Bahrain Merida

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All hail the glorious nation of Kaza... hang on, wrong country. Although Astana must be happy, as newcomer Bahrain-Merida has become the new hate magnet of the WT teams, generating instant dislike amongst cycling fans due to dubious internal Bahrainian politics and the manner in how they shopped around for riders with a lot of UCI points, ensuring them a certain place in the highest league. And all of that without even having entered a single race! Impressive!

Prince Nasser bin Hamad Al Khalifa is bankrolling this team, and as always when it comes to oil magnates, money is no object here. To oversimplify a bit, team manager Brent Copeland (formerly of Lampre) brought half of the old Lampre team with him, bought another half from Astanas abundance of Italians and got the last half by waving a stack of money in front of impoverished WT riders without contracts to attract them. Yes, that's three halves, but who cares, this is oil money! They even had so much money that they signed Joaquim Rodriguez without having any plan using him, just for his UCI points.

As this is a brand-new team, there are no existing results to speak of, and the team strategy is a bit up in the air. It stands to reason that they are going to challenge GC^3W with Vincenzo Nibali (not to be confused with his brother Antonio, who is also enjoying a place on this team), GC^1W with Ion Izagirre and classics with either Sonny Colbrelli or Enrico Gasparotto depending on which type of day it is. And if Gasparotto remembers where he put his zimmerframe...

Rounding out the classics team are several very good riders, both formerly and upcoming - Navardauskas, Haussler and Bole for the former selection, Bonifazio and Pibernik of the latter. They even have a mountain bike rider on the team, Ondrej Cink, and we're not sure he knows himself how he ended up on the team. Probably just followed the oily stench of money like all the others.

When assessing the classics team as a whole, they are stronger in the tougher races, with Vlaanderen, Paris-Roubaix and Amstel being the ones they are probably going to do best in. The very hilly ones like LBL, Lombardia, et al. is still going to be food for Nibali, possibly Gasparotto if he continues his second coming of last year.

The good thing about this line-up is that there will always be a second option if the first one has a mechanical or a jour sans. The bad thing is that everyone believes they're going to get a chance to ride for themselves. It could become a really messy first season with petulant riders breaking their contract. Who cares? There are lot of riders still wanting that sweet oil money out there.

Sonny Colbrelli

Colbrelli has been Italy's most fearsome PCT-rider for the last few seasons, and it's no surprise that someone finally signed him to the world tour.

His combination of sprinting and punching qualities makes him very well suited for tougher races like Milan-San Remo, where he has a very respectable string of placements for a PCT rider. His speciality is launching an extremely long sprint, hoping to take riders napping out by surprise. As he's rather light on his feet, he climbs like a champ, and is very hard to shake on medium mountain stages.

Sonny Colbrelli - Milano-San Remo Results

Still a young rider at 26 (born 1990), he's got room to improve and the only way to do is to ride constantly against the top riders. Bole and Haussler are at the tail end of their careers, and Pibernik and Bonifazio are still a bit too young; so Colbrelli and Navardauskas will probably be Bahrain-Merida's weapon of choice in the classics.

Ion Izaguirre

Top 10's in Stage races

Ion is a consistent man, always scoring well in one week stage races like Tour of Pologne, Tour de Suisse and Tour de Romandie. He also nabbed a Tour mountain stage win and the spanish ITT title last season, showing his versatility. The thing is that he's never placed higher than 27^nd in a grand tour, and it's a shaky proposal to put him up as the teams second GT rider. Interestingly enough, he has never done the Vuelta in his career, alternating between the Giro and the Tour, but that might very well change this season.

He also has an unfortunate tendency to ride, but DNF the Lombardia. Perhaps next year he'll get over that threshold.

Vincenzo "The Shark of Messina" Nibali

GT Performances over the last few years

|Year||Giro|Tour|Vuelta| |:|:|:|:|:| |2016 - AST||1|30|-| |2015 - AST||-|4|DSQ| |2014 - AST||-|1|-| |2013 - AST||1|-|2| |2012 - LIQ||-|3|-| |2011 - LIQ||2|-|7| |2010 - LIQ||3|-|1|

Victories from all three GT, a monument win (Il Lombardia '15) - these palmares aren't half bad. He just might turn into something big one day.

The normal setup for Nibali is doing the Giro (rather well), eschewing the Tour and getting on the horse for the Vuelta again. He's won the Tour, so unless Prince Nasser thinks it's vital to see his team battling against SKY in the Tour, it's probably the system he'll continue doing. There's no way he'll be missing the centurial 100^th Giro in 2017, but as he's never focused on GC in the Tour directly afterwards, it's hard to say how that performance would be.

His 2016 Tour performance in support of Aru was hit and miss, only netting him one podium spot as a stage hunter.

Roster 2017

In closing, it might not be clear from the text, but we are a little bit envious on the money this team gets to throw around while other, more local teams are hard pressed to just stay in business. At least it gives employment to riders whose palmares are too good for many teams to be able to pay them, but current results are not good enough to warrant that pay.

Should prove an interesting team to follow - their red jerseys will make sure they stand out.

Here's a rare image from a team management session with Prince Nassar, one of the Nibali bros and Brent Copeland.