Swapping the black, red and white of Team Sunweb for the bright orange of CCC in 2019, Giant Bicycles are looking to the likes of Greg van Avermaet and Marianne Vos to kick things off with a bang.
New beginnings
With the announcement that the long-standing BMC Racing Team would cease to exist come the end of the 2018 season, many big-name riders were left looking for an elusive WT contract. As other smaller teams folded around them, the market grew ever more saturated – good news for those teams eager to build their rosters but bad news for the riders looking for a profitable contract.
Luckily for the BMC riders, CCC Sprandi, title sponsor behind Poland’s pro continental team, signed on the dotted line and saved them from completely collapsing. As well as rescuing the men’s BMC team, CCC also merged with the women’s WaowDeals team to become CCC-Liv for 2019.
Greg van Avermaet and Marianne Vos headline the two teams and bring across some familiar names that helped drive them to success in 2018. With the addition of some of the biggest names in cycling, CCC has launched itself right into the World Tour and looks set to be one of the most formidable forces come the Spring Classics season.
Orange is finally back in the WT peloton after a 6-year hiatus, a welcome sight for those diehard fans of the blinding Euskaltel-Euskadi team that sadly left the sport in 2013. The orange kit was a regular sight in doomed breakaways and long-range mountainous attacks, but now on the shoulders of riders like Greg van Avermaet and Marianne Vos, we can only imagine it’s going to be the colour that wins and totally dominates the world’s biggest races in 2019.
A team for the classics
With Greg van Avermaet at the helm, CCC have one of the strongest squads for the upcoming Spring Classics races. As well as securing the signatures of some of Van Avermaet’s most loyal teammates, Alessandro de Marchi, Michael Schar and Patrick Bevin, CCC have also brought in some further classics help in the form of Lukasz Wisniowski and Guillaume van Keirsbulck.
While they may not appear to be one of the strongest teams come the Grand Tours, CCC have more than a few tricks up their sleeves with diminutive Portuguese climber, Amaro Antunes, Tour de Yorkshire winner, Serge Pauwels, breakaway artists Simon Geschke and Stefan Denifl, and the veteran climber, Laurens Ten Dam. They may not be winning any leaders jerseys any time soon, but they will be hoping to nurture the promising stage racing talent of Kiwi, Patrick Bevin, a strong time trialist that looks set to challenge for some of the early week-long stage races.
In the women’s team, Marianne Vos is joined by the super-talented Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio. With Vos one of the strongest one-day racers in the women’s peloton and Moolman-Pasio one of the strongest climbers, the CCC-Liv team could be a big threat to the dominance of Boels-Dolmans in 2019.
New year new kit
For the 2019 season, the CCC men’s team will ride an array of Giant bicycles, the all-round Giant TCR in the Grand Tours, the aero-optimised Giant Propel in the bunch sprints and the cobble-munching Giant Defy in the Spring Classics.
Aboard the Giant Defy Advanced Pro – a bike that has been named as the “hottest road bike of 2019†by Cycling Plus – Greg van Avermaet looks set to challenge for the Tour of Flanders title, a Monument that has eluded him for the past decade, and will return to Paris-Roubaix with high hopes after 2017 victory.
Marianne Vos and her CCC-Liv teammates will ride Giant’s sister bicycle brand, Liv. The riders will have the options of the super-light Liv Langma and the speedy Liv Envie, two bikes that are certain to bring the team a lot of success in 2019.
Are you swayed by the orange garb of the new CCC team? Could they be your new favourite team? Why not come down to one of our stores and check out the bikes that the riders will be riding next year.
