Markel Beloki is the latest teenager to step up to WorldTour level with a move to EF Education EasyPost at just 18 after a stellar season that saw him become the Spanish junior National Time Trial Champion.
He is the son of legendary Basque rider Joseba Beloki, who on three occasions podiumed the Tour de France in the early 2000s behind Lance Armstrong before his infamous crash in the 2003 race that affected his career until its premature end in 2007.
Markel Beloki dreams of similar success in cycling’s biggest three-week races, but acknowledges how young he is to be stepping up to the sport’s top division of racing and how much he has but wants to learn.
“My objective right now is to improve,” Beloki said in a press release. “I know that I am young, really young to be in the WorldTour, but I will have time in this team to improve little by little. I will go in every day to improve my level and work for the team.
“We need to have bad moments to improve, they make the better moments better.”
Beloki is the latest young rider to skip the U23 category of racing to join the elite pros which has been successful for some in recent years with Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) and Josh Tarling (Ineos Grenadiers) perhaps the best examples, and the US team were confident in the young Basque rider thanks to his superiority on the Spanish junior racing circuit.
“Markel [Beloki] has proven to be the dominant junior in Spanish racing,” said EF Education-EasyPost CEO Jonathan Vaughters. “He has set all-time records on climbs across the Basque Country, bettering many riders who have gone on to do some pretty incredible things in grand tours. And he is a big, strong kid, not a tiny little climber.
“He has clearly inherited everything that his father had in his racing days and, and maybe even more. He is an excellent bike handler, who knows how to read races.”
Vaughters similarly addressed the challenge of throwing a teenager into the deep end of WorldTour competition but is excited at the young Beloki’s future.
“The challenge for us is just going to be making sure that we nurture him carefully,” he said. “This will be the first time we have ever taken a junior directly into the WorldTour ranks. We believe that Markel has an incredible future in front of him.”
Beloki is the next young talent to sign for the team for 2024. They have already acquired Jack Rootkin-Gray (aged 20), Archie Ryan (21), Darren Rafferty (20), Lukas Nerurkar (19), Jardi Christian van der Lee (22) and Harry Sweeny (25) for the upcoming campaign.
