“I find it very rewarding,” he says. “I find it very challenging. I think I’m also very privileged. Statistically, not that many people find a continuing livelihood in professional cycling, and I was lucky enough to do so. For someone who did nothing else but work in pro cycling, to continue using those experiences is a luxury that many other people don’t have.”

Wegelius provides a fascinating insight into life as a DS. He insists that during the race, the man behind the wheel of the team car does not move his riders like pawns on a chess board – a popular misconception. By then, it is largely too late, and experienced riders do not require such intensive in-game supervision in any case.

The DS has a greater effect by helping his riders manage their lives away from the races, Wegelius argues: by removing any impediment to them delivering their best performance when it matters most.

The coach and ambassador

“London is a great city. Everyone wants to win. I’m definitely still in the race, and I’m enjoying my life.”

For Matteo Carrara, winner of the 2010 Tour of Luxembourg, retirement and a new life as cycling coach and brand ambassador has involved relocating to one of the world’s major capitals.

The Italian, who raced for 12 years in cycling’s top tier, before finishing his career with Vacansoleil-DCM at the end of 2012, has become a face on the London cycling scene, with a roster of coaching clients that encompasses City boardrooms.

His work as an ambassador and industry insider has made him a mover and shaker in the West End too; for example, coordinating an event at the Pinarello store on Regent Street. He is able to name X-Bionic and Passoni among a host of brands he has worked with, and his BelieveCreate agency was a driving force in the inaugural LikeBike Monaco event – the world’s most prestigious bike show.

All of this is a far cry from a frustrating final season in the WorldTour, where Carrara found himself struggling to regain his best form in the early part of the season, and overlooked for selection for the biggest races of the latter part, despite returning to Europe from an extended training camp in Colombia in fine condition.

Despite this setback, Carrara’s unsullied reputation and his ability to gain WorldTour points made him an attractive prospect. With an effective personal manager (who also represents Nairo Quintana and Rigoberto Uran), Carrara says he was “99 per cent certain” he would join Team Sky.

When the deal failed to materialise, he decided to call time on a 12-year career whose highlight had come with the defeat of Lance Armstrong and Andy Schleck to claim overall victory in Luxembourg.

“I raced for the top teams in the world and I wanted to finish my career at the top  level, not with one of the smaller teams. Ok, I never won the Giro or the Tour, but I still have an excellent reputation in cycling.”

“You can teach people how to ride a bike, because the bike is your life,” he says, simply. “You know how to arrive in top condition: the diet, the training, the position on the bike. I’d learned so much for myself in 12 years as a professional.”

He jokes that he finally began life as an adult when he left the peloton.

“You become a man when you start life in the real world. You finish school and go into a job. But cycling is not a real job.”

The professional’s highly structured existence – “You wake up, have breakfast, and train. In the afternoon, you rest. You watch your diet carefully. Your body is like a Ferrari.” – is married to the constant anxiety over form, fitness and health.

Life as an ex-pro begins with the search for new objectives, he says, but once discovered, happiness is not far away. He offers Bradley Wiggins and Miguel Indurain as examples of that rare breed of rider with no need of a job after cycling. For most, a second career is a necessity, but one that can be as rewarding as life on the bike.

Carrara is now helping his ten-year-old son to become a cyclist. The boy races every Sunday and has ambitions to become a professional; ambitions his father shares, to a point.

“He loves cycling. I want to help him to become professional, but if he doesn’t become professional, I’ll be happy too, because it’s a tough life.”

Life outside the peloton can be tough too, but after the danger, exhaustion, and relentless schedule of training and racing, budget airlines and cheap hotels, it’s easy to see how a life representing exclusive brands and training City executives might also hold some appeal.

The pundit and presenter

Daniel Lloyd has carved out a career in the cycling media as a presenter, both for the online GCN channel and the broadcaster Eurosport.

He admits to entering a challenging period after it became apparent that Slipstream Sports, then racing as Garmin-Cervélo, would not be renewing his contract at the end of the 2011 season. Lloyd had joined Slipstream the previous year following the Garmin’s merger with Cervélo Test Team.

“It fell apart with Garmin, and HTC had folded, and there were a lot of riders on the market,” he recalls. “As one of the lower-end riders, I couldn’t find a space with any team. It was quite daunting, actually.”

Lloyd admits that he had been advised throughout his riding career to prepare for the life after the bike. The dichotomy of the professional cyclist’s existence, he maintains, is that a rider needs all of his concentration to survive the present, and has little spare capacity to consider the future.

“Once that concentration has gone, you’re not going to be as good as you can be,” he insists. “A lot won’t be able to train and race at 100 per cent [if thinking about retirement].”

His confidence in front of the camera makes Lloyd seem like a natural, but he admits to struggling in his early days as a presenter and to being lucky with the timing of his career move.

“I struggled a bit at the start with presenting and I was just very lucky. GCN had just started. Nobody had any expectations. There weren’t many people to tell me I wasn’t very good at it, in terms of viewers. In our case, practice has made…” he pauses, then adds with a laugh, “not perfect, but not quite as bad.”

The cycling CEO

Michael Rogers, a triple world time trial champion and now the CEO of the Riis-Seier Project, received a new job the day after a 16-year career as a professional cyclist came to an end in abrupt circumstances.

The Australian, a key lieutenant to Bradley Wiggins during the latter’s 2012 Tour de France victory, rode the last stage of a career that had also yielded three Grand Tour stage wins, at the Dubai Tour in February.

His sudden departure from the sport was brought on by an irregular heartbeat: the result of a malformation of an aortic valve. Rogers had been aware of the condition since his first year as a professional, but its deterioration had been minimal, leaving him with little to worry about.

Despite being aware that the condition accelerated for sufferers in their mid 30s, Rogers had completed a hard, pre-season training camp with the Tinkoff team in Gran Canaria without issue.

“My heart was working fine,” he says. “I had heart monitors on 24 hours a day. There were no real signs of any danger, but then in the race [the Dubai Tour], just through some basic analysis, we picked up some weird beats; these runs of high heart rates.

“When you do an effort, there’s always a lag before the heart rate comes up. The power steps up straight away and the heart rate comes up about 10 seconds later. What we saw was that the power had come up, and the heart rate responded straight away. When the power dropped off,  the heart rate kept going up for about another minute or so.”

While Rogers is unlikely to have planned the second stage of the Dubai Tour as his farewell to professional cycling, there was little point in continuing to risk his health in what he had already intended would be his final season.

Rogers, now based in Switzerland, describes a summer spent, not at the Tour de France, but walking in the mountains with his young family. He watched the action in France on television, tuning in more recently for La Vuelta España, where he might have ridden in support of Alberto Contador.

The transition from an active working life to retirement can be hard to manage in any career, but for a professional athlete, the change can be more dramatic. Rogers puts it well when he says: “Cycling isn’t a job, it’s a way of life.” Now 36, and after 16 years in cycling’s top tier, he had begun to place a greater importance on other aspects of life.

“You may not have a race tomorrow, but going for a four-hour walk in the mountains has a cost. When you’re in your 20s, you don’t think about that stuff, you’re so focused, but when you get to your mid-30s, it starts to weigh on you. It was weighing on me.

“You just want a normal life. Your cycling career is coming to an end. That’s they way it should be: when you’re not prepared to go out in the rain or the sleet or to miss that party, then it’s time to call it a day.”

The Riis-Seier Project is a step outside of the retired pro’s typical post-career path into the DS role or media work, if still firmly within the world of cycling. The ultimate ambition for the company is to fund a top-tier professional cycling team from revenues generated by delivering fitness and training solutions, specifically an advanced static training bike and app, and from a business and hospitality base at a luxury villa in Lucca, Italy.

Retired, but not retiring

It’s not until you get up close to a professional bike race – most vividly from a team car directly behind the peloton or breakaway – that you realise how impossibly fast and dangerous a working environment it is. Adrenaline, injury and exhaustion come in equal measure, and those who merely survive are as worthy of our respect as those who triumph.

As savage as its demands can be, life inside the peloton is still a rare privilege for the elite community of athletes who make the grade; a brutal meritocracy of athletic ability, where no amount of off-the-bike charm will compensate for a deficiency in wattage. The ‘soft skills’ that make other professional worlds turn are of no use here.

Wegelius, Lloyd, Carrara and Rogers represent a fair cross section of the peloton and their separate roles in the peloton are somewhat echoed by the distinct paths they have followed in retirement.

Not all are as fortunate as our model retirees. Most riders never reach the top tier, and so miss out on the salaries paid to the very best. Even those in the WorldTour need paid employment when their sporting career ends, with the exception of the great champions.

“I  must admit I think a lot about how many riders go through the system and get lost and churned out the other end with no real plans,” Lloyd says. “A lot slip into a depression afterwards; some go on to be more successful off the bike than they were on it.”

Retirement remains a rollercoaster for the professional cyclist, even in an age when arguably they have never had it so good. Ex-riders are forced to navigate the post-career landscape alone, much as they do during their time within the sport.

Cycling must do better, but with an economic model dependent entirely on sponsorship and unlikely to change any time soon (despite Rogers’ efforts), the ex-rider must continue to make his own luck.