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Thursday's Eurofile: Hincapie 'protected' at next Tour; Wiggins wants yellow
Johan Bruyneel confirmed that George Hincapie will be “a protected rider” for Discovery Channel in the 2006 Tour de France as America’s top pro team moves into the post-Armstrong era.
Hincapie’s dramatic stage victory in the Pyrénées in July has raised expectations that the classics strongman could morph’ into an overall Tour contender, an idea that Bruyneel has been cautiously nurturing since the conclusion of this year’s Tour.
“George will be one of our protected riders for next year’s Tour de France. He is able to finish in the top-10 in the overall classification and he's a rider who can go for stage wins,” Bruyneel said on the team’s webpage.
The Belgian sport director continues to believe that Hincapie can be a top 10 player without sacrificing his form in the spring classics. Hincapie is always one of the main protagonists in April and scored a podium at Paris-Roubaix this year with second place.
“He has shown that he can combine a spring campaign with a good Tour de France, so his spring classics schedule will remain the same,” Bruyneel confirmed.
Bruyneel has emphasized that the team can’t count on winning the Tour after the recent retirement of seven-time Tour champ Armstrong.
Instead, the team will enter the 2006 Tour with a different strategy, playing its chips to win stages and pushing riders such as Hincapie, best young rider Yaroslav Popovych and perhaps José Azevedo or two-time Giro d’Italia champion Paolo Savoldelli toward the podium.
Popovych to undergo nose surgery
Yaroslav Popovych, the best young rider in the 2005 Tour de France, is scheduled to undergo minor surgery this weekend to repair damage to his nose. Popovych said the surgery “shouldn’t last longer than 10 minutes” to fix one a septum he injured while in school.
“Every time I had a medical checkup with the national (Ukraine) team, the doctor said I should do it, but I’ve always put it off,” Popovych told Tutto Bici. The operation should help the promising young rider to “breath better.”
Popovych has been enjoying some down time in Tuscany ahead of the team’s first training camp in early December.
Wiggins has yellow fever
British Olympic pursuit gold medalist Brad Wiggins will be aiming for the Tour de France yellow jersey as his top goal for the 2006 season, he told BBC Sport in an interview.
Perhaps taking a page from retired compatriot Chris Boardman, a winner of three Tour prologues in the 1990s, Wiggins admits his best chance for the yellow jersey will come in the opening prologue.
“Winning the prologue is my number-one goal for the coming season. Putting that yellow jersey on is the pinnacle of any cyclist's career, more so even than Olympic gold,” he said.
Wiggins won three medals – a gold in the individual pursuit, a silver in the team event and a bronze in the Madison – in the 2004 Summer Games and recently switched from Crédit Agricole to Cofidis, where he hopes stronger support for the team will help clear the way for a ticket to the Tour.
With the 2006 Tour set to open with a 7km mostly flat prologue in Strasbourg in eastern France, a distance that Wiggins said suits him just fine.
“The opener at the Tour de France plays perfectly into my hands. It’s the sort of distance I won Olympic gold over,” he said. “It'll be exciting to see what form I'm in and what happens. And I'm going there with the sole purpose of winning that, which I know could come down to just a hundredth-of-a-second.”
One of Wiggins’ top rivals could be compatriot David Millar, who is expected to return to the Tour after a two-year racing ban for admitting to using the banned blood booster EPO. Millar, a winner of the opening stage in the 2000 Tour, recently penned a deal to join the Spanish team Saunier Duval.
T-Mobile goes international with women’s team
Judith Arndt and Nicole Cooke are among the top names slated to join the international expansion for the T-Mobile team for the 2006 season.
The team announced this week it will add the top-caliber stars and an international racing schedule to the existing T-Mobile team, which has been on a dominant force on the domestic women’s racing calendar.
“Our goal is to nail down a top position in the UCI-World ranking list. For that, we will target both one day classics and international stage races,” said the team’s sporting director Andrzej Bek. “We are very enthusiastic about the new team’s prospects and are looking forward to starting the new season under new structures and new backing.”
The team will enjoy equal status with the more famous men’s racing team and will be presented to the public during an official team presentation in mid-January in Mallorca.
