Axel Merckx has a famous name, being the son of legend Eddy. And his Axeon Development Team is getting an equally famous name for producing some of the best riders for the WorldTour.

“I wanted to create a team that I wish I was on,” Merckx told Velo Magazine. “I tried to take all the positive experiences I had on all the different teams that I raced on, remove the pressure, and keep the attitude, the personality, the spirit of it. It’s been an amazing journey so far. I feel really lucky. I’ve encountered some great riders and some great athletes. This is the good I want to do for cycling. It’s what I want to give back.”

Riders who have graduated from Merckx’s team under its various guises to the top level of cycling and still ride there are: Taylor Phinney (BMC); Clement Chevrier (IAM); Ian Boswell (Sky); Alex Dowsett (Movistar); Jasper Stuyven and Jesse Sergent (Trek Factory Racing); Carter Jones and Lawson Craddock (Giant-Alpecin); and Joe Dombrowski, Ben King, Nate Brown, and Ruben Zepuntke (Garmin-Cannondale). From the current roster, Tao Geoghan Hart is virtuaklly guaranteed a WorldTour slot for the 2017 season.

But Merckx doesn’t see the success of the team as being all the riders who move up to the top, but that they acknowledge that without the team they may not have made it that far.

“To me, the success of this team is not the results, or the number of riders we move up,” Merckx says. “It’s that all the riders who have been in this program, wherever they are, as soon as we’re at the same race they come to see us. They stop by, give us hugs; they come and say, ‘We miss you guys. We had a great time with you. It was awesome.’

It is ironic that the team, which supports clean cycling, was created by Lance Armstrong in 2009 under the Trek-Livestrong name. Back then, Taylor Phinney was on the team and Lance’s sponsors wanted to tie Phinney to their brand so he would become as synonymous to those companies as Lance was. Merckx was brought in by Armstrong to run the team, the two being friends ever since they were Motorola teammates.

 “I wanted to bring in the best talents we could and make a team out of it,” he says, “and turn them into the best pros they could be.”

And Merckx continues to do that, despite a budget of around $1 mllion a year. But Merckx says in order to ride for his team, you need to have the right frame of mind as well as being talented.

“The ones on the team now or who were on the team before are the ones that can say, ‘That guy would fit the team. He’d fit the mold.’ I get riders offered to me, really talented riders, but I don’t pursue all of them. First of all, I can’t, but also because I want to keep the right spirit.”

“We have 12 guys and 12 different personality types,” Merckx says. “There are guys I have to slow down, because they want it so bad that they will do harm. And then some guys, yeah, you gotta kick their asses. If they don’t want it, that’s fine. There are many kids that want it. There are a lot of kids who want to do this, so don’t waste somebody else’s chance by not doing the work.”