I started putting work together on this blog by asking the question ‘are we seeing the rise of the disruptor in cycling?’ In the last two years there had been Grand Tour winners aged 22, 26 and 26 and a number of exciting young riders animating races. It felt like a new era was emerging to challenge the status quo.
However, the data soon told me that, with the exception of 22 year old Egan Bernal winning the Tour de France, the last few years have not been that unusual. The graph below shows the age of the winners of each of the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a Espaina going back to 1989. While the winners are most commonly aged between 28-32 years old, it is not that unusual to see a 25 year old winning a grand tour, 20% of winners have been aged 25 or under (although that is less likely in the Tour that has been dominated by multiple winners gradually getting older).
At 22, Bernal is significantly younger than these other winners, but only the future will tell if he is another outlier like 41 year old Chris Horner who won the Vuelta a Espania in 2013.
Figure 1: Age of Grand Tour winners (1989-2019)
However, the data suggests we might be at the start of a new wave of grand tour winners, and a younger wave at that. The bar chart below shows the average age of Grand Tour winners each year since 1989, and it does seem to move in a series of waves as generations come and go (this is helped by multiple winners who push the average age up each year). If 2019 is the start of another wave, the average of 26 years old is certainly a change from the previous 11 years when these waves tended to start at an average age of 29 or older.
Figure 2: Average age of Grand Tour winners
In fact, you would have to go back to 1997 to see another era of young winners. However, lets hope that if this is a new era, it will not will not be a replica of that late 90’s group that included the young Jan Ulrich and Marco Pantani.
Sport.dat 