Joxean Matxín intervenes in the debate regarding young people who drop out due to mental health problems. In a cycling world that runs ever faster and increasingly tends towards the exasperation of some aspects in the meticulous search for details that lead to excellence, in recent years we have seen more and more talents express their discomfort regarding their psychological conditions, in some cases even leading to a premature retirement. The reasons are many and clearly some personal and subjective aspects also come into play, but it is evidently a common theme that needs to be addressed and that some teams find themselves facing with greater attention, also considering the tendency to go and recruit talent who are increasingly younger than in the past.
This is one aspect, however, that the expert manager of UAE Team Emirates XRG considers it somehow outdated. “I believe that now young people are more aware, for better or for worse. They are a minority, but they are aware of what they want and what they don’t want”, he explains to Mark answering negatively to the question whether in his opinion there will still be many withdrawals by young riders.
“Before, perhaps there were those who did it at 26 or 27 because they had less information about what they wanted and what they didn’t want – continues Tadej Pogacar’s mentor – Now talents and young people have more information. And that information, call it data or whatever you want, cannot be synonymous with experience. Previously you needed experience to learn certain things and now you have information without needing to draw on that experience. So, I believe that now there is more information and that they are more aware, for better or for worse”.
A perception that changes, according to Matxin, also from a generational and personal point of view: “We perhaps see it as an evil and they as a good, because it is what they need, what they want, the decision they have made. These are more personal things: we should investigate the causes of each one”.
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