Lidl-Trek has a much bigger price range, stronger rosters and better ambitions for 2024.
The reportedly 40% enhance in price range, because of the arrival of the Lidl grocery store chain, has elevating the US-registered WorldTour crew to the standing of ‘tremendous crew’, permitting them to tackle UAE Group Emirates and Jumbo-Visma within the males’s WorldTour and SD Worx within the ladies’s WorldTour.
Group supervisor Luca Guercilena is satisfied that the arrival of Tao Geoghegan Hart, Jonathan Milan, Andrea Bagioli, Carlos Verona and others will strengthen the boys’s crew that already consists of Mads Pedersen, Giulio Ciccone, Mattias Skjelmose and Quinn Simmons.
Britain’s Izzy Sharp, Canadian sisters Ava and Isabella Holmgren and Clara Copponi will be a part of Elisa Balsamo, Lizzie Deignan, Elisa Longo Borghini, Amanda Spratt, Elynor Bäckstedt and Gaia Realini within the ladies’s line up.
The 48 riders of the boys’s, ladies’s and new males’s improvement crew, are in Calpe, Spain, together with an identical variety of employees, for an vital December coaching camp. It’s the solely time they’ll all be collectively earlier than the beginning of the 2024 season and a brand new period for the crew.
Guercilena remains to be present process remedy for lymphoma and so gained’t be capable to attend the coaching camp. Nevertheless, he has overseen the transformation of the crew in current months and is worked up to see how the crew performs within the years to return.
He explains to Cyclingnews the crew’s plans and ambitions for 2024.
Cyclingnews: This winter marks the beginning of a brand new part for the crew with Lidl as a key companion and several other big-name riders signed for 2024. How vital will the season be for the crew? What are the objectives for the crew?
Luca Guercilena: 2024 will mark a brand new place to begin for the crew. The settlement with Lidl and the signing of a bunch of recent riders, offers the crew the chance to be extra formidable. The goal is to combat for the primary spot within the UCI crew rating. In fact to try this, we all know we have now to construct a crew that may win a sure amount of races and a sure high quality of races. That can take a while but it surely’s our plan and what drives us.
CN: UAE Group Emirates, Jumbo-Visma and Ineos Grenadiers are thought-about because the tremendous groups of the boys’s WorldTour. Ought to we now add Lidl-Trek to that record contemplating the crew’s price range, rider roster and ambitions?
LG: I consider we’ve reached that stage with our price range and the riders we have now. Lidl-Trek is now an excellent crew. Now an important half can be to carry out as an excellent crew. In sport, cash at all times helps, but it surely’s the outcomes and the way you obtain them that depend probably the most, that’s what we’ll be judged on.
CN: How did you persuade Lidl to turn out to be a serious title sponsor and what do they anticipate from the crew and the game {of professional} biking?
LG: I believe our proposal to Lidl was based mostly on three details. The primary is the professionalism and qualities of Trek as an organization. Each Lidl and Trek are main corporations with comparable ambitions and methods of working. For positive that made a big distinction.
Secondly, Lidl, like us, have the ambition to be the most effective crew in skilled biking. Like us, they wish to show that enterprise abilities might be utilized to sport to spotlight the qualities of the corporate.
Thirdly, we created a transparent technique and advertising plan collectively. We all know that sponsorship is not only about displaying off the emblem, so our plans go a lot deeper and wider than that. Advertising, particular aspect occasions, promotions and plenty of different issues are additionally elements of our venture. Their international attraction and technique is like ours, we’re very a lot in sync in the best way we work and what we wish to obtain.
For us as a crew, involving Lidl in our venture is a supply of satisfaction and satisfaction. In recent times not many main biking groups have been in a position to appeal to a worldwide B2C sponsor into the game however we did and we’re happy with that. Lidl’s help has helped us enhance the crew’s price range, signal new riders and make different investments just like the Growth crew. It’s made us larger and higher.
Greater and higher for 2024
CN: Along with the boys’s WorldTour crew, Lidl-Trek have the extremely profitable ladies’s WorldTour crew and now a males’s improvement crew. What else have you ever labored on to be higher in 2024?
LG: We’re making an attempt to enhance the general high quality of the crew, to always increase the bar, as they are saying. We’ve strengthened the boys’s and ladies’s WorldTour groups, signed among the most gifted younger ladies and created a males’s improvement crew. We’ve created two crew bases in Spain in order that riders can practice there if it’s unhealthy climate at house or want some particular help from the crew. The younger riders can be based mostly in Girona and we’ll have one other base in Denia, close to Alicante. We’ve additionally employed residences in Tenerife at altitude for particular coaching camps.
We’ve additionally invested so much to enhance the structural core and back-room employees of the crew, as we work as one united crew throughout the boys’s and ladies’s programmes. Now we have extra employees with particular roles corresponding to a psychologist, nutritionists, cooks and information analysts.
CN: Lidl-Trek have just lately introduced the signing of gifted junior street race and mountain bike World Champion Albert Withen Philipsen, who will flip skilled in 2025 after his remaining season as a junior. Can we anticipate extra main signings like this sooner or later?
LG: Because the saying goes, Rome wasn’t inbuilt a day, so we have to be cautious and construct the crew strategically to succeed in our objectives. Albert Philipsen is a type of key rider signings for the long-term way forward for the crew. We’ve signed him for 2025, to assist him develop fastidiously with us, so he can attain his full potential whereas racing for Lidl-Trek.
CN: How does the arrival of Tao Geoghegan Hart and Jonathan Milan change the ambitions of the boys’s crew?
LG: I believe Tao is an ideal chief for the GC in stage races, and for positive we wish to help him to be a contender to win a Grand Tour. We’ll give him the time to get able to be aggressive and construct a bunch of teammates round him.
Jonathan Milan must make the step as much as be a a number of race winner however we’re assured he can do it. He may have a devoted group of riders to steer him out within the sprints and he’ll even be a part of our Basic group. We consider he has large potential.
CN: What would you say is the philosophy of the Lidl-Trek crew? How do you choose your riders and based mostly on what qualities?
LG: The philosophy of the crew will at all times be the identical: the identify in entrance of the jersey is extra vital than the one on the again, than any particular person rider. Group objectives at all times have precedence over particular person outcomes. Everybody on the crew has to respect one another and the interior guidelines, so we create the fitting empathy and assist one another do the most effective we will.
Rider choice is a protracted, detailed course of for us. We verify rider outcomes, examine their efficiency and testing historical past, do additional inside efficiency exams, psychological exams, diet evaluation and biomechanical exams. Lastly riders bear an interview with me and the excessive efficiency employees to know their ambitions, eventual race calendars and objectives.
CN: How do you ‘construct’ a cohesive, profitable crew of riders and employees? Everybody was within the USA in October and now in Calpe on the December coaching camp. What occurs in the course of the get togethers?
LG: The go to to see Trek within the USA is an opportunity for everybody to satisfy the individuals within the firm and to spend some enjoyable time collectively, to construct our crew spirit and to get to know one another.
The December camp is an important of all. It’s the one time of season wherein we’re all collectively. We begin engaged on all of the efficiency facets of the crew and the riders practice and spend time collectively. The January camp is extra particular for coaching, the workload may be very excessive, when riders practice with the teammates they’ll then race with in the course of the season. Every camp has particular objectives but additionally consists of some enjoyable stuff too. It’s a mixture of each work and enjoyable that builds a robust crew. It’s all a part of a course of.
CN: What are some great benefits of having each a profitable males’s and ladies’s crew? Ought to all main groups need to do the identical?
LG: We consider we have now one crew of 48 riders, with no distinction between the women and men. The extent of help they’ve is similar, and being at camp collectively helps every crew study from one another. In addition they push one another to do effectively and assist one another.
A brand new enterprise mannequin for skilled biking
CN: There may be a number of discuss in regards to the enterprise mannequin {of professional} biking because of the structural issues of the game, evident after the tried merger of Jumbo-Visma and Soudal-QuickStep didn’t occur.
LG: I believe now’s the time to vary and construct a brand new biking mannequin. The prices at each stage within the sport have grown exponentially in the previous few years for groups and organisers. This implies we’d like a brand new mannequin that brings extra into the game than simply sponsorship or fragmented tv rights. We want a construction like they’ve in tennis, Components 1 and the US skilled sports activities. We want a enterprise mannequin for skilled biking that features the nice issues carried out in these sports activities and the distinctive issues that make biking so particular.
CN: Can Lidl-Trek be an instance for change and assist make the change occur?
LG: We’re going all in to attempt to make it occur. Biking should be financially sustainable like different skilled sports activities, with one entity to create, management and distribute new sorts of incoming, whereas respecting the prevailing buildings. It will probably occur, we will make it occur collectively, simply as we’re doing at Lidl-Trek for 2024.