Lidl-Trek boss Guercilena points to Mads Pedersen near miss as biggest regret of his tenure

On Tuesday, the team confirmed a series of leadership changes. Andy Schleck will move into the newly created role of CEO, while Grischa Niermann will join from Visma | Lease a Bike as chief sporting officer on September 1. Dan Lorang, formerly of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, has also been appointed head of performance, a role that will extend to the new Crivit Performance Center, backed by Lidl’s parent company, the Schwarz Group.

Guercilena will remain in place until after the Tour to help manage the transition. But his departure already invites the bigger question: what does he leave behind?

The answer is considerable: more than 350 professional wins, six Monument victories, including three with Cancellara, a historic first women’s Paris-Roubaix with Lizzie Deignan in 2021, winning all three points classifications in the 2025 Grand Tours, and the creation of a women’s team and under 23 structure.

Asked about his biggest regret in an interview with the team, however, the Italian pointed to one rider in particular: Mads Pedersen.

The Dane has won 59 races since joining Guercilena’s team, including five Giro d’Italia stages, four Vuelta a España stages, two Tour de France stages, a world title, three editions of Gent-Wevelgem, and the points classification at both the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España.

Yet for Guercilena, that record also contains his biggest regret.

“That is the fact that we have not been able to have Mads win a Monument,” he said.

Guercilena’s admiration for Pedersen goes beyond results. He calls Pedersen “the rider I respect the most in the matter of leadership.”

That respect, he explained, was formed over years of working with a rider who could challenge management without breaking trust. “What I appreciate is that from his first years with the team when he was young, even when he won the World Championship, he has always been a guy who was inclined to listen to others, but also always express his own opinion,” Guercilena said. 

“He was never aggressive, always very straight and very clear.”

For Guercilena, that directness became one of Pedersen’s defining strengths.

“When you calmly express your disappointment or your ideas to management, suddenly there’s mutual respect,” he said. “Obviously sometimes I would have to say no to him in a very strong way, and he has always been very fair.”

That is why the missing Monument still stings. Pedersen has become one of the internal reference points of the team Guercilena built. He is a rider whose power and sprint made him a contender in the Classics, but whose value inside Lidl-Trek also came from his voice.

“When there was a moment in which I needed to give a clear message to the whole group of riders, I knew that I could count on him,” Guercilena said. “And he has always been in favour of helping the team more than himself.”

That sentence cuts to the centre of Guercilena’s Trek years. His stated ambition was not only to win races, but to build a team rather than a collection of individual contractors. Pedersen, in that view, became one of the clearest expressions of the project.

It also explains why Guercilena still wants that Monument for him so badly. “I really hope he will win a Monument, whether I’m there or not, because he really deserves it,” Guercilena concluded.