Lotto-Belisol have been around as a team since 2006, but if teams can be said to have break-out years then 2009 was their break-out. New signing Rochelle Gilmore who had been bouncing around Itlay on short-term contracts for the previous two years got lots of podium places, Lizzie Armitstead picked up a few young rider jersies, including that for the Giro, and best of all their long-term support for home riders finally produced a Belgian star in Grace Verbeke who finished 13th in the UCI rankings. And I suspect that both Armitstead and Verbeke could have done better if they had ever sat down and worked out a deal as to who leads out who and when, rather than drag-racing each other down the final straight to 3rd and 5th places.

Sadly Belisol have pulled out of the sponsorship deal, and Armitsead has moved on to Cervelo, but the team has come up with a novel strategy to compensate. They have struck a partnership with South Africa’s other top women’s cycling team, Biogen Toyota (Toyota Supercycling in 2009) whereby two of their top riders will come and race in Europe during the summer, and the Lotto girls will have the chance to train/race in South Africa during the winter. The South Africans look to be taking cycling very seriously in the run-up to the next rounds of the Commonwealth and Olympic games, so expect this to be a lot more serious an exchange than just a “swap you two riders for a holiday” deal.

Continue reading this post »

A year or so back some people were bemoaning the absence of African cyclists in the peloton. OK Barloworld was sponsored by a company with South African roots, but they were registered in Great Britain and based in Italy, if you’d talked about the Cape, half their squad would think you were going to the opera. But now an ex-pro named Doug Ryder, has a plan equally ambitious as Dave Brailsford’s, but is taking it slowly, step by step, and building from the bottom. And with women too. There may be a couple of Nords there too (alas I have no pictures of Trine Schmidt swimming with a dolphin), but the heart of the team is solidly South African.

Team Ryder started up about a decade ago and is now the dominant force is SA cycling in both men’s and women’s road racing (and Sifiso Nhlapo has been kicking some serious ass in MTB too); a mini version of the ANC, if you will. Under the name of Team MTN they set up the first SA pro women’s team in 2008, went UCI registered in 2009, racing abroad in China, Canada and at the Internationale Thüringen Rundfahrt, and now have signed up a couple of top level pros in Susanne Ljungskog and Trine Schmidt so that their home-grown riders will have no excuse for skulking at the back of the peloton just to roll over the line at the end of the day. Well they won’t do that anyway, because that’s one guaranteed way to get a tongue-lashing from the boss:

One of Ryder Cycling’s key objectives with this women’s team has been to transform women’s cycling into a more aggressive racing category. The team’s modus operandi is to consistently be on the attack in order to stimulate a more interesting, higher-paced racing scene, which has been hugely successful. As opposed to the past where most women’s races were contested in a large bunch sprint, virtually all the races have ended in splinter groups with high average speeds, ensuring a higher standard of women’s cycling in South Africa.

source

Continue reading this post »

French site Cyclismag have an interesting little story on their web-page today about the next possible round of bio-passport positives. Apparently the Council Of The Nine (and doesn't that sound like something out of Lord of the Rings) have been meeting this weekend to study the next batch of dodgy dossiers. There is unlikely to be a press release coming out soon, since they must first of all agree unanimously that there is something suspicious about a particular rider, and then that rider is given a chance to rebut the accusations. According to Cyclismag, the five suspended last year  (Astarloa, Lobato, Caucchioli, Serrano and De Bonis) were picked out as possible dopers at a similar meeting last January, but their names weren't released publically until June (the things some to to get an advantage in VDS - I bet none of them picked Caucchioli).

For the last decade this team has been sponsored by German insurance company Nürnberger Versicherung who were also a major sponsor of the Rund um die Nürnberger Altstadt. Now they have moved on and Skyter Shipping, a Luxembourg yacht charterer has taken over. So the next time you are in Luxembourg and the floodwaters threaten to rise above the old record level then you know where to turn. 2009 was a bit of a disappointment for Nürnberger. They lost rising star Claudia Hausler to Cervelo, Regina Schleicher’s last year never seemed to take off and Amber Neben had a couple of very bad injuries, all of which left Trixi Worrack fighting for the team by herself. And fight she did, leading the CQ rankings for days raced, winning the Gracia-Orlova stage race and picking up stages and top ten places everywhere. The other bright spot, which I hope they repeat more often, was inviting journalist Enrico Muax to join them on the Giro d’Italia. If you’ve not seen his behind the scenes videos then start here. Great stuff even if you don’t understand German.

Skyter will start 2010 with a new sponsor, a new nickname, the “Speed Queens”, new kit (please don’t let it be pink), and a handful of signings that should see them level with Cervelo and Columbia-HTC in the team rankings. There will also at some point be a new team website and official photos (although for the benefit of the dirty mac brigade, they did the swimsuit photo-shoot a couple of years back – happy searching). So here’s a rundown of who I think you should watch out for on the road.

Nicole Cooke. Current Olympic champion, recently deposed World champion, ex World no. 1, UCI CDM winner, Giro d’Italia winner, Grande Boucle winner, Thüringen Rundfahrt winner, Ronde van Vlaanderen winner, Flèche Wallonne winner … Not bad going and she’s still only 26. Last year was a bit of a poor year relatively, possibly due to the problems she had in trying to set up her own team, possibly because she was just due a bad year anyway, but even so Cicloweb’s ranking still had her in the top 10. She should at the very least be able to match that performance, but how will she cope with sitting back in the pack while a strong teammate vanishes on the break. Does she have the patience, or is the “chase everything down alone” spirit going to come back at some point.

Continue reading this post »

French cycling is in an odd state. Parts of it are healthy, very healthy, while other parts seem to be beyond salvation, yet there’s no logic or reason as to which are the healthy bits. Just recently Pierre Boue, long-time organiser of the Grande Boucle announced that the 2009 edition was probably the last, but that he himself was writing a book entitled “When women’s cycling loses the pedals”. In between defending himself on charges dating back to when Jacques Chirac was mayor of Paris. Yet at the same time the Tour de L’Aude remains one of the two major stage races of the year, and a host of smaller stage races fill up the calendar at the end of the summer. My guess is that the problem is one of co-ordination: too many of the senior administrative posts seem to be filled by political placemen looking for their next political placing. Occasionally the sport strikes lucky and gets someone like Boue who genuinely does seem to care, but most of the time teams and riders are left to fend for themselves.

Continue reading this post »