When you work on a cycling magazine, it’s not uncommon to receive emails from young riders bidding to get themselves featured. Some just want to show off, others are labouring under the illusion that getting pictured in the mag might launch their career into pro cycling. But this email, which dropped into my inbox five years ago almost to the day, was different.
“Apologies for the contact out of the blue!” it began, endearingly, followed by a flattering paragraph about the “real insight” of our recent fitness content. The writer then cut to the chase. “In September 2018 I decided to take the plunge and commit to cycling full-time, having previously worked in a bike shop. I saved up and quit my job to allow full focus and commitment to the season ahead.”
If we weren’t already disarmed by the intro, it was impossible not to be charmed by the sincerity of the ambition. The naive optimism of youth? Probably, but I couldn’t help but think that with such an attitude, this kid could go far. And I wasn’t wrong. The writer of that email, pitching for opportunities, was a 19-yearold aspiring pro named Callum McQueen – the same young man who today, having just turned 24, is the youngest performance director in the WorldTour.
Rapid rise
When I catch up with Callum by video call in early 2024, it’s the first time we’ve spoken in months – the first time since I heard about his landing a plum job at Soudal-Quick Step. His enthusiasm undimmed, he launches straight into what he has been working on over the past few days. “The final time trial is in Monaco,” he says, describing the process of choosing the best skinsuit for this year’s Tour de France. “It’s likely to be very hot with not much wind, so we might have to consider sacrificing aerodynamics for the sake of cooling.” It can be difficult, he explains, finding a skinsuit that works equally well on all the team’s riders, given their various physiques. Oh well, don’t worry about Remco, I joke, he needs slowing down.
Callum flashes a knowing smile. “We did some aero testing the other day,” he confides, “and the smallest guy on the team, William Junior [Lecerf] – he’s 58kg, a really tiny guy – even in his best position would push significantly more power than Remco [for the same speed].” He won’t tell me the exact number of watts, but what the heck, I might as well ask the irresistible follow-up: just how low is Remco’s CdA (coefficient of drag)? “I can’t really say,” murmurs Callum, “but it’s below… Ummm… It’s very low,” he grins, realising he can’t risk giving even a rough figure. “When I saw it, I was like, wow, that’s low!”
Another recent challenge has been devising a plan for the Paris-Nice TTT (see box), with new rules this year stipulating that the team’s time is taken on the first rider across the line, not the third or fourth as usual. I wonder aloud whether it’s plausible that Evenepoel is so strong that the team’s best option would be to unleash him to ride a chunk of the race solo. “This is the thing,” Callum pauses, again reluctant to give away too much, “I am quite keen to let him do the final 5km because it’s likely he’ll be quicker than anyone else out there.”
This strikes me as an intimidating task: having to tell arguably the best rider in the world to go it alone for what could be several agonising kilometres. Does this rest on Callum’s young shoulders? “I had to make the plan and then propose it to the head of performance,” he says. “Part of doing that meant replicating the climb [from the TTT course] in training.” As he begins to explain, the penny drops: he means they had to find out how much Evenepoel would need to hold back on the 4.5-minute climb to avoid dropping everyone else. “At 360 [watts] everyone was fine, but then we began to step it up,” he pauses to clarify that the numbers he’s about to state are strictly off-the-record. Several power hikes later we get to an eye-popping figure that proved “unsustainable for everyone other than Remco.”
The granular detail, literally road testing every element of an upcoming performance, is even more meticulous than I had imagined. How many staff are involved in putting these plans together? “Doing what I do? Just me,” says Callum, adding that for most of the time he is on his own, working independently and only reporting to head of performance Koen Pelgrim (also Evenepoel’s coach) to get plans checked and signed off. How have riders responded to taking advice from someone so young? “Initially some riders were a bit like, ‘Ooh, why are we doing this?’ but then they see the outcome of tests and feel more confident. Once you circulate the reports, they get it and take it very well; the feedback has been good.”
This seems almost too harmonious to be true; surely there are a broad range of personalities on a team, some spikier than others. “Sure, there are the jokers and others who are serious about everything,” Callum smiles. “Remco is really nice, really funny. We’re almost the same age – he’s just six weeks older than me. When I first met him, in California, he asked how old I was, and when I told him, he said he really respected that I’m doing what I’m doing at this age.”
Callum may be young for a performance director, but he’s far from the youngest member of the team: seven Soudal-Quick Step riders are under 23 – and just hours before we speak, the youngest of them all, Frenchman Paul Magnier, just 19, won his first pro race, the Trofeo Ses Salines-Felanitx (since followed up with a stage win at the Tour of Oman). “He beat a few of our established sprinters,” says Callum, wide-eyed, “so he clearly has even more potential than we realised.” He admits that employing riders who have only just graduated from the junior ranks is partly economic pragmatism – they demand lower salaries – but adds that it’s a fact of life for WorldTour-dreaming youngsters that “these days, if you haven’t been picked up by age 19 or 20, it’s often already too late.”
School of hard knocks
After receiving that email from 19-year-old Callum back in spring 2019, we invited him to Kent University to do some physiological testing – aspiring elite versus normal rider (me) – for a feature on what it takes to turn pro. He put me to the sword with a VO2max of 74ml/kg/min, threshold power of 4.7W/kg and gross efficiency of 26.2%; the latter, according to Prof Mark Burnley, was truly exceptional. Callum and I kept in touch, occasionally racing together on Zwift, and he willingly slotted in CW photoshoots around his training as he continued to pursue his racing ambitions. I wasn’t surprised, then, when at the end of 2021 he realised his dream of turning pro, signing for Continental-level Canadian outfit Yoeleo Test Team.
Suffice to say, it didn’t work out – no need to dwell on the disappointment – but what I am interested to know is what he learnt from that year mixing it with the big boys. “It was alright,” he sighs, “but it was very busy with travel, and the racing was so demanding. We were turning up to the same races as Bora and Lotto, as well as big development teams. For me, it was just like, OK, this level is miles above where I am.”
This is typical humility from Callum; no excuses, he just wasn’t good enough. Such was the shock, though, that it has altered his perspective on the prospects for aspiring young racers out there. “It’s even starker now [working on a WorldTour team], seeing the power these guys are pushing, some of them only 18 or 19 years old. I don’t know if it’s genetics, but you realise the size of the gap. Looking at guys on the UK scene, most of them will never make it – they’ll keep trying, of course, and you’d never want to stop that.”
He may have got his nose bloodied in the pro peloton, but I put it to Callum that the experience must have helped his prospects as he sought employment on a top team. “Exactly, it’s like everything in life happens for a reason,” he says. “Patrick [Lefevere] asked if I had racing experience, and I said yes, I was also good on the bike. He said, ‘Ah, a bit like me’. I said, ‘I wouldn’t quite say that, but–’. The riders too, they appreciate that you know what it’s like to be in the gutter.”
I want to know more about that interview with Soudal-Quick Step’s famously forthright boss Lefevere – and also more detail on how he, Callum, landed such a big-ticket job aged just 23. “Just before the Worlds [in Glasgow], I messaged Klaas [Lodewyck, sports director],” he says, “and said I appreciate I’m young and don’t have the degrees others might have, but I don’t want to beat around working at five other teams before I end up with you, so is there maybe something we could look at?” There it is again, that direct approach, courteous but signalling serious intent. And it worked; he met with Lodewyck in Glasgow, and evidently made a good impression. “Klaas said, ‘I’m very happy, I think I can see where we need you in the team – I’ll speak to Patrick, he might want to meet you’.”
After a few weeks on tenterhooks as murmurings about a Jumbo-Soudal merger grew ever louder, Callum finally received a text message from Lefevere in October, summoning him to the team’s service course in Belgium. He jumped on a plane feeling understandably nervous. On the day, though, the tension was soon defused as Lefevere began regaling him with anecdotes from his racing career. “It was just a general chat,” says Callum. “He said he didn’t understand performance data but just wanted to find out what I was like as a person.” The person Lefevere found, he must have liked – because a fortnight later Callum was on board a flight to California for his first Soudal-Quick Step training camp.
Four months on, he’s now fully settled in – and his schedule sounds hectic, every few days jumping on a plane between training camps, races and test locations. When we speak, he is preparing to fly to Portugal for the Volta ao Algarve, ahead of more pre-Paris-Nice testing, then on to the race itself, before it’s back to the wind tunnel in Milan. The team has staff accommodation in Belgium, but whenever Callum gets the chance he returns home to the UK, usually staying with his parents at their home near Reading – from where he’s speaking to me today.
Conscious that I’m eating into his precious downtime, I want to let him go – but I can’t do so without first asking the question on everyone’s lips this year: can Remco win the Tour on his first attempt? “I’d like to hope so,” he laughs. “Netflix were filming for their Unchained series at our last wind tunnel test, and I said on camera that hopefully this is the bike he’ll win the Tour on – so hopefully they keep that in the final edit and it’ll turn out to be true.”
The best-laid plans: What really happened at Paris-Nice
At the Paris-Nice TTT on 5 March, everything seemed to be going perfectly to plan for Soudal-Quick Step. Six riders were still together as Evenepoel led them up and over the Côte de Jussy, blasting through the intermediate split 17 seconds up on UAE Team Emirates. But then it started to rain.
“I’d say the plan was executed perfectly,” says Callum, “but we got unlucky with the weather.” On the fast, mostly downhill second half, wet corners meant a heavy impact on the overall time – a swing of 39 seconds in UAE’s favour. According to Sporza, Evenepoel was also unhappy with Tim Declercq (Lidl-Trek), whom he claimed “stayed in front of us in a technical turn” costing the team more time. Soudal Quick-Step finished fourth, 22 seconds down on stage winners UAE.
“Sometimes there are things you can’t control,” adds Callum. “Still, the performances, the way the plan was executed and the data we took away were all very positive. When the data matches up with what we had planned, that’s always good to see, too.”
This article was first published in the 14 March 2024 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine. Subscribe online and get the magazine delivered to your door every week.
