Gran Premio New York confirms two pro teams and more on the way for inaugural edition

Pro race from GFNY organisers will feature 25 teams of six riders, including Green Project-Bardiani CSF-Faizanè and Team Corratec-Selle Italia

14:45, Friday 1st December 2023

Logan Jones-Wilkins

Junior Writer - North America

Share

Courtesy of GFNY

The George Washington Bridge, the most heavily traveled bridge in the world, will host the start of the gran fondo and the pro race in 2024

The Gran Premio New York, a new UCI 1.2 one-day race in the United States, has confirmed to GCN that 10 professional teams have signed up thus far for the new race. Fifteen more teams are expected to be confirmed over the coming weeks.

While the full list of confirmed teams was not revealed, race organiser Uli Fluhme told GCN in an exclusive interview that Green Project-Bardiani CSF-Faizanè and Team Corratec-Selle Italia would be on the start on the George Washington Bridge on May 19, 2024.

“In terms of the teams, what I can tell you is Bardiani is coming, Corratec is coming and a lot of Continental teams from around the world will be announced in the next couple of weeks,” Fluhme said.

The race, which will hold its first edition in May of next year, has been a long-term project for Fluhme who also promotes the Gran Fondo New York (GFNY) series of mass participation races. The race will run in conjunction with the GFNY World Championships in May, with the professional race starting 15 minutes before the amateur participants roll over the start line.

“It’s been a long time coming for us. We started GFNY in 2011 and we had no idea what would happen,” Fluhme said. “After doing the [gran fondo] for two years, I said to Lydia, my wife and co-founder, ‘We got to do a pro ride here, it’s a waste of closed course to not have one.’”

Back in 2013, Fluhme and his team pitched the idea to launch a WorldTour race in New York to then-UCI President Pat McQuaid, who liked the idea. The venture was also bolstered by Formula 1 looking into a race in the New York City area, with discussions taking place between the two organisations to form some type of joint venture in and around New York City.

In the end, the F1 project went nowhere and the standalone cycling event, with a proposed $2 million budget, didn’t gain the financial traction it needed to be viable, so GFNY and Fluhme focused their attention on expanding the GFNY brand with other events around the world.

Nevertheless, the dream to bring pro racing into the fold was still something on Fluhme’s mind a decade later.

“We felt like our race in New York needed something else, something new, after doing this for ten years. So we said now is the time,” he said of the decision to start the event in 2024.

Currently, Bardiani and Corratec are the only two teams confirmed, but Fluhme was bullish on the international nature of the peloton, referencing that there are ten contracts signed with teams from Europe, Asia and the Americas, with eight more on the way soon.