The Itera-Katusha continental team will fold in 2016 as the Russian Global Cycling Project will be reduced to include just Team Katusha in the WorldTour and Gazprom-Rusvelo in the Professional Continental ranks.
Itera-Katusha made their debut in 2010 as a further step in the development of the Russian Global Cycling Project which is led by Igor Makarov. However, a lack of funding now means the end for the team as the project will focus all efforts on Gazprom-RusVelo. Piotr Ugrumov has been sports director in recent years.
Seven riders from the 2016 Katusha team came from the continental team: Sergey Chernetsky, Pavel Kochetkov, Viacheslav Kuznetsov, Anton Vorobyev, Ilnur Zakarin, Alexei Tsatsevich and Alexander Porsev. Matvey Mamykin, third in the 2015 Tour de l'Avenir, is the latest recruitment from the team for the 2016 season. Other riders like Alexander Rybakov, Petr Ignatenko and Timofey Kritskiy have not been retained. Other riders went to Rusvelo, including Sergey Firsanov, Eldar Arslanov, Igor Boev, Alexander Foliforov, Roman Maikin, Andrey Solomennikov and Sergey Nikolaev.
The continental team had its best year in 2011 with 26 wins and a 10th place in the UCI Europe Tour as the best Continental team. In 2012, they were fifth. Chernetsky, Kochetkov, Kuznetsov, Vorobyev who was U23 time trial world champion that year, and Zakarin, one of the revelations of this season, were part of that squad and those five later joined Katusha like Tsatevich and Porsev had already done.
However, it is now over for the Russian team after last week's announcement that young riders Ivan Lukonin and Andrey Lutsenko, both 20 years old, had been given one-year suspensions by the Russian Anti-Doping Agency Rusada for unspecificied anti-doping rule infringements.
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