The Cycliste Moderne, October 17, 2005

End of Season

Saturday was the Giro di Lombardia, which is also known as "the race of the falling leaves." Traditionally the last event on the European calendar, the race in northern Italy favors strong riders who can climb. Paolo Bettini fits both categories and as a result won the race. With the rise of the ProTour, Lombardia does in fact represent the last race of the season where ProTour points can be earned. Danilo Di Luca had wrapped up the individual title the week before as CSC had done with the team title. No one is quite sure what that gets you, but both hadcommendable seasons.

Amazingly, the second placed country in the ProTour behind Italy was the United States. The ProTour's national standings are based upon the aggregate ranking of riders of each nationality. The United States had four riders in the top 10 in the individual ProTour standings. Not suprisingly, those four – Armstrong, Leipheimer, Julich and Hincapie – accounted for 529 out of the United States' 559 ProTour points. Even without Armstrong, the season long performances of Leipheimer, Julich and Hincapie alone would have netted the Americans 5th place in the ProTour Nations standings ahead of such cycling powers as Belgium, Netherlands and France.

The ProTour remains at odds with the Grand Tours and it has adversely affected smaller races throughout Europe. ProTour officials are expected to announce changes to the points system it employs to provide greater rewards for stage wins than had been provided this year. However, all in all, the first year of the ProTour undeniably raised the level of racing at the Giro d'Italia, the Tour de Suisse, the Deutschland Tour and Paris-Nice. The Vuelta a Espana was largely uneffected due to its position at the end of the season.

Fassa Bortolo Aftermath

Fassa Bortolo was the only team on a one year ProTour license. The rest were on 2-4 year licenses. Fassa Bortolo, an Italian cement and construction materials supplier, had signed on to support the team only through the end of the 2005 season. Many of Fassa Bortolo's best ridershad agreed to follow Alessandro Pettacchi to the new Milram team which was just the rebranding of the smaller, albeit ProTour team, Domina Vacanze.Then around the start of the Tour of Spain, rumors began to circulate that team management had a long term big budget deal worked out to keep the team together. There was speculation that the new team would keep Fassa Bortolo's ProTour spot. Team management began to sign riders such as Gilberto Simoni and Stuart O'Grady. They even announced the sponsor would be Sony-Ericsson and had committed to the team until 2011.

Then things unraveled this week. It turns out that team management was not dealing with a representative of Sony-Ericsson with authority to make the agreement. The various press reports are still kind of sketchy as to whether team management was working with an agent who represented the existence of a deal with Sony-Ericsson or with local Italian Sony-Ericsson representatives. Regardless, Sony-Ericsson issued a press release denying it had entered into an agreement to sponsor a cycling team and stated that it was not interested in sponsoring a cycling team. The riders are now scrambling to find rides.

There have always been teams that fold halfway through a season, like the Le Groupement team in the early 1990's and the collapse of Mercury-Viatel team when Viatel filed for bankruptcy and the team did not get a wild card to the Tour de France. More troubling however are the stillborn teams where there appeared to be little or no financial backing at all for the team. From the 2001 collapse of Linda McCartney team, to the ghost US domestic team Noble House in 2001 and Italian team Stayer in 2004, it is apparent that every year there are team managers that are willfully blind to the lack of an actual sponsorship agreement or blissfully naive enough to believe that meeting with a guy who is meeting with a guy who knows somebody who wants to fund the team constitutes an actual agreement.

Invariably, good riders are left in the wake of such failed teams. Max Sciandri and Kevin Livingston had signed with Linda McCartney, Marty Jemison had signed for Noble House and Giovanni Lombardi had signed with Stayer. All were left without rides. All had enough experience in the peleton that they should have known that the teams were either doomed tocollapse or that they were in fact ghost teams. But if you race bikes, then you have a great willingness to accept physical and financial risks anyway.

And now for something completely different . . .

To keep myself proficient in Portuguese, I have RTPi, the international station operated by Radio Televisao Portugues. It is difficult to watch TV in a foreign language when you have a wife and kids who don't speak the language, so in a familial compromise, I can sometimes get away with watching Top Mais, the Portuguese music countdown show, on Saturday mornings. My kids like it because they sometimes play videos from American artists, my wife likes it because of its global musical orientation, and I like it because the dialog is fairly simple.

After returning from coaching my son's soccer team early on Saturday, I was surprised to find that my wife had recorded Saturday's edition. I generally only watch it if I have time and expected to miss it. My wife and daughter were excited to share with me the extensive use of bicycles in Saturday's edition of Top Mais. Evidently Franz Ferdinand's new video makes use of bicycles as kinetic art. Don't know, have not seen it. But my wife was thrilled to share with me a video by some Eurochantuse, Kate Melua (whom I have never heard of), for the song "Nine Million Bicycles." Now, there are not nine million bicycles in the video but there are in Beijing. I do not think that Cyclista.com will start offering Ms. Melua's album, which is entitled "Piece by Piece" as it definitely fits the category of "girlfriend rock," but if you need a gift for your cycling significant other and they are not into Metallica, you may want to track down the album.