This performance is all the more remarkable since the team has one of the smallest budgets in the peloton, estimated by procyclinguk.com at €18 million to €22 million. Of the 18 World Tour teams, only Cofidis, the troubled Arkéa-Samsic and Intermarché-Wanty had less money to work with in 2024 and they all had substantially fewer years than EF Education. By comparison, the mighty UAE Team Emirates, which dominated the year, had the largest budget estimated at €55 million to €60 million. On the other hand, INEOS Grenadiers, which is going through an existential crisis, registered only 14 victories this year despite having the second-highest budget of €50 million to €55 million,
In other words, team General Manager Jonathan Vaughters, his staff, and riders can be proud of what they have accomplished despite the failure of several of its squad, such as the British GC rider Hugh Carty and the Swiss time-trial specialist Stefan Bissegger, to perform up to expectations. On the other hand, Richard Carapaz had an excellent year despite his 31 years, motivated at least in part by being passed over for the Paris Olympics in favour of Jhonatan Narváez (INEOS Grenadiers).
The former Ecuadorian champion and Giro d’Italia winner won a stage of the Tour de France and its KOM classification, finished a decent fourth in the Vuelta a España and won Ecuador’s national ITT championship. In many of these races, he was supported by a rider who might have the strongest engine in the entire peloton, Ireland’s Ben Healy.
Though he only won a single race this year, a stage of the Tour of Slovenia, Healy may hold the all-time record for participating in or leading most mountain stage breakaways and for most kilometres spent in breakaways. All this year, whenever there was a breakaway on a mountain or even on the flat, Healy seemed to be at the front, legs pumping, head slightly tilted. It made me tired just watching him work.
Healy is only 24 so it’s just a question of time and of Vaughters’ long-term strategy if and when he becomes a leader himself and tests his prodigious stamina against the likes of Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Jonas Vingegaard (Visma–Lease a Bike). I think he could surprise a lot of people.
It’s a sign of the team’s depth that its 24 victories this year were almost evenly divided among five riders: Richard Carapaz, Alberto Bettiol, Marijn van den Berg, Neilson Powless, and Jefferson Cepeda, with the promising young German Georg Steinhauser contributing a Giro d’Italia stage win and two Giro stage podiums.
This doesn’t mean that everything looks rosy for the coming years. Carapaz will be 32 next May and could see his form tail off. Carty is 30 and, based on his record in 2024, looks to be much closer to the end of his career than the beginning. And Bettiol – who won four races, including Milano-Torino and the Italian National Road Race Championship – left the team in August for Astana Qazaqstan. In addition, Bissegger (to Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale) and Simon Carr (to Cofidis) also left while the great Rigoberto Urán and the veteran Andrey Amador retired.
The team has been active on the transfer market, hauling Kasper Asgreen (from Soudal-QuickStep), Samuele Battistella (Astana Qazaqstan), Vincenzo Albanese (Arkea-B&B Hotels) and Madis Mihkels (Intermarché-Wanty). The prize is the 29-year-old Asgreen who beat Mathieu van der Poel in the 2021 Tour of Flanders and in that year’s E3 Saxo Bank Classic but is coming off a disappointing year. At 29, he should have several good years left in his legs and provide plenty of joy for the team. And the 21-year-old Mikhels looks like a promising sprinter who finished third in the European Road Race Championships, ahead of Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck).
I’m a fan of the team because it does so much with so little and because Vaughters is an intelligent and honourable man whose occasional guest commentary on Eurosport was always refreshingly candid and enlightening. He recently tore into Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme for suggesting that the horrific crashes of 2024, such as the one in the Tour of the Basque Country, were caused by riders “going too fast.”
“Beyond the behaviour of the athletes and the work of the organisers, it is absolutely necessary to reduce speed by appropriate measures: the riders are going too fast,” Prudhomme said at the annual general assembly of the Association of Race Organisers (AIOCC). “The faster they go, the greater the risk and the more they endanger themselves and others.”
It must be said that Vingegaard and the other riders who crashed at that race had slowed down for the curve in which they crashed and were apparently undone by a road surface distorted by tree roots beneath the asphalt. In addition, Vingegaard had flagged as unsafe that particular spot in the course six months before the race.
Vaughters took to the site formerly known as Twitter to respond. “It is absolutely infuriating to me how these fat cats, who have never raced so much as a child’s tricycle, turning tens of millions in profit off the backs of others, squarely throw the blame of safety issues in cycling on the riders,” he wrote, then added: “They are highly competitive people. They are hard-wired to the bone to take life-threatening risks. Similar to F1 drivers. And like in F1, the answer is to create a safer environment around them. Because they will always push the envelope as far as it goes.”
You have to root for a man who loves the sport so passionately and just as passionately defends its athletes.
