Velochimp: Astrochimp on Cycling

T-Mobile has dropped their main sponsorship from their Bob Stapleton run cycling team. The news comes after Adidas dropped sponsorship of the team in light of the ongoing-neverending doping stories surrounding the team. The team will not disband as T-Mobile’s contract was set to go until December 2010 and there must be a decent enough exit payment that will allow Stapleton and Co to continue for at least 2008. The team will now be called appropriately enough Team High Road. The good news for George Hincapie is he won’t have to wear Magenta in South Carolina. Riding with feminine like colors in the South is not good. Then he would get into more trouble when the UCI would say he was a “man in black” for training without his team colors. Perhaps that is why George was pissed at Levi for winning the US Pro Championship. Levi and others probably knew that George was going to go to T-Mob next year and the specter of wearing pink in the South must have been a real FU to George when Levi took the win.

With Team High Road and Team Slipstream in the Pro Peloton could this be the dawn of sponsorless team names? I hope so. It would actually be better for a team’s long term survival since they would not necessarily be attached to a specific sponsor. Team could weather the storm of a major sponsor loss since they would not necessarily be associated with a specific product. Products would then be associated with the team making it easier to switch around.

Anyway, thanks for the years of cycling T-Mobile. It is unfortunate that just as the team was clean T-Mobile decided to leave the sport. It is perhaps premature and hasty. T-Mobile could have stayed on with a cleaner image instead of leaving under a cloud of doping related stories.