Retired Classics specialist racer Andrei Tchmil has put himself forward as a candidate for the post of CEO of the Lotto Soudal team.
Tchmil, 59, broke the news in an interview with Het Laatste Nieuws, saying simply “I want to come to Belgium and I want to be the manager of the Lotto cycling team. I am ready for that.”
The post of Lotto Soudal CEO is due to fall vacant on January 1st 2023 when current CEO John Lelangue leaves. The longstanding Belgian team is also set to be relegated from the WorldTour at the end of this year.
Tchmil raced for Lotto from 1994 to 2002, during which time he took wins in Milan-Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.
Apart from holding Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan passports, according to HLN, Tchmil also gained Belgian nationality in 1998.
Tchmil said in the newspaper he did not understand how it was possible that Lotto Soudal could have been relegated from the WorldTour when there were “so many good riders in Belgium. Not all of them are called Remco Evenepoel or Wout van Aert.”
So far no candidates barring Axel Merckx have emerged for the post of Lotto Soudal CEO. Recently retired Lotto Soudal rider Philippe Gilbert said recently that he was not interested in the post as he lacked experience in management positions. Earlier this week the team confirmed that another former Lotto-Soudal rider, Kurt Van de Wouwer, would take on the new role of sports manager.
However, Tchmil says he is ready to take on the CEO job, and that there are certain parallels between its current predicament and when he joined the team in 1994.
“The team was completely at the bottom,” Tchmil said to Het Laatste Nieuws, “when I left it was one of the big teams in the peloton.”
Tchmil claimed that the team “deserved much better” than its recent management and added that the team “has lost her soul in recent years. I want to return that soul, and I want to come to Belgium for that. I am a patriot. I have someone who can run the bicycle factory in my place.”
Born in Khabarovsk near China, but raised in Odesa in Ukraine, Tchmil was a member of the fabled Alfa Lum team which was the first Soviet Union team to race professionally in Western Europe in the late 1980s. Tchmil's hardbitten attitude to the sport, which saw him win three Monuments and countless lesser races, earned him a description from the now-defunct magazine ProCycling as "one of the toughest riders that ever lived."
His most famous victory came in the 1994 Paris-Roubaix, attacking 60 kilometres from the finish in a snowstorm not so much because he thought he could win but because, as he told ProCycling, "I wanted to annoy Johan Museeuw;" the Belgian Classics star of the time. Before Lotto, he also raced briefly for Evenepoel's current director, Patrick Lefevere at the GB-MG squad.
His post-racing career has been a colourful one, including a spell as the Minister of Sports in Moldova and team manager of the Katusha cycling team for three years, from 2009-11. He later set up a small bike factory in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, where he lives part of the year, but appears ready to take on a bigger role in professional cycling again.
