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To have more reliable figures on the upcoming season you have to wait at least until Marchwhen the competitions have already started and the membership and staff have stabilized. But in general they shouldn’t be that much different from those of last year. As for the Italian category Elite/Under 23the recorded lineups were 53; 524, however, the elite; The Under 23finally, they were 1.037. The count also includes those teams whose activity is modest and those riders who drag themselves out of habit and who perhaps stop in the summer, without forgetting those who practice other cycling disciplines and those who, instead, take advantage of the road to perform better on the track, on a mountain bike or in cyclocross. In short, not all of the 1,561 athletes officially included cycled and ran continuously on the road from February to October.
The category, at an international level even before at an Italian level, is experiencing a phase of settling. If on the one hand the birth of professional nurseries is making access to the top series increasingly exclusive and ruthless, on the other hand the International Cycling Union has decided before go back to excluding professionals from the World Championships, the European Championships and the Tour de l’Avenirand then to discontinue the category Nations Cup, specifying that they wanted to give greater emphasis to that of the juniors. Remaining on Italian soil, the division suffered an obvious scaling: a good part of the best elements militate abroad and many teams have ceased activity (Zalf and Palazzago, to name two) or changed air (Mbh Bank landed among the professionals, Mastromarco joined the juniors, Cycling Team Friuli merged entirely into Bahrain-Victorious becoming its development).
The first ones are felt creaks also come from the previous category, that of juniors. Even though the world of professionalism is paying ever greater attention to it, keeping up with the frenetic pace that modern cycling imposes is tough. And that’s how it is in Italy, for different reasons, both Otelli and F.lli Giorgi decided to stop. The difficulties of correctly managing the physical and psychological development of teenagers who are barely of age are accompanied by the impotence in seeing the most talented fly away: in the youth teams scattered across Western Europe, if not directly among the professionals.
The numbers are low. It is worrying to note that, in Italy, the series in theory closest to professionalism, namely that of the elite and Under 23s, can count on a pool of just around 1,500 athletesa part of which, as mentioned, has now been surrendered to the evidence of a insufficient talent or interested in shining in other disciplines and not on the road. The malaise of a category reflects and at the same time amplifies a more generalized disorder. The medals and triumphs collected at the highest levels are the result of talent, dedication and ability of a limited list of names among riders and technicians, the so-called punta dell’iceberg; but in the long term they are destined to become extinct if enough new recruits do not arrive from the youth universe.
Rather than trying to increase the scope and quality of the structures and activities already present, the priority now is to get the kids on bicyclesto encourage them to choose cycling as their main sport: but how many chances are there that in the next few years the number of Under 23s or juniors in Italy will increase significantly season after season if road safety and sensitivity are at an all-time low, and if the absence of a champion and a great professional team continues to deprive the movement of a North Star to which to turn for guidance?
Since quality can also depend on quantity (trivially: if the pool from which to draw is very large, there are excellent possibilities of catching something good), of all the proposals put forward by the experts the least convincing is the one that would like the Elite/Under 23 category to be closednow considered moldy, in the face of a more widespread impulse to students and juniors. The amateur world may not be going through its most prosperous period, agreed, but What would be left of cycling in Italy if even some of the most beautiful races and those few true semi-professional clubs born in the last ten years were to disappear?? What would happen to the second and third choices of the juniors, potentially valid but rejected by the youth teams? And who would replenish the starting list of many professional races if the continental races closed their doors? If we don’t want cycling to end up like other sports, which have practically disappeared from everyday life even though they are capable of standing out in the Olympic and international arena, the last thing you should do is purposely delete an entire category.
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