TheKillerPenguin

Just curious- Which current pro team has ridden continuously for the same sponsers for the longest amount of time? What was the longest running team ever?

YMCA

Lotto (Belgium) has been around for ~ 16 years.

Once (now Liberty Seguros) was around forever.

Do you mean which main sponsor or which organization.

Quite a few organizations have been changing main sponsors over a few decades.

redal

Kelme continuously sponsored the same organization for twentysomething years.

TheKillerPenguin

I mean which main sponser, YMCA. Curious to see what held their interest for so long; was it paying off financially, or did they just like cycling?

redal

Kelme was the main sponsor until recently. I know they co-sponsored the last year or two, but before that they were the title sponsor.

Keith99

Let's try Bianchi

It is hard to trace exactly but:

1896 Claim is they were the first bike maker to use racing as a testing ground
1899 Won First international race.
1911 Giro Win
****
1940 Coppi Joins team Bianchi

Gimondi also raced for Bianchi (Giamondi raced about 64-76 or so)

Bianchi is still a on the Jersey level sponsor today.

KAS, Molteni and Faema all seem to have at least 20 years. (Just from team listings from the TDF and Giro).

Peugeot lasted at least 30 and 50 would not surprise me. Renault is likely about the same.

EventServices

I saw the thread's title, and I though he meant median age of riders.
That would be interesting to find out.

TheKillerPenguin

^ Wish I had thought that one up.

ed073

Oldest....would have to be Roberto Gaggioli.
Youngest....pick any of the 18 year old stagiares out there.

Median....somewhere in between.

TheKillerPenguin

Really? 43 strikes me as pretty young to be the oldest.

dlbcx

I thought Steve Tilford was older than Gaggioli.

ed073

Maybe. No match for his name on the cyclingnews.com teams database.

Scott Moninger....39.
Ludo Dierckxsens....41.

cyclezealot

Credit Agricoe has been around for at least 10 years?

ed073

Z-Peugeot = GAN = Credit Agricole

USAZorro

I thought

Credit Agricole = Farmer's Bank

I think Bianchi wins it hands down.

classic1

Bianchi haven't been a continuous sponsor.

Credit Agricole can trace the team roots at least back to the Peugeot team in the early 60's

redal

I know that this is not what this thread is actually about but I do believe that Tilford is older than Gaggioli. However, Tilford did not ride for a pro team this year and I don't think he has ridden on a pro team the last couple of years, but he was at Superweek kicking butt in the Pro/1-2 races.

2Rodies

Thurogh Rogers (sp) is still racing domestically at the pro level and I think he's got to be 50 by now.

Keith99

If I recall correctly someone recently (e.g. last 10 years) broke Eddy's record for total pro wins. It was someone who just kept racing forever, he might have been pretty old by the end.

YMCA

You may be referring to Danny Clarke of Australia who won numerous six-day races. Eddy had like 500 wins or so. Can't imagine anybody got that close. Amateur wins maybe, but pro?

bdaghisallo

Of the current teams, Credit Agricole is the longest living team - not with the current sponsor but with the team organisation. When I think of teams and their duration I always think of the organisation behind them. They are the real team. A team may be sponsored by a given sponsor, but that sponsor is, invariably, paying a fee to a team for that team to brand themselves with that sponsor's logos. All the teams have management companies behind them that are the real team and are usually owned by the men that manage the team, the directors and such.

Thus, Credit Agricole can trace its lineage back to the 1950s when they were the mighty Peugeot team. They might go back even further since Peugeot was a major sponsor, but I can't say what the team structure was back then. They went on up to the end of 1986 as the Peugeot team and lots of great riders rode for them. Merckx rode his second and third seasons for them when Tom Simpson was their big rider. Roger Pingeon won a Tour for them as did Bernard Thevenet. They spearheaded the anglo invasion in the late seventies and early eighties with their relationship with the mighty ACBB amateur team in Paris. Riders like Robert Miller, Stephen Roche, Phil Anderson, Sean Yates and Allan Peiper all made their way into the peloton that way.

In 1987 the Z toy company took over the headline sponsorship of the team and they became Z-Peugeot for three years. Peugeot dropped out totally in 1990 when LeMond joined the team. In 1992 GAN became the sponsor as Z pulled out, having boosted their recogniton in time-honored marketing tradition. GAN pulled out in the summer of 1998, after the Tour and that is when Credit Agricole took over.

Roger Legeay, who still manages the team, took over from Roland Berland back in the mid 80s and has been in charge ever since, with Serge Beucherie as his deputy.


As far as longest sponsorship then Kelme would take it, having first sponsored their team back in 1981 I believe.

As for Bianchi, it is true that they have been sponsoring teams and riders since bike racing started in Italy, and sponsored most of the Italian greats at one time or another, but they haven't had a continuous presence in the peloton. Their true team presence ended back in the late eighties when Moreno Argentin left and went to join Ferreti's Ariostea team (Ferreti a former manager of Bianchi back in the Gimondi days).

So there is a long and storied history to many of the teams on the scene today.

That's why I truly love this sport. The present is great and fantastic but the past and the folklore attached is truly magnificent. The heyday of the sport was the late 50s through the mid70s, imho, and I have many books and magazines from that era, and the sport seemed so much more epic back then. I have some magazines that used more words to detail one Tour stage in the Vosges mountains than Velonews uses to cover the whole Tour in their print version!!

Man I love this sport!!!!

redal

Thurlow is 45 this year. He has not been on a pro team since Mercury folded, but he does show up to local pro/1-2 races every so often. He usually does at least two masters races beforehand. Most of the time he will win one of the masters races, place in the other and then be top 10 in the 1-2 race. He hasn't done that as much this year as in years past. I think because he is 45 and now he has another masters category to race.

cosmo_the_third

This thread brings up one of the problems with cycling's trade team system: there's no real team history to the sport anymore.

You can never develop a Yankees/Red Sox (or Steelers/Raiders or Man U/Arsenal or what have you) rivalry if Yankees and Red Sox aren't around for more than 4 years at a time. Even now that most sqauds are "company" teams like Tailwind Sports (formerly US Postal, currently Discovery Channel), teams are never really the same season in and season out.

Here's an example: Davitamon-Lotto and Quick.Step-Innergetic are the two biggest Belgian ProTour teams, and currently have the hottest rivalry in the sport. But in 2002, there were 3 seperate squads: Mapei-Quick.Step, Domo-Farm Frites, and Lotto-Adecco. At the end of the year, Mapei folded, but Quick-Step took over with a new sponsor and became Quick.Step-Davitamon, while Lotto and Domo merged to become Lotto-Domo. In 2004, Davitamon quit Quick-Step (there apparently was a nasty falling out) and joined Lotto, while Domo dropped out of the sport.

So, you'd think that maybe Mapei = Quick.Step, and Davitamon = Lotto + Domo-Farm Frites, right? Well, trying to follow riders makes that a bit more difficult. Johan Museeuw had his best years at Mapei, but won the '02 Paris-Roubaix with Domo before finishing his career at Quick-Step. Robbie McEwen's been with Lotto sqauds since he left Rabobank, but some of his leadout men made the switch from Quick.Step to Lotto with Davitamon. Servais Knaven went from Domo to Quick.Step, while Leon van Bon went from Domo to Davitamon. And then there's Tom Boonen, who I guess rode for one of the Beglian squads as an youngster, got bought by US Postal so that he wouldn't beat Hincapie in Paris-Roubaix (he did anyway...), and is now back with Quick.Step because of never really fitting in at Postal and some long standing beef with Lotto...?

Anyway. You can see why it's a problem. This is why (I think) results sheets generally list a rider's nationality before they list their team; it helps tie them in more firmly to the history of the sport. Cycling's been around for a century, and it wasn't until a bit more than 30 years ago that the trade team system became THE way to organize pro cycling competitions.