Inside Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe Rookies' recruitment strategy 🇩🇪
From identifying talents, dealing with agents and parents and fostering future champions, we speak to John Wakefield
Hey Subscribers,
At Red Bull – BORA – hansgrohe Rookies, recruitment isn’t based on instinct alone; it’s built on power metrics, personality profiling, long-term athlete management, and a clear vision of producing future WorldTour stars.
In this exclusive interview, Director of Coaching, Sports Science and Technical Development, John Wakefield, lifts the lid on how the development squad filters dozens of teenage prospects each year, balances physiology with character, and walks the fine line between nurturing potential and avoiding burnout in the sport’s next generation.
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Daniel Benson: Generally, for this series, I’m interviewing WorldTour bosses, but some of the elements are the same, so can we start by providing background on their team’s overall recruitment strategy?
John Wakefield: Obviously, from the outset, we’re looking at rider profiles and determining whether or not they’re the type of rider that we’re looking for, whether that’s a sprinter or what we might consider could be a stage race or Grand Tour contender. In terms of the marks of identification, the basics we look at are results and how they race within races. We also consider areas such as equipment, because you get a very wide range of set-ups, and not all riders have the same or equal range of equipment available to them. Then, when we dive a lot deeper into the data side of things, training age is a big one for us. We also use the compound score and the compound score mixed just to give us an overall view of what that rider’s overall physiological talent is or identification is.
Daniel Benson: Can you explain to readers, and me, what you mean by training age and share some details as to why it’s so important? Same with compound score, please.