After a long and surprisingly hard transfer window it is now time to present the team that will lead a promotion or even title challenge in CT this year! With the initial plan involving selling Kump and putting together a more youthful roster falling apart due to no interest in the former world champion we had to put together a different plan. And that we did!

Despite hills having been at the center of the team’s identity for plenty years we decided to avoid picking up leaders in that terrain this year due to the strengthening of the division in that regard. We will obviously be present at some of these races by the nature of our calendar but with no clear leader we’re looking for something special from our riders to make a difference this year. An area that we have decided to focus however is stage races and other mountain heavy races, which is the area that has seen the biggest improvement from us this year.

After dropping Grmay and Faiers in renewals we stuck with Diaz to lead our team for one more season before decline, he will be the team’s premier stage racer. He is flanked by Elissonde who joins us in free agency on a wage of 100k, the Frenchman was already a target of ours last year where he ended up joining Indosat Oredoo for 260k, but now he’s ready to be the team’s premier climber in races that don’t feature ITTs. The second new addition to our roster in the stage race department is Pavel Potocki, the Croatian stage racer joins us from GCN via Evonik Elko in a double deal with former teammate Scott Thwaites and is expected to do a solid job in stage races this year where the aim is a solid amount of GC top 10s. The last two additions to our roster this year in the climbing department are Enrico Battaglin, who joins us from the draft after having raced with Sotto il sole di Riccio last year, and Giles Heymes who joins from free agency after being let go from EA Vesuvio. Especially Heymes is an interesting rider who will add a lot of strong support for Diaz and Potocki in important stage races this year. De Vos and Gaspar have been retained will most likely also act as our hills squad for most of the season.

Cobbles have always been at the forefront of our identity, with GVK not getting any younger we were in the market for a younger leader, but it didn’t happen this year. We have however strengthened quite a bit with additions of Salvatore Puccio, who joins us from now defunct Air France, Thwaites who was involved in the deal mentioned previously with Potocki. Add in Kumara and Riesebeek and we have a very solid roster for the cobbled classics this year.

Finally, we have 3 talents in on loan this season, who will all gain valuable experience riding for us, and in the case of Walls potentially even adding to our early sprint set up.

Renewals