After a great 2024, our squad will launch into the coming racing season with renewed ambition and a crew of new recruits who can’t wait to splash pink all over the biggest races with their EF Education-EasyPost teammates.

This year, our team enjoyed another successful campaign, picking up 24 pro victories, including five national titles, two grand tour stages, and our first King of the Mountains jersey at the Tour de France. As a team, we raced aggressively throughout the season, always making the most of our opportunities, entertaining our fans, and bouncing back whenever we hit a setback. We are very proud of our 2024.

It’s now December, and we’re ready to build on the strong foundation we laid this past year.

Seven new arrivals headed to our first camp of the new season to meet their new teammates and the support staff who will help propel them to success in 2025. We welcomed Vincenzo Albanese, Kasper Asgreen, Samuele Battistella, Alex Baudin, Alastair MacKellar, Madis Mihkels, and Max Walker to our squad.

Kasper and Vincenzo will elevate the core of our classics team, while Samuele and Madis are two fast finishers with undoubted talent and potential to improve. Max’s versatility will add strength to our team from the start to the end of the season, Alastair has already settled in as our new neo-pro, while Alex has shown flashes of the grand tour rider he could become.

“I think that Alex will be our breakout rider next year,” said Jonathan Vaughters, CEO of EF Pro Cycling, during the recent camp. “I’m confident that he’ll produce some very surprising results. His style is super aggressive, he doesn’t hold back, and he’s a GC rider who isn’t afraid to attack and put it all on the line. He’s built in more robustness with another grand tour under his belt in 2024, so next season he could take that to the next level.”

The arrival of Kasper, a former winner of the Tour of Flanders, as well as a stage in the Tour de France and several other semi-classics, is a major coup for the team. The Dane will be a natural focal point for the 2025 squad during the cobbled classics, while his all-around skills and experience will no doubt rub off on his new teammates.

“He’s our blue-chip signing,” Vaughters said. “With Kasper, our job is to help him get back to the level he was at in 2021 when he won Flanders and recapture that magic. He’s a really intelligent rider and has already adjusted to making improvements. You could see that with his sixth place at the worlds. He’s very quickly coming back to that highest level and the indications are that he fit in nicely at team camp.”

The sky is the limit for Madis Mihkels. The 21-year-old from Estonia was third in the European continental championships this year and racked up several impressive top-tens throughout the year at races such as Paris-Roubaix, Scheldeprijs, and in a string of stages in WorldTour events. Vaughters believes the youngster could reach the very top.

“With Madis, I honestly think he can win Paris-Roubaix one year,” Vaughters said. “At this point, it’s a little bit undefined as to what sort of rider he is, but he’s only 21 years old. He’s been great in the spring classics and he’s taken a few top-tens in the field sprints. He’s not pulled off a big win yet, but he’s shown that he can compete in long races and that he can freelance in field sprints. He’s the perfect rider for us. He can mix it with the best in the classics and the reduced bunch sprints. He can be a productive member of a multi-pronged approach in the classics, for sure.”

Vincenzo Albanese brings another dimension to the team. The Italian was a late-season pickup but notched up over 15 top-ten results this year.

“Vincenzo, like all our signings, is a key component in terms of how we’ve strengthened the team. He’s consistently in the top ten. I’ve been following him for a while and he was in the group that sprinted for second at Flanders. He crashed out of the group but wasn’t going to get dropped. When you’re scouting for talent, he’s the sort of rider who delivers all year long. He’s so versatile,” Vaughters said.

Of course, it’s not just about the new recruits. In 2024 we welcomed several up-and-coming neo-pros into the team and they spent this season learning their way around the WorldTour and developing at their own pace. With a year’s experience under their belts, 2025 is all about making the next step in their progression.

“We’ve got lots of upside riders I’m looking forward to seeing next season, riders like Lukas Nerurkar, Darren Rafferty, Archie Ryan and others who used this year to adapt to the needs of the WorldTour. Next year, it’s time for them to start producing. I think they’re all ready to do that,” said Vaughters.

“The existing core of the team, riders like Richie, Neilson, Ben, Georg, Sean, and Rui all had their moments this year. They’ll be just as important to us in 2025,” he added.

As a team, we will strive to be competitive from January through to October, while the main focal points will center around the biggest races on the calendar.

“We always race the Tour de France as best we can because that’s our responsibility to our sponsors, our fans, and ourselves. The classics are beautiful races and while they’re not as commercially impactful as the Tour, they’re races that core fans of the sport truly love. They’re races that we want to be successful in because they’re some of the coolest races in the year,” said Vaughters.

Former Giro d’Italia winner Richard Carapaz, who won his first Tour de France stage this summer, along with the KOM jersey, will again play a pivotal role in next season’s grand tour ambitions and his full race calendar and objectives will be announced in the new year.

After Georg Steinhauser’s 2024 stage win at the Giro, the team will aim to go even better at the Italian grand tour.

“With the Giro, we have a lot of ambition for next year,” Vaughters said. “It’s a race that we’ve won before and it’s the most beautiful grand tour of the season. We’ll be doing different things next year. This year we raced the Giro for stages and our initial Tour plan was hit by bad luck but the race ended up being successful. Then at the Vuelta, we raced that purely for GC. Going into next year we’ll have a mix of objectives but there will be a grand tour that we’ll ride GC for and there will be two where we chase other targets, such as stages and chasing breakaways.”

In the coming weeks, we will continue to build on the foundations we’ve created in the off-season with the riders training hard and refining their goals before a second camp takes place in January and the team starts racing at the Tour Down Under in Australia.

“This year we’ve demonstrated that the team is in a stable place and from that position we can now jump forward another notch. We’ve pulled off some pretty impressive results in 2024 and made big splashes. We had peaks here and there but there wasn’t that consistent foundation going into each race. In 2025 we’re going to go into a lot more races with defined goals and realistic aims because our foundations are stronger,” added Vaughters.

Vincenzo Albanese (28)

Kasper Asgreen (29)

Samuele Battistella (26)

Alex Baudin (23)

Markel Beloki (19)

Richard Carapaz (31)

Hugh Carthy (30)

Alexander Cepeda (26)

Esteban Chaves (34)

Rui Costa (38)

Owain Doull (31)

Ben Healy (24)

Mikkel Honoré (27)

Alastair MacKellar (22)

Madis Mihkels (21)

Lukas Nerurkar (21)

Neilson Powless (28)

Sean Quinn (24)

Darren Rafferty (21)

Jack Rootkin-Gray (22)

Archie Ryan (23)

James Shaw (28)

Georg Steinhauser (23)

Harry Sweeny (26)

Yuhi Todome (22)

Michael Valgren (32)

Marijn van den Berg (25)

Jardi van der Lee (23)

Max Walker (23)