EF Education-EasyPost have continued their mini-youth revolution during the transfer window, adding another neo-pro for 2024 in the form of 19-year-old Lukas Nerurkar.
The Trinity Racing rider is the third rider to make the step up from the Continental development team for the new season, following Luke Lamperti (Soudal-QuickStep) and Finlay Pickering (Bahrain Victorious) to the WorldTour.
Nerurkar, son of Olympic marathon runner Richard Nerurkar, is the fifth new face at EF for 2024, joining Saint Piran’s Jack Rootkin-Gray (aged 20), Dutchman Jardi Christian van der Lee (22), Hagens Berman Axeon’s Darren Rafferty (20), and Archie Ryan (21), who moves up from Jumbo-Visma’s development team.
This season, racing in the U23 ranks, Nerurkar won a tough hilly stage in Lombardia at the Giro Next Gen, also winning a mountain stage at the Orlen Nations Grand Prix. Back in February, he mixed it up with the professionals, taking sixth and the best young rider’s prize at O Gran Camiño.
“I think I’m a punchy climber,” Nerurkar said in a statement released by EF Education-EasyPost. “At the moment, that is the way that I am going. I climb quite well and normally, at the end of hard days, I will still have a good sprint to win from a reduced group.
“I just want to learn as much as I can,” he added, noting that the aggressive racing style of EF appeals to him. “It will be really good to get experience racing at the highest level.
“It would be nice to win some races, but I haven’t done a whole lot of racing yet and think the next few years will just be about finding out what kind of rider I am and whatever I turn out to be, improving in those areas, so I can really perform in races.”
In recent months, Nerurkar competed at the Tour de L’Avenir and the Road World Championships junior road race in Glasgow. Last year he took on several pro-level races with Trinity, including the Volta a Portugal and Tour of Britain.
Nerurkar, who grew up in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia before moving to Brighton, England when he was seven years old, recalled how he got his start in cycling after making the switch from running.
“Some friends came over from the UK and brought some cycling kit over for me,” he said. “I was in a jersey and bib shorts that were far too big for me, but just loved wearing them and riding.
“My sister did running. In Ethiopia, it is unusual to do cycling. Almost everyone takes up running instead, but on the bike, I could just go a bit farther and faster.”
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