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Trek-Segafredo 2023 Roster Preview

Balsamo Cordon-Ragot Longo Borghini

2022 Season Summary

Trek Segafredo made a statement of intent in 2022 by signing the newly crowned World Champion Elisa Balsamo. The Italian delivered in a big way with 9 wins and being the equal of Elisa Longo Borghini. The pair of Italians scored 15 victories between them and paired up nicely as their goals rarely overlapped. Balsamo win in De Panne was one of the very few sprint losses that Lorena Wiebes took in all of 2022. We saw the more all-rounder qualities though in being able to win at Trofeo Alfredo Binda and Gent Wevelgem too.

For Longo Borghini, the highlight of the year was winning Paris Roubaix Femmes for sure. Also thrown in there is the GC win at the Women’s Tour. Seemingly done and dusted on the final day with only a final sprint in Oxford to come. Longo Borghini managed to finish 3rd, taking enough bonus seconds to snatch the GC lead from Grace Brown by 1 second.

Ellen van Dijk and Audrey Cordon-Ragot used their experience to chip in with a big chunk of wins too. It was 9 for Van Dijk and 4 for Cordon-Ragot as the Dutch rider won all but 1 time trial she entered in 2022. Cordon-Ragot took a memorable win in the final Vårgårda WestSweden as whilst standing around the podium, Marianne Vos received a disqualification, promoting the popular French rider to the top spot. The emergence of Shirin van Anrooij helps ensure Trek Segafredo is futureproofed somewhat as their older riders creep closer to retirement.

2022 World Ranking: 2nd
2022 WorldTour Ranking: 2nd

2023 Transfers In

2023 Transfers Out

Star Riders

Riders to Watch in 2023

Elisa Longo Borghini continues to impress year after year. There was a point last season I thought she hadn’t had a good classics campaign but that was blown out of the water by the Roubaix win. The Italian can pretty much win any race at any time, so no matter what the formbook says, she’s always going to be a threat. It’s getting to be a similar story with Elisa Balsamo too, except for maybe the high mountains she is a favourite in almost any race she enters.

Shirin van Anrooij looks to have moved up a level in cyclocross this off-season and surely that is going to be reflected on the road too. She took results pretty much everywhere, including climbing well at the Tour de France Femmes and Vuelta a Burgos I fully expect the first WWT victory by the Dutch rider to be earned this season. Gaia Realini is another young rider who is going to be interesting to watch. She’ll be thrown out of her comfort zone a bit more and we’ll see her racing outside of Italy more often.

Amanda Spratt already looks fired up to have a great 2023 season. If she could win a sprint-a-deux, Spratt would already have a pair of WWT wins to her name this season. Those near misses will surely set her on the path to more strong results. There’s also the wildcard of Lizzie Deignan from May onwards. The last time she came back to racing after giving birth was in 2019 and she won the Women’s Tour GC something like 8 weeks after her first race back at Amstel Gold. She says this pregnancy was harder so she may not be ready to achieve the same things but everything is possible for the Brit.

Transfer Thoughts

After a quiet 2022 transfer season, Trek-Segafredo went out and refreshed their line-up for 2023. Determined to beat SD Worx to top spot in the rankings, they went out and claimed GC riders like Amanda Spratt, Lisa Klein and Gaia Realini (not necessarily the same race-type of GC riders!), a strong classics and one-day rider in Brodie Chapman and Ilaria Sanguineti to boost the sprint train and provide sprint wins when Balsamo isn’t racing. The signing of Spratt in particular has the potential to be a big game-changer. After recovering from iliac artery endofibrosis surgery last year, she already looks back to close to her best at the start of 2023.

Gaia Realini is a pure climber and has plenty of time to develop into a serious GC option. Finishes of 11th and 13th on a very small team at the Giro Donne are encouraging. With the support of the Trek team, you’d think that would push her up a few places in GC without too much extra effort. I like the signing of Ilaria Sanguineti as well, it’s a return to the linkage between her and Balsamo that we saw at Valcar 2 years ago. The pair will work well together and maybe allow Elisa Balsamo to challenge Wiebes more frequently.

Lisa Klein didn’t have a particularly impressive 2022 on the road and the time was definitely right to move on from Canyon SRAM. She’s still relatively young at 26 years old and once upon a time, she was very much a Van Dijk-style rider. Finally, there’s Brodie Chapman whose disappointment at not being picked for the Tour de France Femmes led her to look for a move away from FDJ-Suez this year. It felt like a career year last season, with results coming in bigger and better races than ever before. We’ve already seen what she can do for Trek with her new Aussie national champion jersey. A proper all-rounder, there’s still more to come.

2023 Full Roster