the sport. It's beautiful to see the sport evolving and the technology - aerodynamics now is so important and makes a massive difference.

"The speeds are higher, a lot because of our equipment. Sure, we train harder, train differently, and maybe we can ride a little bit faster, but the big difference is the equipment, the bikes, and the suit. We all race now in aero suits and aero helmets and aero bikes that are just incredibly faster than what we used to have. There's up to 10k an hour just in this."

The high speeds have also contributed to increasing concerns around safety in the races, especially in recent years that have seen major injuries to high-profile riders like Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Wout van Aert, as well as the death of Gino Mäder during the Tour de Suisse.

"I feel like there's a combination of our speed getting higher because of our equipment, and there being more and more road safety obstacles - road safety for a car, but not safety for a peloton smashing down a road with traffic islands in the middle.

"I was at a race last month, and they said in the race notes that we had 180 obstacles. That's one a kilometer! This is a challenging situation for safety."

The UCI has made efforts to address safety concerns, forming the SafeR group and imposing rules like yellow cards to force riders to stick to safety rules. A proposed rule to limit gear ratios designed to slow the peloton likely won't have much of an effect, Clarke says.

"I'm not sure that a peloton going two kilometres an hour slower is actually going to fix the safety issue. Sure, a slower peloton could maybe increase safety but taking one gear off a cassette is not going to be the difference for me in the safety of the peloton.

"I feel SafeR is doing a really good job. It's not something we can fix overnight, but they now review every race course before we do it, and they have a panel that watches a live video of the course and asks questions about what provisions are made for safety in potentially dangerous areas. These are things that before never used to happen. I feel like this is a great initiative, and it's a good start to trying to find a solution."