The season finale was a race without stakes for us. We had no chances to move up or down the ranking. On a personal level Tadej wanted to end his disaster of a season in a better light. He kept a good position at the front on the race. He never really threatened anyone, but he came away with a credible 8th place.
Race score: 7/10
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The final ranking update for us covers the last two months of the season. It's a bit more of an exciting time of the year now because the Vuelta is in September.
Before that was the Strada Appia Antica, the last cobbled classic. It wasn't the best day for Ivan Siric who finished a credible 6th on the day, but Fred Wright and Yevgeniy Fedorov were able to add a few depth points. Japan Cup was a nice excursion to the Far East, but not in terms of racing. The Vuelta a Espana was the final big race of the year with Jasper Philipsen leading the team for the sprints. The race was a disappointment early on, but in the end three stage wins and the King of the Mountains meant we came away with a good amount of points and some fond memories.
While the Vuelta was good it still wasn't really enough to move us up the rankings so the final month didn't have many stakes. In Praha we didn't have a sprinter nor a GC rider so the result was as expected. We had higher ambitions with Jasper in Philadelphia, but we couldn't manage a top 10 even in a PTHC race. We did better in Lombardy as Tadej Pogacar's 8th place was our best result at the season ending monument to date.
All in all that left us in 15th place. While for the most part we were never really in relegation danger throughout the season, we also never looked competitive for a top 10 place. A quick and dirty analysis of the situation is that Tadej regressed a lot and from that we missed the 400-500 points that would have pushed us into the predicted spots. With our GC leader and highest paid rider seemingly now a diminished force we have a difficult time ahead of us to keep this team competitive, let alone improve it.
We will recap all the riders performances later in the off season. Also we will have further posts about the season and future developments.
Bostjan Mervar,
team representative and general manager of Cedevita
While this was a failure with Tadej Pogacar finishing 2nd, we take it as successful given the quality opposition we were up against. In fact this was Tadej's lone good race all season.
Ronde van Vlaanderen - FAILURE
This was easily the most disappointing race as it was the one we thought was most likely to be successful. After Ivan Siric was 10th in 2023 and 7th in 2024 we were completely blindsided when he finished only 11th this year.
Paris-Roubaix - SUCCESS
The one goal we were able to complete, the other cobbled monument. Ivan Siric finished 2nd, our best monument result to date.
Giro d'Italia - FAILURE
Same result as Tirreno for Tadej Pogacar, but a very different feeling about the race. It's hard to win any race in the Pro Tour so 2nd place is again not that much of a failure, especially when on paper better riders were present. The expectation was that a 2nd place finish at a Grand Tour would yield a much higher points return.
PT Team Standings - FAILURE
With 15th place this is the 2nd year in a row where we were no where near a top 10 finish and that's with a lot of training invested and a different group of leaders. At this point just avoiding relegation might be under consideration since it's the one thing we are still competent at.
Bostjan Mervar,
team representative and general manager of Cedevita
A mediocre season from the team and Pogacar. Still, there's been some highlights, and some near-misses with e.g. T-A. I'm sure you'll have some more tailwind next season.
Pogacar might have had a pretty bad season, he's still the future GT king after Lecuisinier, Herklotz etc. start to decline - so I suppose he will be worth a hell of a lot more in 2 seasons time
A mediocre season from the team and Pogacar. Still, there's been some highlights, and some near-misses with e.g. T-A. I'm sure you'll have some more tailwind next season.
Difficult to improve a mediocre team when it projects to be a lot more expensive.
Pogacar might have had a pretty bad season, he's still the future GT king after Lecuisinier, Herklotz etc. start to decline - so I suppose he will be worth a hell of a lot more in 2 seasons time
That's like a best case scenario and even then GT winners haven't had much of an impact on team success in recent seasons.
Ivan Siric proved he was worth the training investment as he improved his scoring output by over 400 points. That 11th place at De Ronde still stings, but otherwise we saw Ivan move into the upper echelon of cobbled specialists as the 3rd highest scorer. He won the team's first ever Pro Tour classic and became the 3rd rider in team history to score a 1000 points in a season.
Best result(s):
E3 Prijs (1.PT)
1st
Paris-Roubaix (1.GTM)
2nd
GP Kigali (1.PT)
3rd
Roma-Maxima (1.PTHC)
2nd
Strada Appia Antica (1.PT)
6th
Franceville Classique (2.PTHC)
7th Overall
Tour of Northern Europe (2.PT)
11th Overall
Tadej Pogacar
Let's not sugar coat it. Pogacar was our worst team leader and one of the worst riders on the team. Spending 2 million on mountain training and regressing by 300 points. Only 2/5 of his races can be labelled as successful and given the limited choices that's simply not good enough. We will make some changes for next year, but I think we have to accept that the level shown in 2024 is not likely to come back.
Best result(s):
Giro d'Italia (2.GTM)
2nd Overall
Tirreno-Adriatico (2.PT)
2nd Overall
Giro di Lombardia (1.GTM)
8th
Jasper Philipsen
Jasper came into the team to fill the space of a Pro Tour level sprinting leader and by and large did just that. Four stage wins across the year is a decent return. He did his best work in stage races, but struggled more in one day races. The lead out train was successful more often than not, but when it did go wrong it looked quite bad. All in all a positive first season and some things to look at to keep him performing like this or better.
Tour of Qatar (2.PT)
4th Overall, Stage win
Vuelta a Espana (2.GTM)
2x Stage win
Tour of Northern Europe (2.PT)
Stage win; 2nd Points
Ras Tailteann (2.PTHC)
8th Overall
GP Moscow (1.PT)
7th
Pascal Ackermann
Pascal was supposed to fit a specific need within the team. Since we didn't acquire a puncheur we went for a hilly sprinter instead. On some level we expected the season he ended up having. We knew it was going to be feast and famine, but it was as lopsided as it can get. Ultimately the success prevailed as he became the first rider in team history with two GT stage wins (before Jasper joined him later).
Tour de France (2.GTM)
2x Stage win
Ronde van Nederland (2.PT)
4th Overall
Michal Schlegel
Michal had a good outing at the Vuelta, but couldn't really contribute in the other races. Next year we are probably looking at having him ride two Grand Tours instead.
Vuelta a Espana (2.GTM)
1st KOM; 2nd, 3rd Stage; 19th Overall
Classique du Grand-Duche (1.PT)
12th
Fred Wright
This was Fred's first season as a maxed rider. As we always planned, with his varied skills he covered a lot of different races. One feature of his race schedule is that he often paired up with Ackermann as a sort of uphill lead out rider which really worked out well for both of them at the Tour De France.
Tour de France (2.GTM)
2x 2nd Stage
Tour of Northern Europe (2.PT)
15th Overall
Strada Appia Antica (1.PT)
16th
Sergio Chumil
As an unmaxed free agent signing there was no real pressure or expectations on Sergio. With his race schedule he got the opportunity to race all three Grand Tours and he made a heck of an impact there. Multiple good stage results in those races meant he was one of the most efficient scorers on the team.
Vuelta a Espana (2.GTM)
Stage win
Tour de France (2.GTM)
2x 4th Stage
Volta a Portugal (2.PTHC)
21st Overall
Bachirou Nikiema
Bachirou signed as a free agent to fill the role of a hilly specialist that was left open when we sold Daniel Hoelgaard. He lacked the stamina to compete in the long Pro Tour hilly classics, but found some good success in the stage races listed below. We think we could improve his race schedule more next season.
Tour of Northern Europe (2.PT)
2nd Stage; 12th Overall
Ronde van Nederland (2.PT)
20th Overall
Matic Groselj
This season we used Matic more in our sprint setup with some mixed success, but we still feel if he's the 2nd to last lead out rider then he's as good as it gets. For next year we might look at some race schedule tweaks in flat races.
Rund um Koln (1.PT)
15th
Tour of Qatar (2.PT)
22nd Overall
Husein Selimovic
As another not yet maxed rider Husein spent most of his race days either in a domestique role or filling up full 8 rider race squads. He did have an outstanding result though as he contributed one of the 1-2 stage finishes at the Tour de France.
Tour de France (2.GTM)
2nd Stage
Yevgeniy Fedorov
Yevgeniy took a decent step forward this year, becoming a productive rider with a 100+ points. His main terrain is the cobbles where he can help out team leader Siric while scoring depth results himself. We hope to see further improvement as he hits his full potential next year.
GP Kigali (1.PT)
29th
Strada Appia Antica (1.PT)
30th
Miha Poljanec
With each passing year Miha is transitioning into more of a road captain role on the team. He's still always present when it comes to cobbled races and we see him continue being part of our sprinting set up going forward.
Martin Papanov
We were hopeful Martin would be a good domestique for Tadej Pogacar, but with the latter underperforming that didn't come to fruition. He was pretty much anonymous in other races as well so all in all it's safe to say this signing did not pan out.
Volta a Portugal (2.PTHC)
19th Overall
Dorde Duric
Dorde had a solid season as primarily a domestique in cobbled races. Apart from that he's fairly capable in filling up race squads in other races. If he could add some breakaway stages then getting to a 100 points seems more than doable.
Veljko Stojnic
Veljko showed some solid improvement and he's proved he's a good helper. With his current stats scoring much more isn't likely unless there is a larger shift in the race calendar that would somehow suit him.
Gerben Kuypers
Gerben came on loan from Bralirwa - Cegeka. He didn't really make a scoring impact, but he filled many race squads especially when it came to hilly and cobbled classics. Given we had a smaller sized squad than usual his race days were very handy.
Izidor Penko
It's pretty clear by now that the Pro Tour is simply too good for Izidor to score a notable result. Like all the TT focused riders he could improve with a different race calendar, but for now this is his likely output. That doesn't mean we won't try and tweak things in an attempt to score an extra point or two.
Eric Antonio Fagundez
Eric came on loan from Lotto - Caloi. He helped bolster our team's time-trial, but of no fault of his own it didn't really matter as we weren't good enough in that department anyway. He also filled out race squads in various flat and cobbled races.
Logan Currie
Logan didn't do as much racing this season, he didn't really need to. He focused on his speciality, the TT races and he did fairly well. Next season we intend to plan his schedule more carefully to try and maximise his scoring chances.
Kristjan Hocevar
Kristjan's season was a disappointment, but not completely unexpected. His lower stamina really came into play which is something we can't really affect. A more tailor made race calendar will be considered, but at the end of day this may just be a failed development project.
Matic Zumer
We think Matic had a fine season all things considering. We hope to see him in more breakaways next year, but also as he completes his development he'll probably have a chance of being a better domestique in the mountains.
Bostjan Mervar,
team representative and general manager of Cedevita
A great read on the summary, sad to see Tedej having a bad year, but also great to see Siric training wokring
In my experience however it is the small vicotires from unexpected riders that are the greatest, and that stage win by Chumil must stand as one of the great memories of the season for you
Philadelphia International Championship | Race Result
Giro di Lombardia | Race Result
Tadej Pogacar finishing 2nd, we take it as successful given the quality opposition we were up against. In fact this was Tadej's lone good race all season.
Ivan Siric was 10th in 2023 and 7th in 2024 we were completely blindsided when he finished only 11th this year.
Ackermann
Schlegel
Wright
Chumil
Nikiema
Fedorov
Papanov
Duric
Fagundez*
Currie
