About this time last year, Doug Ryder received the green light to start building his new team. He didn’t have long; the money came together just a few months before the start of the new season.
Before any money came in, what the South African already had in the bank was more than a decade of experience in team management. Team Qhubeka NextHash, as it was known in its final year, folded at the end of 2021.
Ryder has carried learnings from that time into his new project. Coming to the end of Q36.5 Pro Cycling’s first season, he was in a reflective mood when he spoke to Cyclingnews.
“We want to have an authentic team and tell an authentic story,” Ryder told Cyclingnews at the Tour of Britain in front of the team’s brand-new bus. It’s a bus that he’s proud of because it’s a practical outworking of the values he is trying to instill at Q36.5.
“It’s got solar panels on the roof, so it’s all planet-conscious. It’s part of our ‘Racing the Future’ mantra; we talk about being kind to the world that we live in and to try and keep our team as sustainable as possible,” Ryder said.
Launching a new professional cycling team is not a straightforward task; there are so many elements to bring together. Thinking back on their first year, Ryder believes that the rushed nature of the team’s compilation at the end of 2022 bled into their performances this year.
“We only put the team together in September. We had our backs against the wall a little bit.… The complexity of creating a team in three months, in there showed our weaknesses and our lack of preparation potentially, which is understandable.
“I think we had all these high expectations, and we brought these amazing people together, but what you forget fairly quickly is that you bring 24 riders together who’ve never raced together before. You know, most teams rotate 25 to 30% a year, and they keep 70% of their core. We started with 100%.”
“Then we got invited to some of the biggest races in the world, big monuments and classics. So we got thrown in the deep end, and all of a sudden, you’ve got to piece a puzzle together, which was more complicated than we anticipated, actually.
“I’m really happy with where we are. Of course, we would have loved to have a little bit more performance and some more race victories, but we came so close so many times. But I mean, other than that, am I happy? I am happy, and…
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