Jumbo-Visma boss confirms team 'will grow' with major new sponsorship

Jumbo-Visma manager Richard Plugge has confirmed that his team has acquired a major sponsorship boost, ensuring they will have "a long-term future” but also "will grow".

Speaking to GCN at the Velo d’Or awards ceremony in Paris, Plugge cut a remarkably calm figure in the face of the upheaval that has surrounded his team in recent weeks, with the early exit of Jumbo sparking a sponsorship search that started to go the way of a merger with Soudal Quick-Step.

That idea, which had been presented in front of the UCI, has now been scrapped, but the team’s future would appear to have been quickly secured, even if there have been no statements from the team and no official name registered for next year.

“We had a couple of options running, and we went with the best option at that moment for us, where there’s growth, where there’s a long-term future for our team,” Plugge said, publicly discussing the road ahead for the first time.

“We always knew we’d have a long-term future. We were confident. We also had long-term partners in our team already who wanted to proceed with us. We added some partners. So we will have a stronger future than we had.”

Read More:

• Jumbo-Visma to become Visma-Lease a Bike for 2024
• Jumbo-Visma and Soudal Quick-Step merger cancelled

Plugge did not state who will sponsor the team going forward, although he did point out that it’s a major player.

“We added one of the biggest companies in Europe to our list of sponsors,” he said.

This is, in all likelihood, Pon Holdings, the Dutch conglomerate that owns the team’s bike supplier, Cervélo – the source of a significant clash in the merger talks given Soudal Quick-Step and Remco Evenepoel’s allegiances to Specialized. Dutch publication Wielerflits recently reported that one of Pon’s businesses, Lease a Bike, will take over from Jumbo as co-title sponsor alongside Visma.

Plugge stopped short of confirming as much, explaining that the team has initially registered for 2024 as Blanco Pro Cycling, the name of its holding company, out of “respect” for Jumbo.

“First of all we want to close this chapter with our current sponsor, to honour them and everything they have done for us in the past years," he said.

The new name and identity will only be unveiled at the team’s pre-season presentation in December.

'It was all calm'

Plugge was unwilling to discuss the failed merger, only indicating that there were “several reasons” that the deal broke down and that it was only “one of several options” on the team’s table.

“We had our own processes. Internally, it was all calm, let’s say. We followed our own process. We don’t listen to social media or whatever," he said.

"We make decisions based on our strong culture, and that’s what we did. You guys were really busy with it but we were just doing what we always do.”

Plugge was later asked about such a big team finding it ‘challenging’ to secure sponsorship, to which he simply replied: “It was not”.

He did, however, call for an overhaul in the way the sport is run.

“I think the whole system of cycling should change,” he said, donning his cap as head of the Association of Pro Teams (AIGCP).

“Our competition is not the other teams, or ASO, or the Giro d’Italia. It’s other sports, new sports maybe. We as cycling should work together to find a better way for cycling. We maybe have to change drastically our way of looking at cycling to make sure we can maintain this way of racing.”