Trek-Segafredo adds two young recruits in Juan Pedro López and Michel Ries

Trek-Segafredo has added two exciting prospects for 2020-2021 in Juan Pedro López and Michel Ries as the UCI WorldTour team continues to invest in its future with promising young riders.  Both riders come from the Kometa Cycling Team, the development team supported by Trek-Segafredo, and join former teammate Matteo Moschetti, making a total of three riders that made the jump to the WorldTour team in only its second year of existence.

Michel Ries, 21, joined Trek-Segafredo as a stagiaire in 2018 gaining some first-hand experience with the WorldTour team but General Manager Luca Guercilena decided the young Luxembourger would benefit with another year in the development team.

This year, Michel finished second in two stages at the recent Tour de l’Avenir, and finished seventh overall. He also secured third in the mountains classification to show his climbing prowess. Earlier this year, Michael won Stage 3 of the prestigious Giro Ciclistico della Valle d’Aosta Mont Blanc, while his teammate Juan Pedro López also won, claiming Stage 4 a day later.

“We are very proud to have two new recruits from our continental development team, Kometa Cycling Team. We had Michel as a stagiaire last year and were convinced of his capacities, but we wanted to give him another year to develop further at the continental level and given his results and progression, that has been the right call. We believe he is ready to make the step to the WorldTour level now and we are looking forward to seeing him develop further within our ranks,” said Guercilena.

López, 22, joined Trek-Segafredo as a stagiaire August 1st after a successful season with Kometa Cycling Team where he gathered some promising top 10 GC results with his win in the Giro Ciclistico della Valle d’Aosta Mont Blanc. In his first race for Trek-Segafredo, the Larry H. Miller Tour of Utah, the young Spaniard finished third in the youth classification while riding in support of the team’s leaders.

“We had Juan Pedro on our radar since he joined Kometa, and after a series of very consistent results in the first half of the season, we wanted to give him the chance the prove himself as a stagiaire,”  explained Guercilena. “He successfully did so during the Tour of Utah, and we decided to offer him a two-year contract as well. Both are strong climbers who, we believe, in the long term can develop into GC contenders and we will give them all the support to do so.”

General Manager of Kometa Cycling Team, Francisco Javier Contador added: “In the specific case of Juan Pedro, what makes his story so great is that he’s a rider who has gone through all the sports categories of the Foundation,  Junior, U23 and Continental, and he had previously participated in the Selection Campus.

“He is the first rider selected on the Campus that arrives in the WorldTour. That a rider trained in our lower categories and makes this jump is something that makes all the members of this project feel very proud and happy.”