As it was reported in today’s edition of la Gazzetta dello Sport, Slovakian super-star Peter Sagan has reached an agreement with Tinkoff-Saxo to ride in the outfit of the Danish World Tour team after his current contract with Cannondale expires with the end of this year. It was also suggested that the title sponsor of his present squad will follow the move and replace Specialized as Tinkoff-Saxo’s bike suppliers.
As if by magic, all the apparently splitted threads suddenly started do entwine right after Italian Gazzetta dello Sport reported that Peter Sagan, currently riding for Cannondale, will join Tinkoff-Saxo for the next season.
There was a huge amount of speculations around future move of the extremely talented Slovak, as it was well known his contract with the Italian squad expires with the end of 2014 season. While Sagan was most recently linked with the new Fernando Alonso’s cycling team, to be established in 2015, and Astana, eventually claiming not to be ready to put rumored four million euro contract on a table, Oleg Tinkov was interested in buying the Cannondale team last October, before he eventually reached an agreement with Bjarne Riis.
“We were close," Tinkov told Cyclingnews of his talks with Cannondale in December.
"They're good people but the thing is that I wanted to own a team 100 percent but there I would have owned like 40 percent. I would like to be the boss, the owner of the team."
With budged of the Danish World Tour team significantly bolstered by Tinkov’s purchase last winter and Sagan’s agent being a former team mate of Riis from his times in CSC, the move reported by Gazzetta dello Sport seems probable.
It also turns out that the title sponsor of the Italian team, Cannondale, will very likely follow Sagan’s move and replace Specialized in Tinkoff-Saxo not only as bike supplier but possibly a second sponsor, bringing in its €6.5 million budget, what foreshadows a rather uncertain future for the former squad.
As the report was printed today, it remains to be seen how the eventual moves will affect the Cannondale team. There are suggestions that the WorldTour license currently owned by the Cannondale Bicycles company could be possibly bought by the combined forces of Robert Amadio, Fernando Alonso and Sojasun – its technical supplier.
There are eight riders having contracts with Cannondale for 2015: Moreno Moser, Elia Viviani, Alan Marangoni, Kristijan Koren and the neo-professionals Davide Villella, Davide Formolo, Alberto Bettiol and Matej Mohoric
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