{"id":367707,"date":"2025-12-24T00:05:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T00:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/367707\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T00:05:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T00:05:10","slug":"feeling-snacky-food-sponsors-in-cycling-from-weird-to-unlikely","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/367707\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeling snacky? Food sponsors in cycling from weird to unlikely"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trek just rebranded its mountain bike teams to look like its new fishy energy drink sponsor. Finn Iles and the Specialized Gravity Team are pushing canned sea food. Remco Evenepoel is celebrating Pizza Hut Belgium\u2019s birthday. The holiday season is serving up some weird food sponsors for cycling.<\/p>\n

This, it turns out, is nothing new. Cycling\u2019s always had rotating cast of snackable sponsors that wouldn\u2019t necessarily be appetising mid-race. Here\u2019s a brief, but not exhaustive list of some of the odder edible endorsements, from pescatarian practicality to luxury apr\u00e9s.<\/p>\n

And, just a note, we\u2019re leaving out the list of booze sponsors that make a splash at podium time. UCI forbids athletes from promoting alcohol (and OnlyFans<\/a>), but is fine with taking money from various brands for beer gardens and champagne celebrations.<\/p>\n

Other snackable sponsors aren\u2019t so weird, even if the actual endorsement takes an unexpected form<\/a>. Mark Cavendish pushed pistachios, Peter Sagan supported Sunchoke\/Jerusalem Artichoke brand Sunroot, Colavita and Italpasta have sponsored teams with their olive oil and pasta profits. Roland, sponsor of a team and individual athletes like Jolanda Neff, is a Swiss cookie brand.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When does recovery become apr\u00e9s?<\/p>\n

When Katusha inked a sponsorship deal with Caviar de Riofrio, the Russian squad did so under the auspicies of nutrition. I don\u2019t know how much caviar the Spanish brand was making but, given the number of athletes and number of race days and training rides that a World Tour team covers in a year, I can\u2019t imagine there\u2019d have been much of the \u201cecologically pure sturgeon caviar\u201d leftover for consumers to actually buy if all the riders were eating it as a recovery food.<\/p>\n

The sauciest team on any start line<\/p>\n

Belgian sauce brand Pauwels has roots in cycling that run deep. Pauwels remains on the jerseys of one of the larger cyclocross teams, still. Why? While it\u2019s team riders aren\u2019t likely to be sloshling mayo on their post-race snacks, Belgian \u2018cross fans are known for their love of frites. Specifically, frites and mayo. We\u2019re guessing a lot of that mayo is from Pauwels.<\/p>\n

Would you like fries with that?<\/p>\n

The other half to Pauwels, in a sense, is the short-lived Domo-Farm Frites team. The road team was formed by outspoken Belgian manager Patrick Lefevere for the 2001 season. Farm Frites is a Dutch company making potato fries for those Pauwels sauces. Domo, if you\u2019re wondering, was a carpeting company. The team soon changed to Quick Step and various other co-sponsors, leaving fries behind but earning long string of victories for Lefevere.<\/p>\n

\"Eddy<\/a><\/p>\n

Molteni and Merckx<\/p>\n

Even casual cycling fans will remember the iconic Molteni jersey\u2019s of Eddy Merckx. But what is Molteni? Or Molteni Arcore on some jerseys? Well, Molteni was a cold meats brand based in Arcore, Italy. That\u2019s right. Arguably the most iconic name and most recognized jersey in cycling was selling salami.<\/p>\n

Trek-Unbroken follows the flow<\/p>\n

Trek\u2019s mountain bike programs, both XC and downhill, have born the Wisconsin-based bike brand\u2019s name as the sole sponsor for years. Going into the 2026 season, both are now Trek-Unbroken. While that sounds like some Americana out of Hollywood, it\u2019s actually an Icelandic company that makes recovery tablets out of Norweigan salmon.<\/p>\n

With a new title sponsor comes a new jersey design. And Trek-Unbroken\u2019s new jerseys can only be described as fishy. I can\u2019t tell if it\u2019s supposed to look like water or evoke the shimmering texture of salmon skin, but it\u2019s definitely more fishy than it is Trek.<\/p>\n

Specialized Gravity\u2019s canned heat<\/p>\n

Trek and Specialized are long-running rivals, no matter what surface the race takes place on. While Trek\u2019s jumped into the ocean with both feet, it was Specialized leaning on the pescatarian performance advantage first. Frinsa Solo is a canned seafood brand from Spain. It\u2019s sponsored Loic Bruni and, now, the team for a bit. A dazed looking Finn Iles whipping open a jar of canned \u2026 turkey? was a jarring interruption to the usual fare of downhill bikes and podiums on the Specialized feed.<\/p>\n

Remco Evenepoel gets stuffed<\/p>\n

Pizza Hut\u2019s stuffed crust pizza, the hidden topping the changed the game for circular-shaped dinners, just turned 30. Among the celebrants was a semi-enthused Remco Evenepoel. The double Olympic champion lights some candles and smiles, but doesn\u2019t actually eat any greasy goodness.<\/p>\n

We tried to calculate what has more calories: that stuffed crust pizza Evenepoel\u2019s holding or his high-carb diet for an average Classics one-day race. Based on what teams seem to be aiming for, 150g\/hr, and the stated calories\/carb ratio of Maurten gels and drinks, it\u2019s close. Close enough that it depends on Remco\u2019s topping preferences and finishing time. Pepperoni and Paris-Roubaix? Dead heat. Margherita at Milan-San Remo? Pizza Hut isn\u2019t enough to get him over the Poggio. What\u2019s wild is that the stuffed crust pizza is probably more nutritionally balanced than what Evenepoel\u2019s eating on the bike for an average race day.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Lachlan Morton riding for Jelly-Belly at the 2016 Tour of California. Photo credit: Oran Kelly
\nA sugary-sweet sponsorship<\/p>\n

Ubiquitous in North American cycling while it lasted, Jelly Belly was a U.S.-based road team. The title sponsor, Jelly Belly, even tried making \u201csport\u201d versions of its jelly beans for a while. According to the still-living website, a 24-year-old Lachlan Morton\u2019s favourite Sport Bean flavour was lemon lime, while his favourite Jelly Belly flavour was \u201cbuttered popcorn.\u201d It was Louis Lemus 2013 national champ kit, a Mexican flag made of jelly beans, that was the piece de resistance.<\/p>\n

While it seemed like a stretch at the time, a candy company sporsoring a healthy passtime, it probably would be a better fit for today\u2019s instant carb-obsessed gravel racers and gas station food cyclists. All that stuff is basically just sugar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trek just rebranded its mountain bike teams to look like its new fishy energy drink sponsor. Finn Iles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367708,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,784,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-367707","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cycling","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367707\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}