![]() ![]() If the Kazkakh team hasn’t announced its Tour team but you can guess, there will be Mark Cavendish’s lead out train in Mørkøv, Ballerini and Bol, Alexey Lutsenko plus a worker or two. July in the diary: Groupama-FDJ aren’t the only riders on Wilier bikes. Still it does touch the other end of the scale too, there is a minimum wage for the World Tour but few riders will be on it, even neo-pros typically sign for well above this floor… at least for the men. Most of this is driven by rider wages going up, the average in the World Tour for 2024 is €449k but of course the average rider doesn’t earn this, the number is bumped up by the handful of riders on the biggest deals. As La Gazzetta Dello Sport noted the other day the average team budget is now €28 million. The drinks are on him: for the sake of a quick comparison, a decade ago Team Sky dominated the World Tour with a budget of €25 million, a sum that has doubled and Ineos today probably isn’t the biggest budget either. Who is 16th, 17th and 18th? Cofidis’s accounts show about €16 million, Arkéa-Samsic have been on about €18 million according to memory from a radio interview and Intermarché’s roster probably means they’re the third team. The team budget for last year was €22 million. But this is guarded, except for when teams get a pack of info which contains their ranking in terms of budget on a scale so they can see the order between 1 and 18th and the team’s position was mentioned in L’Equipe this week. Every year the UCI gets to review teams and the finances as a condition of their WorldTeam licence and so the governing body knows the headline budget for every team. Le budget: Staying with Groupama-FDJ, they have the 15th biggest budget in the World Tour. So Lapierre dropped Groupama-FDJ, targetted Bora-hansgrohe… and whatever reason missed out as the German teams stay with Specialized so Lapierre is now without a men’s World Tour team. ![]() ![]() All this is told in more detail on the Matos Vélo website. Bike brand Lapierre had long sponsored Groupama-FDJ but the company has been taken over by private equity and new owners KKR want – read need – to increase sales and opting for a more international team became a priority as Groupama-FDJ just looked too French. Lapierre loses out: talking of Bora-hansgrohe, they might have had another deal. The key issue was to have this approved both teams and the UCI by 1 January as transfers are only allowed between the end of the season until the end of the year, otherwise it’d have to wait until the transfer window in August. All is well that ends well but it wasn’t a very pro look for two teams to be arguing in public like this and for his agent to try and get the deal without UCI approval. He is a Visma-LAB rider after his transfer went through this week. Kein Uijtdebroeks: Cian Uijtdebroeks is no longer with Bora-hansgrohe, it’s official. But there’s plenty of time for other teams to resemble each other. Spot the difference: Several teams have unveiled kits and the good news so far is that there is less blue and red, it will be easier to tell them apart on TV for fans even riders can have issues in races when they might glance over their shoulder and can’t be sure if the rider in red kit bridging across is from Bahrain or Ineos. Team sponsors can change but the team keeps its visual identity, it’s a sensible idea as long as the sponsors are ok, very often they are so sensitive to their branding that they want “their” team to adopt every style and brand guideline they have. Visma-Lease A Bike kit looks a lot like the Jumbo-Visma kit. ![]()
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