Were they ever this young? Adam Blythe and Luke Rowe, seventeen, riding through the Derbyshire Peak District in 2007, with professional cycling still a destination rather than a job. Rowe was staying with Blythe’s family, and the two were inseparable. Training together was what they chose to do; friendship and ambition shared the road.
Both were in the British Cycling system, looking towards places in the under-23 academy. But even then, there was more than one way forward. Blythe spent every day he could in Belgium and had already won the junior Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne.
When the academy’s regime proved unsuitable, he returned to Belgium to make his own way. Rowe stayed, developed within the system and joined Team Sky in 2012.
They understood each other’s racing instincts. “Adam is a sprinter, but he doesn’t wait for sprints,” Rowe said at the time. Blythe’s verdict on Rowe was clear: “He’s always attacking, he never stops.”
Those observations travelled well. Blythe’s career took him through Lotto, BMC, Orica and Tinkoff, with a spell back on the British domestic scene bringing victory in the 2014 RideLondon-Surrey Classic. His finest demonstration of speed and nerve came in 2016, when he beat Mark Cavendish to become British road champion. The teenager who refused to wait could also deliver when everything depended on the finish.
Rowe became one of Sky’s, then Ineos’s, most trusted road captains. Strong on the cobbles, alert to danger and willing to spend himself for others, he helped Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas and Egan Bernal win five Tours de France between them. His significance was often measured in somebody else’s victory, a contribution that team-mates understood better than any results sheet could show.
Both have retired; Blythe in 2019, Rowe in 2024. Blythe brings his experience and personality to TNT Sports’ cycling coverage; Rowe directs riders for Decathlon CMA CGM, passing on lessons learned at the front of the peloton.
Here, though, none of that has happened. There are no national champion’s stripes, Tour victories or second careers. Just two friends, seventeen, doing what they love, with the next hill ahead and a whole cycling life beyond it.
