Lars Seier Christensen, Saxo Bank co-founder and longtime co-CEO, who has set up a new venture capital firm Seier Capital, is about to unveil a new project with Bjarne Riis, a former manager of the Tinkoff-Saxo team and 1996 Tour de France winner.
In a blog post, Mr Christensen states that he and Riis have been planning to do something together after Saxo Bank announced the end of its long-term sponsorship of the Tinkoff-Saxo professional cycling team. Mr Christensen notes, however, that the project has to do with himself and Riis, not the bank.
The details about the project will be revealed on Thursday (February 25th) at a special press conference, but Mr Christensen has shed some light on what the new endeavor will be (and will not be) about.
- The project has at least something to do with cycling.
- Riis and Christensen have not bought back the old team.
- It is a broader project in order to create a stronger economic foundation than that normally associated with a cycling team. For that matter, Mr Christensen makes a remark about a perpetual problem in sports being “the tendency for all income eventually to feed through to players’ (or riders’, as it may be) salaries. A sponsor wants to see his money go to a strengthened squad, not to beef up the team owner’s bottom line.”
The blog post from Lars Seier Christensen on the Riis*Seier project can be viewed by clicking here.