Former pro Marc Sergeant will step up immediately from his current position to take over leadership of the Lotto Belisol team, with the Belgian becoming general manager of the squad.
The WorldTour team has announced that it and the previous general manager, Bill Olivier, had mutually agreed to put an end to their collaboration.
“It is an internal reason – we had a very small structure next to the sporting structure, and now we will try to build up a larger structure with Marc,” team spokesman Arne Houtekier told VeloNation today.
“There was a lot of things to do after the split from Omega Pharma and Bill did a lot of work in that area. It would not be true to say that he had not done well – that was not the case. Bill had a lot of things to do, although it was sometimes difficult handle the financial, commercial and organisational things. That was too much for one person and now the board has decided to split it up and have a few people working in those areas.”
Sergeant is 53 years of age and was a professional rider between 1981 and 1996. In that time he took stage victories in races such as the Tour de France, Tour de Suisse and the Tour of the Netherlands, was Belgian road race champion and had top ten finishes in Paris-Roubaix, the Tour of Flanders and the Amstel Gold Race.
After his retirement he went into directeur sportif and management roles with teams, and remained part of the structure after the Omega Pharma and Lotto split at the end of 2011.
He’ll now be in charge of the Lotto-Belisol squad. “Marc will organise the sporting things as he did before, but he will move into the role of general manager as of today,” said Houtekier. “He is one of the faces of the team...everybody knows him. He is always the representative to the media, to the sponsors and others. He has more than twenty years in cycling, is very calm, he speaks English, French and Dutch very well. He will be the link between the board and the team.”
Houtekier added that the restructuring was something that is hoped will lead to a growth in the squad in the longer term, including budget.
“We’ve had a very good start to the year in the sporting sense and we hope that these changes will also bring success,” he said.