The day before Bjarne Riis and his business partner Lars Seier Christensen confirm their return to cycling, more details of the Bahrain Cycling Team project have emerged in Denmark and Italy, with reports that both Vincenzo Nibali and Peter Sagan are being targeted as team leaders for the new WorldTour team backed by Prince Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa.
Riis has been linked to the project with Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet suggesting that he will become team manager. However, Cyclingnews understands that two other team managers currently in the sport are also under consideration for the role of team manager and could see the Bahrain Cycling Team buy out and take over an existing team in the peloton.
One source told Cyclingnews that rumours of a Bahrain-backed team have been circulating for over a year, with at least half a dozen team managers trying to secure the support of Bahrain for their team. Riis perhaps feels he is in pole position to secure the role of team manager and so return to professional cycling but a formal agreement may still have to be finalised.
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If this is the case then the Riis-Christensen press conference planned for Thursday may not reveal further details of the Bahrain Cycling Team project but instead could focus on plans to create some kind of exclusive cycling club and events project that helps support the economics of a professional cycling team.
In his blog, Christensen said the project would be “a broader project in order to create a stronger economic foundation than those that are normally associated with a cycling team,” adding, “yes, there will be partners involved, but we cannot necessarily disclose who they are at this time. But the interest has been substantial and we are grateful for that.”
Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet has suggested that the new Bahrain team could eventually team-up with Riis and buy the Tinkoff team’s licence to facilitate the creation of the new team and so secure the services of Sagan, who is under contract with Tinkoff until the end of 2017. The paper suggests that the new team could ride Specialized bikes as part of a deal to secure Sagan as a team leader.
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