SUNWEB

There was a weird atmosphere around the Team Sunweb bus at the 2019 Tour de France. Morale appeared to be at an all-time low. On the road, the team was misfiring. It had been a fallow season already with only six victories by July, and at the halfway point of the Tour on stage 11, a despondent Michael Matthews, the team’s leader, had recorded seven top 10s without a sniff of a win. He was running out of ideas, and it looked like the team was, too. News reports that morning in Mâcon all indicated that the longstanding talisman and grand tour winner, Tom Dumoulin - who had pulled out of the Giro d’Italia with injury in May and then ruled himself out of the line up at the last minute for the Tour - was on the verge of making his exit permanent, and breaking his contract to sign for Jumbo-Visma.

When Dumoulin’s transfer was finally confirmed in August, there was no like-for-like replacement. Yet while team manager Iwan Spekenbrink insisted that “there is life after Tom” and though the squad had quality in the likes of Matthews and the incoming Tiesj Benoot, Sunweb started 2020 as one of the few teams in the WorldTour without a major GC contender or a major