You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘LPR’ tag.
Katusha Riders in yesterday's TTT. Credit: One Fat Man (CC Licence)
Well there weren’t too many surprises from today’s team time trial. While Garmin Slipstream were targetting a win, Team Columbia sneaked in before them and put Manxman Mark Cavendish in the pink jersey. This came after Cavendish stirred the pot a bit this week by saying Garmin were being “disrepectful” to the Giro by only targetting a single stage. While it’s still all smiles from Garmin, I’m wondering if this isn’t going to be the beginning of a bit of heated rivalry. Danilo Di Luca’s LPR put in a very impressive ride to take 4th, while the new Ukrainian/Italian outfit ISD were a surprising fifth.
For the overall contenders, today was all about keeping losing as little time to your rivals as possible. With the general classification divided up on a team basis mainly, here’s how the general classification contenders shape up against eachother.
Michael Rogers 0.00
Kanstantsin Siutsou 0.00
David Zabriskie 0.06
Christian Vande Velde 0.06
Lance Armstrong 0.13
Levi Leipheimer 0.13
Danilo Di Luca 0.22
Denis Menchov 0.38
Ivan Basso 0.40
Franco Pellizotti 0.40
Damiano Cunego 0.42
Marzio Bruseghin 0.42
Carlos Sastre 0.49
David Arroyo 0.58
Gilberto Simoni 1.06
Michele Scarponi 1.06
Stefano Garzelli 1.21
Boonen: Not so smug now (Credit: hamburgr - Creative Commons Licence)
This is gas. Hot on the heals of Basso and Cunego sniping at each other, we’ve got a war of words between Belgian star Tom Boonen and Italian team LPR. Boonen recently told the Belgian press that LPR’s exclusion from the upcoming Milan – Sanremo would be completely justified since the team didn’t participate in world cycling governing body, the UCI’s blood passport programme or follow its whereabouts rules.
Whereabouts regulations oblige riders to inform the UCI of where they will be on a daily basis, in order to allow drug testers to visit them at any time. The recently introduced blood passport programme regularly takes blood samples from riders to check for evidence of possible blood doping. The top level of teams, those with Pro Tour status, are obliged to participate. Lower level teams such as LPR need to sign up in order to gain invites to major races.
LPR hit back the next day with team manager Fabio Bordonali saying the team had already signed up for the whereabouts programme and paid for its participation in the blood passport programme.
This afternoon, UCI president Pat McQuaid said that five Pro Tour teams could be barred from starting Paris – Nice this weekend since they hadn’t paid the necessary fees to participate in the blood passport programme. Among the five was Boonen’s team Quick Step. LPR had already paid up, McQuaid added.
