In an era where cycling’s “Big Six” superstars seem to win everything in sight, one team is proving there’s another path to success. Lidl-Trek, without anybody named Tadej or Remco or even Wout or Mathieu in their ranks, has muscled their way into fourth place in the UCI rankings through a combination of shrewd talent development, tactical patience, and roster depth. It’s a treasure map that could show other teams how to find success in cycling’s age of superstars.
The numbers tell the story: While Lidl-Trek doesn’t have a single rider in the UCI’s top 10, they’ve placed four in the top 30. Led by Mads Pedersen and Jonathan Milan, and with 22-year-old phenomenon Thibau Nys emerging as their next potential star, the team has transformed from a middle-of-the-pack outfit into one of cycling’s most formidable squads – and they’re just getting started.
Lidl-Trek’s success and its reasons for further optimism are potential blueprints for other squads hoping to take on those teams that can’t rely on a Tadej Pogačar, Remco Evenepoel, or any other member of the sport’s so-called “Big Six.” With a balanced roster, a long-term approach to success, and, yes, the budget to compete for emerging talents, Lidl-Trek is succeeding where other teams without those ingredients are not.
That budget saw a major boost with the addition of Lidl ahead of the 2023 Tour de France, adding cash on top of longtime sponsor, and owner of the team, Trek Bicycles. Those funds place the team in the upper quarter of WorldTour team budgets, behind the likes of UAE and Ineos but not far off of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe and even Visma-Lease a Bike. Now almost 18 months on from the team’s increased buying power, signs of a developmental long game are becoming clear. Although the team’s evolution into one of the top-performing teams in the peloton is recent, team manager Luca Guercilena was laying the groundwork years ago.
“I would mention 2017, when Alberto [Contador] decided to leave the team one year before the end of the contract, because he was, let’s say, accepting the fact that it was better for him to retire,” Guercilena told Escape Collective. “We realized that we had to look in young talents, and we started especially to find riders like Pedersen and later on it was [Antonio] Tiberi, [Quinn] Simmons, later on, [Mattias] Skjelmose, [Mathias] Vaček, and Nys, and so on.”
Waiting for those and other young talent to develop made for some lean years in the results department, and Lidl-Trek was a middle-of-the-pack squad for quite a while there, but team management was patient – even as Guercilena himself stepped back from some of his duties as he underwent cancer treatment.
That patience has paid off in the past few years. Now, the team has a core of contenders in their prime. Guercilena, for his part, returned to managing full-time this year.
Part of Lidl-Trek’s recent success is a focus on opportunities across the entire cycling calendar. As Guercilena put it, “If you would like to be a number one team, you need to really be competitive everywhere.”
Lidl-Trek is by no means ignoring the general classification battles in the Grand Tours – they are hoping Tao Geoghegan Hart can bounce back from a frustrating, injury-marred first season with the team – but the current roster is built to shine even brighter outside of the GC standings of three-week races.
“Right now, we all know that there’s two or three riders that are very successful in winning Grand Tours,” Guercilena said. “So we need to be realistic and know that we need to be competitive in the Grand Tour GCs, and in the meantime try to get an advantage in the other races where we can score more points.”
Pedersen and Milan led the way there, while that very deep roster saw Toms Skujiņš and a few others deliver big results in one-day races and in the stages of stage races as well. Among the team’s best stagehunters in 2024, of course, was Thibau Nys, who only just turned 22 years old. He is one of the sport’s most promising young riders in both road racing and cyclocross, and rider and team are hoping that he can be the next in a long line of ‘crossers turned road stars.
He is already off to an excellent start: Nys scored five WorldTour wins this year, and he has been heating up this cyclocross season, fresh off of several big wins as of this week. Guercilena, like so many others in the sport and like the young Nys himself, has high hopes for what his young star might be able to achieve.
“I think he is the typical guy that can be competitive everywhere,” Guercilena said, “and the Ardennes Classics are the ones that can suit him a bit more.”
Putting too much stock into any prospect is a dangerous game. Some young stars plateau when they hit the sport’s top tier. Plenty of them simply burn out. Nys, however, has the pedigree and the support system to instil confidence. He is the son of cyclocross legend Sven Nys, of course, and he works closely with his father as a member of the latter’s Baloise Trek cyclocross squad. He has been in the spotlight since he was a teenager winning junior events, and he has evolved rapidly and consistently as a young road racer.
Guercilena is particularly impressed by his ability to be “patient” as he takes the necessary steps to develop on the road at a (reasonably) measured pace in the era that has seen younger riders than ever dominating the sport.
“He’s already proving now that he’s a guy that loves to respect the program we provide him and we discuss with the with him,” Guercilena said. “But I think that he’s also at the age that is able to be competitive in certain Classics, and obviously I would love in the early future for him to test himself.”
Guercilena knows that he will have to maintain that focus on balance moving forward if Lidl-Trek is to get the best out of Nys, who has already proven capable of winning at the highest level on the road. In planning for 2025, team management is sizing up the routes of all three Grand Tours to determine where Nys will make his debut as a three-week racer as he also makes his first foray into the Ardennes Classics next spring.
“I think that one of the things that we cannot avoid is to keep the young talents confident to be able to win races,” Guercilena said. “If we throw them directly in the race just to be up there but not with the realistic possibility to win, then the risk is that they lose confidence in being able to win races. So this is an analysis that, especially with the young riders, has to be very attentive and detailed before we decide which kind of calendar they’re going to do.”
More relevant than a crack at a Grand Tour, in the near term, is Nys’s potential as a one-day racer, and given how well he profiles there, Lidl-Trek has good reason to be optimistic about their prospects throughout the Spring Classics. In Pedersen, the team has a legitimate contender for Milan-Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders, and Paris-Roubaix, with former San Remo winner Jasper Stuyven as a key foil and Milan as a major hope for the future, not to mention Strade Bianche runner-up Skujiņš, who enjoyed the best Classics campaign of his career in 2024.
Adding Nys to the mix for the Ardennes could give Lidl-Trek yet another potential contender in the one-day races sooner rather than later. And while Liège-Bastogne-Liège has been won by one of those “Big Six” every year since 2020, anything can happen in a one-day race, where tactical decisions – and momentary misfortunes of rivals – can have a huge impact.
The UCI’s team rankings don’t correlate perfectly with a ranking of teams by budget, but there’s no question the top teams are also the richest, and the bottom teams are the poorest. Guercilena is now operating in rarefied financial air, with a budget larger than most of his competitors. But in the age of Pogačar and Vingegaard and Van der Poel, and when none are available for almost any price, Trek’s strategy must be multi-pronged: careful talent development, tactical patience, and a balanced roster approach.
Beyond the spring one-day campaign, Milan could be set for his Tour de France debut in 2025, while Geoghegan Hart and Skjelmose are outside contenders for the Grand Tours. In short, the team is set up to build even further on its 2024 results moving forward with a roster set up to challenge for wins from January through to October.
“In cycling [today], I think that each team, if you would like to be successful, needs to cover all the areas,” Guercilena said. “We cannot be identified, as in the past, as a team for GC, or a team for Classics, or the sprints. I mean, if you want to be successful and be number one in the ranking, you need to win everywhere. And you need to set up a team, not only with the riders, but even with the staff, that is available and motivated to cover four hundred days of racing.”
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