Transfer Mechanics: A more mature Caleb Ewan handed career lifeline at Jayco

Since abandoning the Tour de France in July and facing the public wrath of his Lotto Dstny employers, Caleb Ewan has kept an incredibly low profile. There have been no interviews, no controversial social media posts, and certainly no indication that the Australian was the difficult and negative influence Lotto boss Stéphane Heulot portrayed him as in the press.

Read more: Caleb Ewan won't be 'pressured or humiliated' by Lotto Dstny, says rider's agent

Instead, the 29-year-old rider has kept his counsel and navigated his way out of choppy waters in Belgium and found safety on the shores of his old team, Jayco AlUla. It’s quite possibly the best manoeuvring we’ve seen from the Australian in quite some time.

Behind the scenes, Ewan and his agent Jason Bakker, who also represents Jack Haig and Chris Hamilton, have been scanning options and looking for possible extraction points once it became clear that a career at Lotto became untenable.

It was obvious from the Tour onwards that Lotto wanted the rider off their books, but with a lucrative contract in place for 2024 the negotiations were delicate, and Ewan was in no hurry to throw his career away just to appease the Belgian team.

In truth, Ewan’s unhappiness within the Belgian camp has been something of an open secret for some time, even stemming back to before 2023. The cracks within the relationship, however, began to really expand towards the end of last year when Lotto began chasing points for their WorldTour survival and stretched themselves too thinly across an expanding race calendar.

Rightly or wrongly, Ewan is the sort of rider who takes little motivation from racing small races or chasing points. For a winner of multiple Grand Tour stages, it’s the major accompaniments that keep him motivated. However, the more he expressed that to the team, the more he was sent to smaller races to pick up points for a squad that was then fighting for WorldTour survival.

The situation became even worse when at the start of this year Lotto didn’t race the Tour Down Under in January - a race in which Ewan has always found success - and the Australian was forced to ride for his national team. At that point, Ewan’s camp began to look for possible ways out, and that included an approach towards the Jayco ownership. Other teams were interested at various points in the season, but Jayco was always Ewan’s first pick.

During the summer the Jayco management sat down with the performance team and analysed both their roster and the potential 2024 race programme in light of Ewan’s availability. What they found was that two sprinters, alongside Michael Matthews, could co-exist within the same team. Unrelated to that, Max Walscheid had already been signed from Cofidis, and while the Australian team initially picked up the German in order to add horsepower to their ranks, it was decided that the rider could be allocated a lead-out role within Ewan’s train.

Before any real negotiations could be finalised the team needed to speak to Dylan Groenewegen. That was handled by Matt White, whose skill in managing rider personalities and leadership aspirations is well respected throughout the sport. Groenewegen was assured of his role and rather than compete for leadership at the Tour de France, both riders would be given clear and structured race programmes from the start of the year. Ewan would lead at the Tour Down Under and the pair would split the major races between them, with one going to the Giro d’Italia and the other to the Tour de France. Groenewegen would also be handed a year-long contract extension, as a way of backing up the team’s faith in his leadership.

It helped that both riders also had a long-standing mutual respect for each other. Ewan was one of the few riders who stood up for the Dutchman after his crash and ban at the Tour de Pologne that left Fabio Jakobsen with life-threatening injuries.

There is of course the small but not invisible elephant in the room, and the fact that Ewan is returning to a team he left for Lotto back in 2019. That departure wasn’t a horrendous experience by any stretch but it did leave a bad taste in the mouth after Ewan agreed to leave his first WorldTour team before even listening to any contract extension offer that Gerry Ryan’s squad were willing to propose.

Time, though, is a wonderful healer and there were certainly hints of Ewan’s new levels of maturity in the press release issued by his 2024 team.

“I'm definitely coming back to the team as a more experienced rider, in the last few years I've won the biggest races of my career and I think I've developed a lot as a rider and also as a leader. When I joined the team initially, I was only 19 or 20, so I was very young. I learnt a lot from the experienced guys that were already there and used that going forward in my career,” he said.

“I have developed as a person and as a rider and I look forward to coming back in more of a leadership role. It will be great to be able to help the younger Australian riders too, to reach their potential and in that way also give back to the team. The main thing for me will be getting back to winning ways and I hope to bring a lot of success to the team. It will be a strong roster for 2024.”

This is a deal that works for all parties. It's unclear whether Lotto has received financial compensation or if they are still paying a proportion of Ewan’s 2024 wages but what’s clear is that the team has freed up a considerable amount of budget for their roster in 2024 and beyond, and have unloaded a rider that simply didn’t fit with their plans or ethos.

At the same time, Jayco have picked up a bargain on the transfer market, with Ewan unlikely to command the sort of salary he was on at Lotto. It’s a high-reward, low-risk move for a team that have worked with Ewan previously, can offer him a primetime slot within the WorldTour, and race programme fitting of a sprinter who should still have a number of years left of his prime. The relationship with Matthews was repaired when he returned to the team in 2021, so why not Ewan’s?

It’s now up to the sprinter himself to prove that he’s still got the hunger, the fight, the speed and this maturity to bounce back.