Heine wrote:

Once again a well built squad from you. With the future in Del Grosso aswell!

MAL is ofc great, Kemboi one of my favorite sprinters with that prl and Vermeersch with training will be fantastic...

TGH, Plapp and Eenkhoorn is a very good GC trio and do I spot a TTT team there?

I wont really have control before seeing the post-transfers DB, but a team that should once again challenge at the top of the PT

Also I hope you let Kluckers hit FA next year so he can join me

With the final transfer news of our transfer window, Evonik - ELKO announces that they signed Andrei Stepanov to a developmental scholarship. Stepanov will spent the season with development team Saubea to gain experience in several C2 races and it is expected that he joins our main team for the 2027 season.

Stepanov is a rouleur who loves medium mountains. He has good attacking stats and should be a valuable domestique at any level.

Throwback: It's the off-season between the 2021 and 2022 season and I'm seriously considering disbanding the team. Previous "All in" attempts to go for the title failed and i was burned out with frustration about the game and a lack of short and long term goals to aim for.

At the time, i did a meetup with someone most of you know as Croatia14. Sitting on my balcony we discussed possible options to move forward for hours and i found that the idea of aiming to complete the Grand Tour triple might motivate me enough to continue and for me there were three possibly available leaders to go for it: Jack Haig and Tom Wirtgen looked like there was a chance their teams would disband and they had the base stats where massive training could lift them into possible GT winners and Pierre-Henri Lecuisinier who was a proven GT winner already and was announced to be available to acquire funds for the Greek training fond.

When the disbands didnt happen, i knew i would be going all out to target Lecuisinier and managed to acquire him in one of the most expensive deals of all time. I did think that i overpaid and didnt think this was an ideal play for a possible future title chance but i didn't care too much as this was a play to deliberately ignore the title race for a while and instead target Grand Tour wins alongside our ongoing mission to win LBL as our final missing monument.

Once i acquired Lecuisinier i formulated a long-term vision for the next few seasons with detailed salary cap plans until at least 2024. Here is a quote from my document i wrote back in 2022:



And the plan worked quite well: Lecuisinier won the 2022 Giro & the 2023 Tour to complete Evoniks Grand Tour triple quicker than we had expected (Taaramäe already won the 2021 Vuelta for Evonik) so we we were on track to achieve most goals already. 2024 was the first opportunity for Lecuisinier to crown himself the TDF goat but the team gambled the race away in one of the weirdest stages possible gifting main rival Merhawi Kudus a minute gap in the second week via the usual breakaway that was not really chased after.

So 2025 came and Lecuisinier helped achieving our longterm plans: He won his third TDF and is now the undisputed TDF GOAT while the whole team won the PT title which means we have managed to achieve two of the three big goals we set ourself back in 2022.

We sticked to a lot of our roster building ideas we envisioned a couple years ago although some ideas were adapted due to changes in the game or unexpected opportunites but in large, we feel like our title winning team resembles our 2022 vision a fair bit.

Having achieved every goal with Lecuisinier that he can help us achieve, we decided to skip another title challenge when the opportunity came to sign our cobbles leader of the future in del Grosso. The transfer meant that we would need to trade away either A) Lecuisinier, B) Plapp or 3) Eenkhoorn+Krasts and with the del Grosso deal being a long-term move it made the most sense to trade away Lecuisinier if we would get a solid offer.

And so Lecuisinier moves to cycleYorkshire for next season and we will be cheering him on in each of his races as if he was still part of our team. We don't know yet where he will race but if it were to us to decide, he would target a possible fourth Tour de France victory on a route that should suit him fairly well.

In the end there is not much to say except: Thank you for 3 fantastic GT victories and the contributions to our first PT title and even more important: Thank you for helping me find motivation for this beautiful game again. Without PHL this Evonik team might not exist anymore today.

ember wrote:

That was a very nice read to understand background and thinking behind your team’s development the last years. Fair to say it succeeded too!

Excited to see how you go from here, as you wrote yourself, the team is slightly older and better than what you imagined it being after a rebuild, meaning another rebuild is looming, or maybe rather do it step by step over a couple of seasons.