2025 Season Review | Arkéa - B&B Hotels: Kévin Vauquelin shines but team meets its demise

In today’s season review for 2025, we arrive at the Arkea – B&B Hotels team. So unfortunately, this story is not one with a happy ending. The 2025 season was a turbulent and ultimately defining year for the Arka - B&B Hotels men’s road cycling team. Arkéa entered 2025 with modest expectations and looming financial uncertainties, and in truth that was their story for much of the year. It was a season of both promise and disappointment for the Breton outfit, marked by one breakout star performance amid otherwise challenging results.

Arkéa - B&B Hotels is a French team based in Brittany, originally founded in 2005 under the “Bretagne” banner and evolving through various sponsors over two decades. The squad earned promotion to the UCI WorldTour in 2023 after strong results in 2020–2022, granting them automatic entry to cycling’s biggest races. In 2024 the team brought on new co-sponsor B&B Hotels, to try and stabilise their finances.

In pure numbers, Arkéa–B&B Hotels ended 2025 with 9 UCI victories – matching their win tally from 2024. These included one one-day race win and two stage-race overall titles, with Kévin Vauquelin accounting for the lion’s share (5 victories). Despite this, the team’s WorldTour ranking slipped. They earned 7234.8 points and slipped two places to 21st in the end of year rankings.

For context, their points haul placed them in a relegation battle zone alongside teams like Cofidis and Intermarché. While not short on total wins, most victories came in lower-tier races, and the squad struggled to make an impact in the most prestigious events. We now examine the specifics of their spring classics and Grand Tour performances.

Arkéa – B&B Hotels’ spring classics campaign got off to a quiet start and largely proved underwhelming in the major one-day races. In the Monuments, the team failed to leave a mark, often missing the decisive moves.

At Milano-Sanremo in March, former 2016 winner Arnaud Démare was expected to lead the charge, but he was anonymous on race day. The team’s best finisher was instead the young Vauquelin, a distant 41st place, illustrating their lack of influence on the season’s first Monument.

Moving into April’s cobbled classics, Arkéa’s fortunes did not improve. In Tour of Flanders, Démare managed only 58th, well off the pace of the winning moves. Over the treacherous pavé of Paris–Roubaix, it was Belgian domestique Jenthe Biermans who was the top Arkéa rider inside the top 40.

These underwhelming results emphasise that Arkéa’s classics squad lacked the firepower and depth to contest the finales of cycling’s biggest one-day battles. And look, let’s be realistic, no one was expecting Arkea to make a dent in either Pogacar or Van der Poel’s spring campaign. But nevertheless, it was a forgettable period for the team.

The Ardennes classics brought one shining highlight amid the spring struggles. In La Flèche Wallonne, Kévin Vauquelin delivered a breakthrough performance. On the famed Mur de Huy climb, only the reigning World Champion Tadej Pogačar proved stronger 10 seconds up the road from Vauquelin.

Overall, the spring classics exposed Arkea – B&B Hotels’ limitations at the highest level. No, they weren’t expected to land any big results. But it cannot have been a good period for the team’s confidence and morale.

Despite the spring frustrations, Arkéa–B&B Hotels rallied to put forth a commendable effort in the Grand Tours, well at least in the Tour de France. The team approached the three Grand Tours with varied objectives and mixed outcomes.

Arkéa’s Giro 2025 squad was built around giving younger riders experience rather than chasing the general classification. With no proven Grand Tour leader, the team rode aggressively in breakaways and for stage opportunities. Ultimately they did not secure any stage wins but a few performances stood out.

Norwegian neo-pro Embret Svestad-Bårdseng emerged as a pleasant surprise, riding consistently over three weeks to finish 22nd overall in the Giro GC. Bårdseng, just 22 years old, handled the mountains and time trials impressively for a debutant, indicating promising potential. While 22nd may not turn heads for bigger teams, for Arkéa it was a solid result from an unexpected quarter, and he was 6th in the young rider’s classification.

The Tour was, as always, the centerpiece of Arkéa – B&B Hotels’ season and provided the brightest moments of 2025 for the team. All chips were placed on Kévin Vauquelin to lead the squad in France, and he delivered a breakthrough performance after his stage win on stage 2 in 2024.

Vauquelin arrived at the Tour in red-hot form after nearly winning the Tour de Suisse and he carried that momentum into July. In the Tour de France, Vauquelin confidently assumed team leadership and even enjoyed time in the white jersey as best young rider during the first week, even ahead of Remco Evenepoel.

As the race progressed into the high mountains, he defied expectations by clinging onto a top-10 position. He managed top 10 finishes on stages 2, 4, 5, 7, 12, 14, and 21. In the end, he achieved a superb 7th place overall in Paris, and he was third in the youth classification. Vauquelin’s consistent rides in the Alps and Pyrenees (often finishing with the elite group) made him one of the Tour’s revelations.

What made things even more remarkable was that Vauquelin was essentially riding to try and save the team from folding. As the 3 weeks of racing unfolded, it became clear that if Arkea could not secure more sponsors, they would cease to exist for 2026. No one can deny that Vauquelin did his very best to attract a sponsor.

By the time of the Vuelta in late August, Arkéa’s morale was a mix of pride from the Tour and gloom from ongoing sponsorship troubles. The team fielded a relatively young lineup in Spain, without a clear GC leader, aiming instead for stage hunting. As in the Giro, no Arkéa rider won a stage at the Vuelta. Their best general classification result was a modest 39th place for Pierre Thierry, who was also 11th in the young riders classification.

So, in truth, the Tour was the only really positive grand tour for the team. Vauquelin fought with pride despite the noise going on around the team, but ultimately he could not win the battle alone. Still, his top 10 was a highlight for the team’s history.

With the 2025 season complete, Arkéa–B&B Hotels faced an existential crisis and a mass exodus of talent heading into 2026. As you will probably know by now, the team was unable to secure a new title sponsor and announced it would disband at the end of 2025, meaning all riders were forced to find new teams. Consequently, the transfer list is exclusively outgoings.

Kévin Vauquelin, the standout of the season, earned a high-profile move to INEOS Grenadiers, a major step in his bid to develop into a Grand Tour contender. Spanish climber Cristián Rodríguez joined XDS – Astana after a consistent year, while fellow Spaniard Raúl García Pierna signed a contract with Movistar too. Veteran sprinter Arnaud Démare announced his retirement at 34, closing a superb career that fell just shy of 100 wins.

With no incoming riders, and no future for the team, Arkea – B&B Hotels’ story ends here. Its best talents have been absorbed by WorldTour teams, while others face uncertain prospects. The team’s closure marks the final chapter in its long effort to remain competitive, a reminder of how fragile survival can be in modern professional cycling.

In truth, 2025 was doomed from the start for the team. And, if that is the narrative we are following, they did very well and fought bravely until the end. But ultimately, the results were simply not good enough.

Arkea – B&B Hotels’ 2025 season can be summed up as one great success amid many struggles. The team scored 9 wins and a few bright moments, but these were overshadowed by an overreliance on Kévin Vauquelin’s form.

Vauquelin’s top-7 Tour de France finish and spring podium gave the French squad a lifeline of relevance, and without him, the year would have been bleak. The classics campaign fell flat, and they were virtually absent from the Monument results. In stage races, aside from Vauquelin’s exploits (and some smaller 2.1 race wins), Arkéa lacked firepower. The looming financial troubles also seemingly impacted morale and planning.

Ultimately, Arkéa’s final season delivered a mixed bag: a couple of high peaks but long valleys of mediocrity. Given the context, a WorldTour team with modest resources that still managed a Tour de France top-10, we score their 2025 campaign 5/10. If it was Team Vauquelin, it would be 9/10, but take Vauquelin out of the team, and this would have been a horrible farewell year.

As a fan, I found Arkéa–B&B Hotels’ 2025 season both inspiring in parts and bittersweet. Watching Kévin Vauquelin break into the Tour de France top 10 was genuinely exciting, especially considering all the pressure he had on his young shoulders. But beyond him, the team struggled to make a real impact in major races. The lack of monument presence and the quiet exits of veterans like Démare made it feel like a team on borrowed time. Overall, I they deserved a better send-off than this.

A lackluster season, it's hard to think otherwise. But it wasn't unexpected, Arkéa don't have a World Tour level team at this point and at best they could be a top-level ProTeam in some events. Several second division teams had a better roster and also performed better. The team didn't have Luca Mozzato pulling off a massive surprise as in 2024; Arnaud Démare didn't make a comeback; Cristian Rodríguez and Raul García Pierna could've had a great Vuelta but both had to abandon; and the team's only bright light was really Kévin Vauquelin.

To be clear, Vauquelin did an amazing job and a great season. From start to finish he performed well, his Tour de Suisse leadership stint was quite impressive and at the Tour de France he broke several 'walls' as he finished high up in GC, proved himself as a Grand Tour contender and had the performance of his career in there. Arkéa raced the Tour like a team hunting for a podium too, not just Vauquelin, and did a great job. But there's only so much one rider can do, specially when Vauquelin is the top figure in a World Tour team.

If the Frenchman wasn't there Arkéa would've been a mid-tier ProTeam lineup, such was the lack of UCI points - which would've thrown them into relegation even if the team survived. The one thing that could've saved the team was potentially keeping Vauquelin on board but we've known that wouldn't happen since before the Tour so the hopes were never realistic.

The farewell tale of Arkéa carried on the same note as its entire three-year stint in World Tour. A team that was never going to compete with the best, heck not even the average WT teams and could've only hoped for scraps in a potential battle for remaining in cycling's top division. But miracles don't happen and Kevin Vauquelin, no matter how great season he rode, could not become the French team's savior.

On a sporting side, Vauquelin took an interesting step up this season and could become a jackpot signing for Ineos in years to come. But looking past the Frenchman, there wasn't much reason for optimism.

Objectively speaking, Arkéa had nice highlights such as top-10 finish at Tour, but there were so many races where I don't even recall seeing their jerseys at all, making any attempts at attracting new sponsors futile. In my opinion their season as a whole was fairly disappointing and only Vauquelin's individual performance keeps Arkéa above water as my subjective rating of Arkéa - B&B Hotels' season is 2/10.