After the announcement of Stauff's renewal yesterday news has arrived today that his team manager is looking to transfer him out to another team.

"We are looking at alternative options and some of the other riders on the market and we just aren't sure that we can operate with Stauff's wage on our budget any longer. We would love to keep him and would only sell him for a good price, but ultimately we do have other transfer targets that we would like to acquire."

After a transfer eason where we managed to keep most of our squad together and had only relatively minor changes (15 of our PT riders will be in our colours this season and another 3 of our riders from last season are out on loan), we are ready to do a full presentation of our squad for next season.



Pieter Vanspeybrouck has been with us since we were founded, meaning that this is his fourth season with the squad. He is one of the top cobbled riders in the world and we expect him to be very competitive in the PCT this season, even with the increased numbers of top cobblestone riders in the division. He has his old sidekick Niels Albert, another rider in his fourth year, there to deputise for him. This time, however, we also have provided him with a new and improved back-up squad. Joeri Stallaert gives us a plan B for those less selective cobbled races while new recruits Laurens De Vreese and Kevin Fouquet will be there to help to make the racing as tough as possible from the outset. We also expect this to be an emotional year for Johan Vansummeren as this, his fourth year in our team, is likely to be his last.

On the mountains we have managed to keep Jurgen Van den Broeck as our leader. After a top ten finish in the Giro last season we expect him to do very well at this level. There are a number of great climbers in the division this year but we don’t fear any of them. One of the reasons for this is our great depth of climbing support. William Maesen, Ben Curfs and Mathieu La Lavandier are all here for their fourth season and they are joined by new recruit Bart De Clerq. Amongst these four domestiques we expect that at least one of them will be there with Van den Broeck for most of the toughest parts of any given stage and will be able to defend any leader’s jerseys that come our way.

Our third leader is Dominque Cornu. One of the few riders who had a fairly good year in the PT he is back and ready to put in some more performances like the ones that saw us get promoted from the PCT in the first place. He is one of the top TT riders in the division and he is strong enough over hills to at least defend his lead from most of the other TT riders. We haven’t got a strong TTT squad around him this year but we are confident that he can put in good performances in his own right, with some of our hilly domestiques around him to help out.

All three of those leaders are here after last year but this season we believe that we have managed to strengthen in the sprinting department. Kris Boeckmans has really benefitted from his season at the top level and he is ready to lead our team in some races here. Not only that, but after this season we are sure that he will be ready to lead at a PT level. In the off-season we said goodbye to Andreas Stauff but in return we picked up Jens Keukeleire, ensuring that all of our leaders this year are Belgian. Not only that but they are roughly the same speed anyway and Keukeleire is slightly younger and better on hills. We are sure that he will pick up a number of wins this season. Joeri Stallaert is perhaps not at the same level as these two but he will be serving as a lead-out at times, joining Laurens De Vreese and Sven Vandousselaere.

Now we come to the hilly terrain, where we are notably weaker than last season. We had to say goodbye to Robin van der Hugenhaben during renewals as his wage demands were just too high for him to be a solid leader for us with all of our other commitments. Romain Zingle will thus be stepping up as our leader. He undeniably had the best season of anyone in our team last year with a lot of surprise results, but now he gets to test himself with a bit of pressure on. We have a huge number of support riders for him, like Jerome Cousin and new recruit Jelle Wallays (who is happy to ride with his twin brother Welle Jallays, one of our TTT squad).

Finally, we did not bring in many talents this year as most of the top Belgian talents already were under contract. We did however bring in Dieter Bouvry, who will one day become a solid hilly and climbing domestique for us. We also brought in Niels Vandyck who will certainly join our growing number of Belgian climbers one day. That said, several of our young talents are reaching the end of their development and are out on loan. Tim Wellens will come back to us next season as a fully-fledged stage racer. Guillaume Van Keirsbulck will be capable of performing the same role as Niels Albert and may one day even look to take leadership of this team. Eliot Lietaer will also continue his development towards becoming great back-u for Romain Zingle into the future. We thank our friends at Festina for looking after Van Keirsbulck and also Bouygues Telecom for taking on board the other two riders.

Avin Wargunnson wrote:
Great squad Count, you are certainly one of the favourites for the PCT honors, good luck with that. Boeckmans is great rider, will be a beast next year.

With the season on the cusp of starting and excitement in the air we are releasing the first of what we hope will be a regular series, looking ahead to the month that is going to come and looking back at what has already happened.

Of course being January we have nothing to look back to, and indeed we are just trying to forget that the 2014 season ever happened. So without any further ado let’s look at the first two races of our season, both in January.




Jens Keukeleire
Joeri Stallaert
Laurens De Vreese
Sven Vandousselaere
Welle Jallays
Victor Campenaerts
Dieter Bouvry
Niels Vandyck

Jens Keukeleire makes his debut in our colours at this race, as do some several of our domestiques and young talents. The talented young sprinter leads up an altogether young list, with Stallaert, De Vreese and Vandousselaere all coming along with him to provide help in setting up the sprints.




Jens Keukeleire
Romain Zingle
Bart De Clerq
Laurens De Vreese
Mathieu La Lavandier
Victor Campenaerts
Dieter Bouvry
Niels Vandyck

This is our second race of our season and arguably the one where we have the lowest hopes of scoring strong amounts of points. We have set up a team that is devoted to trying to come away with at least a stage win and hopefully more than one. Jens Keukeleire once again heads our line, though his support in the sprints isn’t quite at the same level with only De Vreese there to really help him. Romain Zingle will be looking out for the fourth and tenth stages and really just any opportunity to enter a break. De Clerq and La Lavandier will be hoping to either look for a chance to attack on the mountain stages or ultimately just test their legs and see if they can get into the top 15-20 on GC. We come here ith no expectations but every hope.