Elia Viviani has done it all as a bike rider and at times during his career has been the fastest man in the world in a sprint. He has 87 career wins on the road - including five stages of the Giro, three at La Vuelta and one at the Tour - as well as being a former European road champion. On the track he's picked up an OIympic title, two world titles and is an eight-time European champion.
In short, the 33-year-old Ineos Grenadiers rider knows a thing or two about sprinting. He says he now fears the days of the pure sprinter are ending because of the way professional cycling is developing. He also has firm views about who the fastest sprinter in the world is at present as well as the most complete sprinter of the current generation.
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“In a flat sprint Jakobsen is unbeatable in the last 200 metres,” he said of his former team mate at QuickStep, Fabio Jakobsen. He believes young Dutch talent, Olav Kooij, is about to become the most complete sprinter in the sport.
“For the future, the most complete is Kooij. He already has real consistency, and he’s only going to improve," he said of the 20-year-old who won 12 races this year, beating all of the top sprinters in the world at some point.
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In recent years top sprinters, who would be almost guaranteed to score stage wins on the Tour de France, have been omitted from their team line-ups because management has opted to pick the riders needed for a general classification challenge; something Viviani says he is concerned about.
Sam Bennett fell victim to that this year with Bora-hansgrohe. And Dylan Groenewegen was benched by Jumbo Visma for the French Grand Tour last year because it did not want a sprinter and lead-out men taking Tour slots.
“The art of getting by comes into play, in the sense that a team is no longer built to facilitate the sprinter," Viviani said. "In a sprint you can count on the help of two or three team mates at most, and not even that in a Grand Tour. In an eight-man team 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.”
Viviani believes the sprinters are also under pressure because of the style of racing that has evolved - with riders and teams putting in huge efforts on even short climbs to split the field - not to mention the hillier race routes now being chosen by race organisers.
“The pure sprinter is going to disappear,” Viviani told La Gazzetta dello Sport. “You have to be capable of hanging in on 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 in 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.”
