A portion of the French team is at the Tour of Guangxi closing out the squad’s final-ever racing kilometres.
Numerous emotions coalesce in the rarefied air of the Tour of Guangxi. At the stage start in the ancient city of Jingxi, which skirts the Vietnamese border in the south-west of the country, you have the tired pros ready for the off-season and bright-eyed neo-pros on their first-ever voyage this far east. Then you have those suffering a more existential crisis, as the ground underneath their professional lives begins to give way.
With Lotto and Intermarché’s merger submitted to the UCI, two will likely become one with a Thanossian click of a bureaucratic finger in an Aigle boardroom. Levity aside, half of these two squads present in China, sitting side-by-side in adjoining tents underneath the still-hot October sun, have little chance of being here, or anywhere in the professional bike racing world, next year. In fact, given the predilection of WorldTour teams to send a bomb squad for this final race of the calendar, the survivors here are likely to be in even lower number.
And then there’s Arkéa-B&B Hotels, the French squad that has been very open about its struggle to bring in new financial backers after both Arkéa (co-operative bank and insurance group) and B&B Hotels (… a hotel chain), and have finally relinquished hope that they will be able to continue into 2026.
Jenthe Biermans hits the deck as the peloton lines up to salute the retiring Arnaud Démare at his final race, the 2025 Paris-Tours.
“We already knew the situation was complicated for several months,” Arkéa sports director Sébastien Hinault told media including Escape at the Guangxi start in Jingxi. “[Team boss Emmanuel] Hubert was searching for backers for the team for more than a year. We were hoping for a reaction from a sponsor who was maybe hesitating, but you can see that the economic context isn’t easy and we couldn’t find a sponsor to go again next year.”
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