There will be no Avengers of cycling. In any case, not right away. While in recent weeks, the merger project between Jumbo-Visma and Soudal Quick-Step was in the pipeline, the first team announced that it would not happen, in a letter made public this Saturday by several media. “We want to be ready to face the future organizationally, financially and sportingly after the era of Jumbo as main sponsor. In this process, we concluded that a merger with Soudal Quick-Step was not the best option. We will see later which is the best option. »
The shareholders of the two teams came together this summer to consider a merger in reaction to the upcoming withdrawal of Jumbo as a sponsor and the desire of Patrick Lefevere, manager of Soudal, to take a step back after thirty years at the head of a cycling team. This project quickly provoked an outcry especially within Soudal, where riders and management members feared numerous job losses. For them, “it is certainly relief that dominates,” the newspaper wrote this Saturday The evening.
The hardware question was a problem
Questions of a sporting nature had also emerged, in particular on a possible cohabitation between Jonas Vingegaard and the Belgian Remco Evenepoel, leader of Soudal Quick-Step, who share the same objective of winning the next Tour de France. Finally, according to several Belgian media, it was the complexity of the file which caused the project to bring together two of the largest structures in the world to fail. For example, the new entity would have had to complete and pay for the UCI licenses by October 19, a deadline considered too tight.
The question of equipment was also thorny, Evenepoel having an exclusive contract with the American Specialized, while Jumbo wanted to continue its collaboration with Cervelo. The end of this series does not, however, put an end to a certain number of uncertainties, in particular over the sponsor who will replace Jumbo as main sponsor of the team led by Richard Plugge in the coming seasons. Once mentioned, the investment (up to 15 million euros) from the American platform Amazon will ultimately not happen, according to the daily Algemeen Dagblad this Saturday.