We are happy to announce another loan signing. Rune Herregodts was one of our top targets this season and we are excited to have him for a season.

Rune is a very versatile rider. He excels in short prologues but can hold his aerodynamic position in longer solo rides as well. He also is a pretty solid stage racer with abilities on shorter and longer climbs. He will be our leader in some races where racing solo against the clock is a crucial part of the race.

redordead wrote:

I'm interested to see how you use Herregodts, he's a very cool rider

Jente Michels is the 21st and final rider for our squad this year. He is the first Evonik stagiaire since 2017 when we infamously signed four stagiaires (Airidas Videika, Marco Mathis, Joosten Vaidem, Vasilijus Lendel) to fit Miguel Angel Lopez under our salary cap which caused a rule change for PT teams.

He will ride on a 10,000 contract and will join us in August to participate in fourteen race days for us across multiple different terrains.

While transfer season is always an exciting time to see new faces join the team, it usually also means that there are some riders departing to new adventures. Riders that have been an important part of the recent team history and that will be missed a lot!

Already during renewals, we let three guys depart. All three of them were only part of our team for a single season:

Patrick Konrad was a late addition last season when we wanted to add a versatile domestique for mountains, hills and time trials. He had an anonymous season with us and we never attempted to bring him back. At the age of 34, he couldnt find a team anymore and will surely retire now.

Nihal Silva was the less successful of our sprinter duo. His bigger contribution was as part of our cobbled team in service of Jan Polanc. Despite him never showing the quality needed in PT, we made half-hearted attempts to renew his contracts but were not surprised to see him trying the open market. New CT team IncaLine Pro Cycling secured his signature for the minimum wage and we hope that he can shine more in CT.

Jaume Sureda was the more succesful of our sprinter duo. He was a consistant sprinter for us who we would have loved to keep around. But during negotiations, he declined what we saw as a very fair wage. The market proved him right as he got paid a surprisingly large wage increase - rumoredly figured around 150.000 from Simba Cement.

During transfers, three more riders left the team. All three of them were long-time members of Evonik - ELKO and were seen as important members in some of our biggest highlights, helping to shape the team into the top team we are now seen across the globe.

Eriks Tom Gavars was signed prior to the 2022 season. He started his pro career with us and quickly developed into a super reliable domestique across different terrains. At the same time, he was one of the most important hills domestiques for Lopez and a core member of our stage racing unit. He was part of our Giro winning team in 2022 and part of our Tour winning team in 2023. He will be missed in the Tour this year.

Jan Polanc spent four seasons with us after joining us from Isostar in 2021. During that time, he grew his reputation from a reliable top 15 cobbler into one of the strongest cobbles leader around. The highlight of his time with us was of course the solo victory in the Ronde van Vlaanderen 2023 but he also won other PT races such as Macskako Kerekparverseny or the Cheshire Cycling Tour. He left to Tryg to terrorize the PCT division as part of the deal that saw us loaning in Ovsyannikov.

Martins Blums started his career in 2018 when he signed his first contract with us. After two loans to Zalgiris and our moo-st reliable loan partner Valio (sorry for milking the most obvious cheesy pun), he slowly grew into one of our most prominent riders and became the face of our latvian team core when we sold Skujins. He was our most important domestique in the hills for half a decade and doubled down as the strongest domestique in two Evonik Grand Tour victories: The 2021 Vuelta won by Rein Taaramäe and the 2022 Giro won by Pierre-Henri Lecuisinier. He didnt get many opportunities to ride for his own glory in hilly races but he has repeatedly shown to be one of the most consistent and most underrated GC riders in the PT. In the last three years he finished 17th in the Vuelta 2022, 17th in the Giro 2023, 16th in the Vuelta 2024 proving that he can be a leader himself too. He leaves to our close friends at Xero where he probably will fill a very similar role in support of our arch rival Joseph Areruya. We look forward to seeing him again and enjoy personal success but hope his excellent support will not cost us big victories in the Ardennes.

It's already public knowledge that we had to promise big investments into the training of Ovsyannikov and Herregodts to secure their loan deals. Both riders are expected to make the next step into being proper PT leaders after the training camps they visited.

Another rider who comes out of the offseason with improved strength is Tobias Foss. Our stage racer has worked on his climbing abilites and will be stronger than ever in the mountains and medium mountains.

We are looking forward to see all of them in action during the upcoming season and hope to celebrate new heights together.

They call us a stage racing team now - so we had to continue building around that strength. Lecuisinier remains our leader but around him we have assembled an impressive squad of co-leaders and domestiques. Luke Plapp and Tobias Foss return stronger than ever and both are ready to lead a PT team too. Eenkhoorn & in the future Krasts look strong enough to be a GT leader too but we are running out of leading opportunities to share around so they might have to settle for luxury domestiques for now. Around them there is an increasing number of stage racers capable of setting the pace in the mountains and supporting in closed group rides.

Miguel Angel Lopez goes into his nineth professional season and for this season we have re-arranged his support squad quite a bit: After years of relying on hybrid climbers with Martins Blums as the most prominent one, we will heavily rely on two proper puncheurs: Calmejane and Adria are two puncheurs with a versatile skill set ideally suited to support Lopez in all the hills. Since that duo isnt enough his support, a wide variety of other riders will be included in our support lineups for him.

Rune Herregodts will get a lot of leadership opportunities in races with short and long prologues. We hope that we can make good use of his versatility as well and hope that he can perform for us in races where we have historically performed badly.

We combine the presentation of our cobbles team & the flat teams since the personal is almost the same: Ovsyannikov is both our cobbles and sprint leader. Neilands his lieutenant on the cobbles while Bauhaus is the backup sprinter in races that Ovsyannikov wont be able to participate in. Dversnes, Ansons and Kurianov are our rouleur trio that we hope does well in flat classics, provides support on the cobbles and just generally provide a very flexible depth option on all sort of terrains.

So this is our squad for the upcoming season and we think we are stronger than ever. We have improved our lineup for sprint races and stage races while losses elsewhere were covered as good as possible. We have high expectations but are especially looking forward to having less hopeless races than in past seasons in between obvious highlight races.