Road cycling is not just a sport: over more than a century, it has been a different way of experiencing the body, work, time, and effort. Looking at its evolution means going beyond victories and defeats, to observe how careers, their duration, and cycling's place in athletes' lives have transformed. If today we are accustomed to thinking of a rider as a hyper-specialized professional, monitored by data and scientific staff, it is worth remembering that this has not always been the case. This transformation is not only cultural or technical: it is measurable. And it is precisely here that numbers help us read what sports memory often perceives intuitively.

When Cycling Was a Life Interlude

In the pioneering phase, between the late 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, being a cyclist did not mean "being" a cyclist. Careers were short, irregular, often subordinate to other jobs. One raced when possible and stopped when the body or life demanded it. Infographic 1 immediately makes this structure visible: the average career duration was reduced to just a few years. Cycling occupied a marginal portion of existence, an intense but transitory parenthesis. The effort was extreme, protections non-existent, the calendar limited. But it is precisely in this brevity that the foundational idea of cycling as an absolute human challenge against the road is born.

The Birth of the Cycling Career
Something changes in the historical period between the 1920s and 1930s. Cycling progressively becomes a recognizable job. Careers lengthen, entry into competition occurs earlier, continuity increases. Infographic 1 again shows this first structural leap: the average duration doubles. Cycling life is no longer episodic but begins to coincide with a central phase of adult life. More stable teams, broader calendars, and a first professional identity mark the transition from occasional work to career.

The Golden Age: When Cycling Was Everything

The point of maximum balance arrives in the so-called heroic period, between the 1940s and 1950s. This is where cycling becomes an entire life. Careers are long, continuous, cumulative. One enters young and exits late. Infographic 1 shows the historical peak of average duration; Infographic 5, dedicated to the Cycling Life Index (duration × productivity), clarifies why this era produced unrepeatable myths. It's not just a matter of talent: it's the combination of time, continuity, and performance that allows the construction of complete narrative careers. In this phase, cycling almost totally coincides with the athlete's identity.

Professionalization That Shortens Time

From the 1960s onward, cycling enters a modern phase. Sports science, technology, and organization radically change the way of racing. Careers remain important but become more selective. Infographic 2 clarifies the paradox of this phase: competitive intensity grows, but duration begins to reduce. Modern cycling does not increase the "how much" produced in a lifetime, but how much is produced each year. The athlete specializes, is inserted into precise roles, depends on a complex system that accelerates entry and anticipates exit.

Today's Cycling: More Intense, Less Long 

In contemporary cycling, the transformation is even more stark. One enters very early, often already as a junior, with extremely high workloads. But permanence is uncertain. Infographic 3, based on survival curves, visualizes a crucial datum: today cycling does not "wear down slowly", it selects immediately. Many athletes exit in the first years; few manage to build long careers. The career becomes intense but fragile, compressed in time. Cycling life risks no longer coinciding with a biography, but with a high-pressure phase.

Cycling Life as a Biographical Space

This change is perhaps the most profound. Infographic 4 represents an athlete's life as an 80-year arc, highlighting the portion occupied by cycling. In pioneers, cycling is a limited section. In the heroic era, it almost coincides with the entire adult life. Today, instead, it is an extreme temporal window: brief, concentrated, totalizing. Cycling no longer accompanies the entire maturation of the athlete but rapidly consumes its peak.

Towards a New Era?
The youngest represent an open bet. Entry is early, scientific support is maximum, but the Cycling Life Index – as Infographic 5 shows – is today at its historical low, not due to lack of talent, but because the time of permanence in the sport has drastically reduced. Cycling could take two paths: extremely brief but hyper-performing careers, or a new longevity built on intelligent management of load, growth, and error.

The Meaning of Numbers
The infographics do not tell of a decline, but a structural transformation. Cycling has not become less hard nor less competitive: it has become faster in judging, more demanding in the short term, less indulgent with maturation time.
Once, the cyclist built himself by racing. Today, he must immediately demonstrate being ready. The true challenge of the future will not only be finding new champions, but reconstructing sustainable cycling lives, capable of lasting over time without breaking too soon.

Analysis Methodology
The analysis was conducted starting from a biographical and historical dataset relating to road cyclists, organized by generational cohorts and aggregated into temporal clusters (pioneering, historical, heroic, modern, contemporary, new era). In the absence of precise and homogeneous information on the start and end dates of each athlete's career, career duration was estimated through consistent proxies: biographical age, historical period of activity, observable competitive continuity, and result accumulation. To make comparable eras characterized by deeply different calendars, scoring systems, and competitive density, the data were normalized by historical period. In particular, sports productivity was treated relatively, while career duration was used as a structural contextual variable. On this basis, synthetic indicators were constructed, including the Cycling Life Index (CLI), defined as the product between estimated career duration and normalized productivity, useful for describing cycling's overall weight in the athlete's biography. Permanence dynamics in the sport were finally represented descriptively through survival curves inspired by the Kaplan-Meier approach, interpreted not in a clinical sense but as a narrative tool to visualize selection over time. The analysis's objective is not the precise measurement of individual performances, but the reconstruction of structural transformations in cycling life over the long period, integrating data, sports history, and socio-biographical reading of careers.

Prof Giovanni Di Trapani, CNR Researcher