Addy Engels left Visma after 10 years for Tudor: “I was starting to go on autopilot”

Tudor didn’t miss a beat at the start of the season. As of mid-March, it ranks fourteenth in the WorldTour standings, the highest of all Pro Continental teams. The team achieved this by, among other things, placing two riders—Luca Mozzato and Matteo Trentin—on the podium at Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne and securing top-ten finishes in the Tour Down Under (Marco Brenner) and, more recently, Paris-Nice with Mathys Rondel.

And then they also had their share of bad luck, with new signing Stefan Küng suffering a broken femur and Rick Pluimers crashing on the Molenberg in the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. Sprinter Arvid de Kleijn has also not yet seen any action this year.

Tudor isn’t just doing well in the foreground: by securing riders like Pluimers and Rondel on long-term contracts, they’re also making solid moves behind the scenes. The team’s professional approach was the reason Engels decided to make the move from Visma | Lease a Bike.

Engels joined the Dutch team in 2014, when the squad was still known as LottoNL-Jumbo. Over the years he played a role in the team’s transformation into one of the dominant forces in professional cycling. Grand Tour victories, Monument wins and numerous stage successes followed, with riders such as Jonas Vingegaard, Primož Roglič and Wout van Aert becoming some of the sport’s biggest names.

Despite that success, Engels felt the need for something different after ten years. “I had a fantastic time with the team and experienced incredible things,” he explained. “But after a decade you notice that certain processes start to become routine. I felt I was starting to go a bit on automatic pilot.”

“My role is once again more focused on the sporting side of things, whereas at Visma I was more in the background,” he continues. “I was certainly involved in races and sporting matters, but I also handled a lot of logistical tasks. Now I’m stepping back into the spotlight on the sporting side, with a diverse program. I won’t be doing the Flemish races: they’re wonderful to watch, but even as a rider I never raced there,” says the former Quick Step and Rabobank rider.

‘Not that it was bad: I’d been with Visma for ten years. And over the last two years, I noticed things were starting to run a bit on autopilot. I enjoyed it immensely, I had a great time,’ Engels explains. ‘But I felt that I could still take the plunge and try something new. Ultimately, that was the deciding factor.’

After a few months, he realizes he made the right choice. “It’s in the little things. You meet a lot of new people, and that gives you a fresh burst of energy in a way. I did race once with Rick Pluimers for Visma’s development team, but other than that, they’re all new faces.”

‘You know most of them, but then again, you don’t,’ says Engels, who has, of course, been around the block for a long time. ‘I already feel quite at home; the chemistry is good, and I’m happy to be at Tudor. Hopefully, I can work for this team for a long time to come, because I foresee a very bright future.’

‘We have good riders, but we can certainly still grow in terms of depth,’ he explains. ‘That’s the most important thing, especially given our ambition to enter the WorldTour with the cycle that has now begun anew. At the same time, it was very good that the decision was made to lay a foundation first: Fabian Cancellara and the team did that very well.’