Cycling commentator and former pro rider Brian Smith has decried the amount of pressure young pros face as they attempt to forge a career in the sport, saying that "the enjoyable side of things has gone for a lot of the riders".
His comments follow a year during which several riders have hung up their racing wheels while still in their twenties, often citing burnout or 'falling out of love with the sport' as part of the problem.
Smith, who was a high-level pro in the 1990s and now commentates for TNT Sports, told Cycling Weekly: "Young riders are becoming robots, where everything's measured. Their nutrition is measured, training's measured – everything's measured. It's just robotic. It's just not enjoyable."
There was a culture now where a rider's every move is monitored, he said, layered over a pressure to succeed at a young age.
"Every time you push a pedal around these days, it's been uploaded for your coach to look at every day. To do that day in, day out, is super hard for a lot of these young athletes," he explained.
Riders were being turned into "Formula One cars", said Smith, with every fine detail examined and improved where possible. And with superstars being signed straight out of the junior ranks, there is little room to grow into the sport as there was when Smith was a pro, he points out.
"Cycling is getting younger and younger… there's people in their early 20s thinking, 'I'm not going to make it as a pro'," he said. "There's teams signing up junior riders, bypassing some under-23s now."
On the one hand, Smith told us, the riders of his era missed out on modern coaching and nutritional developments, something he says that personally he would probably have thrived on: "I was so serious. I was always trying to do things better. I was always looking at going the extra mile. When I was racing in Britain, I was possibly the hardest trainer – a training machine. I was quite proud of that.".
But that approach isn't for everyone, he says. When Smith was a directeur sportif at the second-tier NetApp-Endura team, he attempted to allow the riders off the leash and maybe enjoy a few drinks at big moments, just to ease the pressure.
"I would try to allow them to do these things, because what they're doing every week of the year is so, it's so difficult," Smith added.
"We were slightly bigger riders [when I was racing]. You look at all the riders now, they're all super skinny. They're all low body fat, and for some that's not natural. And how, how do you stay there? The guilt factor."
It is perhaps no wonder that last season we saw riders including Ide Schelling, Jonas Gregaard, Lizzie Holden, Fem van Empel and others all calling time on their careers in their twenties.
Even Simon Yates, last year's Giro d'Italia winner, surprised many when he announced his retirement at the start of 2026 – not just because it was sudden but because he was still relatively young, too.
As former Classics star turned boss of Tudor Pro Cycling Fabian Cancellara told Cyclingnews recently: "Now I see how tough being a rider in modern cycling really is. Science is important, but at the end of the day, we're all human and that's important for us, we need to protect our riders."
