Having looked at the financial fortunes and prospects for teams last year, the topic keeps coming up already in 2026 so here’s a fresh review of pitfalls ahead.
Like last year’s post, the point here is not to shout “fire” in a crowded place and spread doom. It’s just a look at the issues ahead and how some teams have challenges to solve.
We’ll start with Picnic-PostNL as the team only got a one year licence from the UCI. This decision wasn’t helpful but practically one or three years, there’s always an annual review in October so it’s less admin and more a way of saying out loud the team must resolve financial issues. The team has a side-hustle in selling off riders which reached a new level with the sale of Oscar Onley to Ineos, generating millions in revenue. But this probably backfills previous losses. Fabio Jakobsen is on the last year of big contract while still struggling for results so the outlook could ease but right now the team hasn’t had a win this year and sits on 25th place on the UCI rankings, all early but a tough start. Some good news is that Dutch postal service PostNL is keen to back the project.
Bahrain-Victorious is code for Bahrain-Your Name Here and the team has been open about wanting a co-sponsor but so far nobody. It’s not an obvious match to have a co-sponsor named alongside a repressive state and this juxtaposition limits the scope. But the team’s ambitions are restrained by the lack of another sponsor.
EF Education First-Easypost has gone public to find a co-sponsor. It’s not clear if Easypost is stopping but the the point is EF is willing to become the junior partner in naming rights if the team can find a new backer. A lot hinges on this because if they can land one then the team can get the financial firepower it needs, right now it can sustain a grand tour GC challenge with the likes of Richard Carapaz and in Ben Healy it has as solid chance of a Tour de France stage win too, short of hiring Jonathan Milan or Tadej Pogačar. If no sponsor is found then the troubles could begin because while EF wants to stay, can it shoulder all the costs?
As said here a few times last year you could see a few dark clouds for Visma-Lease a Bike. The jersey is getting crowded with logos as the team seeks as much revenue as possible, costs have been cut with riders unloaded. Visma’s stockmarket float was also cited as a possible threat as the Norwegian IT company could change its marketing; now it’s doing this ahead of the float where saving tens of millions a year can make the business hundreds of millions more valuable. Which leaves the team searching for a big backer. For all the relaxed briefing from the team there’s still an alarm bell as it needs to find someone soon, there’s no cushion of capital to spend while waiting for a new backer. It ought to be an easy sell but that makes it a bellwether case.
Groupama-FDJ have a joint sponsorship agreement that runs until the end of 2027. That sounds like a long time away but now is the time to review this and here comes the problem. The costs of backing the team go up and up but the results have gone in the other direction, especially after Thibaut Pinot has left. They haven’t won a Tour stage since 2018. The development team is a calling card as it can unearth talent but it’s also a cost to run it.
Lotto-Intermarché is newly formed from the merger and so for now there’s no worry. But is it a sustainable project? Time will tell but Lotto brings a political angle as the Belgian state lottery funding means the team’s funding is a national affair and comes with scrutiny from politicians. Like other teams can the costs of backing the project can keep rising but will politicians support this? It places more burden on Intermarché and the French sponsor needs to be aligned with the Belgian backers, you can imagine Intermarché wanting more French riders but Lotto insisting on an even balance of Flemish and Walloon Belgians.
Soudal-Quickstep is in an interesting season. It’s built the team around Remco Evenepoel only he has left and so it is trying to revert to the wolfpack of old and pivot back to classics and one day races, stages included. Only this turn might take time. The nervous part is the Soudal sponsorship. Remember the sponsor and its founder Vic Swerts almost dropped the team to “merge” with Visma in the wake of the Jumbo supermarket quitting the Dutch team. But Swerts stayed, in part keen to support Evenepoel. Now that’s changed it’s a story to watch.
NSN? In a sport driven by naming rights, being called Never Say Never is bold. There is a concept of having a cycling team that is not a textile billboard. Instead the strength comes from establishing a visual identity so strong that you don’t have to read “Soudal” on the shorts or “Tudor” on a jersey because you’ve already thought it. However this squad appears to be more like “Never Say Israel” and a rebrand to keep protestors away. It is backed by some wealthy companies and individuals but what they’re getting back isn’t clear. So look to see if the project evolves during the year and what it does once the thrill of the Tour de France start is over.
Jayco-Al Ula had a wobble on the final approach to World Tour registration for last year but in the end Jerry Ryan came good and backed the team for three more years. But it came close to stopping, this was not an admin bungle. Ryan is another backer confronted with rising costs but diminishing returns and also the tricky path of promoting Australian sport and giving their riders a path to the top. The team needs Australian talent but has to bid alongside other squads for it which creates an asymmetry, they really want Aussies more than others and so risk paying a premium for them. They may not have to outbid every team to lure Aussies “home” but they have to be close.
Uno-X have the same issue as Jayco when it comes to recruiting home talent and only compounded since they only hire Norwegian and Danish riders. It does make for a coherent project whether on the team bus or in business given the sponsor only has business in these markets but again they have to bid big to secure home talent. The real concern is how long can a relatively small business sustain a World Tour team? Uno-X is a brand within the Reitan conglomerate whose name also appears on the kit, itself and also the Rema 100 stores it owns and the wider business has interests across the Baltic so there’s probably cover to recruit here too. But for now how long does Uno-X want to stay in the sport? But there’s good news this morning as the team has picked up a sponsor outside of Reitan’s portfolio in Faxe Kondi, a soft drink brand.
Ineo Grenadiers has TotalEnergies as a co-sponsor, the template for many teams looking to retain ownership but expand with a co-sponsor so it’s ahead of others. So safe? The parent company Ineos has financial strains and has cut back on its sports sponsorship. Since then things have not got easier, its bonds have taken a dive which signals corporate distress and specifically the Grenadier car project has had some headwinds too. But the saving grace is personal as Jim Ratcliffe really enjoys having a cycling team. The only remaining question is the burden-sharing between the two sponsors for the future.
XDS-Astana seem to be thriving as a team. But can this sustain the sponsorship? XDS is the Chinese bike company with eyes on mimicking the growth story of Giant, selling everything from kids bikes to World Tour team issue bikes and keen to do this in its own name rather than as an OEM manufacturer. But funding a World Tour team is an expensive way to do this, it can easily cost ten times more. Canyon and Specialized find it more efficient to supply two teams each; there’s only Trek left and now it’s junior partner; Decathlon is a sponsor but to promote wider retail sales. Plus there’s Kazakh political risk, the team can promote the nation and its sovereign wealth fund but is down to three Kazakhs now.
Conclusion
As established in the previous blog post, there’s more money than ever coming into the sport. It’s boom time. So this post feels like pointing out the lone cloud in the sky on a summer’s day.
However it’s not poking around for the sake of finding negatives, indeed one team has been put on notice by the UCI and others have gone public about needing to find extra funding. Some of these questions can be existential, but in many cases it’s not binary and more about where teams want to get to in the coming years. So while you watch their riders on the road, keep an eye on the moves management make this season too.
Jayco gave at least started the year in style but it remains to be seen if they can keep it up.
The queen stage of the PVSL Tasmanian tour was won by a 17 year old who is going into their development team .. mountain bike emohasis for the moment but the potential is obvious.
The tone of the piece suggests we’re in a bit of a bubble situation. A boom time indeed, so is there a bust ahead? We also see sporadic hints of the AI investment bubble bursting, if that came to pass would this affect wider financial systems, and if so how did teams fair after the wider 2008 financial crash?
(I can’t say I was as invested in the minutiae of sponsorship etc as I am now, thanks to Inrng!)
If you weren’t interested in the minutiæ of sponsorship before now, we can be fairly sure you are not /that/ JV. 😉
Maybe I’m just here looking for tips. Now where did I put my Garmin…
(I’m def not *that* JV)
The decline of the ProTeam division would suggest that not all is well.
I think the Pro-teams are declining for two reasons:
More races have world tour teams in them. And the Grand Tours are now limited to the top 30 teams in the rankings, and only two true wildcard invitations. This means a Pro-Team with a domestic sponsor in France/Italy/Belgium/Spain can not race all the big races on their domestic circiut, which would keep their sponsor happy. Without access to the biggest races on their domestic circiut these teams are no longer viable.
World Tour teams now have development squads. This means Pro-Teams can not concentrate on young riders not yet ready for the world tour, and get results with these young riders. This reduces the interest in having these smaller teams in races, and hence reduces interest from sponsors.
Personally, I agree with DaveRides, and think the hollowing out of the Pro-Tour ranks is a very serious issue. But I don’t think it is necessarily the same issue as the struggle that some world tour teams have in raising money.
Just did a quick perusal of the current UCI rankings, and although I know it’s way too early to make real judgments it looks very bad for some of the legacy Pro Teams. I think we’re going to see a second points race in very obscure races purely to try to make it into the magic top 30. I’ve really enjoyed watching Modern Adventure so far, but it seems unfair that they already have some high-profile invitations to races where even a top-20 result means a decent points haul. I know it has always been this way, but it seems like the cliff is much higher and more arbitrary than in the past. I would rather not see a bloodbath of minor teams ceasing to exist, just to be replaced by development teams that have no interest in giving a 30-year-old journeyman a chance to stay in the sport.
I think it really is too early in the season to get alarmed. The European races outside Spain are really only just getting going. Some of the Pro-teams have barely raced, and will move up the ratings once the season starts properly.
Only four Pro-teams will finish outside the top 30. Three of them are likely to be Team Novo Nordisk, Flanders-Balouse and MBH, none of whom can have any realistic aspirations to go to a Grand Tour next year. The shortage of Pro-teams is actually making it easier to get into World Tour races for those that remain.
That’s a good point regarding the shortage of Pro Teams, but I’m not so sure about only four teams finishing outside the top 30. I think Euskaltel (a favorite underdog of mine) is really going to struggle. I hope I’m wrong.
The sport wasn’t too dependent on banks and it was also on the up at the time, this was when Sky, Greenedge and others were buying into the sport. But at a much lower price of course. €20 million was superteam status then, today that is relegation candidate.
Not dependant on banks? Maybe in the sense that it’s a sport that, unlike football, doesn’t leverage much on debt. But, as I posted a few days ago, the prevalent sponsorships of what we now call WT teams were financial companies 20 years ago. CSC, Caisse d’Epargne, Rabobank, Ag2R, Credit Agricole, Cofidis, all as first name sponsors. Let the contracts expire and in a couple of seasons they were down to half of that, Cofidis downgraded and the two French banks leaving. In 2014 only Ag2R was left, besides, ahem, Tinkoff, if you want to count… him… as “financial services” (to me, it’s rather the sugardaddy category).
Thanks Gabriele. That’s a really good point. Probably well represents the financial market seeking customers to take on unaffordable debt.
Your point (below) about state identity and funding is interesting. State lottery funding is an enduring source of income for cycling. The basis of Team Sky was of course Sky money, as sponsors, but also National Lottery funding. This is State income, the expenditure of which is delegated to various arms length/governing bodies, including sports ones. There was some criticism of how this state money supported a commercial enterprise, but very little scrutiny (which was the style at the time).
Re: Bahrain and what you later comment on bike sponsorship. It’s a curious case as Bianchi entered as a bike provider and could maybe be interested in placing their name on the shirt as Merida did for long (before stepping down in 2020 while still providing bikes). Bahrain has a strong Italian component and a star rider in Lenny Martinez, which means that it could have a had a key impact in the two top markets for Bianchi. But the magnitude of the investment has changed so much that it doesn’t make sense anymore for companies in the range of tens or hundreds of millions of revenue, when most big sponsors now think in billions.
The above is meaningful because it shows clearly that cycling’s situation is actually very dynamic, irrespective of the general frame of the sport which didn’t change much if at all.
It’s a bit like when we were talking of some races, say, Milano-Sanremo, which looked in extreme need of some course change, then…it suddenly is the most exciting competition precisely thanks to its course! Which doesn’t mean, of course, that some route adjusting isn’t needed again in a handful of seasons.
I also find it interesting that the longlist above displays a very broad variety of situations with different issues among them, which suggests that the problems aren’t structural, unless, of course, we bring our analysis to a point of higher abstraction.
If anything, one very unspecific common point shared by most teams above is their extremely strong bind with a nation State, currently or in their very recent history; EF and Quickstep being probably the main exceptions (QS has a strong Belgian identity, but they weren’t funded as a national project and have been having mixed international owners for a while). Visma is also a peculiar case because they’ve been actually trying hard to move away from their “Dutch national team” identity, and partly succeeded, but I believe they’re partly still in that process.
It’s not something which I consider negatively, and there are exceptions as UAE or, to a certain point, Movistar, but it’s a symptom of a significant transition in how the sport is perceived or self-perceived.
I think there is a structural part to it, that for commercial sponsors with marketing criteria for returns, rather than nation states or billionaires, find the sport can be expensive and we’re seeing sponsors backing off. Visma and EF both seem to be saying “enough, we like the sport but can’t spend more”.
Or it’s forcing mergers, see Lotto and Intermarché and we might see more of these being explored but they’re complicated even trying to merge two Belgian teams and done largely for rescue purposes. The idea for these two teams was to have a “superteam” by combining their budgets but it turns out the funding didn’t increase notably.
As I pointed out elsewhere, ROIs are actually better if you measure them as a percentage of the marketing budget of some of the companies which really got involved. Which, of course, is a peculiar way to see it, but it allows to highlight how the sport slowly got some access to a part of the economic system which previously wasn’t simply interested. Of course, this process will kick others out and make competition tougher which will bring the sort of expected returns (victory) too low again. From my POV is more of a change in scale and a socioeconomic shift. Strain is implied as in any transition.
Am I a fan of economic growth and scaling up? Well, no.
That said, I’m not as sure as J Evan that, beyond my personal POV, this growth is intrinsically “bad for the sport”, although downsides are easy to be seen (advantages do exist, too, probably for athletes, to start with, and professional figures working for teams).
If the financial side doesn’t improve it wouldn’t be a surprise if PostNL sell Poole and Hamilton to Ineos then fold or merge with another team. Hopefully not though as the team structure seems good.
Also Rabobank, I was assuming them sponsoring VLB from last year was a prelude to becoming title sponsor at some point
Team Rabobank-PostNL anyone?
Rabobank seems to have been asked but declined, they prefer to sponsor more grassroots initiatives in the Netherlands (and remember Visma went to the last Tour without a Dutchman among their men’s team. Tijmen Graat is promising but no local rider who will have sponsors queuing. We’re seeing the search go wider, eg Van Aert was part of the marketing drive to California last year etc.
Re: California (my home state), I find it kind of strange that the West Coast market seems to be virtually untouched by Big Cycling, when cycling is a major participation sport here (see: Levi’s Gran Fondo) and we used to have a legitimate stage race. I’m sure there are good reasons for this, but every time I hear about Wout or G. Thomas coming to LA for marketing/training, I wonder why this potential income stream remains largely untapped.
Yes, it is a shame that the US barely has any serious races (last year, just the Maryland Classic). The key problem is securing the support of local government. Races are expensive and time-consuming to organize, and they take time to build an audience.
Ultimately, cycling teams are readily replaceable but the races are not. In the last 40+ years the only new race which has won a huge audience and become a must-win race for the top riders is, I think, Strade Bianche.
Two other aspects, partly related to what DaveRides underlines above (and rightly so), besides the interesting observations by John.
What follows is quite secundary issues, but they’ve got an impact, especially speaking of sponsorship, which relies on image and identity.
In a sense, money calls money. Some sponsors will invest in a rich sport because it’s a sport for the rich. It must look expensive, sophisticated, technological. No matter if it was (?) much more sophisticated and technically challenging when the subtleties were, say, tactical ones. Just throw in some small talk about figures, be it percentages of marginal gains, w/kg, coefficients and somebody in need of pretending to have an access to that complex world of control over chaos will pay. Then others of the same kind will pay for the same. Of course, never ask why all that control over performance (how was that crypto claim?, “trust proven by performance” ROTFL) won’t prevent a top science team to have its notable ups and downs in performance in a few seasons time.
Which brings us to the second point: some of the above have an ability to sense when performance can be someway bought by money, be it through marginal gains or other technological aspects, and enter the sport in order to win, and win big. The problem is that when many agents pretending to win, win and win come into a sport where just a tiny percentage of athletes ever wins much, and structurally so, it’s complicated to satisfy everyone. We can see how intelligent team managers have been able to sell a different concept, starting precisely with *the real* 😉 JV, but you can feel the tension in his project, too, probably both from the inside and the outside. Cofidis, Movistar, Astana, FDJ etc., or Bardiani, Unibet have been trying with more or less success to build on different narratives, but it sure isn’t easy. The paradox is that as big, big sponsors come in, it’s more and more the sort of companies which have a mentality of victory only. It’s an issue with some nations, too, of course. This creates even higher pressure to get wins even in secundary contexts, gone is now that idea once so characteristical of cycling that an athlete, even a top one, could race just to get into form hence knowing he or she wasn’t going to have much chances of a win, or at least not through mere physical superiority. Such a situation leaves less shades of gray for races where you could have big names but not on top form – now it feels like that what’s worth being won is *only* where the top dogs are, but if they’re there, no occasion to shine is left for the rest.
A provisional positive reaction of the sport to these two challenges has been rotation. Top teams have gone through 3-4 years cycles (will it happen to UAE too? I suspect they wouldn’t be as willing to slow down a little), the new narrative of versatile talents suggesting an interest of the big names in “winning everything” has had them tackling a broader range of races. Rotation also means that you receive limelight then you must endure and manage some time in the shades. Plus, obviously, as in a breakaway, it works if it works and while it works… skip a turn or two and the whole dynamic equilibrium falls into a standstill.
Groupama-FDJ had a development squad before the others and had the pick of promising riders to recruit. This worked initially with Geniets, Scaroni, Stewart, Askey, Penhoët, Pithie, Grégoire, Martinez, Watson, Pickering, Hobbs… all going on to WT teams. The problem was that not many stayed, and now attracting talent is so much harder with development teams two a penny.
It is worth remembering that:
Teams are more stable than they have ever been in the past. Most WT teams have been around for many years. They also have larger budgets than they have ever previously enjoyed.
In any generation there are only 3-4 riders (at most) who can win the Tour de France. Hence there are only 3-4 top GC teams (the teams who have one of these talents). Not every team can, or should, try to “win the Tour”. Doing something else in races is not a failure. But most team owners need to settle for being “somewhere in the middle” and find their niche and understand that they can not win the Tour. This can be done for a much smaller budget than the big GC teams (Vaughters, Roodhoft etc are actually very successful at running this kind of team). These teams are still a valuable part of the sport.
I’d add that the few sports which don’t work exactly like that achieve a different format only through active interventionist policies on a tightly closed system (think NBA).
One of the interesting things in cycling is that teams get to “the top” by having a Tour winner in their ranks, and then start to slide when this top rider comes to the end of their productive years. Teams do not create a multi-generational dynasty. Examples include:
Anquetil raced for Saint-Raphaël in the early 1960s.
Merckx raced for Faema and Molteni.
Thevenet raced for Peugeot.
Hinault and Fignon raced for Renault.
Hinault (with Lemond) moved to La Vie Claire.
Indurain raced for Banesto.
Riis and Ullrich raced for Telekom.
Armstrong raced for US Postal.
Contador (some years) and Nibali raced for Astana.
Wiggins and Froome raced for Sky.
We can name other teams who won. But of the list above, only Banesto, Astana and Sky are still around, and none have anyone capable of winning the Tour. As a result they have all drifted back to the middle-of-the-pack (as has all the other teams which were once at the top). This will happen with UAE too.
Interesting trend, but there are exceptions, or some instances in which the cause-effect relation is unclear.
To begin with, we’d need a better definition of “being on top”. Quickstep was arguably a top team, or even *the* top team with no TDF winner or even strong candidate.
Mapei might be seen, or not, as the same team but it’s also a notable exception.
Similar reflections on High Road-Columbia.
Pantani never raced for any juggernaut team but won a TDF and had been a candidate before. Even if one could easily consider his case “an obvious exception”, the way events were connected between them is perhaps less obvious.
Riis obviously wasn’t… an obvious TDF winner. But we might say that he was a consequence of Germany knowing they had Ullrich coming. So maybe his case fits, but it’s not that evident.
Other peculiar situations include Sastre or Pereiro. The latter means Banesto back in yellow. Yes, a strange victory, yet a victory of sort. We might decide not to count it, but they came close to winning again with Quintana. Were they a top team? Maybe. Was Quintana a plausible candidate? Yes and no. Anyway, much material which doesn’t fit the theory. Similarly, fluid perspectives on Sastre.
ONCE was a top team, sometimes the very top one, with candidates for a TDF win, who were such as they rode for the team rather than the other way around.
Jumbo-Visma became a top team although perhaps not the single very top one *before* having a TDF winner, just a couple of good but vastly unproven candidates. Hadn’t it been *already* a top team, they wouldn’t have won the 2022 edition.
Sky-INEOS went on winning TDFs with quite improbable candidates (the more plausible being a then shockingly young Bernal) when Froome’s saga was over for good.
In short, surely having at hand a TDF winner or strong candidate brings along money which helps the prophecy come true and confirm itself again beyond the team’s merits. At the same time, the money stream (and/or political protection and influence) may well depend on other factors.
Gabriele: “having at hand a TDF winner or strong candidate brings along money”
Yes, I think this is true.
I stuck mostly to multi-year winners to make the point simpler to follow. But having a Tour winner (or serious candidate) helps the money flow in. And when there is no serious candidate for the Tour, the money declines. Hence the fact that teams have a brief moment in the sun and then decline.
Sky…were remarkable since they managed to win with several riders. This was partly since they were much more professional than the other teams in the near decade 2011-2019, allowing them to win with some unremarkable riders (in the grand scheme of things).
@John Anyway, recent cases like Armstrong’s and Sky prove the opposite point: before the athlete(s) being even vaguely expected to be a serious TDF candidate (let alone winning it) in the eyes of the general public and «external» sponsors, the programme is already on and so is political covering.
Armstrong’s backdated prescriptions were already accepted during his first TDF, when he had already hired from scratch the richest and most expensive medical «engine» around.
Freeman was confident enough about the crossover relations between Team Sky and State-funded British Cycling to have testosterone patches delivered at a public venue like Manchester’s velodrome – May 2011.
Oxford university and NIH had been developing ketones with military money from the USA since 2003 and later UK’s ministry of defence. They were available to UK elite athletes from 2011 onward for «scientific» use (yet implying medals, records and victories in unspecified competitions), as an exclusive until 2016 at least, when the rest of the world was allowed to commercially buy – with a 5 yrs delay in know-how, of course.
Generous TUEs were issued mainly by UCI’s Zorzoli both to Wiggins and, later, Froome – in both cases *before* they won their first TDF, since 2011 for Wiggo and since 2013 Romandie for Froome.
Frankly, nothing of the above looks like «hey guys we found a TDF winning champion, let the money flow and he’ll do his thing». Not quite. It sounds more like deciding in advance «let’s have this people win the TDF whatever it takes».
Perhaps it’s not by chance that those athletes never looked technically or even athletically as gifted as Indurain, not to speak of Hinault. Indurain probably enjoyed the best «preparation» then available, and Pinarello wasn’t the only example of Italian excellence he worked with. But it never was an exclusive. Banesto was a strong team already (actually they had won the TDF with Perico in 1988), but Delgado was only there in 3/5 TDF, sort of doing his GC, and never at the Giro. The rest of team was far from being hugely brilliant and didn’t improve much through time. Solid, reliable, but not a super team as the others named above. Other rival teams looked like they had an economic and sporting edge as a collective, only they didn’t have Indurain.
Gabriele:
I claim that the Sky team was set up specifically to win the Tour de France, and that Brailsford believed Wiggins was their candidate to win the Tour. And Brailsford managed to persuade Sky to fund the project. The team was in place already by 2011, and there was huge publicity around this project even before Wiggins won the Tour.
I believe there was a similar project around Armstrong, and the people around Armstrong believed he could win the Tour at least by 1997. They managed to persaude a sponsor to back their project.
Anyway, I understand that people may not agree with my view.
To put it in a mildly ironical way, did Contador stop being in the very top team because he wouldn’t win other TDFs, or did he stop winning TDFs because he wasn’t anymore in the *blessed* team?
And now I recall we had already talked this subject and I had also named Evans, another interesting exception.
It doesn’t seem to be great overall picture with so many teams having actual or potential financial difficulties. Reading through the post, by the time I’d got as far as Uno X I started to think that it would have been quicker for Inrng to have written a post on which teams don’t have financial issues! Albeit less interesting for readers.
PS In the Astana paragraph “Cinese bike company” is missing an h.
Sometimes this blog is the best thing to read on the whole internet. Both for the blog itself and also for the comments, thoughtful, informative, non confrontational.
thank you inring.
@Paul Agree 100%!
@John I agree about the projects coming from far back, perhaps not as much in Armstrong’s case as he was diagnosed in October 1996 and was undergoing therapies through 1997. Bruyneel himself was still a rider. IMHO that was a case of powerful convergence between different circumstances. However, no need to push the OT much further. An interesting reminder for much later events is checking what team Bruyneel was racing for – and where Contador was picked from thanks to some «unexpected earthquake» in the cycling world.
That said, I was trying to point out that sometimes a TDF winning rider generates a top team around him, some other times a powerful project creates a TDF winner from athletes who could otherwise be deemed very lucky if they only could podium.
I’d add that anyway you don’t need to win the TDF to have the characteristics of a superteam (unless we fall into tautology asserting that the top team is only the one winning the TDF). With no intention of being exhaustive, I’d say that a superteam can use as supporting cast riders who’d be captains elsewhere, plus it can win different top races with different captains, not just its star rider; we may add the ability to control a race with little or no collaboration from other teams. We might also notice a trend of neat athletical improvement in riders hired by the team, normally reverted if they move away.
Telekom/T-Mobile was probably among the clearest examples of a superteam, but ONCE, Festina, Mapei, Quickstep also largely comply with the above without need of being related to a TDF winner or outstanding candidate.
Of course, that’s not a binary category, so we have several shades of gray.
Curiously, both Sky and, with even starker a contrast, USPS…don’t mirror as perfectly some of the aspects I’d attribute (it’s of course arbitrary) to the abstract ideal of a superteam, mainly due to some limitations in scope (way less manifest in Sky, as I said). Besides Telekom,UAE or Visma look more akin to my idea of superteam. But probably behind such a situation there were a range of political reasons within cycling’s broader environment (a different approach to «sharing some of the cake»).
Mapei and Quickstep made no attempt to create a GC team and stuck to the classics. They were hugely successful. Alpecin are a modern example of a team being very successful by concentrating on the classics. But those kind of teams need a much smaller budget than GC teams. Lefevere and now the Roodhoft brothers are/were extremely sharp operators, and have got enormous success from their budget.
Except Lefevere flew too close to the sun with the Remco experiment and got burned (at least as far as the Wolf Pack is concerned). It is interesting to see the success that having a regional, limited-scope focus can have in cycling. If you can keep the Belgians happy you have a sustainable business model. In the case of the Roodhoofts, it doesn’t hurt that you got and kept a generational talent within your team, essentially keeping you competitive in half the important races every year.
Yes, I agree. If you have a mid-tier budget then you can have a lot of success if you ignore GC in the stage-races. Riding classics and stage-hunting has to be more fun, and more interesting to the sponsors, then trying to get a GC top 10 in a grand tour (and barely any TV coverage).
Yes, I agree about the change of strategy by Lefevere when he hired Remco. In hindsight they might both have made a mistake in that decision.
Philipsen wasn’t bad, either, but of course MvdP is key… supragenerational talent, even.
However, my point was you can have what is perceived by most fans and experts (or metrics like points) as a superteam, *the* superteam even, without caring too much about winning the TDF, or without achieving that.
(Alpecin isn’t much of a superteam, anyway, and QS was only in some seasons, not through its whole history).
Yeah, I thought about Philipsen too, but he’s not as much of a Swiss army knife as MvdP. But he’s a pretty good trump card to have in your back pocket just in case! The Roodhoofts deserve huge credit for sticking with him as well. He wasn’t always a sure thing to be at the level he eventually reached.
What you and John say is confirmed nearly word by word by a recent interview to Ferretti, claiming he got the fame and the sponsors happy precisely dropping GC ambitions when they started to cost too much.
RE: costs of GC-rider.
It is not just the cost of your GC rider with whom you hope to podium, but also of mountain domestiques etc (over a million each, for a good one; Yates makes over 2 million). UAE are paying over a million each to Wellens and Pollitt, mainly to ride in the Tour for Pogi. It rapidly gets very expensive.
In contrast, the Roodhoofts are picking up Belgian rouleurs for under 100,000 euros each. Obviously, these rouleurs can’t go up a proper hill, but the team doesn’t care.
Visma hve a new main sponsor! Mistral AI, a pioneering company in the world of artificial intelligence, enters the sport. More big money, to an already top heavy sport.
A main sponsor – or just a partner? I believe the difference in terms of money in a team’s bank account can be fairly big.
An interesting development all the same.