Published: Saturday, Jul. 04, 2009
Tour de France: SLO’s French Connection
Team Columbia-HTC, based in San Luis Obispo, is the winningest team this year and will compete in Tour de France beginning today
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closeLance Armstrong and the powerful Astana team may receive the lion’s share of attention as the 2009 Tour de France gets under way today.
But the squad with the most victories in professional cycling so far this year is Team Columbia-HTC, which is headquartered in San Luis Obispo. Owned by Bob Stapleton, Team Columbia has captured 49 wins.
Leading the team is one of cycling’s top sprinters, Mark Cavendish of Great Britain. Local cycling fans will recall that he won the Tour of California stage that finished in downtown Paso Robles in February. He captured four stages in the Tour de France last year.
Other veteran leaders on the team include Kim Kirchen of Luxembourg, who wore the green (sprinter) and yellow (overall leader) jerseys in the first week of last year’s tour and finished eighth overall; team captain George Hincapie of the U.S., who used to ride for Armstrong on the Discovery team; and Michael Rogers of Australia.
Twenty teams from around the world will converge in Monaco for the start of this year’s Tour de France. Fielding a pro squad can cost upward of $10 million annually.
Toward the goal of broadening its financial base, Stapleton’s company, High Road Sports Inc., announced this week that it has a new corporate partner, HTC Corp., a designer of mobile phones. As a principal partner, its name will be part of the team identity, replacing High Road in the brand.
Before he left for France, The Tribune conducted a question-and-answer interview with Stapleton by e-mail about his squad’s goals in cycling’s biggest event.
Q: Size up Team Columbia-HTC’s chances to win the team title in the 2009 Tour de France. What strengths does the team bring to the race?
A: We were the winningest team in professional cycling in 2008 and thus far in 2009. We have won 49 races, about twice as the next closest team. We have the top talent from 18 different countries and race to win each day. Our strengths are in the flat and fast stages that end with sprint finishes. We have Mark Cavendish, who is the “world’s fastest” and is the biggest name in the sport after Lance Armstrong, even at the young age of 24.
Q: Describe the course and how your team will fare on it. What will be the challenging stretches?
A: The Tour de France is a three-week battle of attrition. The winner usually conserves his strength for the days where he can gain or lose the most time. Those are in the most difficult mountains and the individual time trials.
The race will largely be determined in the Alps, the time trial around Lake Annecy, and the penultimate stage on Mount Ventoux, a dramatic mountain similar to Mount Shasta in California.
We will focus on each day of racing to win as many individual days as possible. Each day of victory generates $2 million or so of television exposure for our partners and sponsors and furthers our goal of being the most successful team in the sport.
The Tour de France is the largest sporting event in the world in 2009. It will be broadcast in 185 countries, and has a total viewing audience of 3.4 billion people worldwide. It’s like a three-week-long World Series, but with 20 teams fighting to win each day. It’s a crazy and dramatic sport — we fight for victories and visibility each day.
Q: What realistic chance do you give Michael Rogers, Kim Kirchen and Mark Cavendish to win any stages, or even the overall leader title?
A: We won six stages last year in the tour and had the yellow, green and white jerseys. We won six stages and held the leader’s jersey in the very similar 2009 Tour Of Italy that ended in May, and we won six of the nine stages of racing in the 2009 Tour of Switzerland that ended last week. I think our chances of winning stages and jerseys are pretty good.
Q: Do you expect Mark Cavendish to win the overall sprint title?
A: We will focus on collecting daily wins, and hope that the sprinters’ coveted green jersey comes with those successes.
Q: A question about Lance Armstrong — how well do you expect him to perform? What might be the challenges for him? Do you see Astana as the team presenting the most competition to your squad?
A: I think Lance will perform very well. He knows how to train, use his energy and his team. He is backed by a team that is purpose-built to win the Tour de France. They will win only a few races the entire year but have built the entire team and season toward the Tour de France.
The overwhelming favorite to win the Tour De France is Lance’s teammate Alberto Contador. He won the Tour in 2007 and has improved since.
Astana’s biggest challenge may come from the potential power struggle inside their team. It has happened before in the Tour de France and is probably the best chance for another team to beat Astana.
The race is very back-ended, with the decisive racing very late in the schedule. If the race develops slowly as is likely, we hope that the daily racing and performance of our team could be one of the big stories of the event.
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