'My legs are getting worse, but my head is still there' - Francisco Mancebo on Puerto, Rock Racing and riding past 50

Francisco Mancebo has been all around the world during his cycling life. From Mexico to Mauritania, from Salt Lake City to Tabriz: have bike, will travel. Right now, he’s in Osaka, where he has been able to combine his final duties for Matrix-Powertag with his other passion, hunting down retro video games. The hobby was reignited during his stint with the Japanese team, and it brings him back to where his reel begins.

“I started playing video games in 1994, when I was doing my military service,” Mancebo tells Domestique. “I like video games up to around 2001 or 2002. The newer consoles are a marvel in terms of graphics, but the only new game I ever really play is FIFA with my son. I prefer to go retro and, well, I suppose I’m a retro guy…”

He’s not wrong. Back then, in an era when young Spaniards were still conscripted for a dreary year of what they called ‘lamili,’ Mancebo was an 18-year-old amateur bike rider quietly nursing dreams of a pro career. More than three decades on, he’s somehow still in the game even though he was locked out of the top level long ago. 

Last month, it was confirmed that Mancebo will ride for Chinese Continental outfit Pingtan International Tourism Island Cycling Team in 2026, meaning that he will remain a professional cyclist past his 50th birthday next March. 

It’s hard to fathom that a rider whose career began at Banesto in 1998, where his teammates included Abraham Olano and José María Jiménez, is still racing bikes for a living now. Mancebo laughs at the idea that he would have considered it when he lined up for his debut at the Tour of the Mediterranean.

“When you start out as a professional, you think you’re going to retire at 32 or 33, which is when people used to retire. People last longer now, but even so, 50 is a long time…” he says in a video call from Japan. “But no, it’s happened because it’s happened. It’s not something you plan or target.”

Still, there must be easier ways for a man to make a living as he enters his sixth decade. Mancebo has been bouncing around Continental teams for almost twenty years now, often for desultory wages, at least compared to the riches of the WorldTour. He has a family at home in Navaluenga, near Ávila. It begs an obvious question: why do it? 

“Hombre, I like competing, and I like the life of a cyclist. I like the scene generally, but being a sports director or a soigneur isn’t as nice as being a rider. So as long as I can do it, my head will want to race,” Mancebo says, and he laughs again. “My legs are getting worse and worse – but my head is always there.”

Mancebo’s trajectory draws obvious parallels with that of his compatriot and contemporary Óscar Sevilla, who will race past his own 50th birthday in 2026 with Team Medellin-EPM. There are also clear echoes of the late Davide Rebellin, who raced for minor teams of varying quality on various continents until the age of 52. 

“The demands aren’t the same as they might be on a WorldTour team, right?” Mancebo says by way of explanation. “And ultimately, we’re still here because we love it, we love racing and the life of a bike rider.”

Love for the bike is only a part of their shared story. Sevilla, Rebellin and Mancebo’s narratives also entwine around the fallout from doping scandals that saw them locked out of the top level of the sport thereafter. Rebellin became the first Italian athlete to be stripped of an Olympic medal for doping, and no major team would hire him on his return for suspension, and he spent the remainder of his career in a sort of limbo on the fringes of the sport.

Mancebo and Sevilla’s cases reached the public domain in more nebulous form, but the aftermath was the same as it was for Rebellin. Both riders were immediately implicated in Operación Puerto when news of the inquiry broke in 2006, and they were swiftly dismissed by their respective teams. Neither rider would ever serve a suspension for their links to Dr Eufemiano Fuentes, but an invisible wall was erected to keep them out of the WorldTour thereafter.

After being fired by AG2R, Mancebo raced alongside Sevilla at Relax in 2007, but the team’s notorious riders meant they were refused a wildcard for that year’s Vuelta a España and folded at season’s end. Three years after finishing just off the podium of the Tour de France, Mancebo found himself where Spanish cycling’s most broken heroes have generally tended to wash up over the years, the Portuguese Continental circuit.

“Well, obviously, my career was marked by Operación Puerto. It was a turning point,” says Mancebo. “They didn’t let us race the Vuelta with Relax, and that’s really where everything really changed, rather than in 2006. If we had been able to continue at that level, I might have retired at 33 or 34. But racing at a less demanding level allows you to enjoy it more and keep going longer.”

Even so, it must have grated for Mancebo to see other riders implicated in Operación Puerto continue unhindered at the top level. Some, like Ivan Basso and Alejandro Valverde, served bans but were welcomed back to the top table. Mancebo, meanwhile, was cast out altogether, though he declines to describe it as an injustice.

“Well, it was so many years ago, 20 years now, madre mia…” he says. “It was tough at the time, because there was no ban, but behind the scenes, there was pressure from the UCI and from organisers, and we weren’t able to race. That’s the hypocrisy of cycling, and a lot of the same people who were there then are still there now, so little has changed. But now I just see it as something that happened to us. 

“Whether it’s an injustice or not, well, it depends on who you ask. Some people were sanctioned and they came back. Others were sanctioned and they didn’t come back. And others, as I saw in my case, were neither one thing nor the other.”

Only once, in the winter of 2011, did Mancebo believe he was on the cusp of a re-admittance to the club. He held talks with his old team, now known as Movistar, about a possible return to the fray. That same winter, Alejandro Valverde would return from his Puerto suspension, but Eusebio Unzue ultimately opted against putting the whole band back together. Bringing Mancebo in from the cold was a step too far.

“I was talking to the Movistar team, I think it was for the 2012 season, and everyone said yes – but then, at the last minute, Eusebio decided not to go ahead,” Mancebo says. “He used the sponsors as an excuse. I don’t know if that was true or not. But that was the last time I tried to return to the ProTour.”

By then, Mancebo was already 35 years old and already quite a way along the road less travelled. After his time in Portugal, he headed further west to the United States in 2009, where he again linked up with Sevilla, this time at the notorious Rock Racing team. 

It was probably the only squad in cycling where Mancebo’s Puerto links were ever likely to be interpreted as a selling point. Owner Michael Ball, who couched himself as a disruptor of the most brazen kind, was keen to pitch his team as a collection of men mad, bad and dangerous to know. And so, in a dizzying two-year spell, he signed up riders like Sevilla, Santiago Botero, Mario Cipollini and Tyler Hamilton to an infamous crew who donned garish jerseys bedecked with skull and crossbones.

Almost inevitably, Ball’s team, like his Rock & Republic jeans brand, would implode in extravagant fashion, and a federal investigation into his activities would lead towards the inquiry that brought down Lance Armstrong. Even so, Mancebo has only praise for the outfit, where he spent 2009, winning a stage of the Tour of California and the Vuelta Asturias. 

“Michael Ball was a little bit crazy. He had a lot of money – or at least he looked like he had a lot of money – and his craziness took the team right along with him,” Mancebo said. 

“The kit was flashy with the skull and crossbones, and everything was so extravagant. But it was also very professional. Rudy Pevenage and Lorenzo Lapage managed the team very well, and we rode a really good calendar in America and in Europe. That was probably the team where I enjoyed myself the most in my whole life, where I had the most fun. And the results were good too.”

Mancebo’s American sojourn continued with Realcyclist.com and 5-Hour Energy, and he picked up a succession of notable results on the US circuit, including wins at the Tour of the Gila and the Tour of Utah. The American road scene was already beginning to atrophy, however, and by 2014, Mancebo was on the move again. 

His peripatetic career brought him to Skydive Dubai for three seasons ahead of another brief American interlude with Hangar 15. A season with the small Dominican outfit Inteja in 2018 was followed by seven in Japan with Matrix Powertag. Some paycheques were more modest than others, but the sense of adventure remained intact. “Riding new races in new countries with new people – it always keeps your head fresh, and it gives you more motivation,” he says.

In the opening act of his career, Mancebo performed on the biggest stage, finishing on the podium of the Vuelta in 2004 and fourth at the Tour a year later. His second act has seen him engage in a never-ending tour of some decidedly less noted theatres, but he has kept hitting his lines even as his physical powers have gradually waned.

Some standout memories include winning the 2015 Tour of Egypt, the first to be held in the aftermath of the revolution four years earlier. The ongoing potential for unrest limited the racing to five stages over the same stretch of road around Hurghada on the Red Sea Coast. “We started from the hotel entrance every day – five stages, starting and finishing right at the hotel door,” Mancebo smiles. 

Last January, meanwhile, Mancebo raced the Tour du Sahel in Mauritania, where his victory on the opening stage reflected a cycling world that could scarcely be further removed from the increasingly detail-driven fare of the WorldTour. 

“They’d take you in the caravan to the start, and suddenly all the cars just stopped, they painted a line on the road and said, ‘Ok, here’s the start,’ and that was all I knew about the stage,” he says. “The stage I won was 100km in a straight line. And for whatever reason, the start was late every day, you couldn’t rely on anything. It was very strange, but also fun, in its own way.”

Fun seems to be the keyword for Mancebo, and it’s perhaps where his story diverges most from that of Rebellin. The Italian was an essentially shy and awkward man, and there was always a certain melancholy to his commitment to a sport that had done its best to forget him. “I think that he’ll continue riding a bike all his life,” the former L’Équipe writer Philippe Brunel once said. “Maybe it’s only on the bike that he feels best. Maybe he feels better there than among men.”

Mancebo, by contrast, carries himself with a more happy-go-lucky sort of air. Sure, the Puerto doping scandal cost him the final years of a lucrative career as a Grand Tour contender, but he escaped without sanction, and he has been a bike rider every year since. He has tried his hand at some other things – including being a candidate in 2019 local elections for far-right party Vox – but cycling has remained his centre of gravity. 

Indeed, he never even contemplated retirement until he suffered a heavy crash at the start of last season. “I split my lips and tongue, I lost teeth,” Mancebo says. “That’s when I thought, ‘What am I doing still riding now? So old and in Japan, so far away…’ I had a few bad days.”

The moment quickly passed, and Mancebo didn’t think about stopping again until Matrix-Powertag decided it would not continue as a Continental team in 2025. It briefly looked as though his career was ending, but then a new team in a new country materialised. Pingtan International Tourism Island Cycling Team in China? Why not?

“This chance in China came up, and I’m very happy – a new experience, a new team, new motivation. It’s all good for the head,” says Mancebo, whose programme will include a hefty dose of Chinese races on flat roads that scarcely suit him, as well as “two or three” international excursions. “Possibly the Tour of the Philippines, maybe the Tour of Uzbekistan, and the other, I don’t know, but hopefully in Korea.”

In 2025, half the Pingtan squad comprised Russian riders under the guidance of Viatcheslav Ekimov, but Mancebo confesses that he knows precious little about the composition of the 2026 roster. “I only met the manager a few days ago, so I’m slowly integrating into the team,” he said. 

Much like the Tour du Sahel, it seems Mancebo will rock up to the start line and figure it out from there. It’s carried him this far, after all. And no, he still can’t see the finish line. 

“Hopefully I’ll last until I’m 60,” Mancebo laughs. “There’s no date in mind: I would like to continue for as long as I can. But it’s complicated, of course. Still, I hope to do well this year and continue into 2027. That’s what I think now, anyway. But in the end, my legs will decide.”