Morton confirmed for 2022 as EF unveils its roster
Morton confirmed for 2022 as EF unveils its roster
The EF Education-Nippo team – which is set to announce a new name soon as Nippo leaves the role of title sponsor – unveiled its 2022 roster on Thursday, and that roster includes a handful of names that, at least publicly, had not yet been confirmed for the squad for this season.
As it turns out, both Lachlan Morton and Alex Howes are both sticking with the team this year. The pair have been among the most active participants in the team’s “alternative racing” endeavors in recent years, but until this week, their status for the coming season had not yet been officially announced, although the team and CEO Jonathan Vaughters had hinted that Morton would be back.
Other headliners on the 31-rider roster include returning stars like Rigoberto Urán, Hugh Carthy, and Alberto Bettiol and new arrivals like Esteban Chaves, who is coming aboard from the BikeExchange team, and Mark Padun, who is joining EF from Bahrain Victorious.
“This has the potential to be the strongest roster we’ve ever had,” team CEO Jonathan Vaughters said in a press release. “It’s a dynamic, fun, interesting, and very high potential roster of riders. We changed one third of the team so that’s a pretty extreme turn over, but that’s been with some very specific intent in changing the way that we race and changing what we’re focused on.”
All told, there are 11 new riders on the roster for 2022.
Vaughters said that the team will take on some new challenges with its new roster this year.
“I’m most excited about the prospect of doing some stuff that we haven’t done before,” he said. “Chasing stage wins, we’ve done that. We’re quite good at it and we will continue to do it but when I say stuff we haven’t done before I mean go after King of the Mountains jerseys in a way that maybe we haven’t focused on in the past.”
The EF squad for 2022 is as follows:
Daniel Arroyave
Alberto Bettiol
Stefan Bissegger
Jonathan Caicedo
Diego Camargo
Simon Carr
Hugh Carthy
Esteban Chaves
Owain Doull
Odd Christian Eiking
Ruben Guerreiro
Ben Healy
Alex Howes
Jens Keukeleire
Merhawi Kudus
Sebastian Langeveld
Lachlan Morton
Hideto Nakane
Magnus Cort Nielsen
Mark Padun
Neilson Powless
Sean Quinn
Jonas Rutsch
Thomas Scully
James Shaw
Georg Steinhauser
Rigoberto Urán
Michael Valgren
Marijn van den Berg
Julius van den Berg
Łukasz Wiśniowski