Jayco AlUla and Liv-AlUla-Jayco team owner Gerry Ryan was at the Giro d’Italia for the last week of the race, as he and team manager Brent Copeland plan for the long-term future. The team restructured their performance staff in a sudden shake-up, with their Director of High Performance and Racing Matt White stepping aside.
Speaking exclusively to Cyclingnews, Ryan said he had decided it was time for change.
The men’s WorldTour team won two stages at the Giro d’Italia with Luke Plapp and then Chris Harper on stage 20 thanks to his attack over the Colle delle Finestre on Saturday.
However, the men’s team have only won three WorldTour races this season: Mauro Schmid won the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, Letizia Paternoster wore the leader’s jersey for a day at the Vuelta España Femenina for a day and Silke Smulders was second at the Tour Down Under. The Liv-AlUla-Jayco women’s WorldTour team has still to win a race this season.
“Matt White left a mark on the team but if you keep doing the same thing, you get the same result,” Ryan told Cyclingnews, with respect and affection for White but with a desire for change.
“We’re doing a restructure. We sat down with Matt and saw where he wanted to be. Out of it came a decision by mutual agreement to move on.”
Ryan seems committed to sponsoring the men’s and women’s teams for the next three-year WorldTour cycle but knows they need to adapt and move faster to compete against the bigger budget super teams on both the men’s and women’s peloton.
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“When I first started in 2012 it was a different game. Now it’s not just about the riders and the coaches, there’s all the sports science too. You’ve got to keep improving,” he said.
“You may think you’re getting better but so is the opposition. We want to follow a more structured process and have accountability. We’re trying to move forward and compete with the biggest teams. We’ve got to be faster to beat them, we’re going to be faster at reacting.
“It’s not about the dollars but how we do things. We’ve got to get the best out of everyone because we can’t afford to have waste. I’m involved in a lot of organizations, from sports to business and the bigger you get, the seepage and the waste happens. We can’t afford that.”
Ryan has decided to act now to strengthen the team’s performance structure.
“We weren’t expecting this to happen. So we’re in the process of searching for new people. The problem is, that if you wait till the end of the season, it’s too late,” he said.
“We’ve already brought a few new people in. We’ll update the process and then fit the people who are best for that process and to make it happen.”
Ryan and Jayco AlUla are hoping Ben O’Connor can do well in next week’s Critérium du Dauphiné and of course at the subsequent Tour de France. Liv-AlUla-Jayco will target the Tour of Britain Women, the Giro d’Italia Women in July and then the Tour de France Femmes.
“The season is certainly not over. We’ve got to look and see where we can get the opportunities to win some more races and get some more UCI ranking points,” Ryan said.
“We can’t say we’ll have a better year next year. Why can’t we do it the next race or the next Grand Tour?”
