Itamar Einhorn is a 25-year-old Israeli who rides for Team Israel-Premier Tech. He also is one of the world’s strongest sprinters.
Like his fellow countrymen Guy Niv and Omer Goldstein, Einhorn is a trailblazer. Niv and Goldstein are the first Israelis to ride in the Tour de France; Einhorn is the first Israeli to win a one-day WorldTour race.
But Team Israel-Premier Tech’s future is uncertain because it did not win enough races to accumulate enough points to remain on the WorldTour (similar to the soccer’s Premier League).
Einhorn, who is under contract to ride for Team Israel-Premier Tech through 2023, is refreshingly blunt about his ambition to win and his future on the team.
A career at a crossroads
Einhorn has been racing since he was 12-years-old. His Bar Mitzvah gift from his family was his older brother’s aluminum, red Specialized S-Works road bike. By the time Einhorn was 15-years-old, he was training and racing in Europe. So, unlike many American riders and others who come from countries without a deep tradition of cycling, Einhorn never experienced culture shock or a difficult adjustment to racing against the best European riders in the world.
For the upcoming 2023 season, Einhorn said his goal is to accumulate as many UCI points as possible, which would qualify him to represent Israel in the 2024 Olympics and get the top European teams to take more of an interest in him.
“If I can gain 500 or 700 or a 1000 points in one year, it is already something that other teams will be closely looking [at]. So this is also important for me [if I am] able to get a contract outside of Israel,” he said. “For the moment, for all my performances, I got some teams talking, but I was never offered another contract.”
Einhorn spent a part of October camping in northern Israel where it was still warm enough that he could swim and kayak. He has been able to relax for a few weeks, unafraid to enjoy a beer. He began training with some running and weightlifting this month.
Is Einhorn undervalued?
Einhorn’s coaches and WorldTour watchers believe that he could be a valuable addition to a WorldTour team.
“Itamar can bring points–meaning higher rankings–for a small or medium-sized team,” said Ilan Ulman, a former Israeli cyclist and the founder of Team 500 Watts. “He could be very good…as a leadout man.” (Meaning that Einhorn could do the hard work of letting a team’s top sprinter follow in his slipstream until the last few hundred meters of a race.)
“He’s more than just a pure sprinter. He understands the peloton, the road, the wind, the surface. He can read races and people and he’s very good under pressure,” said Ulman, who has known Einhorn for more than a decade.
He added that Einhorn has the potential to win some of the classic one-day races, especially those that end with slight uphill sprint finishes, if he could lose a few pounds without sacrificing his strength.
Relegation and an uncertain future
The riders on Israel-Premier Tech face an uncertain future on the WorldTour because they have been “relegated” to a second division, or ProTeam, with a lower status. The team did not win enough points to remain a part of the 18-team WorldTour and secure automatic bids to the Grand Tours.
It is unlikely that the race organizers of the Grand Tours would invite them (for example, the Tour de France organizers will invite lower level French teams rather than an American or Israel team.)
The team is not completely shut out of the WorldTour. It can race one-day races, such as Paris-Roubaix or Amstel Gold. But team owners, riders, and journalists all agree with Israel-Premier Tech’s owner, Sylvan Adams, that, “Relegation is death.”
Strategy and tactics collide
Einhorn said his 2022 season included some solid performances, but bad luck and missed opportunities played outsized roles as well.
“In the end, most of the guys on the team are a bit disappointed how it went,” he said.
It is hard to understand a team with two stage wins at the Tour de France and some other solid finishes, including a win at the Maryland Cycling Classic in Baltimore, has been relegated.
“The team had a lot of tactical mistakes in that they put, in almost every race, a few guys in the breakaway to go for the final win instead of helping one guy go for a good result,” Einhorn said. “Trying to go with three or four guys and never had a good result. I think you can say that this tactic didn’t work.”
Let’s break that down. To help a rider win, the team managers ordered several of its riders to join a breakaway. That’s a smaller group of riders who are able to jump ahead of the larger group of riders known as the peloton. The hope is that one or two riders from the breakaway could get far enough up the road so that the peloton could not catch them.
But that strategy does not work for a sprinter like Einhorn. His preference is to stay with the peloton to conserve his energy by drafting off of his teammates. Then, in the final kilometer of a race, he can hammer the pedals and sprint to the finish line.
It is this strategy that yielded both historic wins and relegation.
“The team seemed to consistently prefer to race with a scattershot breakaway strategy,” Spencer Martin, author of Beyond the Peloton, said. “In fairness to the team, it is this strategy that brought them two Tour de France stage wins.”
“Instead of trying to stack the breakaways at big races, they needed to be sending a full team to just work for Einhorn at smaller races to rack up UCI points over the past three seasons,” Martin said.
What does Israel Premier-Tech do now?
The big question now is how does Israel Premier-Tech manage its current circumstance? Cycling’s governing body, the UCI, could decide that relegation does more harm than good and just expand the number of teams on the WorldTour. If the UCI decides not to change, then what does Sylvan Adams, Team Israel-Premier Tech’s founder and owner, do? He told reporters earlier this year that he would consider legal action.
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Adams champions Israel every chance he gets and the team gives him an enormous platform to talk about what it is to be Jewish and to promote Israel as a place to visit and live.
Einhorn, too, is deeply proud of riding for an Israeli team and representing Israel on the world stage.
“A lot of people have a bad image of Israel because of everything that comes across the television. When I talk to people, I can say that Israel is not as you see on television and everything is not so bad,” he said. “The picture I want to represent is that Israel is a normal country, not that it can be. But that it is a normal country.”
Whether Einhorn’s future is with Team Israel-Premier Tech or elsewhere, he’s already made history. He’s demonstrated that it is normal for an Israeli cyclist to have what it takes to race and win in Europe.