2024 starts at the Tour Down Under

South African powerhouse Stefan de Bod bolsters our roster. The Olympian and former African time-trial champion is going into his sixth season in the WorldTour. He is a valuable asset in hilly classics and time trials. Great friends with his teammates, Stefan is always good for a laugh in the bus.

Stefan lives in Girona, our Catalan home base, during the racing season. He loves all the places that bike racing takes him, but whenever he has the chance travels back to South Africa, where he can disappear for a bit into the bush on his mountain bike and return home to his family farm for a braai.

Owain is one of just two Welsh speakers in the peloton and became the first Welsh-speaking athlete to win a gold medal at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

While he loves to explore new places on long rides, his favorite place to ride is in the Peak District — preferably on a sunny day. For Owain, setting goals and giving his all in their pursuit is deeply satisfying. In the moment that a race kicks it up a notch, he finds motivation in reminding himself that the outcome will be worth the effort. Owain, the runner-up in the 2019 edition of Kuurne-Bruxelles-Kuurne, loves racing the Classics and Grand Tours. When Owain is not on his bike, you’ll find him overseeing 5 Rings, his coffee company named for the Olympic rings.

Jonas Rutsch loves the Classics and is always excited when he gets to race up the Muur-Kapelmuur. The lanky German won the U23 Gent-Wevelgem and finished 11th at the 2021 Paris-Roubaix. He is a very versatile rider, who is always ready to work for his teammates.

In 2022, he even impressed in the mountains at the Tour de Suisse.

This is already Jonas’s fifth season racing with the team. He says that racing in the WorldTour had been his goal since he was a little boy, when cycling’s historic races captured his imagination. He has now finished two Tours de France and even proposed to girlfriend on the Champs-Élysées after the 2022 Tour.

In addition to racing, Jonas also finished his exams at the German police academy. While he follows a training schedule, his favorite days are when he just gets to ride his bike. Whenever he has the chance, he goes mountain biking.

Harry Sweeny is excited to broaden his horizons with EF Education-EasyPost. The 25-year-old Australian joins our team in 2024. It will be his fourth season as a pro. Harry is still discovering his limits as a racer. As a U23, he won Il Piccolo Lombardia and has since ridden the Tour de France, where, as a rookie, he finished third on a stage and rode onto the Champs-Élysées in the break, as jets trailed red, white, and blue streaks into the sky overhead. He has raced Paris-Roubaix in the wet and Liège-Bastogne-Liège alongside his friend, the former winner and local legend, Philippe Gilbert. This year, he finished fourth on GC at the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon. Harry believes that his best is yet to come.

He came to cycling late. As a kid growing up in Brisbane, where his family moved when he was a child, he played soccer and rugby and did gymnastics and swam. He took up triathlon as a schoolboy, but focused on cycling when he was a junior and was recovering from a running injury. He started out racing local crits. His athleticism soon shone and he was picked to race the world championships in Richmond, Virginia for the Australian national team.

He moved to Europe to race, first for a small junior team in Belgium, and then for two years with the Australian Institute of Sport squad, which was then based in Italy, before moving back to Belgium for his final year as an U23. Those years opened up new worlds for Harry.

EF Education-EasyPost’s open-minded international character is a big draw for him. On the teams he has raced for in the past, he has often been one of the few foreigners. Our team is made up of riders and staff from dozens of nationalities. Most of them know what it is like to build a life far from home and can help with all of the little difficulties that come with that. Our multicultural make up helps us to expand our outlook and think beyond traditional ways of doing things too.

Harry is a lot more than a bike racer. He is a keen cook and he loves to go camping and hiking with his girlfriend, an environmental scientist, near their adopted home in Andorra. In the winters, he loves to ski. And he is a YouTuber.

Watch out for Harry on RaceTV. He is going to bring an exciting perspective to our team this year.

Jardi van der Lee is excited to ride his rookie WorldTour season with EF Education-EasyPost. Last year, the Dutch talent was working in a supermarket to fund his racing adventures in the Dutch peloton. A number of breakthrough results caught our scouts’ eyes, including a fourth-place at the Orlen Nations Grand Prix. We decided to give Jardi a shot at the Tour de Langkawi and he fit right in, finishing 13th overall himself, and making a great contribution to Simon Carr’s general classification victory. Now, he’s a full pro, ready to go toe to toe against the world’s best in the mountains.

Jardi knows he has got the power. He is one of the top e-racers on the planet. He took up the game during Covid, when all of the local road races that he had been doing since he was a little kid were canceled. Almost no one on the internet could match his watts.

There is a lot more to bike racing than power however. This year, Jardi knows that he has a lot to learn. He learns fast. He will be an eager apprentice this season. Turning pro is his dream come true and he is determined to make the most of his chance.