Tour de France winner and key lieutenant sign three- and one-year extensions respectively with Swiss-sponsored US team
Cadel Evans and George Hincapie have both signed renewed contracts with the BMC Racing Team; Hincapie for one more year and Tour de France winner Evans for a further three. Both riders have been with BMC Racing since 2010, as the team continued to expand from its American Continental roots.
“Having these two return to the BMC Racing Team next year allows for our continued growth by having our two captains stay on board to provide leadership and mentoring to others in our organization,” said the team’s president and general manager Jim Ochowicz. “In George’s case, we need him to help the young guys like Taylor Phinney and Greg Van Avermaet keep developing. For everyone else, he creates leadership in the classics and at the Tour de France.”
Evans joined the team as the new World champion, having taken the race in Mendrisio, Switzerland in 2009, and promptly began to provide the team with its biggest ever results. His Flèche Wallonne victory in April was followed by a day in the pink jersey at the Giro d’Italia, as well as victory in the epic rainy stage to Montalcino across the white roads of Tuscany.
He also wore the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, although his chances of victory were ended by a fractured elbow sustained on the day he took it.
2011 has been an even more successful year for the 34-year-old, winning Tirreno-Adriatico and the Tour de Romandie on the way to becoming the first ever Australian to win the Tour de France; he currently sits in the number one spot of the International Cycling Union (UCI) WorldTour.
“I feel that as a team, we have grown successfully together,” said Evans. “It’s been an enjoyable and satisfying journey so far. From the start, I have always felt the BMC Racing Team has had a lot of confidence in me as a member and often as a leader of the team; so a longer-term contract echoes this.
“I look forward to the years ahead,” he added. “We will keep working and progressing toward the future.”
Hincapie’s further year with the team will be his eighteenth, having turned professional in 1994. In those years he has ridden sixteen Tours de France, a record he shares with Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk (although Hincapie abandoned in his first appearance and Zoetemelk finished all of his, as well as winning the 1980 edition), and has been on the team of the winner a record nine times (Lance Armstrong 1999-2005, Alberto Contador 2007, and Evans 2011).
Should he make the Tour team for a seventeenth time in 2011, the American would make the record his own.
“I’m really excited to continue the success of the team,” said Hincapie. “My two years with the BMC Racing Team has been even better than my expectations. Being able to help Cadel win the Tour de France was a career highlight for me.
“To be able to continue on for another year offers me more opportunities to extend the goodwill of the team,” he concluded.
According to Ochowicz, the team hopes to announce further contract extensions and rider acquisitions in the near future.