After becoming part of the furniture through the various incarnations of the Trek Factory Racing team, Jesse Sergent is dreaming it up all over again in the new surroundings of AG2R-La Mondiale.
The New Zealander was not without suitors when he came on the market at the tail end of last season, with Tinkoff among those to register interest, but ultimately he opted to take a road less travelled by Anglophone riders in recent years and sign for Vincent Lavenu’s squad.
The attraction of AG2R-La Mondiale was twofold, in that Lavenu’s eagerness to add the double Olympic medallist to his Classics roster manifested itself in the security of a two-year contract. For Sergent, who lost four months of 2015 when he broke his collarbone after a neutral service car drove into him at the Tour of Flanders, the value of a safety net in such a precarious occupation cannot be under-estimated.
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“The two-year contract is a big draw compared to a one-year deal, especially with the changes possibly coming in next year for the number of riders on a team,” Sergent told Cyclingnews at the Tour of Qatar last week.
“I don’t know if they’re true or just rumours, but you do hear all these stories of teams having to get smaller, and this and that. Each year it seems tougher and tougher for getting contracts. If an accident like last year happened again it could easily be career over, so a two-year contract is a big draw.”
Not that Sergent’s decision was purely a question of security. Over five years at RadioShack and Trek, he seemed to recede into a supporting role. In theory at least, AG2R-La Mondiale should provide more opportunities for Sergent to chase results of his own in time trials and short stage races, while in the Classics unit, too, the hierarchy is not as strictly defined.
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