Cycling's 2010s - An Unpredictable Journey

by EDWARD PICKERING -- EDITOR

ProCycling UK, January 2020

A lot can happen in a decade. This time 10 years ago, Team Sky were just about to start and, let’s be honest, they were a bit average initially. Lance Armstrong was unretired and undisgraced. Fabian Cancellara had yet to win his first Tour of Flanders. And a British rider was probably not going to win the Tour de France any time soon, notwithstanding the fourth place that Bradley Wiggins had just achieved in the race. On the other hand, Marianne Vos was winning a lot of races, just as she is 10 years later. In a fast-changing world, some things remain reassuringly stable.

Pedants will rightly point out that the decade technically ends in December 2020, but pedants didn’t have as good a time as the rest of us on December 31, 1999. We’re celebrating the cycling teens, and what a decade it was. The last 10 years have seen the domination of Sky, the peak years of Cancellara, Peter Sagan, Philippe Gilbert, Vos and more, and most importantly, significant growth in women’s cycling. We’ve gone back and looked at the most interesting stories of the decade, from the misfiring first year of Sky, through the once-in-a-generation rivalry of Boonen and Cancellara, to the women’s superteam Boels-Dolmans. We’ve looked back at the British success, and its darker side, along with the Lance Armstrong interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was one of the moments cycling really started to face up to its profound doping problems.

Cycling’s internationalisation has continued apace since 2010, and the other features in this month’s magazine reflect that. We followed Peter Sagan on his recent trip to Colombia, and have interviewed Reinardt Janse van Rensburg and Jay Thomson about being South Africans on a South African WorldTour team. Ten years ago, I couldn’t have imagined the way the sport was going to go. I wonder how things will change in the 2020s.