It’s difficult to say if the switch to Decathlon’s Van Rysel RCR Pro bikes was responsible for the team’s success in 2023 or if it was the fact that some of its riders had very good years, such as the 29-year-old Benoît Cosnefroy, who registered seven wins, including a stage and the yellow jersey in the Tour des Alpes-Maritime.
Veteran sprinter Sam Bennett chalked up five victories in his first year with the team by winning four stages and the GC of the misleadingly named six-day race 4 Jours de Dunkerque (or 4 Days of Dunkirk). The young 2024 French national champion Paul Lapeira also racked up five wins, including a stage of the Tour of the Basque Country.
Most of the team’s wins were scored in lower-level races, but not all. For example, Valentin Paret-Peintre won a stage of the Giro d’Italia and the team’s star, Ben O’Connor, took the famous stage 6 of the Vuelta a España and finished second in the race, behind Primož Roglič. He also finished second in the World Road Race Championship and fourth in the Giro d’Italia. Finally, in addition to Lapeira’s French national road race championship, Bruno Armirail won the French national time trial championship and Jaakko Hänninen won the Finnish national road race championship.
That is a lot of success for a team that hasn’t drunk much champagne over the years. Decathlon now sits an impressive sixth in UCI’s World Team Rankings list, with nearly 16,000 points, ahead of more renowned teams such as INEOS Grenadiers and Alpecin-Deceuninck, and just a few points behind Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe..
The question now is if the team can keep rolling or even improve over 2024. If so, it will have to find a replacement for O’Connor, who has moved on to Jayco AlUla. Paret-Peintre, an excellent mountain domestique, has also left the team, for Soudal–Quick Step, who is beefing up its climbing squad for Remco Evenepoel’s next foray in the Tour de France.
The 28-year-old Callum Scotson, who moved the other way, from Jayco AlUla to Decathlon, is not the answer, just going by his professional record. However, another newcomer, the time trial specialist Stefan Bissegger, may replace the points lost with O’Connor’s move, if he recovers his form. The 26-year-old Swiss had a terrible 2024, without a win to his name and an uncharacteristically mediocre 29th place in the World ITT Championship. Clearly, Decathlon is banking on his relative youth and past performances, such as his second place in the 2019 World Road Race Championship. But there are about 10 weeks left in the transfer season, and the team must surely be looking for more manpower to move to yet another level.
But we still don’t know what effect the new bike has had on the team’s success, if any. Fortunately, the GCN Tech Show debated the point for us and concluded that though the Van Rysel might be slightly better than its predecessor, it would not be enough to account for the staggering improvement from nine wins to 30.
Their hypothesis (or one of them, anyway) was that it may simply have been the infusion of new funds by the well-heeled first-year sponsor and all the benefits that this money can buy, such as top-level consultants. However, you still need winning riders to win races, and O’Connor will be hard to replace.
So, given Tom Pidcock’s ongoing feud with his team, INEOS Grenadiers, and reports that negotiations to have the two-time Olympic MTB champion move to Q36.5 appears to have fallen through, would Decathlon be willing to shell out the reported 12 million euros it would cost to terminate his current contract? Stay tuned.
