EF Professional Biking introduced on Thursday they may begin a ladies’s group that may race as EF Schooling-Cannondale subsequent season.
The press launch was obscure and didn’t point out how this may have an effect on the present Ladies’s WorldTeam of Paris-Roubaix winner Alison Jackson and junior time trial World Champion Zoe Bäckstedt, which lately misplaced long-time sponsors Tibco and Silicon Valley Financial institution as a result of “latest financial challenges and occasions” after the financial institution’s collapse earlier this yr. The 2 firms had supported the ladies’s group, run by Linda Jackson, since 2008.
EF Schooling joined the group as a co-title sponsor in 2022 however Jackson owns and manages the squad. Calls to EF Professional Biking gave no clarification, and Linda Jackson couldn’t be reached for remark.
It’s so far unclear if EF Schooling-EasyPost will turn out to be the ninth WorldTeam to personal a ladies’s equal, becoming a member of the ranks with Alpecin-Deceuninck/Fenix-Deceuninck, Cofidis, Movistar Group, Group DSM, Jayco-AlUla, Jumbo-Visma, Lidl-Trek and UAE Group Emirates/UAE Group ADQ.
They may be making a lower-level outfit alongside the strains of Soudal-Quickstep, who’ve a ladies’s Continental counterpart in AG Insurance coverage-Soudal-Quickstep.
It isn’t the previous Slipstream outfit’s first foray into ladies’s biking. Jonathan Vaughters and Slipstream picked up the Cervélo ladies’s group as a part of an settlement with the bicycle sponsor in 2011. The ladies’s group got here together with seven riders from the lads’s Cervélo Take a look at Group.
Group Garmin-Cervélo included high riders like Emma Pooley and a younger Lizzie Deignan. Nonetheless, by the top of 2011, a handshake cope with BigMat to return on as a co-title sponsor for the organisation evaporated, leaving Vaughters scrambling to save lots of all the outfit.
The collapse may have been devastating for riders aiming to earn a spot for the Olympic Video games in London in 2012, however the group discovered reprieve with a partnership with the AA Drink/Leontien.nl run by Michael Zijlaard. That group additionally ended after one season.
