Team Giant-Alpecin heads to this year’s third and final Grand Tour of the year following successful campaigns at both the Giro d'Italia and this summer's Tour de France. The main focus for the team will be on day success in the sprint stages. Alongside the sprints the team remains focused on the general development process of our riders.
This year’s Vuelta presents opportunities for different riders to battle for stage wins, over a parcours that features nine summit finishes as the Vuelta celebrates its 70th edition. The race once again gets underway with a team time trial before heading straight into the first uphill finish on day two. The first week continues with both sprint and attacking opportunities as well as a mountain top finish on stage seven.
John Degenkolb (GER) returns to the race having won the green jersey of points leader in 2014 and will be looking to make the most of the sprint opportunities over the three weeks. Team Giant-Alpecin has a strong line-up to support Degenkolb in this, but one that is versatile enough to challenge across other fronts. Degenkolb will be joined by Tom Dumoulin (NED) who will have an eye on the race's individual time trial on stage 17 as well as the puncheur-stye finishes, together with Lawson Craddock (USA) who showed his progress once again at the Tour of Poland by taking third on the toughest stage of the race.
"Our main goal is to go for stage success with John, as we targeted at the Tour," explained coach Christian Guiberteau (FRA). "With Koen [de Kort], Luka [Mezgec], Zico [Waeytens] and Tom [Dumoulin] we have a strong lead-out for John. With Lawson we are working towards the longer-term development, and will not target specific GC ambitions but rather we aim to help him learn how to behave as GC rider.
"We have shown at the Giro and Tour that we are ready to take any opportunities as they come and on the in-between stages we will look to profit from the breakaway opportunities. In addition we have Tom D here who will look to target the TT along with the classics style stages."