The idea caused a stir, threatening to shake up professional world cycling. But on Saturday October 7, the merger project planned for 2024 between the Belgian groups Soudal-Quick Step and the Dutch Jumbo-Visma was abandoned, according to a letter from the latter made public 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 what the best option is,” is written in the letter from Jumbo-Visma, the team of Dane Jonas Vingegaard, double winner of the Tour de France.
The shareholders of the two cycling teams, among the most powerful in the world peloton, 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 hindsight 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,” wrote the newspaper Le Soir on Saturday.
Complexity of the file
Questions of a sporting nature had also emerged, in particular on a possible cohabitation between Jonas Vingegaard and the Belgian Remco Evenepoel, the leader of Soudal-Quick Step, who share the same objective of winning the next Tour de France. Ultimately, according to several Belgian media, it was the complexity of the file that 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 the main partner of the team led by Richard Plugge in the coming seasons. Once mentioned, the investment (to the tune of 15 million euros) from the American platform Amazon will ultimately not happen, according to the daily Algemeen Dagblad on Saturday.
