The Dissolution of the Jumbo-Visma-Soudal-QuickStep Merger Is A Win For Cycling Fans
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Parity is an essential element to sports.
The idea that any one team, for one cause or another, can win in any given contest is one of the main reasons fans tune in to sports. Sure, sometime a champion is decided long in advance, as is often the case with cycling’s Grand Tours. But still, we watch for stage wins, even to see who might win this climb or that, never knowing exactly how the day is going to unfurl.
Otherwise, if we knew the outcome before anything even kicked off, there’d be little point in watching. Which is why it comes as little surprise that Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme expressed a sense of relief that the idea of a potential Jumbo-Visma and Soudal-QuickStep merger fell apart earlier this autumn.
“What did worry me a bit were the rumors about the Jumbo and Soudal merger, with Jonas and Remco in the same team,” Prudhomme told Spanish paper AS in a recent interview. “But instead, there will be four big champions—Pogačar, Vingegaard, Roglič, and Evenepoel—on four different teams, which could make for a really good Tour de France.”
After much speculation and open commentary, Jumbo-Visma team manager Richard Plugge revealed on the eve of October’s Il Lombardia that the highly anticipated merger—which was more of a Jumbo takeover than a marriage of equals—had fallen apart due to “a number of reasons.”
Such a merger would have created something of a cycling superteam, even more so than it could be argued Jumbo-Visma already is, with a stable of riders that would have included superstars Jonas Vingegaard, Sepp Kuss, Remco Evenepoel, Julian Alaphilippe, Fabio Jakobsen, and Wout van Aert, amongst a dozen other of the world’s best domestiques, climbers, and sprinters.
Given the novelty of next year’s Tour—it’ll be the first to finish outside of Paris—owing to next year’s Summer Olympics, an early, Stage 4 climb up and over the Galibier, gravel sectors, a variety of mountaintop finishes, and the first final-stage time trial since 1989, which will course through Nice, rather than the traditional pseudo-crit around the Champs Elysees—Prudhomme, like many cycling fans, is hoping for as exciting of a Tour as we’ve had in years.
Such excitement might have been tempered if a Jumbo-Quickstep (or whatever the name would have been) superteam came to be. His comment also nodded to Primož Roglič’s transfer from Jumbo-Visma to the Bora-Hansgrohe squad, further spreading out some of next year’s GC favorites.
Asked by AS if the 2024 Tour might recapture the magic of the 1989 Tour, which Greg LeMond bested Frenchman Laurent Fignon by 58 seconds on the day, giving the young American an eight-second overall victory, Prudhomme said, “we dream about it, obviously. Afterwards we don’t know what reality will be like. In the recent past, we saw that a time trial at the end of the Tour can change everything, like in 2020 in Belles Filles with Pogačar and Roglič.”
Whether or not next summer’s Tour will come down to a time trial like it did in 2020 and 1989 is impossible to tell. And that, after all, is part of the fun of watching sports.
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