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Teams & Riders Team Visma - Lease a Bike

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Pog, Rog, Wout van Aert, Van der Poel & Evenepoel, in whatever order based on their form on the day.

I know people would be tempted to put Vingegaard in there but let's wait & see. Those five are serial winners who'll score their team loads of UCI points all year long.

I'm also so looking forwards to Itzulia in a couple of weeks because that's when Vingegaard can & should grab his first WT stage race, considering who he's up against. No offense to Gaudu, Mas or the Yates brothers but Jumbo have to fancy Vingegaard's chances there.

Let's just say that JV has 3 out of best 6. Obviously I'm not a fan of Vinge and his peaking for one race but one can't ignore his peak level and great style of his TdF victory.
 
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I merely meant his first win in the GC of a WT stage race.

Yes, I reread I realized that.

Let's just say that JV has 3 out of best 6. Obviously I'm not a fan of Vinge and his peaking for one race but one can't ignore his peak level and great style of his TdF victory.

I want to see whether the TdF last year was a perfect alignment of planets for Vingegaard or whether he can truly lead the team alone this summer & remain a champ. I'm not being harsh here either, i.e. in terms of mentality, WvA & Roglič are absolute monsters. That's what Vingegaard needs a dose of. Not just crazy summer watts.

Because without Pog blowing up like on Granon (& with hardly any ITT in the 2023 edition) I think Vingegaard is going to need some steely resolve because it'll be much closer this year.
 

Uh oh. For those wondering what this has to do with the cycling (and speed skating) branch: Frits van Eerd = Jumbo-Visma. From the sponsor side of things, it was his little project. If he is found guilty, I can very much see it having repercussions for the team.

Here we go. In short: Frits van Eerd is no longer in charge with the firma Jumbo, and current board of directors is contemplating calling it quits.
 

Here we go. In short: Frits van Eerd is no longer in charge with the firma Jumbo, and current board of directors is contemplating calling it quits.
As i said, after Sunday their supermarkets were doomed in Belgium anyway, lol.

Insert Lefevere.gif.
 

Here we go. In short: Frits van Eerd is no longer in charge with the firma Jumbo, and current board of directors is contemplating calling it quits.
I don't think Frits van Eerd was ever really the driving force behind the cycling sponsorship, if you looked at his social media it was all Max Verstappen and auto racing. He wasn't even there when the team won the Tour de France.

It does make sense though for this Dutch supermarket chain to reevaluate its sponsorship of an international cycling team that doesn't really add any value to their product. I don't think they're selling any more toilet paper or cans of soup because Wout van Aert just won a race that most Dutch people have never even heard of. Even though their total sponsoring budget (including their sponsorship of Max Verstappen and the speedskating team) is 20 million euros, which for such a big company isn't huge.
 
I don't think they're selling any more toilet paper or cans of soup because Wout van Aert just won a race that most Dutch people have never even heard of.

That's not what sponsoring is about at all. It's about branding, getting name-recognition.
Aside from that, of the many past and present cycling sponsors, the ones benefitting more in sales directly through sponsoring actually are the likes of Jumbo, QuickStep, Alpecin, Borah etc. as they are selling a product every fan can buy. But sponsoring is primarily about branding: or do you think Lampre was a sponsor all those decades hoping for cycling fans to rush their factories and getting their hands on some nice pre-coated steel parts? Or Ineos was in it expecting to finally get the average Joe to buy industrial chemicals in bulk?

I think them sponsoring both cycling (summer) and speedskating (winter) was pretty smart. Van Eerd always having been a huge fan of Verstappen even when he was still in a kart... well they just struck gold with that. The first two sports have always been pretty big in the Netherlands historically. The latter one.. well, it is now.. For Jumbo as a company, those 20 million saw a huge return. Wether another company is willing to step in and put as much into it is anybody's guess.
 
That's not what sponsoring is about at all. It's about branding, getting name-recognition.
Aside from that, of the many past and present cycling sponsors, the ones benefitting more in sales directly through sponsoring actually are the likes of Jumbo, QuickStep, Alpecin, Borah etc. as they are selling a product every fan can buy. But sponsoring is primarily about branding: or do you think Lampre was a sponsor all those decades hoping for cycling fans to rush their factories and getting their hands on some nice pre-coated steel parts? Or Ineos was in it expecting to finally get the average Joe to buy industrial chemicals in bulk?

I think them sponsoring both cycling (summer) and speedskating (winter) was pretty smart. Van Eerd always having been a huge fan of Verstappen even when he was still in a kart... well they just struck gold with that. The first two sports have always been pretty big in the Netherlands historically. The latter one.. well, it is now.. For Jumbo as a company, those 20 million saw a huge return. Wether another company is willing to step in and put as much into it is anybody's guess.
And what does a supermarket chain want name recognition for? To sell more products, I would think. I think the sponsorship wasn't really about name recognition, maybe in Belgium because they were new over there but in Holland it was already pretty big and I don't know if this sponsorship really made any difference. Visma on the other hand, now there's a company that needed the name recognition.
 
And what does a supermarket chain want name recognition for? To sell more products, I would think. I think the sponsorship wasn't really about name recognition, maybe in Belgium because they were new over there but in Holland it was already pretty big and I don't know if this sponsorship really made any difference. Visma on the other hand, now there's a company that needed the name recognition.
I want to avoid getting into marketing too much (after all, I wanna leave some room for proper linguistic discussions) so this is all I'm gonna say about it: Jumbo want to beat Albert Heijn. In a nutshell, that's what Jumbo are about, and I believe that with their sponsoring strategy, (including a sh*load of luck with Max suddenly crushing the field) they are getting pretty close. And like Samamba said, sponsoring with a strategic plan can be really succesful. There's a reason they didn't go with football (obviously the #1 sport): it draws less sympathy. Precisely because it is the number one sport. Cyclists and skaters are more approachable, have a higher cuddle factor. They're big, but still seen as underdogs. It costs less to sponsor them and people think more favourable about these sports in general: win-win.
 
It's so predictable... once you start winning you get people who hate you just because you're winning. Such a dumb sentiment.

I don't see how that's dumb? Lots of people simply don't like dominance. You basically need to see at as compliment. I rooted against Mercedes in F1 for years, no I root against Red Bull, I just want more teams to win things, it's gets boring to me otherwise. Same with cycling. I disliked Sky, I disliked QS, now I dislike Jumbo (they're worse imo). Those teams usually get arrogant too.

I simply don't like races where I'm 90% sure which team is going to win.
 
I don't see how that's dumb? Lots of people simply don't like dominance. You basically need to see at as compliment. I rooted against Mercedes in F1 for years, no I root against Red Bull, I just want more teams to win things, it's gets boring to me otherwise. Same with cycling. I disliked Sky, I disliked QS, now I dislike Jumbo (they're worse imo). Those teams usually get arrogant too.

I simply don't like races where I'm 90% sure which team is going to win.
As long as it's not done by simply outspending every other team, or through other nefarious means, I don't mind. These eras of dominance always end. And then there's a new team that everybody hates.
 
As long as it's not done by simply outspending every other team, or through other nefarious means, I don't mind. These eras of dominance always end. And then there's a new team that everybody hates.

Well it's not simply done by outspending, but budget is definitely a big reason why they're on top. They do better things with that budget than Ineos and UAE obviously, but most teams just simply don't stand a chance against them because they're simply way richer.

And If you don't mind it, you don't mind it, but it's obvious that a lot of people don't like dominance, not just in cycling. So I don't see how that's dumb. It's simply more entertaining to me too se multiple good teams battling it out every time. And yes there's always teams at the top and better than other, but this time it seems worse than ever. Sky for example was just dominant in the Tour and some stage races, QS in the classics and sprints, Jumbo almost everywhere.
 
I don't see how that's dumb? Lots of people simply don't like dominance. You basically need to see at as compliment. I rooted against Mercedes in F1 for years, no I root against Red Bull, I just want more teams to win things, it's gets boring to me otherwise. Same with cycling. I disliked Sky, I disliked QS, now I dislike Jumbo (they're worse imo). Those teams usually get arrogant too.

I simply don't like races where I'm 90% sure which team is going to win.

At least the races are not suffocated like with Sky.
 
Well it's not simply done by outspending, but budget is definitely a big reason why they're on top. They do better things with that budget than Ineos and UAE obviously, but most teams just simply don't stand a chance against them because they're simply way richer.

And If you don't mind it, you don't mind it, but it's obvious that a lot of people don't like dominance, not just in cycling. So I don't see how that's dumb. It's simply more entertaining to me too se multiple good teams battling it out every time. And yes there's always teams at the top and better than other, but this time it seems worse than ever. Sky for example was just dominant in the Tour and some stage races, QS in the classics and sprints, Jumbo almost everywhere.
They are not way richer. That is simply not the dynamic that's going on here. They were the worst team in the Worldtour just 5 or 6 years ago, and they've worked their way to the top not by outspending everyone but by outsmarting everyone. And of course they have a bigger budget now than they had then, because success attracts sponsor money... but as we can see from Jumbo potentially pulling out, maybe not as much as you would think.
 
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They are not way richer. That is simply not the dynamic that's going on here. They were the worst team in the Worldtour just 5 or 6 years ago, and they've worked their way to the top not by outspending everyone but by outsmarting everyone. And of course they have a bigger budget now than they had then, because success attracts sponsor money... but as we can see from Jumbo potentially pulling out, maybe not as much as you would think.

That must be 8 years ago by now.
 
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The main stars of the team are on pretty low wages compared to what they could earn elsewhere; i.e. based on reports, we 'think' WvA & Rog are on about 2 million something a year. Vingegaard signed a new deal in 2021 (I believe) but since then he's won the TdF so he could ask for quite a substantial pay rise.

I do wonder what a potential main sponsor departure could actually mean for rider contracts going forward because under Jumbo they've run a very tight ship in terms of budget.
 
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