Irish road race champion, Rory Townsend, will work closely with German sprint legend Marcel Kittel in his new role next season. Kittel had been hired by Townsend's new team, Unibet Rose Rockets, to whip its sprint line-up into shape.
Townsend will be part of that set-up, along with six-time Tour de France stage winner Dylan Groenewegen. And Kittel has been given the role of coaching the new fast men in the team, alongside a wider brief with the ProContinental squad.
His appointment is a coup for the ProConti team and comes at a time of increasing specialisation in coaching roles in pro cycling.
Kittel famously opted out of pro cycling midway through the 2019 season, saying he had had enough of the sport as the sacrifices required to stay at the top came at the expense of "qaulity of life". Though he hung up his wheels early, aged 30 years, he had already won 89 races, including 14 stages at the Tour de France.
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"I'm going to make a sort of comeback next year with Unibet Rose Rockets. I'll be working there as a sprint expert and will be part of the team,” Kittel told Dutch media outlet NOS.
"The focus is on the sprints, of course. But also on coaching the entire team and building a top-level sports structure. We definitely need to raise it two more levels, towards the WorldTour. That's very clearly the ambition.”
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His new role comes at a time when Unibet Rose Rockets, now registered in France, is a team very much on the up and hotly tipped for a wildcard invite to next year's Tour de France. The team's signing of Groenewegen, and riders like Wout Poels and Victor Lafay, are all an indication of its growing status in the sport.
Townsend has signed for the team, for 2026 and 2027, after two years with Q36.5 Pro Cycling and after taking the biggest victory of his career, at German one-day World Tour race ADAC Cyclassics, in August.
He was in a breakaway for 187km and, though he was almost caught on the line, Townsend had the legs for a final sprint to hold off the remains of the main bunch and take a fairytale victory.
The 30-year-old, who represented Ireland at the Worlds in Kigali in September, this year also claimed his second Irish road race crown in Co Meath. He won the gallop in June from the select group that rode away from the opposition over 168km.
This year Townsend was also in the breakaway, for 175km, at Tour of Flanders and was up the road in the main breakaway of the day for 142km at Paris-Roubaix.
Though he almost quit his pursuit of a pro contract in 2022, weeks later he won the road race title at the Irish championships for the first time. He was then offered his first ProContinental contract, with Kiwi team Bolton Equities Black Spoke, before moving on to Q35.5 Pro Cycling for the past two years.
