After five years on the WorldTour, former Olympic track champion Matt Walls has dropped down two tiers and joined a German UCI Continental team.
The 27-year-old, who rode last year for Groupama-FDJ and previously for Bora-hansgrohe, is part of a 15-rider roster at the newly launched Team Storck-MRW Bau.
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“I had no contract,” he said, “and then I just got a message [from Stock-MRW Bau]. We got to talking and were able to basically work it out.
“It’s an ambitious team. For me, it’s been a while since I’ve actually won some races, so I’d like to get some opportunities to actually go for some wins. It’s a promising project and I’m looking forward to the year.”
Walls became Olympic champion in 2021.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
After winning gold in the omnium at the Tokyo Olympics, Walls last won a professional bike race in October 2021 at the Italian one-day Gran Piemonte.
The years that followed that victory have been marked by “quite a lot of bad luck”, he said; in 2022, Walls crashed over the barriers on the track at the Commonwealth Games, suffering severe concussion and requiring stitches in his forehead. He then broke his hip in a training crash in May 2023.
Walls returned to racing at the Tour of Britain that September, where the then Bora-hansgrohe rider told Cycling Weekly he was without a contract for 2024. The following year, he joined Groupama-FDJ, and despite 10 top-10s with the team in 2025, was released at the end of the season.
“I don’t think I really fitted into the team very well,” he said. “I didn’t get the opportunities I wanted, so I think it was better just to part ways – for them to look for someone that more suits the team, and for me to look for a team that suits me.”
Walls’s road debut with Storck-MRW Bau came last Sunday, when he placed sixth at the GP Vermarc in Belgium.
Throughout this season, he plans to combine road racing with track – a recipe that worked well for him previously – with an eye on the LA Olympics in 2028.
“[The two disciplines] obviously do compliment each other quite a lot,” said Walls, who ended a three-year absence from the Great Britain track squad at the European Championships last February.
“Obviously [the Olympics] is quite far away yet, and I’ve not really been on the track so much in the last few years. It’s just to see if I can get back up to the level I can be at.
“I just want to get back to winning races again. It’s been quite a while.”
If the wins do come – and the hope is that they will for a rider of Walls’s talent – is the goal then to sign back to the WorldTour? “You always want to be in the top teams, doing top races. It would be nice to, but I’m just going to see how this season goes, to be honest,” he said.
“I’m not really trying to look too far in terms of the future. I just want to focus on the here and now and try and win some races and see where it goes from there.”
