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Many of today’s pro teams were founded in the 1990s by ex-pros. These founders have become part of the landscape and the teams almost institutions.

Because of time and retirement plans some of these founders are on their way out. In the case of Vincent Lavenu at Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale in recent days, brutally so and his forced exit tells us something about recent changes in the sport.

Ex-pro Vincent Lavenu founded the Chazal-Vanille et Mûre team in 1992, backed by improbable combo of a meat distributor and a company selling children’s perfume. It had just 12 riders but took on a stagiaire from Estonia called Jaan Kirsipuu who won a race for them in the late season and in the following years became a prolific winner.

In 1996 in came a new sponsor in “Petit Casino”, no gambling but a chain of mini-supermarkets belonging to major French retailer Casino. In 1997 Casino itself became the sponsor, joined in 1998 by Ag2r, an insurance company.

Ag2r the company grew with the team over the years, merging with La Mondiale to become one of France’s biggest savings and insurance companies. It’s a safe business, people subscribe to pension plans; the company invests in real estate. It’s gained plenty from the Tour de France, brand recognition has soared.

The Tour de France goes a long way to explaining the longevity and ubiquity of the French teams in the peloton today, they’re a quarter of a century old and almost institutions who have been able to continue in part because of likely start in the Tour de France.

Another figurehead closer to retirement than the start of his career is Marc Madiot, age 65. He founded the Française des Jeux team which is Groupama-FDJ today. He told the Face à Face podcast his team has gone from a family shop to a multinational business. Certainly budgets have soared in recent years, €20 million or more. Back in the day these founders started out doing everything chasing sponsors, recruiting riders, handling the media and all while driving the team car too. Today this is very different with teams having many departments from communications to performance, logistics to admin and payroll and often more than one team some have women’s squads and many have in-house junior and U23 development outfits too.

Being a business can mean risk-taking which brings us to Vincent Lavenu’s downfall. According to reports in L’Equipe and local paper Le Dauphiné he decided to modernise the team HQ in 2020 and took on debts for this. Then Citroën decided to exercise the right in a five year deal to pull out early, leaving the team with a sudden funding shortfall. Loyal readers will also remember the team has had issues with bike suppliers too.

Ag2r La Mondiale told Lavenu they’d buy the team off him for €8,000: not eight million, just eight thousand Euros but with this they’d keep sponsoring the team. Faced with this ultimatum Lavenu had no options.

The transaction went through in June 2022 and the new owners have appointed a general manager in Dominique Serieys who has a sports management background, having run the Paris Défense stadium and worked in motorsport. There’s also Béatrice Willems who also runs the Ag2r La Mondiale chief executive’s office, a clear sign of reporting lines going to Paris.

Reduced to an employee, this week L’Equipe noticed that Lavenu had vanished from the organigram on the team website and reported he was given notice of his dismissal at the end of July, which caused him to fall ill, even requiring paramedics being sent to the team HQ although fortunately they write he didn’t need to get in the ambulance. A brutal end, certainly not the exit he would have liked.

Marc Madiot doesn’t own any shares as the team has belonged to its sponsors from the start but he’s become more a totem figure over the years rather than the boss. Meanwhile Jean-René Bernaudeau at Total Energies is 68 years old and the search of a successor is on; apparently Julian Alaphilippe was almost in tears when he called to say he was going to join Tudor instead of Bernaudeau’s outfit, some of the sorrow may have come from knowing that without a star rider the team is going to keep struggling for invites and could run out of road soon. Meanwhile chez Cofidis the sponsor is the owner and facing relegation and poor results they’re considering changes too in the management.

So far so French but another team with a long history is Lotto-Dstny, it can be traced back to 1985. It’s in trouble because Dstny is leaving and there’s been a quarrel with the co-sponsor frustrated because they wanted the team to race abroad more while Lotto as the Belgian state lottery clearly wanted more presence in their home market, a clear tension. But if there’s no sponsor there’s a significant financial shortfall to close and all this needs to be resolved now, or even two weeks ago for some UCI deadlines, by autumn for other regulatory matters. If this is not not resolved quickly never mind promotion back to the World Tour and the bright prospects of Arnaud De Lie, Lennert van Eeetvelt, Maxim Van Gils, Alec Segaert and Jarno Widar to name some, they might not make it to 2025.

Meanwhile Movistar goes back to 1980 and the Unzue family still rule the roost. If Italy has lost its World Tour teams, Spanish fans must be concerned for their last team which is not the force it used to be, in part because financially it has struggled with the inflation in team budgets of late. It’s openly looking for a co-sponsor and Movistar itself is on-board with this because if the performance improves then Movistar will see its name mentioned more often, even if it is shared with another backer.

Behind a lot of this is a return of sponsor power. They don’t just provide the funding, increasingly they own the teams. This used to be the norm until the late 1980s when Cyrille Guimard and Laurent Fignon and others launched their own team which “sold” sponsorship to third parties and this model became widely copied. This still exists today with teams like Visma-LAB and UAE Emirates belonging to team management; but Ineos the company owns Ineos the team to the point where the senior figure behind the team is discreet; and EF Education-Easypost is no longer Slipstream as it belongs to the EF and the Hult family behind it. Likewise Red Bull don’t just sponsor their team, they’ve acquired it and so on.

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The days of teams being led by one man are over, they probably ended a decade ago. We might still think of Soudal-Quickstep as Patrick Lefevere’s team but when the Jumbo merger was on a year ago he was in the dark at times as the real power and ownership is with Zdenek Bakala. A similar situation applies to plenty of other teams, although to varying degrees.

Conclusion
Nothing is eternal. Several team managers are contemplating retirement but those that can get out on their terms are going to be the lucky ones. Few can cash in their equity as without sponsorship there’s little value in a team, even if they have built up a kind of franchise.

Guiding a team through the 1990s to today is a feat, a tale of survivorship and probably luck too. During this time all teams have changed. While some still have their founders around, increasingly they’re figureheads for the media rather than the controlling power. Being able to delegate is itself a form of power. As budgets continue to increase and teams take on more and more the practices and customs of established businesses it’ll be interesting to see if they can also retain their identity, so often shaped by their founder.

The post Exit The Founding Fathers first appeared on The Inner Ring.