When RCS Sport announced the list of wild cards for the 2016 Giro d'Italia, there was a surprise with the presence of Gazprom-RusVelo. The Russian Pro Continental team's manager admitted he was suprised too. He sent an application mainly to please their Italian sponsors

"We sent in our dossier to the organisers but to be honest we weren’t at all sure of our chances because there were lots of strong Italian teams out there," Renat Khamidulin told Cyclingnews. "Our service course is in Italy and all of our technical sponsors are Italian, like Colnago, Nalini and Campagnolo, so for that reason I was hopeful. The link to so many big Italian sponsors was an advantage for us and would have been significant for RCS too. But we want to show with our results in this race that it was right to invite us."

Nippo-Vini Fantini, Colnago-Bardiani and Southeast Venezuela are the three other teams to receive a wild card for the next edition of the Giro d'Italia. 

"Gazprom’s sponsorship is very significant for the whole of cycling, because in cycling there’s no other sponsor as powerful as this: Gazprom is the 17th biggest company in the world, with more than 300,000 employees. We all know there’s a lack of money in cycling, there are always sponsors leaving, so I’m very happy that we’ve brought such an important sponsor into cycling", Khamidulin added. 

Among the leaders are Sergey Firsanov, Artem Ovechkin, who won the Russian ITT title last year, and Ivan Savitsky, the only rider who won a Hors-Catégorie rated race last year at the Tour of Qinghai Lake. "We have a lot of young riders but some experienced guys too. We’ve got Sergi Firsanov, for instance, who was second at Tre Valli Varesine behind Nibali last year. He can be competitive on some of the tougher stages. Then we’ve got a rider like Artem Ovechkin, who is the national time trial champion, and a lot of passisti, who will be capable of going in breakaways. The one thing I can guarantee right now is that we’re really going to battle very hard to make it into breakaways and to animate the race on every stage."

But the question is if there is a conflict of interests. Gazprom-RusVelo is a part of the Russian Global Cycling Project, managed by Igor Makarov and inlcuding Katusha. "No, our team is absolutely independent of Katusha. We ride for ourselves and we’re looking to get results for ourselves. Things like that should never happen in cycling and the UCI does a lot of work to prevent it from happening. We’d never ride in the service of another team."