Pro Team Sponsors: What Do They Do?

Do you know your Soudal from your Sky, your Sunweb from your Sky? Here’s an A-Z primer on the World Tour team sponsors for 2017 and what they do. It turns out that if you want to refresh your bathroom then the pro peloton has just the sponsors you need.

Ag2r La Mondiale: an insurance and savings company based in Paris. Note the team name is not two sponsors because Ag2r La Mondiale is the name of one company. The firm sells pension plans, healthcare and other forms of social insurance and is mutually-owned and the team places a matching publicity slant on the collective ahead of the individual. The distinctive kit features those brown shorts but there’s a poetic side as the blue and brown represent terre et ciel, or heaven and earth.

Title sponsor since 2000 and the team was founded in 1992 as Chazal

Astana is the capital of Kazakhstan, a gas-rich former Soviet state that’s the size of Western Europe. The team is funded by the state sovereign wealth fund Samruk which sort of translates as “Self Seed” and the team rides to promote the country, a bid to counter the “Borat” image of Kazakhstan and pesky reports about dictatorship and poor press freedom. Has it worked? That depends, repeated doping scandals have given them a dire reputation among many who follow the sport closely but the wider, larger audience will be more familiar with their triumphs.

Title sponsor since 2007 when the team was born out of the ashes of the Liberty Seguros team which was engulfed by Operation Puerto

Bahrain-Merida is a new team and sponsored by the eponymous island monarchy from the Persian gulf with various state partners from the oil company, an aluminium smelter and other agencies. Merida is a Taiwanese bike manufacturer listed on the Taiwanese stock exchange and run by the Tseng family, it started out making Raleigh bikes and owns 49% of Specialized but like many Asian manufacturers it wants to manufacturer and sell its own goods to enjoy higher margins. The team has various other Italian sponsors assembled by Alex Carrera, a rider agent know the team’s general manager. As if to prove the team’s Italian DNA they have a website with an animated home page that plays sounds.

New for 2017

BMC Racing Team: a brand of Swiss bicycles. Once upon a time, or 1994 to be precise, these initials stood for the plain title of Bicycle Manufacturing Company. The team is registered in the US but funded by the Swiss francs of Andy Rihs, a billionaire cycling enthusiast who owns BMC and furthers the Swiss side with many a Swiss rider from Stefan Küng to Michael Schär and for 2016 they’ve picked up watch-maker Tag-Heuer as a co-sponsor to further the Swiss aspect too. Registering the team in the US helps the team to tap this large, lucrative market whilst trading on the image of Swiss quality. Some of Rihs’s other assets feature on the jersey like his La Coquillade luxury hotel near Mont Ventoux.

The team began as BMC Racing in 2007

Bora-Hansgrohe is a German team sponsored by two of the country’s manufacturers. Bora make kitchen extractor fans with their selling point being that the fans are located beside the cooking hob rather than above them. Hansgrohe make plumbing parts like taps and shower heads and if they have a Germany history since being founded by Herr Hans Grohe in 1901 are these days majority owned by US conglomerate Masco. The silent partner is Specialized, the bike brand was instrumental in helping the team secure Peter Sagan and their rise into the World Tour.

The team started in 2010 as Team NetApp

Cannondale-Drapac features a familiar name and a new one. In the 1990s Cannondale supplied its famous oversized alu tubed frames to the Saeco team in Italy. The company moved into motorcycles, offering innovative lightweight offroad bikes exploiting their alu tubing knowhow but this was a commercial disaster and to cut a long story short the brand was rescued by Dorel, a Canadian conglomerate that also owns Sugoi, Schwinn and GT as well as a non-cycling items like the Bébéconfort range of strollers. Now the team race on carbon frames which almost have a retro feel with no aero road frame in the range right now. The kit is green because it’s Cannondale’s corporate ident and the team retains the quirky Argyle motif. Drapac is Michael Drapac, an Australian real estate investor who is now trying to conquer the West Coast of the USA and he has been sponsoring the eponymous Drapac team which merged with Cannondale for this year. People say “dray-pack” but “dra-patch” sounds like the verb “to scratch” in various slavic languages and the team will certainly be itching for a win. The team has sponsorship from POC too which means all riders must wear the Swedish firms glasses and helmets.

The team began as a junior development team in 2003, became a pro team in 2007 whereupon it has changed title sponsor every single year since then

FDJ is short for La Française des Jeux, the French state lottery which sponsors this pro team and also various grass roots sports too. The team is a fixture on the French scene and an illustration of how globalisation may be a thing but the Tour de France means a French team can rely on huge domestic publicity every July as a means to exist. The team has explored co-sponsorship but for now the lottery has agreed to increase funding to the team in order to retain the likes of Thibaut Pinot on long term contracts.

The team began in 1997 and has kept the same sponsor all along; in 2012 it was FDJ-BigMat

Katusha-Alpecin are a Swiss team. A team can register under whatever flag it wants and this switch from a Russian identity sees the team trying to distance itself from its image as Team Kremlin but a flag can only do so much. They’re certainly not Team Heidi, after all Katusha is the diminutive version of Ekaterina, Catherine in English and a famous Soviet wartime folk song in Russia which still gets patriotic hearts stirring today. In English you’d call them Team Kathy. New for this year is Alpecin, the German brand of caffeinated shampoo has switched teams to become a co-sponsor here.

The Katusha name came in 2009 after the team was bought ought from Oleg Tinkov’s Tinkoff Credit systems team which began in 2006

Lotto NL-Jumbo: another lottery in the shape of the Dutch state lottery. The team uses the “Lotto NL” term to signify the Netherlands lottery but the sponsor is simply Lotto to locals, presumably to differentiate from their Belgian rivals. Lotto recently merged with the state lottery, the Staatsloterij which sponsors the Roompot team. Jumbo is a chain of supermarkets in the Netherlands which has, via deal-making, grown to become the country’s second largest retail chain. This is more than a cycling team, it’s a joint venture with a speed skating team coordinated by loyalty card company Brand Loyalty. Skating is very popular in the Netherlands thanks to icy winters and all those canals but Brand Loyalty has plans to make the Dutch team more international.

The team can trace its origins back to 1984 and it has participated in every Tour de France since

Lotto-Soudal sees is go from one state lottery to another with Lotto being the Belgian state lottery. This sponsorship is the longest single team backing in the pro ranks but increasingly subject to political scrutiny and points-scoring as politicians question the money spent. Soudal is a Belgian business making adhesives and sealants, a staple in DIY stores in Europe and beyond and the team has done some amusing sponsorship videos to highlight this, a means to bring alive otherwise dull products.

The team goes back to 1985

Movistar is a mobile telecoms operator with activities in Spain and Latin America as well as in the UK and Germany under the separate O2 brand. Their rider roster reflects this geographic distribution perfectly with a Spanish core of riders from across the country plus Nairo Quintana of Colombia and Andrey Amador in Costa Rica as well as British rider and a German too.

This is the longest standing team in the peloton with a lineage going back to 1980 and the Reynolds team with José Miguel Echavarri at the helm for most of the time before handing over to Eusebio Unzué

Orica-Scott have a new co-sponsor on board. Orica is an Australian company that makes explosives and other speciality chemicals for the mining industry that ought to have ACDC’s TNT as it’s corporate theme, especially as it bought Nobel, the Norwegian dynamite firm several years ago. Reassuringly it’s hard to buy Orica products so why are they backing a team? Well the company does not have a great reputation after explosive disasters as well as several fines for environmental damage so sponsoring a cycling team is seen as a way to put something back and to associate the name with something fun. Scott is a Swiss-American bike brand, registered in Switzerland but with a US heritage and with the departure of the IAM Cycling team Scott are all-in for the Australian team and have stepped-up as a naming rights sponsor.

The team began as Greendge Cycling in 2012

Quick Step Floors is the official name for what everyone is going to call Quick Step this year. It is a brand of laminated flooring that might seem indissociable from Belgian cycling but it belongs to company founded in Amsterdam… Amsterdam, New York called Mohawk Industries, a giant supplier of commercial and residential flooring and the team a cosmopolitan recruitment policy to spread the sponsor’s name far beyond Belgium. German discount supermarket Lidl appears on the kit again while Belgium’s Latexco make rubber mattresses and it and the Maes family have backed team manager Patrick Lefevere since the 1990s.

Quick Step’s sponsorship began in 2003 but the team is an assembly of mergers over the years and can be traced back to the 1990s

Team Dimension Data: is sponsored by a corporate cloud computing and IT outsourcing firm from South African with an international history. “Di Data” used to be traded on London’s stock exchange before it was aquired by Japanese telecoms giant NTT. The team is also backed by blue-chip accountancy firm Deloitte, plus Sapinda, a Dutch investment fund that backs African projects. There’s also Oakley sunglasses, the brand belonging to Italian sunglass giant Luxxotica; and Nederberg, a South African winery and the team retains the partnership with bicycle development charity Qhubeka.

Dimension Data came on board for 2016 and the team can trace itself back 2008 as MTN, named after the South African telecoms operator

Team Sky is backed by the British TV company Sky which is branching out into telecoms too. The firm has operations in Britain and recently took full control of its businesses in Germany and Italy too where the Sky name is a thing as well. As a company Sky is 40% owned by 21st Century Fox of the US and ultimately controlled by the cosmopolitan Murdoch family and currently 21st Century Fox/the Murdoch family are in takeover talks to buy the 60% of Sky they do not own, a means to combine Fox’s content with Sky’s distribution network. If the takeover deal goes through expect the Sky name to last as its a brand but how long will the team go on? There’s controversy and if there’s no smoking gun there’s aggro and sponsor may still feel they’ve got their money’s worth from the team. Perhaps Ford will step-up to replace them?

The team began in 2010

Team Sunweb was Giant-Alpecin last year. Sunweb is a European tour operator that is part of the Swiss-Dutch Sundio Group, essentially a Dutch company but with its HQ in Switzerland and if you follow them on social media you’ll see their hashtag “CreatingMemories”, a way to sell the sizzle rather than the steak of holidays. Giant remains the bike sponsor and is very visble on the team kit even if it has stepped down from naming rights. The team has BMW’s Mini brand as a vehicle supplier and Belgian steel shutter and blinds company Renson appears on the shorts.

A quiet story of growth that goes back to Shimano–Memory Corp in 2005. It’s been a Dutch team for most of its years but now rides under a German flag

Trek-Segafredo is the combination of US bike brand Trek and Italian coffee Segafredo. Trek should be familiar while Segafredo literally means “cold saw” in Italian but it’s an Italian coffee giant controlled by founder Massimo Zanetti that floated on the stock exchange last year and whose stock has duly fallen 40%.

Formally the team began in 2011 as Leopard-Trek

UAE Abu Dhabi is new and backed by the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven emirates or kingdoms with Abu Dhabi as the capital and it also includes the city of Dubai, both cities with their own World Tour events. Reportedly they’re the lowest budget team in the World Tour thanks to their in extremis rescue after the aborted TJ Sport takeover from China and it’ll be interesting to see if the Emirs settle for this modest status when their wealth and spending habits suggest they like to go large or go home

The team can be traced back to 1990 when it was Colnago-Lampre. Merida has left the squad and things have gone full circle with Colnago back as the team’s bike supplier

Notes: notice the themes?