Milan Eržen: Limited budget meant we couldn’t keep Mikel Landa

Bahrain Victorious boss Milan Eržen has confirmed that budget restrictions meant that he could not keep Mikel Landa on the team for 2024.

Landa departed for Soudal Quick-Step in the winter on a two-year deal and has formed part of Remco Evenepoel’s Tour de France collective.

The Spaniard is also set to lead his new team at the Vuelta a España but he has left a gap in Bahrain Victorious’ roster with the squad not willing or able to replace the veteran stage race with a like-for-like contender.

Landa had a consistent, if not spectacular 2023, with the 34-year-old cracking the top-ten in the majority of the stage races he started and ending the year with fifth in the Vuelta a España.

“We talked with Mikel in January 2023 and he knows that we were limited with the budget. That was the reason why we didn’t sign him again. He showed a really amazing season and he’s still got huge potential for the top rankings in the Grand Tours in the future. He’s an amazing guy and an amazing rider but that’s the business of cycling. Sometimes you lose something and sometimes you get something,” Eržen told GCN at his team’s winter training camp.

Bahrain Victorious didn’t sign a single WorldTour rider for the start of 2024 and instead bolstered their roster with U23 athletes, Italian talent Alberto Bruttomesso, British rider Finlay Pickering from Trinity Racing and then 28-year-old Torstein Træen from Uno-X.

For Eržen, the plan is to develop the up-and-coming talent over the next few years and sign riders from the squad’s development team who have not been identified by the biggest WorldTour squads in the world. 

“I think we’ve created one of the best performance groups in the last few years. If I look at how we started in 2017 and what we’re doing now it’s really amazing what we’re doing when it comes to equipment and training. I think we’ve got a really good team for the future with young guys,” he said after a season that included six Grand Tour stages, three of which came at the Tour de France.

For Eržen, the gap to the richest teams in the world means that he and his closest management leaders need to be creative when it comes to signing riders and scheming race tactics.

“We need to understand that the richest teams have more chance of getting the younger riders, but for me, it’s always a challenge to work with some of the guys who didn’t win big races in the junior categories. We can take a different approach and then take them to a higher level,” he said.

“Our way of racing has been the same in the last couple of years. We need to stay away from the top three or four guys in the world because if they’re at the races then you need to know it’s going to be hard to win. Then you can only fight for a podium but I think we’ve found really good tactics in the past that shows we can win races in different ways."

Nevertheless, from that philosophy, Eržen has built a structure that he believes will help the team punch above their weight.

"We’ll follow this way of racing in the future. It’s not always about the money but you can invest in different ways with staff and training that can improve performance. I sometimes say that we’re the best of the rest because when we compare our budget and results we’re the best investment in cycling," he said.

“Our way is to create riders from the young guys who have two or three years to learn. We want to create a circle of production from our development team so that in one or two years we’ll have one or two really good riders from the young ranks. We give the young guys the same materials, and coaches as the WorldTour team.”