Cycling
Media reports: Mega merger of top teams collapsed
The teams of Remco Evenepoel (l) and Jonas Vingegaard will probably not merge after all. photo
© Pep Dalmau/belga/dpa
The merger between Jumbo-Visma and Soudal-QuickStep kept the cycling world in suspense. Now the project is apparently off the table.
The planned merger between the Cycling teams Jumbo-Visma and Soudal-QuickStep have collapsed. Several Belgian media reported this unanimously.
Accordingly, Amazon could compensate for the loss of the Dutch team’s main sponsor Jumbo. The future of the Belgian Équipe Soudal-QuickStep is secured until at least 2025, but the whereabouts of time trial world champion Remco Evenepoel is unclear.
The merger of the two heavyweights, which in football is roughly comparable to a merger between Liverpool FC and Manchester City, was the dominant topic in cycling over the past two weeks. This year, Jumbo became the first team in history to win all three major national tours. However, the main donor, a supermarket chain, had already announced months ago that it would withdraw by the end of 2024 at the latest. Soudal was long considered a classic team, but built a team around young star Evenepoel, who is celebrated in Belgium as the new Eddy Merckx.
During the negotiations, many drivers feared for their future, as a team can only have a maximum of 30 professionals under contract. Together, Jumbo and Soudal had 50 drivers under contract. Almost the entire transfer market came to a standstill because other racing teams wanted to wait and see how things developed.