‘Financial doping ensures cycling at two speeds’
Jan Bakelants is concerned about the state of cycling. Major teams shopped en masse at the ‘little ones’ last transfer market: Oscar Onley, Remco Evenepoel and normally Derek Gee were all bought away. Bakelants notes that teams that are less fortunate can easily be robbed by the bigger players.
This will have the effect that smaller teams will appear less frequently. Dangerous for teams that largely rely on sponsorship money. After all, a sponsor requires reimbursement in some way. Bakelants: “We will again have cycling at two speeds. In the past it was due to doping, now due to financial doping,” he tells Het Laatste Nieuws.
Imbalance in budgets
It creates a snowball effect, because riders would rather be co-leader of a large team than absolute leader of a small team. “If you can ride for Visma-Lease a Bike, UAE Team Emirates, Lidl-Trek, Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, INEOS Grenadiers and now also Decathlon CMA CGM, your life looks much better than with Lotto-Intermarché. While that is also just a WorldTour team.”
An amount of around six million euros would have even been paid for Onley. “For INEOS Grenadiers, that 6 million may be just over 10 percent of the budget, while for Picnic-PostNL it will be more like 25 percent. It is probably the annual contribution of a co-sponsor. That is what I mean: there is a huge imbalance in budgets in the peloton.”
Mathieu van der Poel as an example
A team that shows how it can be done despite a lower budget is Alpecin-Premier Tech. With Mathieu van der Poel and Jasper Philipsen as goldcrests, they consciously choose not to focus on rankings in the grand tours. “They discovered Mathieu van der Poel early on and when he fully broke through on the road, the practice that is now becoming common was not yet really established.”
That would have been different now, according to Bakelants. “Suppose Mathieu van der Poel had won his first major classic in the Amstel Gold Race, then an opportunistic team such as INEOS or Lidl-Trek would have jumped on the bandwagon, which would have tried to lure the golden boy away from the small Corendon with an astronomical bid. That did not happen and so they were able to build a stable top team.”
