Five riders for the future

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Wilco Kelderman has been identified as Rabobank's next big thing(Image credit: Isabelle Duchesne)

This article originally appeared in the February issue of Procycling

Meet the class of 2012 – five young riders we think are destined to become future stars of the sport. We’re not talking about success this year, but half a decade down the line when they’ve lapped up the experience offered by the current generation and started to make their mark on the races that matter. Limiting ourselves to five was a tough task. There’s no room for promising climber Fabio Aru, winner of the Giro Della Valle d’Aosta; Jetse Bol, winner of the Olympia’s tour; Moreno Moser, double stage winner at the baby giro; U23 world champion Arnaud Démare; nor a host of others who could, and probably will, press in on the pro ranks when their time comes.

Picking riders to watch is a risky business. For every Vincenzo Nibali there’s a handful of Thomas Lövkvists who have burned brightly for a time but for one reason or another have never lived up to their early promise. Who’s to say whether one, three or all five of this lot will falter? Call it gut instinct but there’s something that makes them stick out – a run of big victories, a keen racing mind or a word from the people around them who say they have the spark of world-beating talent. The final choice is a mixed bag of TT racers, classics riders and future GC contenders. The only parameter we set was that they were not fully contracted to a Pro Continental or Pro team outfit last year – something which ruled out riders such as the Colombian Giro Dell’Emilia winner Carlos Betancur, who’s bound for stardom, or Johan Chavez Rubio at Colombia es Pasión. Welcome to our pick of the next generation.

Andy Fenn
Omega Pharma-Quick-Step
Age: 21
Nationality: British
As a junior, Andy Fenn used to head to Belgium to race. It was a tough playground but the roads, the races and the competition struck a chord with the youngster. Plus, says the 21-year-old, people tend to like what they’re good at and he’s good at riding cobbles. One rider who knows this is Peter Sagan – Fenn beat him in the Junior Paris-Roubaix back in 2008. Fenn spent two years under Max Sciandri at the GB Academy before deciding he was ready for a richer diet of UCI-ranked races, so Team GB Performance Manager Shane Sutton put him in touch with the An Post-Sean Kelly squad for 2011. The team’s manager Kurt Bogaerts remembers being impressed by him as Fenn was an aggressive, tactical rider who had an innate ability to read a race and “do the right thing”. In other words, he has the native wit essential for successful classics riders.

Fenn rode strongly at the tours of Oman and Qatar and, when he returned to Europe, he got in the break at Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. When he wasn’t being aggressive he was being a good team player. “He feels the race and he knows what to do in each situation,” says Bogaerts. “He’s a good sprinter first of all but the number of races he can do well in is limited at the moment. He knows he can’t win them yet but he rides aggressively so he can discover the races – he’s got that intelligence.” At the Tour de Bretagne, he took his first victory on the final stage of the seven-day race. At the Paris-Roubaix espoirs he was in a break of five, but a slow puncture wrecked his chances of winning, something that he was easily capable of given his strong finishing kick. At the Worlds, he finished third behind Adrien Petit and the winner Arnaud Démare. By then he was ready for a Pro team, and Omega Pharma-Quick-Step made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

For him, 2012 is all about learning from the classics experts on the team. The squad might have diversified but with riders such as Tom Boonen and Sylvain Chavanel on the roster, plus manager Patrick Lefevere, there’s all the experience to draw on that he could possibly need. Fenn sees the big classics – such as Roubaix and Flanders – as the territory of older men, patient riders who have served their apprenticeships and hardened up. The youngster from Hertfordshire has a way to go but all the signs are that he has the tools for the job.

He says: “Maybe it’ll take a bit longer than [three years] – everyone says those sorts of races suit the older guys. Maybe I’ll go better in the smaller ones and hopefully be more of a contender by then. There’s a lot of guys on the team who have won races that I want to do well in, they know what they’re doing and so do the directors, so I think it’s a really good place to learn. I rode the smaller type of [classics] race in Belgium last year, and I performed better in them – I suppose there’s an element of liking what you’re good at.”

Enrico Battaglin
Colnago-CSF Inox
Age: 22
Nationality: Italian
If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Enrico is a distant relative of Giovanni Battaglin, the Giro and Vuelta double winner of 1981 who turned to frame building in his retirement. However, recently it’s the precocious young man from Vicenza who has been keeping the family name in the headlines. In fact, he started attracting attention at such an early age that the manager of Colnago-CSF, Roberto Reverberi, put him under contract four years ago.

The year he came to the fore was 2010, riding in the colours of Zalf Desirèe Fior, the same team that incubated Paolo Savoldelli and Ivan Basso. He won eight races including a stage and the overall of the Nations Cup event, the Giro Delle Regioni. He could have turned pro in 2011 but opted to play it slow and steady and spend another year building his strength and experience with the amateurs. The year passed and the wins kept coming. In August he finally stepped up to the Colnago-CSF Inox squad as a stagiaire and immediately made an impression by beating doping impenitent Davide Rebellin in the 1.1-ranked Coppa Sabatini. Arrivals don’t get much bigger than that.

It was a victory for the tifosi to savour. After a disastrous year for Italian cycling, which the Giro d’Italia’s director Michele Acquarone said was the worst since 1989, at least Battaglin’s late season success offered a glimmer of revival. The 22-year-old looks destined for a career as a classics specialist. He’s a punchy climber and can push big gears on the flat. These talents have led to inevitable comparisons with 1980s classics star Moreno Argentin but Battaglin is playing it down. In his own estimation at least, Battaglin – who holds a diploma in industrial graphic design and names his favourite television show as Desperate Housewives – has his feet on the ground. All he wants in 2012 is to find his place in the squad, he says. Italian media report Battaglin has a three-year contract with Reverberi, which speaks volumes about how jealously they guard him. Given the Sabatini win, it’s likely he’ll get his chance to lead the team alongside Domenico Pozzovivo and Sacha Modolo and he’s already down to ride Milan-San Remo and the Giro.

They say: “At Colnago-CSF Inox we pride ourselves on developing the best young Italian riders and we think Enrico has the potential to become a star of the future. He has a fast finish too, so he could be suited to races like Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Tour of Lombardy. Some people have said he’s a lot like Paolo Bettini. Let’s hope so!” Roberto Reverberi, team manager, Colnago-CSF Inox.

Sergio Luis Henao
Sky Procycling
Age: 24
Nationality: Colombian
One of 2012’s most intriguing transfers was Henao to Team Sky. The 24-year-old Colombian has been on the fringes of the European scene since he joined Colombia es Pasion in 2007 but he hasn’t made the impact that his talent suggests he should have done because he’s hardly raced here. He’s been touted as specialist climbing support for Bradley Wiggins and Sky’s bevy of established stage racers but at this early stage, his race coach Kurt Asle Arvesen said they were keeping an open mind. Given his background, anything is possible with Henao.

In 2011 Henao joined the continental squad Gobernación de Antioquia and his exposure to the highest levels of racing picked up a gear at the Tour of Utah, which he led for most of the event after winning the uphill opening prologue. In the end he was undone by his time trialling and ceded the lead to eventual winner, Levi Leipheimer. Two weeks later the pair duelled again at the USA Pro Cycling Challenge where Henao narrowly missed taking the win and the overall lead atop Crested Butte on the first mountain stage. When Henao’s Sky move was completed David Brailsford admitted that everyone on the team had been watching him since 2009 – or to put it another way, since Sky was being prepared for launch. There’s something about the rider that Team Sky really like and, given his relatively old age and high experience, we might see glimpses of it this year.

Wilco Kelderman
Rabobank
Age: 20
Nationality: Dutch
“Patience is needed but this is the successor of Eddy Merckx or at least Joop [Zoetemelk],” proclaimed a Dutch cycling forum member last summer after Kelderman took back-to-back overall wins at the Tour of Norway and the Thüringen Rundfahrt in Germany. Poor guy. He was still with the Rabobank continental squad and some fans were already lost in a daydream about the lad’s potential domination. Kelderman is probably not the next Merckx or the next Zoetemelk – at the moment he’s a 20-year-old with a love of hair products.

Nevertheless, he’s an exciting talent. He’s spent two years at the Rabobank continental team and has notched up landmark victories in races that matter. In 2010 he took the overall in the Tour d’Alsace, including the mountain-top stage up the Ballon d’Alsace. He backed this up with a solid 10th at the Tour de l’Avenir in the same year. Last year he was a crushing force in time trials, winning the event at the Thüringer Rundfahrt and the Tour de l’Ain prologue, where he saw off vigorous competition including Jérôme Coppel, Rein Taaramäe and even time trial specialist Svein Tuft. Incidentally, he also took a sprint on a testing stage of the German race after the pure sprinters had been shelled out of the bunch, so he’s no slouch on the flat either.

It’s not known what kind of rider he’ll turn into but given his all-round capabilities, stage races and hilly one-day classics seem the natural fit. Don’t expect him to make a high-profile entrance in 2012 though – Rabobank’s management will put him on a trajectory similar to Robert Gesink and Bauke Mollema’s in their first season and that means no grand tours. Instead, he’ll be carrying water bottles for his senior team-mates and finding his feet in WorldTour stage races such as Tours de Suisse and Romandie. Rabobank’s squad is packed with riders who seem to be on the verge of a real breakthrough win. Gesink, for all his promise, hasn’t delivered yet and the time has now arrived for Steven Kruijswijk and Mollema to make a mark. Kelderman is a few years behind them but Rabobank staff speak of him in the same breath as them – and secretly they think and hope that he’s even better.

Luke Durbridge
GreenEdge
Age: 20
Nationality: Australian
When Luke Durbridge was growing up, Michael Rogers was one of his idols. In Australia, Rogers is the man: he has won the World TT Championship three times and his pro career stretches back more than a decade. At the 2012 Australian TT Championships in January, the 20-year-old Durbridge, in his first major senior TT, beat his hero by 16 seconds. Is Durbridge Rogers’s successor? Possibly, but in Australia there are three other riders aged 23 or under who might feel they’re on a similar path: Cameron Meyer, Jack Bobridge and Michael Hepburn. What, apart from his ‘Durbo the turbo’ nickname, makes him stand out?

His rise to the top of the national time trial heap has been exceptional. It’s not just the plethora of young talent he was up against but Mick Rogers and Richie Porte too. The Australian Championships aren’t always the best indicator because of their January billing but the World Championships paint an equally dominant picture in favour of Durbridge. Less than 18 months ago he lost out to Taylor Phinney at the U23 World Championships in Geelong by less than two seconds. He was 19 and became the youngest ever rider to win a medal in the U23 World TT. It’s a remarkable feat: the rider he took the record from was Fabian Cancellara. A year later in Copenhagen it was no surprise to anyone that he went one better and beat his nearest rival, Rasmus Quaade, by more than half a minute on the pan-flat course. In the run up, he had also shattered another record. At the Chrono Champenois, a pre-Worlds form tester, he broke the course’s previous best by more than a minute – on damp roads.

Sam started as a trainee reporter on daily newspapers in the UK before moving to South Africa where he contributed to national cycling magazine Ride for three years. After moving back to the UK he joined Procycling as a staff writer in November 2010.