When Neil Fachie won his first world titles in Manchester in 2009, Barney Storey was piloting the tandem. Two years later, Fachie was winning again with Craig MacLean. He reunited with Storey for London 2012, where they won Paralympic kilometre gold, before further success followed with Pete Mitchell and then Matt Rotherham.

At the 2022 Commonwealth Games, Fachie rode with Lewis Stewart, winning the kilometre in a Games record. Four years later, he arrived in Glasgow with another new pilot.

Aaron Pope and Fachie had only begun riding together in March 2026. Five months later they won the Commonwealth kilometre in 1:00.162, around two-tenths outside the record Fachie had set with Stewart, before going on to win the sprint as well.

Across almost two decades, the rider at the front changed repeatedly while the results continued.

That can make tandem racing look more interchangeable than it really is.

Most visually impaired riders are not choosing between a queue of international-standard pilots. Finding one cyclist with the power, handling ability, availability and willingness to commit to the role can be difficult enough. Finding several and then selecting whichever combination looks best on paper is a luxury many programmes are unlikely to have.

The pilot needs to be good enough to race internationally while accepting that their own performance is now tied closely to somebody else’s. Training, travel and championship preparation all have to work for both riders. An accomplished solo cyclist may have the physiology required but little interest in becoming a tandem pilot, while another may simply have other racing ambitions.

So the starting point is often not finding the ideal pilot. It is finding a suitable one.

Only then does the harder part begin.

Two riders, one performance

A tandem connects both athletes through the same drivetrain. They share cadence, accelerate together and cannot independently change their pedalling rhythm when one rider begins to fatigue.

That sounds obvious until two individually strong cyclists are put on the same bicycle.

A 2025 study tested trained cyclists individually and then as tandem pairs. During a ten-minute effort, mean individual power fell from 282 W on the solo bicycle to 257 W on the tandem, while cadence increased from 93.6 to 102 rpm. Short-duration maximal performance did not deteriorate significantly.

The riders were inexperienced on tandems rather than elite Para athletes, so the study cannot tell us how an established international pairing behaves. It does show how quickly individual performance can change once two riders are mechanically linked.

Two strong cyclists do not simply add their power together.

They have to learn how the other accelerates, how force is delivered through the pedals and what happens when fatigue develops differently between them. During a standing start, both riders are applying substantial force while trying to accelerate a much heavier machine from almost stationary. At speed, they still have to maintain the same cadence even if that rhythm suits one athlete better than the other.

Repeated training gradually makes those interactions more familiar.

What tandem riders have far less of is racing.

Domestic opportunities are limited and international races bringing together strong tandem fields are relatively rare. A new partnership can therefore spend months becoming faster without really knowing whether it is becoming internationally competitive.

Standing starts improve. Training times fall. Power numbers move in the right direction. The position looks better.

None of that tells you whether the leading tandems elsewhere have found another second.

That makes development unusually dependent on training. Coaches can compare the riders with their own previous performances, but international benchmarking remains difficult until the partnerships actually meet.

The World Championships can therefore become more than the target event. They can also become one of the first proper audits of months of work carried out largely in isolation.

A tandem may arrive substantially faster than it was at the start of the year and still discover that the rest of the field has moved further.

The scarcity of racing also limits the experience that cannot be replicated cleanly in training. Qualification, championship pressure and tactical sprint racing all ask something different from a controlled effort completed at home.

A new partnership may therefore still be learning how it races at the same time as it is expected to deliver its best performance.

Fachie, Stewart and Pope

If tandem success depends on familiarity, repeated training and a shared understanding developed over time, Fachie’s partnership with Aaron Pope appears to challenge the idea that the process necessarily takes years.

They started riding together in March and were Commonwealth champions five months later.

Their kilometre time was almost identical to the Games record Fachie had set with Lewis Stewart four years earlier, despite the new pairing having comparatively little time together.

Fachie was, of course, an unusually experienced stoker. By 2026 he had spent years adapting to different pilots, understanding how they accelerate and learning how a tandem behaves when the person immediately in front of him changes. Pope was new to that particular partnership; Fachie was not new to building one.

Some of that accumulated knowledge may therefore have travelled with the stoker.

It is impossible to separate precisely how much of their rapid success came from Fachie’s experience, Pope’s qualities or the work they completed together. The result itself is still revealing.

Partnership development may not follow a fixed timetable.

Some riders could require prolonged periods together before reaching their potential. Others may arrive at an effective combination quickly, particularly when one athlete already has years of tandem experience.

For coaches, that makes judgement difficult. A slow start does not necessarily mean a pairing is wrong, while an immediately fast combination may still have considerable development left.

And when opportunities to race are scarce, there are few external reference points to help make that call.

Changing the rider at the front

Fachie’s career also disguises another difficulty, changing pilot is not simply replacing one source of power with another.

The new rider changes the physical shape of the tandem as well.

Aerodynamic research examining different pilot and stoker positions has shown that the rider at the rear can have a substantial influence on the drag of the complete system. The pilot alters the airflow reaching the stoker, meaning that a position developed around one pairing cannot automatically be assumed to work in exactly the same way with another.

A taller pilot, different shoulder width or a change in torso position can alter what happens to the rider behind.

So even if a replacement arrives with better power figures, the complete tandem may need to be reassessed.

For well-resourced programmes, that can mean another round of track testing and aerodynamic work. For others it may mean practical experimentation until a position is found that both riders can sustain.

The bigger problem is that a replacement may not be available at all.

Pilots have careers and commitments of their own. If one retires, changes direction or can no longer commit to the programme, the stoker may be left waiting for another suitable athlete to appear.

For some nations, losing a pilot could interrupt an entire tandem programme. That reality makes Fachie’s succession of successful partnerships look even more unusual. He did not simply remain competitive through one established combination. He repeatedly rebuilt the performance around somebody different.

What happens to that experience now?

The final partnership with Pope raises another question because Fachie has now retired.

If his experience helped shorten the process of making a new combination competitive, what happens to that knowledge when the athlete leaves the track?

Across several Paralympic cycles, Fachie experienced different pilots, different training relationships and repeated changes to the way the tandem had to be ridden and set up.

Much of that understanding is difficult to capture in conventional coaching material.

A coach can see power, cadence and split times from trackside. They cannot directly feel what happens through the timing drivetrain when the pilot changes effort, or how subtle differences in acceleration alter what the rider behind experiences.

Someone who has spent years riding with different pilots can. That makes retired tandem athletes potentially valuable in ways that go beyond conventional coaching.

They can help new riders understand what a partnership should feel like, assist programmes trying to introduce pilots to the discipline and identify problems that might otherwise take months to become obvious.

That matters more in a sport where racing itself provides so few opportunities to learn.

A young tandem cannot simply accumulate competition experience every few weeks and gradually work things out. Some of that knowledge may have to come from people who have already spent years doing exactly that.

None of this assumes Fachie wants to become a coach.

The broader issue is whether tandem racing is good enough at retaining the expertise of athletes whose careers have given them knowledge that is difficult to replace.

The riders arriving in Apeldoorn will have spent months trying to answer questions that racing has barely allowed them to test. Some will have long-established pilots. Others will still be discovering what their partnership can become.

Fachie spent almost two decades learning how to make that process work with different riders in front of him.

The interesting question after his retirement is not simply who replaces him on the track, but whether some of that knowledge can remain behind.