When sprinter Dylan Groenewegen sees the new Unibet Rose Rockets cycling shirt for the first time, he blinks for a moment. The shirt is blue, the sleeves are bright purple-pink striped. “It really stands out,” is the first thing he says in one video of the team. “It’s, uh, hip.”
With six-time Tour stage winner Groenewegen (32), the team underlines its great ambitions. From the moment youtubers Bas Tietema, Devin van der Wiel and Josse Wester started the team in 2023, then under the name ‘Tour de Tietema-Unibet’, they have dreamed aloud of participating in the Tour de France. For a while it seemed like it would happen this year, but at the end of January Tour organizer ASO decided to hand out the two available wild cards to other teams.
Despite this setback, the rise of the ‘Tietema team’ (the name of the founder has now disappeared from the team name) is going very fast. After one year at the third professional level, he moved to the ProTour, just below the WorldTour with teams such as Visma-Lease a Bike and UAE Emirates. The organization grew from a club of thirty riders and staff members to now a hundred employees, including a large media team – because they still make YouTube videos.
Now the Rockets, as the team has called itself for two years, is at the start of its fullest spring program so far. The classics season starts on Saturday with the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, after which the team will appear for the first time in the monuments of the Tour of Flanders and Milan-San Remo. The first participation in a major tour will follow in May: the Giro d’Italia.
But the rapid development is also accompanied by growing pains, from material shortages to over-staffing. How do staff and riders deal with this?
Pizzas in Paris
In mid-January, 31-year-old Bas Tietema orders coffee and breakfast in a café in his hometown of Zwolle. The day before he flew back from the training camp in l’Alfas del Pi, on the Spanish Costa Blanca. At the end of the week he will return for the first preparation races for the new season.
It says a lot about his position as owner and face of the team: Tietema not only has to lead a growing organization, but also has to go to many matches to be visible in the videos.
Bas Tietema in December 2024, when participating in an amateur competition in Diegem, Belgium.
Photo David Pintens/ANP
In the summer of 2019, the then 24-year-old Tietema drove to France in a van with contemporaries Van der Wiel and Wester to make fun videos about the Tour de France. It was a success: teams enjoyed working on something more light-hearted than just serious questions from journalists, and fans quickly found Tietema’s YouTube channel. The handing out of pizzas after the final sprint on the Champs-Élysées was particularly popular. In the following years, Tietema and his crew returned to France for new films, and the pizzas in Paris became a tradition.
Tietema was just about to announce on TV that he was going to start a professional team when presenter Dione de Graaff cut him off from going to the rebus
While his YouTube channel only had about ten thousand followers, Tietema already expressed his desire to set up his own cycling team. The three men tied the knot in 2022. “In cycling you are usually a fan of a rider and not necessarily of the story or a team.” So: why not try that once, with a cycling team at the lowest level?
On July 18 of that year, Tietema joined the NOS talk program The Evening Stage. He was allowed to talk about YouTube during the Tour, but had also prepared an announcement about the professional team that was being formed. Things turned out differently. Tietema started his sentence, but presenter Dione de Graaff cut him off to go to the rebus, a regular part of the program.
In retrospect, setting up the team in such a short time was perhaps “one of the biggest bizarre pieces” in the company’s young history, Tietema thinks. “The outside world underestimates how much is involved in running a cycling team. Even at a lower level. You need equipment, staff, riders. With the three of us, three bicycles and a car were enough. Everyone said: ‘You are taking on a lot of trouble.'”
Nevertheless, Tour de Tietema traveled to Alicante, Spain, in January 2023 with twelve riders for a first training camp.
Scorn from the peloton
Three years later, Tomas Kopecky (25) can “hardly imagine” at a press day during the January training camp in Spain what it was like in the first year. Many people were “looking for a new position,” he says in a video call. As a rider, he still had to arrange a lot himself regarding his nutrition and training. “Now there are many more people in favor of that.”
The Czech who grew up in the Netherlands also had to get used to the reactions of the outside world. By shouting so loudly that they wanted to progress to the Tour, all the team’s achievements were under a magnifying glass. “As riders we saw the potential of the project. But the rest of the cycling world thought: ‘what the fuck are you guys doing?’.” He remembers how teammates once took the attack and were laughed at in the peloton. “You heard mockingly: ‘It will be a nice video again’.”
Kopecky himself is one of four remaining riders from the very beginning. “I always believed I had the talent to grow to this level, but you also need an opportunity,” he says. “Since this year, I have also been more active in deciding which role I will take within the team.” Kopecky focuses on the ‘lead-out’: properly pushing off the leader in the final phase of the race.
The competition at Rockets is fierce. In addition to Groenewegen, Tour stage winners Wout Poels (38) and Victor Lafay (30) are also under contract this year, while larger teams would have been happy to sign classic specialist Lukas Kubis (26), who were recruited last year, after good performances in, among others, the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. The Slovakian decided to stay despite the interest.
Paris-Roubaix, April 2025: in blue-purple Tomas Kopecky of (then) Unibet Tietema Rockets on the cobblestones.
Photo Luc Claessen / Getty Images
Journalists queue up in front of Groenewegen on press day. According to him, things are not very different from the WorldTour teams he rode for, Jumbo-Visma and Jayco AlUla. “In the end you have a bicycle, you go to a training camp, you get to eat and you get a massage,” he says via video connection. But what does differ is “the media approach”. The cameras are often on, the size of the media team is larger than most, if not all, WorldTour teams.
Groenewegen already met Tietema and co in 2019, when the YouTubers during the Tour a song recorded for him. “I thought it was a nice song,” says the Amsterdammer. In 2024, he contributed to an item in the Tour in which Wester dressed as his double, with a Dutch champion jersey, identical glasses and a tattoo sleeve.
It turned out to be the prelude to a switch. Groenewegen already sat down with the team in the autumn of 2024, which at the time had only recorded five victories in competitions at a lower level. The fact that he became convinced was due to the vision of the future that Tietema and Wester dared to sketch. Attention was focused on building a sprint train: the fastest way to success.
Franchise name
In order to attract Groenewegen, the budget had to be significantly increased. This was partly possible thanks to the recruitment of bicycle brand Rose as a name sponsor, in addition to gambling site Unibet. The third name component, ‘Rockets’, was already added last year, following the example of American sports teams such as New York Yankees or Chicago Bulls. “In cycling, a team often changes with the logo and color of the sponsor. But this is how you build your own brand identity.”
When we started, all the staff with experience in cycling were already with other teams. So we got caregivers who had never handed out a water bottle before
The budget is still far below that of an average WorldTour team. At the highest professional level, a team can spend an average of 33.1 million euros, reported the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport early January. “We don’t even touch a third of that.” Moreover, more than average is spent on the salaries and equipment of the media team. “We have to make choices: how do we use every euro in a valuable way, while we still want to be competitive?”
This means, says team leader Rob Harmeling via video connection, that the team is always behind the times in some areas. “The balance is not there, that is the problem story of our lives. There has been a shortage of everything: riders, cars, equipment. When we started, all the staff with experience in cycling were already with other teams. So we got caregivers who were manual therapists or masseurs, but had never handed out a water bottle. A lot has been asked of people.” At the same time, says Harmeling, this only makes the challenge more fun. “The most important thing is: how do we communicate about it, how do we understand each other?”
Dylan Groenewegen celebrates his victory with teammates at a one-day race in Valencia on January 25.
Photo Antonio Baixauli / Getty Images
In terms of logistics and organization, Rockets has certainly made a step forward this year. Tietema shows a photo of the team bus on his mobile which would be unveiled a few days later. Eelco Meenhorst, national coach of the successful Olympic rowing team in 2024, also joined the team as the second sporting director next to former cyclist Julia Soek. And German former top sprinter Marcel Kittel (14 stage victories in the Tour) can shape Groenewegen’s sprint train as coach.
Their presence takes away organizational pressure from Tietema, who can therefore keep an overview and be the ambassador of the team. Wester focuses on attracting sponsors, Van der Wiel leads the creative team.
At the same time, fans keep calling to see the trio themselves in the kind of videos they made before. Tietema doesn’t see that happening anytime soon. “We want to have the intrinsic motivation to do that. That has now become more about how we make this team a success.” Moreover, running your own team makes it a lot more awkward and difficult to make fun videos with riders from other teams.
When Tour organizer ASO announces a few weeks after the interview that Unibet Rose Rockets will not receive a wildcard this year, it leads to a slight disappointment. The team was considered promising by experts due to the many reinforcements, last year’s good performance and the French competition license on which the team is registered – the latter was necessary due to the Dutch ban on sports sponsorship by gambling companies. Tour director Christian Prudhomme appears not to be very sensitive to the French flag behind the name. “They do not emphasize the French identity at all. They have more Dutch riders,” he told the AFP news agency.
Tietema does not respond to Prudhomme’s argumentation. On social media he congratulates Caja Rural, the Spanish team that is allowed to go to the Tour. “2026 is still going to be a fantastic year,” says the foreman a video. One day it will happen, the Tour, he is completely convinced of that.
