Will this winning combo be short lived? Image courtesy of Team Astana.
As the Tour de France heats up in the Alps, the rumor mills are swirling around who will be riding for who in the current Astana powerhouse. VeloNews is reporting that Johan Bruyneel, the director of Astana and for Lance Armstrong during all his Tour winning years, will be leaving as the head of Team Astana at the end of this year. The return of Alexander Vinokourov to the Kazakh squad next year seems to be one of the sticking points. Vinokourov who founded the team four years ago on Kazakh oil money is coming off a two year suspension for doping in the 2007 Tour, a suspension that got Astana banned from last year’s Tour. (Bruyneel took over the leadership of Astana after the doping scandal.) Just before the Tour started he held a press conference informing the world that he would be racing for Astana next year whether Bruyneel liked it or not.
Enter into the fray Lance Armstrong who announced on Twitter yesterday:
Making a very cool announcement on Thursday re: a new American partner for our team in 2010 (and beyond). Stay tuned!
Notice he didn’t say what team in the post? This seems to confirm what others have speculated for a while, that upon Armstrong’s return he and Bruyneel were simply running out the contractual clock on Astana to then launch a new team around Armstrong with Nike and the LiveStrong Foundation as the sponsor.
Expect Bruyneel to take most of the Astana riders with him as he did when he took most of the Discovery/U.S. Postal squad to Astana two years ago. That is with one major exception: the current leader and likely winner of the Tour. Alberto Contador is believed to have been unhappy with sharing the lime-light with Armstrong and asked Bruyneel to be excused from his Astana contract just before the Tour. Bruyneel refused but Formula One world champion Fernando Alonso is putting together a Spanish pro cycling team for next year believed to be built around Contador.
And you thought the drama and fireworks happened on the road?
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