Wednesday, March 31, 2010

4 American Teams in the 2010 Tour de France!

Holy! That just hit me. 4 American based/owned cycling teams in the 2010 Tour de France. That is 20% of the teams.

Interesting to think back on the lineage of American teams in le Tour over the last 25 years:

1) Team 7-11 in 1986. My boss, Ron Kiefel, raced on that team!

2) Motorola - (7-11 version 2.0 and begin Lance Era....again my boss raced on that team, even with Lance

3) US Postal - More Lance

4) Discovery - Even More Lance

5) Garmin/Transitions/Chipotle (Slipstream) - Go Go Local Burritos and Boulder, Colorado team to the big leagues.

6) Team HTC-Columbia (Highroad) - Guten Tag! Team Telekom/T-Mobile calls on American big wig Bob Stapleton to buy the once dominant, turned druggie German powerhouse.

7) BMC - Phonak blows up (thanks Floyd) and the Swiss hearing aid company's boss decides to build an American team around the bike company he also owns.....BMC.

8) Radio Shack - need I even mention.....more Lance and remote controlled monster trucks and CBs.

8 American teams have (or will have) raced in le Grand Boucle over the last 25 years.

I need a Big Glup and maybe a Carnitas burrito.

2 comments:

co2cycle said...

BCC+TDF=BFF in 2012

did you see Peter Hymas' Cyclingnews story about the 7-11 team in MSR:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/phinney-and-kiefel-recall-7-11s-wild-milan-san-remo

John Miles said...

In other news, BikeSnobNYC has finally been unmasked:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304370304575152160672087120.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Looks kinda like I expected, actually.