Israel Cycling Academy began life as a development squad at the end of 2014 with the help of Peter Sagan. They became the first Israeli registered Pro Continental squad earlier this season and aim to be the first to make it to a Grand Tour, with the Giro d’Italia set to start in Israel next May.
Should the team gain that much-desired wildcard spot, team manager Ron Margaliot has confirmed that at least one of the team’s home riders will be in the starting eight. The team have five Israeli’s on their roster, and Cyclingnews sat down with three of them at the end of their bonding camp in November.
Guy Sagiv is the team’s longest standing Israeli rider and was there in 2014 when Sagan helped launch the team. He is a two-time road race national champion and reigning time trial national champion. Roy Goldstein, the current national road race champion, had a spell with the team in 2015 but didn’t join them properly until the following season. The 23-year-old Aviv Yechezkel came to the team last year and is a former national time trial and cyclo-cross champion.
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Cyclingnews: How did you all get into riding and what was it like getting into racing in Israel?
Aviv Yechezkel: I guess you grow into more from the touristic side. Your dad might ride a bike or someone else where you grow up might ride a bike just for fun. As a 10-year-old you just get a bike and start riding with them and then you slowly start liking it more and at one point you start doing an after-school activity with bikes. With the years, you sort of grow into racing and I guess we liked it enough to suffer everything that we suffer during the day. You just get sucked into it.
Guy Sagiv: I am really competitive in my character so I was riding with my father, that’s how I started, and then I realised that I really liked riding and I was good at it so I started to look for a club to join and race with them. When I was about 11 or 12, I joined one of the clubs in my hometown and then I started racing at 12 years old as a mountain biker and I started to get better at it and win some races. I then started to do some road cycling and I realised that was really what I loved so I did just that.
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