In the ninth round we signed another great Italian talent, as twenty-two year old Elia Favilli joins our squad on a three year contract. While he won a few races in his young career, his biggest achievement is a third place at the World Junior Road Race Championships in 2007. His main strengths are in the sprints and on hilly roads.

Christmas time is here. While we are on a break from the drafts, it gave us time to put up the decoration we got as a present from Bulgari. This serpentine decoration will only feature on the most important Bulgari stores around the world and we are proud that they made one for us too.

Here is a picture on what it looks like on one of the Bulgari stores:



Also, we got together with the full staff and squad to celebrate christmas with a nice dinner tonight. We all had a great time and our chef made one of the nicest christmas tree salads ever. Moser took a nice picture before digging in.



Through this way we like to wish all our fans and everyone involved in the UCPCL a Merry Christmas.

Although we currently only have five riders on the team, we sat down with them before the start of the training camp (which will start once our squad is complete) and discussed what they want to achieve this season. While our focus is primarily focused on Italian and Spanish races, our riders also want to race in other countries once in a while. We found three races that suit our riders perfectly, but the calender of the Continental Tour races is not revealed yet, so those three goals are subject to change. Most of our goals are in the hands of Cunego, as he wishes to compete in some of the biggest races on the World Tour calender. A full overview of our goals can be seen here.

First off, we are really excited to announce that Tom-Jelte Slagter has signed a two-year contract at our team. He managed to convince us with his incredible win at the U-23 National Road Race Championship in The Netherlands in 2010, so we followed him ever since.




Secondly, we signed Gustavo César Veloso on a three-year contract. Yes, you read it right, !three years! We think the organisators were drunk when they thought this would probably be a fun restriction. Anyhow, we have to make the most of it and Veloso will certainly be a great team-mate for our talented squad. His best result dates back to !2008! when he won the Volta a Catalunya.


See you next time, when hopefully we will announce the signings of two great talents.

Another big talent joins our team today, after we completed the transfer of the winner of the 2010 World Junior Championship Individual Time Trial, Bob Jungels. He will sign a one-year contract, but we're already confident he will resign for more years.




Because we had the NeLux area in our team, it would be weird to not go for a Belgium rider to complete the BeNeLux area. So that is what we did. We are proud to present one of Belgium's biggest talents, Julien Vermote. He signed a contract for two years and we are very happy he chose for our team.


Next round is restricted, but we will get to see a talent join us, but probably not a very known one yet. The round after that will most likely be another big talent.

See you soon.