Forty wins. Not bad for a “mid-level” team. Marc Sergeant beams with pride as he looks back on the 2015 season of the team he used to ride for and now manages. Lotto Soudal don’t have at their disposal the bumper budgets enjoyed by the likes of Team Sky and BMC, but they punched above their weight and were the third most prolific team in the professional peloton last term. Etixx-QuickStep, the other Belgian WorldTour outfit which has nearly twice the financial resources, led the way on 53 wins, while Sky were narrowly ahead of Lotto on 43.
For Sergeant, it constituted the most successful season in the team’s 31-year history.
“Of course we had 2011 with [Philippe] Gilbert,” he says, pointing to the Belgian’s glittering campaign that included a remarkable Ardennes triple and a Tour de France stage, as well as 14 other victories. “We, as a smaller team, or let’s say mid-level team, we won the WorldTour as a team, practically with the results of Gilbert alone. That was an outstanding year – it’s hard to improve on that.
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“2015 came close and actually went over, because we’ve never had 40 victories before, and we ended up third in that ranking. I said at the beginning of the season, 'we aim for 30 victories – or let’s say 25 but I want more quality'. In the end we ended up not on 25 but on 40, and with a lot of quality. There were 14 WorldTour wins in there – that’s quite amazing.”
In the same way that Gilbert was accountable for two thirds of the team’s win tally in 2011, one man dominated in 2015. Others chipped in to a greater extent than four years ago but there is no getting away from the fact that André Greipel was the leading light, with 16 wins in total and a virtuoso four-stage haul at the Tour de France.
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