EF Education-EasyPost announced this week the addition of the Aevolo Cycling under-23 development team to their organisation. The yellow and green team will go pink in 2025.
The partnership is a win-win for EF Pro Cycling, who lacked an official feeder team, and for Aevolo, who were looking to raise the stature of the team which has fought to bring in new talent against teams with bigger budgets.
Mike Creed, who started Aevolo in 2017, will continue to manage the team and act as the main sports director.
"I'm excited because it's something new to learn," Creed said. "It's new people and a new environment, new situations. The goal for me will be finding the best people we can recruit.
"I'll measure my success not only in terms of how many under-23s we can feed to the WorldTour squad and are successful but how many of those transitions are almost seamless, in terms of rider professionalism, of being prepared."
Creed was closely watching the junior men's races at the USA Cycling Road National Championships in Charleston, West Virginia this weekend, telling Cyclingnews he was "Looking for riders with talent who might not have yet developed their racing instincts" and who might not attract attention from other managers because their results haven't reflected their true abilities.
His rider Gavin Hlady won the under-23 men's road race and under-23 men's criterium national titles this week.
Creed hopes to keep as many of his current crop of riders as possible in hiring a mix of American, European, and Japanese riders for a team based in Girona, Spain, and focussed on racing a European calendar since the North American road scene lacks the level of races that were present when the team started.
"We definitely want to go to all the under-23 monuments and the bigger races like the baby Giro especially or Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Valle d'Aosta. All those races, we'll be trying our hardest to get into," Creed said.
Jonathan Vaughters, the EF Pro Cycling CEO, sees the devo team as part of the WorldTour team's future plans.
"For a team like us that doesn't have the biggest budget in the WorldTour, you realize that if you truly have the desire to someday win the Tour de France, the way to do that is to identify the talent, nurture the talent, even build a team around the talent and retain the talent. And then do that for a period of 10 or 15 years and build a Tour de France winner," Vaughters said.
"With the success of the EF Education-Onto junior program, it made me realize that quite a few of those athletes don't necessarily have a jumping-off point or a way forward to stay within the EF Pro Cycling program.
"So in order to correct that, I felt like we needed an in-house U23 developmental team so that there is a direct, visible, tangible line all the way from when you're a 14-year-old talent to becoming a WorldTour rider."
Vaughters' team has had partnerships with under-23 development teams before, but Aevolo's arrival marks the first time the team will be under the same paying agent as the WorldTour team, meaning the riders can cross over between the devo team and WorldTour squad.
"This is our first foray into having our own in-house, proprietary Continental team. And Aevolo is the obvious team to do this with," Vaughters said. "It's a sister team in the sense that they've been with Cannondale for quite a while, and obviously, the team has done a great job. But to make that next jump in performance, they needed to have a more international program and to have a foundation with a WorldTour team.
"By joining forces, we're combining resources so that we can build what will hopefully be one of the best, if not the best, continental teams in the world and be the most attractive place to go for up-and-coming talent. We're going to build a truly first-class organization that supports the rider in the same way that both our men's and women's EF Pro Cycling teams are supported."
