Germany’s only professional continental team, team Stolting has said in announcement that this will be its last month as it plans to stop at the end of the season.
This will mean the end of an era as Stolting is Germany’s only remaining professional continental team.
For several years, Stolting had been ranked as a continental team and as at last year, it had announced its intention to move up he ranks by moving to the professional continentals. The team had planned to do this by sponsoring the cult energy team.
However, in December 2015, the team’s Danish sponsor had decided to pull out from both the team and the deal saying that the blame lies solely on Stolting as they had not fulfilled their end of the obligation. In response to this, the German team firmly denied the claims of their sponsors and went on to take over full sponsorship of the team.
The team this was majorly made up of Danish and German riders. Stolting had gone a long way and had in its harem, top names and highly ranked riders like Fabian Wegmann, Gerald Ciolek, and Linus Gerdman.
However, as the season progressed, the team began to encounter a major problem, in 2016 Stolting had very few wins and in the same period, the team’s search for a new co-sponsor was unsuccessful.
During the summer, the team had put out an announcement that it would drop back to the continental levels in the New Year, but in a sad twist of events, Christian Grosse, the team manager had said that this would be the last season for the team.
Another reason for this is that, a large number of the team members have already found new teams for the 2017 season. Two of which are moving to the world tour: Lennard Kamma to team Sunweb, and Mads Pederson to Trek Segafredo.