Pinarello Has Finally Entered the Women's WorldTour, Joining Forces With Roland
Pinarello has entered the Women’s WorldTour.
After years of staying out of the highest echelons of the women’s game, the legendary Italian brand has announced a partnership with the Roland Cycling Team.
“It’s a proud moment for us to be making our debut in the UCI Women’s WorldTour, and an historic milestone as well,” said Pinarello’s chairman, Fausto Pinarello.
Roland’s riders, who include reigning Olympic road race champion (and post-doctoral fellow in mathematics) Anna Kiesenhofer, three-time Asian champion Thi That Nguyenand, two-time Irish national champion Alice Sharpe, and Canadian national road race champion Maggie Coles-Lyster, will ride Pinarello’s Dogma F bikes atop Vision brand wheels this coming season, which kicked off this past weekend with the women’s UAE Tour.
“We’re delighted to be working with Pinarello in 2024 and it’s a dream come true for me personally, as, in my opinion, they are the best bike brand in the world,” said Roland’s general manager Rueben Contreras.
Though this is Pinarello’s first foray into women’s WorldTour racing, they have worked with women’s teams in the past. UCI Continental team Top Girls Fassa Bortolo have ridden Pinarellos for the last decade and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The move comes at a pivotal time for the most elite ranks of women’s cycling, as the sport’s growth in arenas like the success of the Tour de France Femmes is tempered by the ever-shaky ground the Women’s Tour finds itself on.
Having a stalwart brand like Pinarello can only help to bolster the sport as it grows and hopefully finds steady long-term footing.
Pinarello was started in Treviso, Italy in 1953 by Giovanni Pinarello. To this day, the brand remains a private and family-owned operation. The brand has enjoyed enormous success over the years, counting sixteen Tours de France victories, six Giro d’Italia wins, five Vuelta a España wins, along with dozens of points and mountains classification victories. Legends like Miguel Indurain, Erik Zabel, Chris Froome, Jan Ullrich, and Bradley Wiggins all enjoyed enormous success atop Pinarellos. Today, they are perhaps most well-known for their sponsorship of Ineos Grenadiers.
The Switzerland-based Roland team began in 2018, then known as team Cogeas, in the UCI Women’s Team ranks. They moved up to the Continental circuit in 2020 before coming up to the WorldTour in 2023 as Israel Premier Tech Roland. However, late last year, Israel-Premier Tech announced they would not continue with sponsorship in women’s racing, focusing solely on the men’s side.
According to their original statement, which said the split was mutual and due to “different visions for the team going forward,” Israel-Premier Tech does plan to return to women’s cycling “in the future.”
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