Marco Brenner is laughing. Again. It’s all he does. “Yeah, of course,” he chuckles when I say that life is good. “Like you say, I have a lot of energy and I am talking a lot.” Which is a good thing, because the 20-year old-climber is a 178cm, 60kg mass of intrigue. 

There’s many places we could start, but let’s begin with his management portfolio. After turning pro with DSM aged 18 following near-constant success as a junior, the German was disappointed that his U18 team, Auto Eder Bayern, no longer had an association with his regional cycling federation in Bavaria when it became the official junior outfit of Bora-Hansgrohe.

“My area didn’t have a team to compete in the junior national series and that was sad. It was my first year in the WorldTour and I wanted to organise a race for young riders or something like that. Then my dad said as a joke, ‘you can do what Pogi does with his Pogi Team’,” he references Tadej Pogačar’s Slovenian youth team. “‘You can do your own Marco Brenner team’, he said, and I laughed at him but said, ‘well, why not?’”

So Brenner, still 18, did exactly that. He set up his own eponymous cycling team. “I am the team owner and I like to organise stuff, this is the kind of work I like,” he says. “I do the business side of it all, I meet with the sponsors, sign the team up for races. In the off-season I am basically full-gas with it. I try to do everything in person in October and November and then I do all the organising stuff in the hotel room in December on the training camps. I sort the clothing, the right sizes, I ask the riders for all their details, I order the bikes, the groupsets, everything. That’s what I do.” 

This article was published in Rouleur in March 2023. You can read the full article here.