Bicycle Racing News and Opinion,
Saturday, December 23, 2023
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2023 Tour de France | 2023 Giro d'Italia
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. - Thomas A. Edison
Les Woodland's book Tour of Flanders: The Inside Story - The rocky roads of the Ronde van Vlaanderen is available in print, Kindle eBook and audiobook versions. To get your copy, just click on the Amazon link on the right.
Upcoming racing:
- Dec 26: World Cup Gaver Cyclocross
- Dec 27: Superprestige Heusden Zolder
- Dec 28: Superprestige Diegem
- Dec 29: Exact Cross Loenhout-Azencross
- Jan 12-21: Santos Tour Down Under
- Jan 20: Clasica Comunitat Valenciana
- Jan 24-28: Challenge Illes Balears-Volta Ciclista a Mallorca
- Jan 28: GP d'Ouverture-La Marseillaise
- Jan 28: Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race
- Jan 30 - Feb 3: Saudi Tour
Latest completed racing:
- Dec 17: World Cup Namur Cyclocross
- Nov 5: European Cyclocross Championships
- Nov 1: Trofee Oudenaarde-Koppenbergcross
- Oct 28: Superprestige Ruddervoorde
- Oct 22: Superprestige Overijse-Vlaanse Druivencross
- Oct 12 - 17: Tour of Guangxi
- Oct 15: Japan Cup
- Oct 15: Veneto Classic
Here’s the team’s post:
With our team camp recently wrapped up and the Tour Down Under on the horizon, we couldn’t be more excited to get back to racing. In 2023, we had one of our best seasons in our team history with 26 wins, including six national champions jerseys, a pair of stage wins at the Giro d’Italia, a breakout season for Ben Healy, and more – and we want to build on that.
“We need to keep doing what we’ve done well,” says sport director Charly Wegelius. “Playing on our strengths. We’ve made some good steps forward. A rider like Ben Healy, we were super excited about what he did last year and want to see what he does going forward. Neilson Powless also took some big leaps. And then we have riders who are something of the finished product, riders like Alberto Bettiol and Richard Carapaz.”
Ben Healy wins 2023 Giro d'Italia stage eight. Sirotti photo
Charly believes that having riders with a range of strengths and experience is key to the team.
“We’ve got a good mix of riders. Some are arriving at their peak, we’ve got some riders who are at their peak and then we’ve got this new wave of riders coming in.”
That new wave of riders is significant. Of the nine new faces joining our team, seven are making their WorldTour debut.
“It’s a long time since we’ve had such a young roster,” he says. “There’s a lot of optimism because we believe in them. We’re prepared to give them the space to find out how they need to grow and we’ll also give them the space to work through that. As a team, we do well at adapting to what we find once we start to work with the riders, so I’d say we’re feeling a lot of optimism without the burden of any particular expectations.”
Our new signings are all feeling that optimism, not to mention plenty of enthusiasm. Rui Costa is keen to share his experiences with the younger riders. Lukas Nerurkar and Markel Beloki grew up hearing their parents’ stories of being athletes at the highest level – now it’s their turn to write their own stories. Yuhi Todome and Jardi van der Lee, who have both sampled racing with our squad at the Tour de Langkawi, will now sink their teeth in their first WorldTour seasons. Harry Sweeny will be racing his fourth pro season with us and, like Archie Ryan, Jack Rootkin-Gray, and Darren Rafferty, is looking forward to taking the next step in his cycling career.
It’s no accident that our roster features so many young riders this year. Director of scouting Sebastian Langeveld played a significant role in seeking out young talent that aligned with our goals.
“This was my first year scouting so I had a lot of help from inside the team and going through data. It’s a responsibility but I’m super happy with it. I want to be a DS but I also wanted to do something where I can have a different impact as well — I’m really happy with what I get to do within the team,” he says.
“What we did really well was to be in contact with these young riders, to show the team in a positive way, but also in an honest and realistic way,” Sebastian says. “I didn't chase them down or fly to their homes. It’s not a super fancy story of how we signed them, but I think the way we went last year as a team, with a lot of victories early on, and how we approached the riders, helped make us a super attractive team. That's why young guys want to sign for us. I’m super excited to see what they’re capable of in the upcoming year but it’s really a process to see them develop over two or more years. I’m quite confident we’ll see some nice growth in our roster.”
Jonathan Vaughters, CEO of EF Pro Cycling, agrees that our riders, from the youngest rookies to the experienced vets, have what it takes to make 2024 a banner year.
“If I look at this roster on paper, I see a capable group of riders that can, and should, surprise at races from the start to the end of the season. I think every manager says something similar this time of year. But we know our races aren’t won in December, and they’re not won on paper. I’m happy with the group we’ve put together. It’s dynamic, and it’s full of guys with attacking spirits. It’s very young, which is exciting, but also a big responsibility for us as managers and for the older guys on the team,” he says.
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We are immensely proud of what we accomplished in 2023. Alberto Bettiol opened the WorldTour season by winning the Tour Down Under prologue. Neilson’s fifth place at his Tour of Flanders debut had us fired up for the cobbled classics. Sean Quinn and Ben Healy took their first pro wins on consecutive days at Coppi e Bartali. Ben then went on to win four more times in the season, including soloing to a memorable grand tour stage win at the Giro d’Italia. And don’t forget his back-to-back podiums in the Ardennes. Michael Valgren showed us the importance of showing up and putting in the work. He will return full time to our WorldTour roster. Esteban Chaves winning the Colombian national championship for the first time in his career moved us. And, as he always does, Lachlan Morton inspired us to get out there and ride, for the pure love of adventure.
As we look ahead, you can be sure our team will ride as one as we look to make 2024 our best season ever.
Our 2024 roster
Andrey Amador, 37
Markel Beloki, 18
Alberto Bettiol, 30
Stefan Bissegger, 25
Richard Carapaz, 30
Simon Carr, 25
Hugh Carthy, 29
Alexander Cepeda, 25
Esteban Chaves, 33
Rui Costa, 37
Stefan de Bod, 27
Owain Doull, 30
Ben Healy, 23
Mikkel Honore, 26
Lachlan Morton, 31
Lukas Nerurkar, 20
Andrea Piccolo, 22
Neilson Powless, 27
Sean Quinn, 23
Darren Rafferty, 20
Jack Rootkin-Gray, 21
Jonas Rutsch, 25
Archie Ryan, 22
James Shaw, 27
Georg Steinhauser, 22
Harry Sweeny, 25
Yuhi Todome, 21
Rigoberto Urán, 36
Michael Valgren, 31
Marijn van den Berg, 24
Jardi van der Lee, 22
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Here’s the team’s post:
Not only the Groupama-FDJ cycling team’s squad experienced changes over the winter. The sports department is also going through a real transformation. Two new sports directors are joining the ranks of the WorldTour organization, while Franck Pineau and Sébastien Joly left the team. At the head of the department, newly retired Yvon Madiot left the command to Philippe Mauduit, who sat down to talk about his new role and the reorganization.
Team Groupama-FDJ being presented at the start of the 2023 Tour de France. Sirotti photo
Philippe, can you first sum up the sports department reorganization?
With Yvon and Franck retiring, the team chose to anticipate the changes of the coming years. It was necessary to find a successor to Yvon as director of the sports department, and I was chosen. It’s a new role for me in the team but it’s something I wanted to do. There are other changes, as Julien takes over from Fred Grappe as head of coaching, and Fred is moving more towards R&D. This represents three important changes in the team’s management, and it brings a little rejuvenation. If we just talk about the sports directors’ pool, the average age goes down from 52 to 46 years old in just one winter. We don’t intend to make a revolution, but we want to try to implement small changes which can bring renewal, and thus revitalize the group of sports directors, as well as the team overall. We want to do things a little differently from the past few years, without making a revolution because this teamis almost three decades old. It has its own culture, its own identity, and we must not lose that.
What is the role of the sports department’s director?
It is mostly about planning the sporting strategy, and the roadmaps towards the sporting goals. My role is also to recruit, organize, measure, as well as build race programs and riders’selections in order to achieve our goals. All this is done in close collaboration with the different executive committee’sdepartments. My role is also to optimize discussions and race preparation with preparatory meetings beforehand, and to organize the entire sporting operation. I am also responsible for race management which will be conducted by the sports directors themselves. I have a team coordinator role. My goal is to do everything before the races so that the teams can work well and with peace of mind. I’m not necessarily going to do more than before; I’m going to do it differently. It is a role which must produce energy, ideas and which must support sports directors in their daily missions and their preparation.
Will you then do fewer races?
If I look at the race program, I will roughly do the same number of race days as in past years. However, I won’t be in charge very often. Rather, my colleagues will be directing inthe races. I will be more in the background, an observer, or a facilitator. Above all, I will follow the projects, try to create a good dynamic, and bring something new when it will be possible. I am also committed to ensuring that sports directors have large freedom of action, because they also have ideas, and we need this commitment to go faster, further, higher.
What would you like to bring to your current position?
I really want to facilitate the projects’ execution. I want to make sure that sports directors have the freedom to think, express themselves and act. Of course, this must be in line with the framework defined upstream by senior management, and towards the objectives which have been set. I really want them to be able to express themselves, because whatever their experience, you realize by working with them every afternoonthat they all have great ideas. We just need to ensure that they can execute them. In a company of 120 people, it is not easy to change things. And then you shouldn’t change just for the sake of changing. We really try to add little things that allow everyone to function better and be more efficient.
Do you set any goals for yourself as director of the sports department?
Of course we have goals in terms of results, and we must have sporting success, because this is the very essence of a professional team. We are here to win races and rise to the top of the WorldTour rankings. Let’s not forget that we finished seventh this year and won nineteen victories. We also had some thirty podiums, including ten or so in the WorldTour. The goal is to win races, again and again. Transforming a third of the podiums into victories would be pretty nice. So, the sporting goals are well defined, but we have other objectives in terms of team restructuring. It’s a mission that is also important for me because we have to support change. Cycling evolves, the regulations evolve, the other teams evolve, and it is better to be one step ahead than one step behind. If we want to arrive on time, we have to get on the train right away.
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Can you tell us about the sports directors’ pool, which also welcomes two new members?
First, we will continue to rely on the experience of Thierry, who is now our most experienced sports director. Fred, Jussi and Benoît also know the team perfectly, as they rode there for over a decade and have been sports directors for several years now. They want, precisely thanks to all the knowledge they have of the team, to bring their little touch and their energy. To these four cornerstones, we therefore add two new ones. The first of them is Yvon Caër. He is someone who has a lot of technical background, and not just in cycling. He also has the ability to discuss, exchange, implement projects and support them. We feel that his experience as a teacher in a difficult area for more than fifteen years has developed faculties that we – the other sports directors – do not have. With the experience he had at Arkéa-Samsic, it makes him a very complementary profile to that of the other sports directors. The other newcomer is William Green, a young man from New Zealand. His addition to the team comes from a wish of everyone, both senior management and sports management. It’s a desire to open the team and to benefit from an outside perspective. Without changing our own culture, we want to bring other cultural elements, other knowledge, a different perspective which will force us to answer hisquestions, his interrogations, and sometimes to follow the paths he will suggest to us. We have a great group of sports directors, who have already put a lot of things in place at the Calpe training camp.
What pushed the team to move towards these particular profiles?
Nothing and no one pushed us in this path. It was really a desire, within the team, to expand the group to skills, whether cultural or sporting, that we did not necessarily have. We wanted to provide complementarity to what we had and to push us to question our habits. This team is almost three decades old, habits have been taken, and changes are not often easy to implement in sport, even at a high level. We often do things out of habit without even asking ourselves any more questions. What we wanted was to ask ourselves questions. “Why are we doing it like this?” The answer is often the same. “Because we’ve always done it like this, and it works.” “But can’t we do things differently to make it work even better?” That was kind of the idea. Furthermore, beyond his culture, his youth, and his slightly different curriculum because he studied sports science, our idea in recruiting William was also to have someone who could communicatefluently in English. It should enable us to be even closer to all our Anglo-Saxon riders, and foreigners in general. Even if many of them now speak well-developed French, it’s a real benefit in terms of relationships and confidence when you can express yourself on difficult topics in the rider’s mother tongue. We really wanted to make this effort, because we now have several Anglo-Saxon riders, we are attached to them, and we hope to have them by our side for a long time.
This is the first time since yourself, in 2019, that the sports director’s group welcomes external members. What does this change in terms of stability?
Marc [Madiot] and David [Le Bourdiec] are company leaders who are committed to the long term, to loyalty, who trust people, and this is perhaps also why there aren’t a lot of turnovers. To bring change, we actually had to wait for the retirement of Martial, Yvon and Franck. But I also believe that they are well aware that the world is changing, quickly, and that we must adapt and renew ourselves. It was a great opportunity to bring change with all these departures for “long vacations”. The team wants to be loyal to the people who form it. Now, it is also up to us to honour this trust. As a result, the addition of the two new members must also be a long-term one. We don’t know what our future holds, but we have a very rejuvenated group. With an average age of 46, I think we must be among the youngest at the WorldTour level, a bit like we are with the riders.
Would you like to share a few words about Yvon and Franck, who are now retired?
I have already had the opportunity to tell Yvon what I had to say to him. I won’t repeat everything here. That said, I had the chance to work with a great person, a passionate man, who always did his best to support the team at the highest level. If the team is here after twenty-seven years of history, it is also and above all thanks to all the work he has accomplished backstage. Yvon is a humble person, who doesn’t like to show off, but he perfectly passed me the baton to complete this grueling 4x400m relay. He gave me a good start and I thank him for that. Like Yvon, Franck will be greatly missed. Even though he was reaching retirement age, he always brought freshness, motivation, sometimes carefreeness, and he always had the right words when times were difficult. We will miss his joy of life. Nature abhors a vacuum, and voids are always filled, but on a personal level, it was great to have been able to work with these two people in my life as a sports director.
What does the sports department’s director expect from 2024?
I am waiting for confirmation of our young talents’ breakthrough, and I hope that I will live up to Marc and David’s confidence. To use a famous phrase from Marc, I’m waiting for the winning counter to run, and for it to run as soon as possible.
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