Teams & Riders The Great Big Cycling Transfers, Extensions, and Rumours Thread

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RedheadDane

RedheadDane

May 5, 2010
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Right, this is rather random.
I was snooping around on some preliminary startlists on PCS, and noticed that Øxenberg was down for Burgos with Ineos. So I clicked his profile, and noticed that he actually hasn't been racing for Kern-Haus since 29/6, but he also hasn't been moved up to Ineos:

Peter Øxenberg

Peter Øxenberg (born 2005-10-23 in Nørreby) is a former professional road racing cyclist from Denmark, currently riding for Team Lotto Kern-Haus PSD Bank. His best results are winning a stage in Orlen Nations Grand Prix and 2nd place in Eschborn-Frankfurt U23.
www.procyclingstats.com www.procyclingstats.com

www.uci.org

TEAM LOTTO KERN-HAUS PSD BANK

TEAM LOTTO KERN-HAUS PSD BANK
www.uci.org

Now, if PCS are right, and he is indeed riding Burgos with Ineos, then I guess we can expect a "Peter moves to WorldTeam!" announcement soon. And then poor AC will get all confused about who the heck 'Peter' is...
 
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Ilmaestro99

Ilmaestro99

Apr 13, 2021
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Roku said:
Weirdest transfer of the season: Filippo Fiorelli signs for Visma.
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Finally a proper transfer man this is what it's all about. Fiorelli is gonna be the Italian Laporte. Amazing. Thought he was the kind of rider bound for Ineos like langelotti and Oscar Rodriguez.

Starting to like Visma's transfer policy.none of this investing in big young talents nonsense. Real transfers signing random established riders and hoping they work . Much more entertaining.

Would be nice to see what he can do with belge pozzato riding for him
 
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Libertine Seguros

Libertine Seguros

Feb 20, 2010
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Devil's Elbow said:
Very bad sign for the state of the sport when a team with Van der Poel and Philipsen can't find a sponsor, we have not seen the like since HTC folded 14 years ago. Between this and the Tour viewership numbers (which are down literally everywhere), it's clear that the current era is turning into an abject disaster in all aspects.
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The problem is that the usual suspects will treat this as a sign that teams need the greater security afforded by their packagable One Cycling super league private members' club that they can sell off to the highest bidder à la F1, yet it's the fact that all the best riders are tied up into a small handful of teams that is causing the issue for viewership and driving up the cost of sponsoring a competitive team, leading more successful teams to be reduced to also-rans or struggle to hold on to sponsors that will enable them to keep operating at a competitive level.
 
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Berniece

Berniece

Sep 12, 2022
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Libertine Seguros said:
The problem is that the usual suspects will treat this as a sign that teams need the greater security afforded by their packagable One Cycling super league private members' club that they can sell off to the highest bidder à la F1, yet it's the fact that all the best riders are tied up into a small handful of teams that is causing the issue for viewership and driving up the cost of sponsoring a competitive team, leading more successful teams to be reduced to also-rans or struggle to hold on to sponsors that will enable them to keep operating at a competitive level.
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What alternative solution would you suggest, given that budget caps aren't an option? The goal is to bring team budgets closer together. That requires attracting bigger sponsors — but to do that, the sport needs to become more appealing to them. Right now, limited viewership makes sponsorship less attractive.

Another problem is that around 80% of viewership is concentrated on a single race. That creates a lopsided situation where too much attention — and therefore value — is placed on one event, leaving little to share with the rest of the calendar.

To fix this, cycling needs two things: higher overall viewership and a more balanced distribution of that viewership. The Tour de France shouldn’t overshadow everything else. There’s more to the sport, and that broader appeal needs to be showcased.
 
Libertine Seguros

Libertine Seguros

Feb 20, 2010
33,055
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Berniece said:
What alternative solution would you suggest, given that budget caps aren't an option? The goal is to bring team budgets closer together. That requires attracting bigger sponsors — but to do that, the sport needs to become more appealing to them. Right now, limited viewership makes sponsorship less attractive.

Another problem is that around 80% of viewership is concentrated on a single race. That creates a lopsided situation where too much attention — and therefore value — is placed on one event, leaving little to share with the rest of the calendar.

To fix this, cycling needs two things: higher overall viewership and a more balanced distribution of that viewership. The Tour de France shouldn’t overshadow everything else. There’s more to the sport, and that broader appeal needs to be showcased.
Click to expand...
In truth, there's not a great deal that can be done, it's just that the proposals to change things on the table seem to place even more power in the hands of the superteams, not less, and the fact audience metrics are going down runs counter to the spiel being given that seeing these teams and names in more races would drive more audience engagement, because it seems a predictable race between the same group of OP teams isn't the audience hit those guys thought it would be. The problem, as ever, is wanting to use star power to try to capture a hypothetical audience, but running the risk of alienating the existing audience in order to do so. And while Premier Leagueification has worked to massively increase the money in the Premier League itself, it has had a hugely detrimental effect further down the pyramid, and there are at least a dozen teams that have gone bust, gone into administration, been liquidated or dropped down to fourth tier level - some of them more than once - from trying to keep up with the costs of doing business at that level. Hell, if I remember rightly, the UK even introduced a law to prevent TV broadcasting live football in the traditional Saturday 3pm slot in order to stop the bleed of fans watching big teams on TV instead of lower league teams live. For a sport where the 'cast of thousands' element is one of the big selling points and all are competing against all at the same time, I don't think that's a viable route to go down; if you don't like Manchester City vs. Chelsea, you can always watch Bournemouth vs. Brentford instead. You can't watch WT cycling without seeing the UAE/Visma show in some iteration.

I would at least like to try offering more UCI points for secondary competitions to drive up attention to things like GPMs and maybe some way to officially quantify the combativity prize (an Intergiro, an old Ostbloc-style Activity Classification, Metas Volantes, all have their benefits and drawbacks, but could at least offer something), and give fewer UCI points for minor stage placements, especially in flat stages, to try to discourage the situation where the teams historically in the role of race animators see more value in controlling for a sprint that they have no hope of even coming top 5 in without massive crashes because of the points available.

Smaller sized WT with more wildcards and flexibility for organisers and, if no budget caps, then a salary cap to prevent the hording of all the talent into the same small group of teams, with the intention of making leading a secondary team more viable than riding as a domestique in a top team would be nice, but would require some kind of protections for the second tier size teams. At the moment there's simply too little flexibility for any of the WT races to have any of the same kind of individual charm in terms of the field attracted in the way there was in the infancy of the ProTour, with the glut of viable Italian ProConti teams basing their whole year around the whole Tirreno-Sanremo-Giro calendar section, the teams like Landbouwkrediet and TopSport Vlaanderen always being visible in Classics season, and the wave of Spanish teams offering one-dimensional climbers who lived and died by the Vuelta.

Ironically enough though, I think the best thing for re-establishing that kind of viability for the second tier and breaking the hegemony would be something which would be terrible for the sport as a whole, and that's a good old-fashioned major doping scandal. Back then there was a decent pipeline of riders either riding under a cloud of suspicion that meant top teams were reluctant to take risks on them, or coming back from a doping ban and facing a two year informal quarantine from the top level, meaning they'd often take lower salaries from a ProConti team with a decent calendar to prove themselves post-ban. Relax-GAM, Fuerteventura-Canarias and Karpin/Xacobeo did a decent line in exiles from Operación Puerto, while the Italian scene was full of ex-dopers riding hard to earn their spots back, as well as wily veterans like Stefano Garzelli and Gilberto Simoni who were considered too past it for a leadership role at a PT team but preferred to take leadership of a smaller team with a limited calendar over riding as a domestique in a top team in a way that is simply not viable today.

Maybe if we can't go with a budget cap or a salary cap, some kind of cap to the number of UCI points that can be deployed in a single race at the WT level would be beneficial, as it would restrict the top teams from providing a nucleus of support for an elite leader who are all capable of being leaders in their own right, and the sheer cost of deploying a rider like Pogačar against the cap would heavily limit UAE's choice when it comes to available domestiques, such that it would become less attractive for an Adam Yates type, who is not likely to be first choice at any of the big races with the depth the team has, to ride for them instead of being a leader at a smaller team. But the danger with that is that it would simply cause the team to continue to keep the same riders, just deploy them differently meaning the big names appear less, not more.

But replacing the central importance of the Tour de France to the sport (outside of its core audience) has been tried multiple times in the past and not worked once. The sport has too many varied specialisms and a calendar that caters to those different specialisms to an extent that season end rankings like the World Cup and the ProTour leadership swiftly lose their value because some races are off-limits to many racers' capabilities. Even the Women's World Tour, which was starting from a position with no monuments or Grand Tours, is seeing the overall ranking's value being eroded as the individual races establish their own histories and lore. The only way to make a ranking system like that work would be to have a uniform format of racing, and that would entail undoing over a century of history in the sport and has been rejected as a proposal at least three times in the last 20 years already. The core audience won't be suddenly made to care about an ongoing ranking system like that, and the casual audience only cares about the Tour because its name value is so much higher than that of other races. Remember the American Open Wheel Racing split: CART had all the best cars, all the best drivers, and the bigger fanbase. But IRL won out because it had the Indy 500, and that was more important to sponsors and TV companies because of its name recognition, and within five years CART teams were defecting. You can't untie the casual audience from the Tour de France at this stage. Maybe if you had some kind of system whereby riders had to achieve a certain number of points across different profiles to qualify for Tour de France eligibility or something so it would see riders in races before the Tour going hell for leather to earn themselves places it could be beneficial to those races, but it wouldn't help the Tour itself...
 
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