This weekend, I will be mostly watching the Tour de France. It’s been a very good tour for software and cooperatives. Look at the current leaderboards:-
- Teams
-
- Carlos Sastre Candil (also 2nd in King of Mountains) Team Computer Sciences Corporation – Saxo Bank
- Frank Schleck (3rd KoM) Team CSC – Saxo Bank
- Bernhard Kohl (1st KoM) Gerolsteiner bottled water – OK, not related
- Cadel Evans, Silence anti-snoring product – Lotto Belgium – also unrelated
- Denis Menchov, Rabobank cooperative
- Points
-
- Oscar Freire Gomez, Rabobank
- Erik Zabel, Team Milram, a brand of Nordmilch cooperative
- Thor Hushovd, Crédit Agricole cooperative banks
- Teams
-
- Team CSC Saxo Bank
- AG2R-La Mondiale insurance mutuals
- Rabobank
- Euskaltel – Euskadi – privately-owned telco and a government
- Caisse d’Epargne cooperative bank
So however it finishes, I think it probably will have been a much better race for software and cooperatives than last year’s tour, likely to take 4 of the top 5 team positions and 1-2-3 in the green jersey contest… even the doping scandals have been for other teams this year, I think.
One day, one of my companies will sponsor pro-cycling. I hope. Anyway, if you’d like to cheer on other Software and Cooperative firm teams until then, European TV coverage details are on another site of mine and Saturday’s time trial start times are posted on a sister site.
Doping scandals are merely for teams who don’t dope their cyclists properly. Given the current difficulty and speed of the Tour, it is not possible to be even in the first half of the rankings without EPO.
As you might expect, I don’t agree. I think the current medical testing programmes run for CSC, Astana 2, Garmin and Columbia make doping very unlikely – it would need not only the team, but also the national federations and the testing programme companies to be corrupt.
I’d love to see the cooperative-backed teams do it, but I hope that at least Scott-American Beef and whatever-Barloworld-becomes start similar programmes after their problems this tour.