Zabel guides young riders at Columbia
- By Steve Frothingham
- Published Apr. 12, 2009
Cavendish’s San Remo win only part of the program
Fresh from retiring from one of the peloton’s most prolific careers, Erik Zabel is still busy at the races. These days he’s working with the young riders at Columbia-Highroad.
Mark Cavendish won Milan-San Remo after consulting with Zabel. “That was just amazing,” Zabel said of Cavendish’s closing sprint, and now the German veteran is officially working with several of the young riders on Columbia.
“I’m an advisor for the young riders’ development for the Highroad team,” Zabel said at the Tour of Flanders.
Besides Cavendish, riders under Zabel¹s tutelage include Edvald Boassan Hagen (who just won Ghent-Wevelgem), Mark Renshaw, Marcus Burghardt, Vicente Reynes and Marcus Sieberg.
“I’m busy with all of them,” Zabel said.
Zabel retired from his long road career at the end of the 2008 season, after winning nearly 200 major international races, including stages at all three grand tours, four wins at Milan-San Remo and six green jerseys at the Tour de France. Zabel was also active on the track in the off-season, and won his final six-day race this past January.
Although the Columbia riders listed above are young and still developing, it’s not as if Zabel has a stable of Cat. 5 riders to shepherd. So just what can Zabel teach these young men?
“The most important thing for riders is to have patience,” Zabel said. “Because they are young and they are so over-motivated, they want to win every day. That’s impossible. Even a day like [at Flanders], for example, my young guys didn’t finish on the podium. And just as Marcus was in the first group, the others were dropped. That¹s how it goes.”
It may be impossible for Columbia to win every day, but given the track records of Zabel and Columbia, more wins are almost certainly in the works.
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Steve Frothingham
VeloNews.com editor Steve Frothingham joined the gang in bike-crazy Boulder in early 2008. He is the former executive editor of the trade magazine Bicycle Retailer & Industry News. He also was a reporter and editor for The Associated Press, where he covered three presidential primaries in politics-crazy New Hampshire. His racing career began on a BMX track in 1980 and reached its zenith with several miserable road races as a category 2 in the early 90s. He subsequently retreated to cat. 3, where he has had a consistently mediocre (at best) record ever since, in road, mountain bike and cyclocross events. Follow him on Twitter at @steve_froth