British Continental girls’s staff Lifeplus-Wahoo will finish operations on the finish of 2024, it was introduced on Monday afternoon.
The staff, which started life as Drops in 2016, has been unable to discover a sponsor to pay for naming rights in 2025, and won’t compete subsequent yr.
“We’re very unhappy to announce that Drops Biking – at present racing as Lifeplus Wahoo – Britain’s most profitable and longest operating UCI girls’s staff, will shut on the finish of the yr,” stated staff managers Bob and Tom Varney in an announcement.
“Regardless of securing a full steady of premium product companions for 2025, we have now been unable to promote the naming rights for a determine commensurate with the price range required for a UCI Professional Staff Licence utility. A second division in girls’s biking, the Professional Tour, is being launched from subsequent yr, with minimal salaries a requirement.
“Our purpose has at all times been to progress to Professional Staff stage and in the end turn into a World Tour staff. With uncertainty surrounding the viability of the challenge at Continental stage, we not have the urge for food to wrestle to ship our skilled imaginative and prescient on a minimal price range at this largely unregulated stage.”
The pair additionally pointed to a rising value of racing, and the “lack of sponsor bonus revenue with TDFF [Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift] participation”.
The staff competed within the Tour in 2022 and 2023, the one British squad to take action, which is value an awesome deal in sponsor phrases, and they might have hoped to take action once more this yr. Nonetheless, the frustration of non-selection dealt the staff a big blow. They typically punched above their weight with invitations to among the largest races, together with Paris-Roubaix Femmes and the Tour of Flanders.
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Lifeplus additionally referenced the theft of the staff’s bikes at this yr’s Tour of Britain Girls. Your complete fleet of 14 machines – value greater than £5,000 every – was taken from the staff’s lodge after stage one of many race. It left the staff’s riders utilizing borrowed bikes for the day earlier than tech companion Ribble was capable of resupply the staff with new bikes.
It was additionally experiencing an “ongoing partnership dispute as a consequence of unpaid instalments” it stated, with these a number of components main in the end to the tip of the staff.
“We thank our world fan base for his or her loyal help over the previous 9 years and ship the worldwide peloton our greatest needs for the long run,” the assertion concluded.
Through the years the staff gained a number of races and offered the beginning for a lot of promising riders, together with former British champion Alice Towers and former Hour Document holder Joss Lowden. Lots of its quantity have gone onto race at WorldTour stage.
