Bet on Cycling

The Quick Step team has a new, more colourful jersey for 2011 and is hoping to have a more successful season after team leader Tom Boonen was plagued by a knee injury during the second part of last year.

Boonen seems to have made a full recovery and will surely be a big favourite for what he has always described as ‘his’ races: the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. He has won Flanders three times and Paris-Roubaix twice, and taken a series of other top five placings.
Boonen is now 30 but is again expected to be one of Fabian Cancellara’s biggest rivals on the cobblestones.

Quick Step is more than just a classics-centric team and proved it last summer when Sylvain Chavanel won two stages at the Tour de France and wore the race leader’s yellow jersey for two days. Fellow Frenchman Jérôme Pineau also spent ten days in the climber’s polka-dot jersey, giving Quick Step huge amounts of media attention. Both will target the hilly Ardennes classics in 2011 and of course return to the Tour de France.

Quick Step has slipped down the UCI rankings and lost classics contender Stijn Devolder but has boosted its winning potential by signing sprinters Gerald Ciolek, Francesco Chicchi and Gert Steegmans. They will all benefit from sprint coach, former rider Tom Steels.

Ciolek was Under 23 World Champion and will surely rediscover his powerful burst of speed after two quiet seasons at Milram. Chicchi is a jovial Italian who always wins his share of sprints. In 2010 he won 7 and even beat Mark Cavendish to win stage four of the Tour of California.

Steegmans has had two difficult seasons and changed teams twice. However the best results of his career came at Quick Step and there is no reason why he can’t make a successful comeback.