For British fans in particular, it may have been spotted that one of the teams flying the GB flag hasn’t actually raced so far this season. Hess Cycling transferred from a Luxembourg licence to a British one ready for the start of 2024, and with it came a lot of talk about ambitions to become a Women’s WorldTour team and Tour de France Femmes winners. Lofty goals that seem to be on very shaky ground after an off-season with missed payments, cancelled kit deals and now, riders beginning to leave. It’s all starting to turn into a distinctly Zaaf Cycling-sounding set of events. ProCyclingUK has been working with Velo-Club’s Charles Marsault to establish some of the information below.
The signs something might be amiss about Hess Cycling started around the turn of the year when some of its new signings were due to race in Australia. Hess themselves weren’t due to race any of the Australian races but as a new signing from Team dsm-firmenich PostNL (as the team was known in 2024), Maeve Plouffe certainly was going to be racing at the Australian national championships. In theory, the first chance to race in her new team colours. At the time, an Instagram story by Plouffe suggested that the new 2025 Hess Cycling kit would be delivered to her European base rather than Australia because of costs. Unusual but plausible enough sounding.
Photo Credit: Toby Watson - @tobyphotoswatsonHowever, more and more riders were posting their usual Instagram work, and it was starting to become clear that all of the new 2025 signings weren’t training in Hess Cycling kit. The likes of Estonian pair Elisabeth Ebras and Laura Lizette Sander were often either in unbranded kits or their Estonian national kit instead. Plouffe continues to wear logoless kit from the Australian company Attaquer. The only new signing that I have seen in any Hess Cycling kit is Esther Wong, who won the Irish national cyclocross championships in early January while wearing a 2024 version of the Hess Cycling team kit. She then raced the rest of the cyclocross season in a generic Ireland jersey, with no Hess Cycling branding, to reflect her status as the national champion.
Photo Credit: Chris AuldMissed and Late Payments
The lack of a 2025 kit raised early alarm bells that something wasn’t going as expected. A delay isn’t unheard of, and famously, the likes of EF Education love waiting as long as possible into January before unveiling their new designs. But as the time moved on, it became more likely that something else was amiss. Cuore was the team’s 2024 kit supplier, and in early February 2025, they confirmed that ‘[Hess] have moved on and we are not providing the 2025 jerseys due to various reasons.’ A former staff member elaborated that this was because Cuore hadn’t been paid. With that in mind, having not received payment, it explains the delay for the 2025 kit and the breakdown in that relationship. The team announced a new partnership with the kit supplier Jakroo on February 18th 2025, and shared a new jersey design for the 2025 season on March 3rd on Instagram. No riders have been seen in this jersey in races or training so far.
The next group that Hess didn’t make payments to initially was staff and riders, based on email evidence + the responses of various contacts. According to a member of the team, Hess Cycling had a history of pushing the boundaries of late salary payments but always came through with the money until the final month of the year. A bigger issue was the reimbursements made to riders paying for their travel, which were often made very late. This reached a head when riders said they didn’t want to pay for travel on those terms, for fear of not getting reimbursed.
The initial delay of salaries dragged on so much that it ended up including both the December-only wages for outgoing 2024 staff and riders (December salary), plus the December + January salaries for the 2025 staff and riders, according to an email seen by ProCyclingUK sent to team members in early February. The payment missed the promised Tuesday (4th February 2025) deadline as promised in the email above, but it is our understanding the delayed payment was eventually made to all parties by Saturday, 8th February 2025.
Potentially linked to this inability to make payments at the start of the year were the previously reported legal proceedings involving team owner Rolf Hess. Hess is currently under investigation in Spain amid allegations of fraud related to his company, United Global Water Holdings Limited (UGW). Investors claim Hess secured nearly one million euros by promising substantial returns linked to UGW’s repeatedly delayed IPO, which has yet to occur. Hess has publicly denied any wrongdoing, attributing IPO delays to challenging conditions in London’s financial markets. In a statement from the team in response to that article, they maintained that these legal matters are separate and will not affect its operations. The full response is in the original article.
2025 UCI Registration issues, delays and lack of registration
Most UCI Continental teams are in place by January 1st of each year. The UCI begins to update its website a few days later and the list of Continental teams gradually fleshes out. So a team not being officially listed by mid-January isn’t a massive red flag, depending on when its first races of the season are. As time ticked by and, in theory, the start to the 2025 season planned by Hess Cycling at Omloop van het Hageland on 2nd March 2025 got closer, there was still no sign of registration. So what was going on?
Discussions had been taking place behind the scenes as the unpaid monies were reported to the UCI. The email below was sent by Julien Chovelon – the UCI’s Road Manager in charge of Riders & Teams to Hess Cycling to establish if the unpaid 2024 riders had received their final salary payments and that without proof of that being undue, the UCI wouldn’t register the team. The email ultimately helped to get the payments through to those affected in Early February 2025 and remove one obstacle to the team getting its UCI registration for the 2025 season.
Just over a month later, the team is still not registered as a UCI Continental team. Now technically, a team can take place in certain races as a club team depending on the race level, but there has been no sign of that happening so far. There’s also no sign of Hess Cycling on the Continental teams list yet, either. We’ve struggled to establish definitive proof of this, but one source speculated when talking with ProCyclingUK that there are issues with the team’s ability to pay the bank guarantee that must be made to the UCI. This guarantee covers a percentage of the total wage bill of the team, which in theory at least, is designed to provide a small safety net for riders in the case of a team folding mid-season. Riders from the former Zaaf Cycling team know that is unlikely to work as expected, with them reporting 2 years after the demise of that team that they had still not received any monies from the guarantee funds.
Delayed start to 2025 season
With no UCI registration, no jersey, no team cars and a host of other factors, Hess Cycling hasn’t taken part in any races this season. Where riders have taken part in races, it has been like Maeve Plouffe racing for an Australian national team or in the sponsorless kit in the national criterium championships and Natalie Quinn racing in the Vuelta Extremadura for an American national team as well.
2025 Race Plans
Originally, the team was due to start the Omloop van het Hageland on 2nd March 2025. They were quietly dropped from the startlist late on when it became clear they weren’t able to race – the race organiser responded about their withdrawal with ‘Hess Cycling Team will not start at FENIX Omloop van het Hageland. They decided themselves to withdraw for our race.’
The Hess Cycling team then responded to Charles Marsault’s request to when their next race would be and was given the answer of March 12th (GP Oetingen). That confirmed that they would miss the 2025 edition of Le Samyn des Dames, for which they were showing on a list of teams due to race on 4th March as well.
Naturally, the 12th March came and went with no Hess Cycling on the start line for the GP Oetingen. A further request after GP Oetingen was made, and the answer from Janine Hess of the team was: ‘Our first race will be the Midwest Classic in Belgium on March 23rd. We will be on the UCI website prior to that.’
Riders begin leaving Hess Cycling
That initially felt like another deadline which could be promised and then missed, with just enough to keep the team together and active in the 2 weeks until that race. However, that quickly changed Thursday morning when Estonian rider Laura Lizette Sander announced her signing with Team Coop-Repsol for the 2025 and 2026 seasons. She wasn’t alone either; later on Thursday, Esther Wong announced she would be riding for Torelli this season. The British (formerly Irish-registered) team, which isn’t registered at Continental level for 2025, was more than happy to take on one of the strongest riders from the British Isles coming through at the moment. That team is set to race the Midwest Classic on 23rd March as it happens. As we saw with the Zaaf Cycling team when it folded, once riders begin to leave, a trickle can quickly become a torrent, with another team manager suggesting they are finished this morning.
It is understood that the UCI is preparing to make a statement on the situation soon. This may clear up what is actually going to happen with the UCI registration of the Hess Cycling team for the 2025 season and the fate of the remaining riders and staff affected.
