This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 143

Bas Tietema is nervous. There are just under three kilometres to go in Ronde van Brugge, the WorldTour semi-Classic in which his team, Unibet Rose Rockets, have been granted a wildcard spot on the startlist. The Dutch manager stands at the front of a gaggle of staff and journalists a few hundred metres beyond the finish line and bites his nails. As the peloton expands and contracts on the television in front of him, weaving and divebombing round corners, Tietema’s angst sometimes forces him to look away.

Two kilometres to go and he starts pacing up and down the tarmac. On screen, the distinctive purple and blue jerseys of the squad he owns emerge at the front of the peloton. Shoulder-to-shoulder with established sprint outfits like Alpecin-Deceunick, this unknown bunch of ProTeam riders look every bit the part. Expertly hidden at the back of their lead-out train is six-time Tour de France stage winner Dylan Groenewegen – the Rockets’ big signing for 2026. The investment they made to bring the experienced Dutch sprinter on board was significant, and this very moment could make it worth their while.

Under the flamme rouge and Tietema darts away from the television and cranes his neck to look down the finishing straight. The minute it takes for the charging peloton to come into view feels like an eternity. Finally, they are in sight. Photographers and journalists try to push past Tietema but he stands at the front of the scrum – he must see this moment. Noise builds in a crescendo until the announcer's voice booms through the chilly air: ‘Dylan Groenewegen wint de sprint!’

The 32-year-old Dutchman crosses the line with his hand over his mouth, he can’t believe it. Tietema yelps in elation and grabs him for an embrace. Teammates come next, one by one, and the screaming continues. Film cameras close in and there is so much energy it feels like this freezing Belgian day is warming up. Many are shocked at Groenewegen’s victory for his new team who, despite big ambitions, have far less budget and experience than those they are competing against. Surprise, however, is not the emotion which would describe Tietema’s reaction. He’s delighted, but not stunned. This was part of his plan for the Rockets. He’s always believed in the dream.

From pizza to chicken dinner winners

The day after that seminal moment on the finish line of the Ronde van Brugge, I have a phone interview with Tietema. We’d scheduled the call a long time before the Rockets’ first-ever WorldTour victory, but the eventual timing is a handy stroke of luck.

“It’s been a busy 24 hours,” he says with a laugh. “In fact, this whole week has been quite exceptional: we won a 1.Pro race on Friday and then again on Sunday, so to finish it off with a win in Brugge yesterday was really quite unique. For any team, it’s exceptional.”

It's true that even the best World-Teams would be happy with the string of results that Unibet Rose Rockets have pulled off over the last week but, for Tietema, these victories are more than just numbers or UCI points. They are validating the unique ethos and strategy that he has been preaching since the team’s inception three years ago.

In order to truly understand what the Unibet Rose Rockets stand for, we need to go back to the very start at the 2019 Tour de France. On the Champs-Élysées that year, Tietema and two of his friends turned up armed with film cameras and 120 Domino’s pizzas. The concept was a simple one: hand out slices to all the riders who had just finished three weeks of gruelling racing round France and film their reactions, before putting it on YouTube for the world’s viewing pleasure. Then, wait and watch the numbers on the screen tick up.

The ten-minute video on the Tour de Tietema (TDT) YouTube channel that day was the start of a project that grew faster than anyone expected. More and more videos were made – challenges, pranks, behind-the-scenes at bike races – and the viewership skyrocketed. By 2021, the YouTube channel evolved into an amateur team, with TDT documenting the process of starting a cycling team from scratch.

Now four years on, the team is known as ‘The Rockets’ and has been awarded ProTeam status. We are not talking about a group of friends making fun videos anymore, but an organisation competing in the highest echelons of bike racing. Tietema is adamant, though, the Rockets are staying true to their roots.

“From the start, we have been trying to set up the type of team that we would love to see as a cycling fan. One thing I think is missing is the identity of the teams. Right now, a lot of teams' identity is just the brands who sponsor them. If that changes, then the identity of that team changes too. It’s like in football, if Chelsea got a new sponsor and changed to one with the colour red brand guidelines, rather than blue, that would be really weird,” Tietema says.

“I think having value for yourself is better than changing your identity for the sponsor in the short term. With the Rockets identity, it is more sustainable because we bring value to the partners without giving away all of our identity.”

Cycling is a sport steeped in history and tradition, and Tietema is asking sponsors to support his project in a way that is alien to many. Selling social media audiences and fanbase size is a different approach to flogging spaces on jerseys, or advertising on team buses, but Unibet Rose Rockets are sure that this provides more value in the long run. Finding partners who are on board with the team’s strategy is imperative for its survival.

“Rose bikes were really convinced and believed in the Rockets, for example, but sometimes you have to explain what you are doing more. The difficulty is that we are always selling the dream. The first year we created a presentation for prospective sponsors that set out our road map. In cycling, though, a lot of people are selling a lot of dreams and you need to make it happen. We had an unorthodox way of starting a team – we are not former entrepreneurs with a huge network. We have to really work our way up to prove the value of what we are doing and the media value we can bring.

“We believe that if you combine storytelling with performance it creates amazing awareness. More brands are reaching out to us, but we try to invest and not switch our sponsors too often because it’s easy to place logos on a jersey but we don’t want to just do that. If you change partners often, you are selling yourself out. We believe that we can generate more than that for the partners we have on board.”

Unibet Rose Rockets claim that they are a ‘media company with a professional cycling team’, placing content creation at the centre of what they do. Any spare budget is not used to pay riders’ salaries, but to invest in another videographer or editor which will bolster the team’s social media output. For a long time, Tietema operated the team with a unique scouting method, using data-experts to analyse the results of smaller races and detect hidden talent lower in the ranks, rather than paying big money to already-established riders.

Dreamers to schemers

In 2026, with Rose and Unibet coming onboard and bringing a healthy cash injection with them, Tietema and his colleagues – for the first time – found themselves with the freedom to spend money on some bigger names. Not only would this help acquire UCI points which would bring the Rockets up the ProTeam rankings (essential for getting invites to big races), it would also raise the profile of the team exponentially. Groenewegen, alongside Liège-Bastogne-Liège winner Wout Poels, and Tour de France and Giro d’Italia stage winner Victor Lafay, joined the Rockets at the start of this season. Tietema also brought in 14-time Tour stage winner, Marcel Kittel, as a sports director in the team to help master the perfect lead-out train for Groenewegen.

“It did take some time, energy and attention to bring these bigger riders to the team. It was a lot of explaining about what we are doing, because if I saw an article about three YouTubers starting a professional cycling team, I would also be sceptical. We explain to them why we produce media and the reason behind that, but also that performance and winning is still a huge part of it. We want to become the team with the biggest fanbase in cycling and we know that we have to invest in performance to do that too,” Tietema says.

“We weren’t really trying to convince them to join us but it’s more of an open discussion: ‘do you see a place here? Do you see yourself being one of the main characters of the team? Do you see a role for yourself in this journey and this adventure where there is a blank sheet?’ We don’t have a huge track record of winning races so we need people on board that bring their expertise and create a role for themselves.”

Despite splashing some cash on some salaries, Tietema stresses that he still largely stays true to his original attitude towards recruitment and talent scouting. He isn’t trying to build a team made up of well-known superstars, but believes it is possible for young riders to thrive in the Rockets set-up with the correct guidance.

“We don’t have the biggest budgets so we need to make clear decisions. If you look at the line-up for Ronde van Bruuge, Wessel Mouris and Karsten Feldmann have both only just stepped up from the Continental scene. It was Tobias Müller’s first-ever WorldTour race. The sprint group is a lot of young riders who we approached the same way as how we started. The only difference to previous years is that we now have a sprinter who can finish off the work. It’s still a really young team and that’s why it is so unique that Marcel and all those young guys clicked so quickly. He is teaching them how to ride, for the first time, in these types of sprints.”

The team atmosphere in the Rockets isn’t just working for the 20-year-olds who are getting a chance to lead out one of the best sprinters in the peloton, but also for the superstar fast man himself. Groenewegen is seemingly back to his peak in 2026 after a few years off the pace in the World-Tour peloton. He’s winning without being part of a big-budget outfit that has access to state-of-the-art aero testing or a team of scientists, but instead with a young, imaginative, fresh-thinking project.

“I think a lot of things have come together for Dylan. First of all, you really see the passion. He is a 32-year-old rider who has won a lot in his career so far, but he still has the motivation to make victories happen. That clicked from the first moment because we are three founders of a cycling team trying to find our way in professional cycling and that makes us open and transparent, but also means we are having fun along the way,” Tietema explains.

“That’s a really thin line with performing but I do believe you need the fun part still to have a good outcome. Then also with the sporting side, with Marcel coming in, he brings a lot of experience and they are heavily invested in how to make a sprint train work. It’s a great mix of experienced riders and young guys who are overperforming and growing into the team. It’s cool to see.”

For all the success and validation Groenewegen has brought to the Rockets so far this season with his victories, Tietema is candid that the team still faces challenges. In order to be automatically selected for Grand Tours, the Rockets will need to be in the top-three ranked ProTeams, a goal they failed to achieve last year. Other Pro-Teams such as Tudor Pro Cycling and Pinarello-Q36.5 (the latter backed by billionaire former mining firm boss Ivan Glasenberg) are operating on the same level as World-Tour squads and still have far more resources at their disposal than the Rockets.

“The ProTeams are in the mix with WorldTour teams now so the lines have become a bit more blurry and overlap more. We are still the owners of the team ourselves and we are doing it step by step. Running a team with one hundred people costs millions. We are still quite a bit below the lowest end of a WorldTour team budget,” he says.

“It’s super competitive to get these wildcard spots. Riders like Tom Pidcock are performing phenomenally for teams like Q36.5 and it’s hard for us to get in the mix there. We are not in the same area of budget as Tudor and teams like that.”

No Tour, no problem

It is no secret that Unibet-Rose-Rockets were in the running for a wildcard spot at the Tour de France this year, and many were disappointed when race organisers ASO announced that Spanish team Caja Rural-Seguros RGA would take it instead. Fans of the Rockets expressed outrage at the decision on social media, with Tour de France race director Christian Prudhomme explaining that the choice was largely down to the team not leaning into their French identity, despite being registered in the country.

“They claim they’re not French at all,” Prudhomme said to the media after the wildcard announcement. “They have more Dutch riders. It’s true they’ve made some very good signings — Wout Poels, Dylan Groenewegen and Victor Lafay, three former stage winners in the Tour de France. It’s a team that dreams of the Tour de France in the long term. We will follow this closely in the coming years.”

The Rockets’ French licence was a strategic choice, designed in part to keep sponsor Unibet on board. Under Dutch regulations, the betting brand would not be permitted on the team jersey — so the project opted for a French workaround. That move also looked like a potential advantage for a Tour wildcard, given French-licensed teams often sit prominently in the conversation. For now, though, it appears to have worked against them.

“We hoped to participate so it was disappointing, but we are an upcoming team so we know it makes it difficult to see the potential in the short term. I still believe that we have a team both on and off the road who can bring something cool to the Tour and I don’t have an official reason why they made the choice not to invite us but it doesn’t mean the dream is over. We still dream of it and we’re showcasing our improvement each year. We’re focusing on that because we can control it,” Tietema says.

Some speculated that Prudhomme’s choice to omit the Rockets from the Tour selection was a rejection of the team’s modern attitudes towards the sport by the oldest and most prestigious race on the calendar. Tietema prefers to focus on the positives of his team’s growth however, rather than the naysayers.

“We have multiple people in the sport who really support us and what we are doing. We try to focus on what we can change ourselves without making it too big, like producing YouTube videos straight after the finish, trying to create fan events, these are the things you can do yourself. It would not be possible for us to change the whole sport ourselves so we just try and get as many people on board as possible from our end,” he explains.

“We try to show what we can do with our storytelling and our approach. I hope it inspires others to do so. That’s why we are doing it, because we believe it’s the way to bring more attention to the sport that we love.”

Although they will not be present at the Tour’s Grand Départ in Barcelona this July, the Rockets will make a Grand Tour appearance this season as they have been granted a wildcard to race the Giro d’Italia in May. With a sprint stage opening the race in Bulgaria, Groenewegen has an outside chance of taking the maglia rosa – something that even big-dreamer Tietema admits would be an achievement greater than he could have imagined this season.

“I think a lot of people would say it is an extreme goal and seems unrealistic if you see where we have come from. However, it’s the opportunism of this sport, especially in sprinting; you can have a sprinter that maybe has reached the end of his career to suddenly be a contender to win the opening stage of the Giro,” Tietema says with a laugh.

“We are still a young sprint team so we will probably still do some races in the coming months where things don’t work out, but with the form and how Dylan is riding at the moment, he is looking so strong and giving confidence to all our riders. It’s just going to be cool to see how far we can get in our first Grand Tour and it’s crazy to me that normally the question is how the team is going to show itself [and now] people are asking me about winning stages.”

While the team are looking forward to an Italian adventure in May, there is no getting around the fact that the Tour de France is the pinnacle of the sport. Closing the circle to go from handing out pizzas in Paris to competing in the race themselves with their own team, would finally be the perfect story for the Rockets.

“We want to show the three YouTubers who started this thing back there years later, not just with a cycling team, but showing we have always stayed true to how we started it all,” Tietema says.

Outside of performance goals at both the Giro d’Italia and, hopefully, one day the Tour de France, Tietema is keen to stress that those who watch the team’s videos and unwaveringly support the Rockets will always be at the beating heart of who they are. While many cycling teams have ambitions focused solely around being at the front of the biggest bike races, Tietema says his dreams span further than that.

“The end goal is to be the most likeable and have the biggest fanbase. Therefore performance is super important because when we win races, attention rises, but we also want to keep people on board regardless of performance,” he states.

“You see in other sports that even in times it's not going well, fans still support and root for their teams. That’s what we want to create. Winning races is cool, but it’s just a race and a result if you can’t share it and celebrate with others. That’s always been the dream.”