The team’s success is all the more remarkable in that it has no superstar. What it does have is an impressive roster of excellent riders with specific abilities suited to winning stages and one-day races. Of those 42 wins, 32 were racked up by three riders: the Danish all-rounder Mads Pedersen (12), the big Italian sprinter and two-time Giro d’Italia green jersey winner Jonathan Milan (11) and the Belgian prodigy Thibau Nys (9).
Nys is only 21 and looks like a future star, while Milan has just turned 24 and will be winning lots of green jerseys in the coming years. The team also has a talented GC rider in 24-year-old Mattias Skjelmose, who this year won the young rider’s jersey in the Vuelta a España. However, the Dane had to end his season prematurely due to a back injury suffered the morning of the World Road Race Championships. Another promising young rider is the 22-year-old Czech Mathias Vacek, who came second in the Vuelta’s stage 1 ITT, ahead of Wout van Aert, and won the best young rider classification at the Tour of Norway.
These young winners are complemented by a strong lineup of veterans, such as the 28-year-old Pedersen, the 2020 Giro winner Tao Geoghegan Hart (29), Jasper Stuyven (32), who won Milan-Sanremo in 2021, and the 2023 Tour de France King of the Mountain winner Giulio Ciccone (also 29) – to name just a few. This makes for an exciting and well-balanced squad that can look forward to another successful year in 2025 as all of the riders cited above have been re-signed for at least one more year.
But Lidl-Trek is not standing pat in the transfer market, having signed the excellent climber Lennard Kämna from Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe. The 28-year-old German, who has won stages in each of the Grand Tours, has not raced since late March after colliding with a car in Tenerife and suffering severe chest trauma, fractured ribs and a bruised lung. The team also signed Søren Kragh Andersen from Alpecin-Deceuninck. The 30-year-old Dane has won two stages of the Tour and could be an excellent domestique in a Grand Tour or one-day race.
Astonishingly, despite a lack of superstar-power, Lidl-Trek ranks fourth in the UCI World Team Rankings, with 17105 points, less than 100 points behind Remco Evenepoel’s Soudal–Quick Step, a team that routinely led the points standing by winning stages and one-day races until choosing to support its serial winner and now Olympic road and time trial champion. This is the space that Lidl-Trek has now come to dominate, though it has also won some important multi-stage races, such as the Tour of the Alps (by Juan Pedro López), the Tour of Hungary (Nys) and the Tour de la Provence (Pedersen). In addition, Skjelmose finished third in the Tour of the Basque Country and the Tour of Switzerland and fifth in the Vuelta.
The team’s racing strategy looks to be a good one and the squad appears to be a winning one for a few years to come. But there has been talk that in 2023 Lidl-Trek may have signed a future superstar in the 18-year-old Albert Withen Philipsen. The young Dane was one of the sport’s hottest prospects after his 2023 season, when he won the Junior World Road Race Championship (at 17, the youngest rider ever to win that title), the Junior European Time Trial Championship and the Junior Cross-Country World Championship, which he won again this year.
Philipsen was courted by all of the sport’s moneyed teams, but Lidl-Trek was able to sign him to a contract that begins in 2025 and runs until 2028. If he lives up to his promise, a very good team looks to be on the verge of becoming a great one and may, eventually, give both UAE Team Emirates and Visma–Lease a Bike a run for their money in the Grand Tours.
