VeloNews has made some controversial choices in its 19th annual awards issue. The magazine’s 2006 International Cyclist of the Year is Spanish revelation Alejandro Valverde, the overall champion of the UCI ProTour, while the top North American awards go to embattled Tour de France champion Floyd Landis and the three U.S. women who won world championships in 2006: Kristin Armstrong (road time trial), Sarah Hammer (track pursuit) and Jill Kintner (mountain bike four-cross).

“No category produced a more debatable outcome than top North American man,” said VeloNews editor Kip Mikler. “Whatever the outcome of the yet-to-be-resolved charges that Landis used testosterone on stage 17 of the Tour, he outperformed his fellow Americans, including George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer, throughout the rest of the season. Though the coverage wasn’t always positive, Landis landed on five VeloNews covers in 2006, a Lance Armstrong-like achievement.”

In the first five months of the racing season, Landis won the inaugural Amgen Tour of California, the prestigious Paris-Nice stage race in France and the Ford Tour de Georgia prior to finishing the Tour de France in Paris wearing the leader’s yellow jersey. Landis, the 31-year-old Pennsylvanian who lives in Southern California, is the subject of an exclusive interview and feature about his upcoming appeal against a potential four-year racing ban in the December issue of VeloNews.

Less controversial is the joint North American woman’s award to Armstrong, Hammer and Kintner. The 33-year-old Armstrong, from Boise, Idaho, won both the national road race and time trial titles before going on to beat the top professional women cyclists at the world’s in Salzburg, Austria. When she’s not racing for Team Lipton, Armstrong works at the Boise Home Depot as part of the Olympic Job Opportunities Program.

Hammer, 23, was working in a Colorado Springs bagel shop when she was inspired by watching the cycling competitions at the 2004 Athens Olympics on TV to return to the sport she had left as a disillusioned 19-year-old. “I was done with it, never going to come back. I sold all my bikes and everything,” she said. Since her comeback in August 2005 Hammer, who now lives in Temecula, California, has had tremendous success. She won the world 3000-meter track pursuit title at Bordeaux, France, in April this year, and in October on her home track at Carson, California, she shattered the U.S. 3000-meter record of the legendary Rebecca Twigg with a time of 3 minutes 32.865 seconds.

Things haven’t gone well for Kintner, 25, from Seattle, since she successfully defended her world four-cross championship, a spectacular downhill discipline, at Rotorua, New Zealand in August. She was injured in a crash at the Jeep King of the Mountains finals in Colorado in early September and was unable to compete at the World Cup finals a week later. Kintner’s series lead allowed her to accept the overall title at the finals in Austria, but five days later her father Peter Kintner, a former ski racer, died after a heart attack. “I went from the highest high to the lowest low of my life,” Kintner told VeloNews.

There was a very close vote among VeloNews editors before awarding the year’s top award to Valverde, who had close competition from Italy’s world road champ Paolo Bettini and Norway’s mountain-bike phenomenon Gunn-Rita Dahle-Flesjå. The January issue of VeloNews features an exclusive interview with Valverde at his home in Murcia, Spain, discussing his remarkable 2006 season, in which he won the Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Flèche Wallonne classics, took stage wins at the Vuelta a España, Tour de Romandie and Basque Country Tour, and was overall runner-up in the Basque Country and at the Vuelta before taking the bronze medal at the Salzburg world’s.

In the other major category of VeloNews Awards, the editors chose the ongoing effects of UCI rule 1.3.019, created in 2000, which limits the weight of a competition bicycle at 15 pounds. The rule has not stopped manufacturers from building lighter bikes, and the development of super-light carbon-fiber frames and components has brought virtually all Tour de France bikes under the limit. In turn, this allows pro teams to fit power meters that help the riders to better pace their efforts — highlighted by Landis on his winning Tour breakaway — while the bikes still meet the weight regulation.