At the end of November 2018, it becomes official: Assos becomes the technical clothing partner of Team Dimension Data for Qhubeka. Both teams — the WorldTour squad and the Continental team — will wear Assos from 1 January 2019. The contract runs for three years.
What this means for Assos
Assos was always the riders’ brand, not the teams’. In the early years, pros bought Assos shorts out of their own pocket. With Dimension Data, that changes: Assos kits out a complete WorldTour team — from base layers to rain jackets.
The rider roster carries weight. Mark Cavendish, one of the most successful sprinters in cycling history, wears Assos from 2019. Add a team that regularly lines up at the Grand Tours and Classics. For Assos’ product development, this means: direct feedback from the toughest races in the world.
More than sponsoring
The deal is explicitly structured as a technical partnership. The riders work with the Assos development team — material feedback under race conditions that feeds into the next product generation. What gets tested in the peloton ends up in the production line.
Assessment
Dimension Data (later Qhubeka NextHash, then dissolved) was a team with a mission — bicycles for Africa through the Qhubeka Foundation. Assos’ partnership connected Swiss engineering with African cycling development. The team no longer exists in this form, but the three years in the peloton gave Assos valuable race data and visibility that fed directly into the S9 Targa and later the S11 development.